Chronicler Makes Honest Living Monitoring the Mob

Nicholas Pileggi writes real-life best sellers, films and TV series about the Mafia. And it’s a wonder to many citizens hereabouts that nobody has yet busted his kneecaps or invited him to sleep with the fishes in cement pajamas.

The Boswell of the bosses and underbosses protests that, firstly, “these knees aren’t worth busting.” And, secondly, he is not one to pass judgment on the peccadilloes of La Cosa Nostra or its perpetrators. He merely chronicles them after the fact. “I’m a recorder of that world, not an investigator. All I do is write up stuff that already happened.”

Nick, as he is known to one and all since his stickball-playing days in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, has made crime pay without packing a roscoe.

From humble beginnings as a legman on the police beat, he hit the best-seller list with “Wiseguy --Three Decades of Life in the Mafia,” all about the zillion-dollar Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport. This became the movie “GoodFellas,” which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including his film script with director Martin Scorsese, and which won a supporting-role Oscar for Joe Pesci.

Next he scored with “Casino,” true life and not-so-true love in Las Vegas. Again he teamed with Scorsese on the movie script. His TV series, “Michael Hayes,” has just finished a season on CBS.

He pursues the ways of organized crime in a cluttered den on the penthouse floor of Manhattan’s Apthorp apartments. This posh pile is a 20-minute walk up Broadway from Mindy’s, the fictional restaurant where Damon Runyon’s “Guys and Dolls” used to meet and eat when not lying low from the gendarmes or other unfriendlies.

But the inhabitants of Nick’s world are real, even if they have Runyonesque names like Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, Carmine “The Snake” Persico, Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia, Anthony “Gas Pipe” Casso and the brothers Albert “Kid Blast” and “Crazy Joe” Gallo, who are credited with 15 gangland slayings in the service of Joe “The Olive Oil King” Profaci.

Several floors below his rooftop atelier, Nick Pileggi resides in a luxury apartment with his wife, Nora Ephron, author of bestsellers such as “Heartburn” and the Oscar-nominated screenplays for “Silkwood” and “Sleepless in Seattle.”

Nick and Nora might seem like a Hollywood remake of the Thin Man series. He is tall and courtly, with the charming manners and restrained wardrobe of a consigliere, while she is pert and sassy and in the know.

She writes downstairs in the apartment, while he is topside in that den near the elevator shaft, lined wall to wall with his “library of louses”--tomes such as “Mafia Wife,” “Fascism and the Mafia,” “The French Connection,” “Brothers in Blood” and “The Luciano Project.”

They do not engage in professional collaboration, but Nick and Nora do edit each other and, he attests, “are thick-skinned enough to swap some very blunt criticism” without fomenting marital strife. “Nora’s writing is much more elegant than mine,” he admits, “and from her stint at Esquire, she is a really savvy editor.”

Win or lose, both enjoy dressing to the nines and climbing into a studio limo together to attend the Oscar awards. So far they have not experienced rival nominations in the same year. “That might stretch the marriage contract beyond the limit,” Pileggi concedes with the impish grin that won him his first job in the crime-watch profession.

Growing up in the mean Brooklyn streets fought over by the Profaci and Colombo crime families, Pileggi identified with those Warner Bros. gangster flicks starring Bogey, Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. But unlike Henry Hill, his eponymous “Wiseguy,” he showed no inclination toward a mob career. In homage to his father, who “came from Calabria far down in the boot of Italy and spoke with an accent,” Pileggi set out to do the family proud by becoming an English professor.

In his sophomore year at Long Island University, he got a night job at the Associated Press. “I ran copy for the city desk, went for coffee and delivered paychecks to reporters working the beats at City Hall, the courts and police headquarters.

“I was enthralled. I found a really fascinating collection of characters. Some were nuts, some brilliant, but for the most part they were talented, generous people.” Upon graduation, he jumped at the surprise offer of a reporter’s job from city editor Joe Nicholson, “who only communicated in growls.”

His first break came covering a Teamsters union election. “Jimmy Hoffa and the mob,” he relates, “were moving in to take over with a lot of paper or fake locals run by racketeers like Johnny Dio. It was a night to remember, but I knew from nothing. Fortunately Abe Raskin, the [New York] Times labor expert, took pity on a kid who a week ago was running for coffee and let me read his story.”

Pileggi came to the police beat at a time when organized crime was about to unfold as a major story over the next 10 years, with televised Senate committee hearings enthralling the nation.

The same names kept coming up: Costello, Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lansky. Pileggi wondered, “Who are these people? What are they all about? There were no files. You couldn’t call the cops; they wouldn’t tell you. So I began keeping my own files on 3-by-5 cards. Any newspaper story, any indictment, any public record, I’d enter the name and the date. I began to develop a record on these characters. I’ve kept it up ever since, and here they all are.” His hand swept over rows of metal file cabinets in his den.

