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Hill, now 42, lives with his two children and long-suffering wife in an unnamed city under an assumed identity. They are part of the federal Witness Security Program, and as such receive $1,500 a month; they run a legitimate business and own a suburban home. For those repelled by the notion of a malefactor getting away with murder, there are two compensations: this is a true picture of crime, with its permanent sense of insecurity, its blunders, its lack of intelligence and trust. And then there is the source of Hill's current misery. "I'm an average nobody," he complains. "I get to live the rest of my life like a shnook." Pileggi draws no moral, but it is obvious that for a wiseguy, life as a shnook is almost worse than death by piano wire.