Quotes from Nicholas Pileggi

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

Everybody gets pinched but you did it right. You told them nothing and they got nothing. You learned the two greatest things in life: Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.

Let me tell you something. Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught. They don't have things organized.

For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.

By birth, certainly, they were not prepared in any way to achieve their desires. They were not the smartest kids in the neighborhood. They were not born the richest. They weren't even the toughest. In fact, they lacked almost all the necessary talents that might have helped them satisfy the appetites of their dreams, except one—their talent for violence.

Of course, no matter how Henry tried to rationalize what he had done, his survival depended upon his capacity for betrayal. He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail. For Henry Hill giving up the life was hard, but giving up his friends was easy.

On one occasion Jimmy is said to have given the elderly, impoverished mother of a young hood five thousand dollars. The woman's son was said to have owed his mother the money but had refused to pay her. Jimmy was apparently so incensed at this lack of regard for motherhood that he gave the woman the five thousand in the morning, claiming it was from her son, and then allegedly killed the woman's son before dusk.

The federal prosecutors were asking him about his role in the $6 million Lufthansa German Airlines robbery, the largest successful cash robbery in American history.

It should have been so sweet," Frank Cullotta said. "Everything was in place. We were given paradise on earth, but we fucked it all up." It would be the last time street guys were ever given anything that valuable again.

Henry was never able to help McDonald crack Lufthansa—the

I had a drugstore wholesaler who had discount stores all over Long Island.

Las Vegas was a city with no memory.

I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn't. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.