He began pulling out tray after tray of color-coded file cards, a veritable “Who’s Hoods.” Green, he explained, tracks legitimate mob business like laundries, juke boxes, cement and construction firms. Yellow tabulates political connections. Red is for murder, incorporated or freelance.

“If I get a picture of these guys,” he adds, “I reduce it on my Xerox and glue it to the page. I’ve got more files stored in the basement. Yet for years people who should know, like J. Edgar Hoover and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, claimed there was no such thing as the Mafia. It’s like flying saucers. Where’s the proof?”

That attitude changed in 1959, Pileggi vividly recalls, “when a Sgt. Edgar Croswell of the New York State Police parked his radio car in the driveway of Joe Barbara’s stone mansion near the little town of Apalachin. The trooper was curious about all those trucks unloading ice and wine and steaks. But the boys overreacted. Half of them ran into the bushes in their chalk-striped suits and wingtip shoes, tossing away money and guns. The others drove out.”

Of the 58 identified by license plates, 49 had arrest records, 35 had convictions, and the woods yielded $300,000 in scattered cash. Croswell had crashed a summit that was critical in mob history. Fidel Castro had just shut down the syndicate’s lucrative casinos in Cuba. Motions were on the table to move into narcotics and to recruit Corsican thugs to keep the Communists from taking over the port of Marseilles, the French connection to the opium suppliers in Turkey.

Narcotics changed everything, and every boss who tried to buck the trend was eliminated, Pileggi relates. “Frank Costello was wounded by a hit man outside his apartment because he didn’t want any part of the drug scene. Albert ‘the Mad Hatter’ Anastasia was shot dead under a candy-striped towel in a hotel barbershop.”

By 1965 the narcotics guys had won, Pileggi says. But the bloom was off. “My first 10 years on the street, mobsters were considered colorful characters out of ‘Guys and Dolls.’ You know: natty dressers, charming men about town. Now, nobody wants to sit next to a drug dealer in a restaurant.”

The old mob funerals with 20 flower cars and a mile-long convoy of mourners became a thing of the past. Terence Cardinal Cooke denied a Requiem Mass for Carmine Galante, blown away in the rear garden of a Brooklyn pasta palace, his signature cigar still in his jaw. Similarly, John Cardinal O’Connor cited Canon Law 1184, dealing with “manifest sinners,” in refusing a church send-off for top capo Paul Castellano, gunned down outside a Midtown steakhouse.

“This is a heavy sentence,” says Pileggi. “I know gangsters who are very religious. Mike Miranda was a daily communicant. On the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, ‘Dandy’ Jack Paresi of Murder Inc. always went barefoot in the procession, hefting the statue. One day I ask Dandy point-blank what he prays for.” The hood replied: “I pray to God for the strength to steal some more.”

The drug wars let loose the canaries. “From the early 1900s when the old mustache Petes arrive as the Black Hand, nobody ever squeals to the cops,” Pileggi points out. “Then in 1962, Joe Valachi in the federal slammer at Atlanta thinks the mob is out to murder him. Atty. Gen. Bobby Kennedy and the McClellan Committee are very anxious to hear him out. He’s the first to violate omerta, the code of silence.

“The lid is off. Down the years to Salvatore ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano, you’ve got more than 5,000 defectors or their victims in the Federal Witness Protection Program.”

Pileggi’s years on the police beat, playing cards with the cops and chatting with mob lawyers in courthouse corridors, give him more than a press pass to the underworld. “You work the beat, they trust you, you get the contacts.”

Editors at Simon & Schuster contacted him when Henry Hill, under federal protection, sought a book deal to pay his legal bills. Pileggi had “many rendezvous at obscure places and remote airports” before “Wiseguy” donned its book jacket.

There is no national society of Mafia writers, he says, “because we all know each other.” His first cousin, Gay Talese, wrote the bestseller “Honor Thy Father” and persuaded him to forsake the newspaper crime beat and turn his files into books.

Over dinner at the family home, Pileggi’s father urged Mario Puzo to “do more” with a character in an earlier book on Italian immigrants and a baker tempted to join the Mafia. The result was “The Godfather.”

Director Scorsese, reared in Manhattan’s Little Italy, has a town house near Pileggi’s place. There, at writing sessions punctuated by a pasta lunch, Pileggi does the typing while both speak dialogue into a tape recorder. They are collaborating on “Dino,” a biography of Dean Martin.

“Basically,” Pileggi laments, “we’re in a dying business. John Gotti’s in jail for life. The Italians are pretty much out of it. Maybe you’ve got one generation left. Not enough to hold another Apalachin summit, unless it’s in a home for retired hoods someplace.

“Hey, wouldn’t that make a great book?”