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This is the sort of book that makes reading true crime interesting. What I mean is this: while reading about gruesome murders is sometimes chillingly good, and one reads such books just for the shock value, sometimes a book comes along that gives you the big picture. This is such a book.

Henry Hill fell in love with the Mafia way of life as a kid, and he stuck to it until the bitter end - or rather, until he had two choices. Either join the Federal Witness Protection Program, or face the music with the mobsters he had been living his life since he was twelve. The music would have killed him.

Pileggi's book traces the life of Henry Hill through all his scheming and swindling, from earning a few pennies delivering sandwiches to poker players to stealing cigarette trucks, and on to stealing millions of dollars' worth of cash and other goods from Kennedy Airport. It is sobering to see how anything is stealable in their world, and how little faith these people have in ownership.

It is also hair-raising to read this book and learn how these mobsters would just identify a target, be it Italian scarves, a truck of booze, or a load of mink furs, and they'd just go and grab it. Sometimes there is assistance from the people who have been charged with delivering the truck - they may be in on the hit and get a little bit of the money, but more often they just enter the truck, tell the driver they know where he lives, and drop the hapless guy off the truck by the highway and disappear with his truck.

It is this disregard for other people that makes this such a chilling book. In this world of wiseguys, all is theirs for the taking. In fact, it made me think that if this is still the case, that anything you happen to possess that is of interest to the Mob can be taken away from you, the much-touted American concept of freedom is not very valid. At least you're not free to own things, and if you try to put your case to the law, Hill provides ample examples of how both the police and the judicial system has members on the take.

And when you finally get to the end, and see how Hill escapes a bullet in the head (that was issued to everyone else who knew of the Lufthansa heist) to become a Federal employee, you wonder... is this all okay and correct that this should happen? People are killed en route to this, millions of dollars of property and cash are redistributed among wiseguys, and yet the prime mover becomes another man in lieu of the one he never was. I am not sure.

Read this book to learn about the business of being a wiseguy, but for splatter and flying kidneys, read "The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer" instead.