Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  A foreign sound hits our, and their, ears. An insistent, even desperate, banging. “What the fuck is that?” Liotta says. “Is it a flat?” asks Pesci, now somewhat animated. “Better pull over and see.”

  The car pulls over; we see its back end, sidelong, in a medium shot. The three men get out of the car and line up, looking at the trunk. The car’s taillights suffuse them in red. They look like they’re stepping out of, or into, a garish Italian horror movie.

  There’s a cut to a plain head-on shot of the car’s closed trunk. A more ordinary director would just let that shot lie. Instead, the camera tracks in, slowly, from the right side; Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus make its lens a curious consciousness in and of itself. Following is a reverse angle shot of the three men, De Niro, Pesci, and Liotta, lined up looking at the trunk. Pesci reaches into his sport jacket; we presume he’s going to pull out a gun. Instead, he takes out a terrifyingly long and sharp butcher’s knife. The camera pans right as Liotta approaches the rear of the car, warily, keys in hand. Inside, wrapped in a bloody sheet, is a man with blood all over his face, rasping, “No.” Pesci approaches, knife ready to strike, furious: “He’s still alive, the fucking piece of shit,” as he stabs through the sheet several times.

  De Niro, whose face has until now had an expression one could read as disapproving, steps up, revolver in hand, and fires four bullets into the body. The trunk is all white sheet drenched in blood; we can barely make out the now definitively dead man’s head. The whole frame is turning red.

  Liotta is then alone, still bathed in the red of the car’s taillights; he looks off-frame at his companions and moves to close the trunk. In voice-over, he says, “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.” As he closes the trunk the camera tracks in on him, resolving in a medium close-up; he’s gazing into the distance with a “what the fuck just happened” look on his face (a look likely shared by anyone watching the movie for the first time) as the blaring, almost comical horns of the intro to the 1953 Tony Bennett song “Rags to Riches” come up. The shot freeze-frames Liotta in close-up. Only then does the movie’s title appear; these letters are red on black.

  In less than three minutes, the movie simultaneously establishes a realistic intimacy, putting you right in the car with those characters, and uses stylization as a distancing effect that’s nevertheless anything but neutral in its temperature—the horror-movie lighting, and the mordant irony of “always wanted to be a gangster” as the punch line to this mystifying, squalid bloodbath.

  * * *

  Goodfellas is frequently cited as the most realistic American movie about organized crime ever made. In a sense, it is. But it is a great movie about organized crime because, among other things, it constantly pushes beyond ordinary realism.

  In fact, the movie’s director, Martin Scorsese, does not make movies that are by any yardstick objectively realistic. Rather, he makes movies that explicitly reflect his own perception. In the late ’80s he recounted to an interviewer, “I read in the Village Voice that Jim Jarmusch, who made Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law”—knowing, aesthetically offbeat, minimalist comedies with long, static shots of characters standing, or sitting, around talking—“said something like, ‘I’m not interested in taking people by the hair and telling them where to look.’ Well, I do want them to see the way I see. Walking down the street, looking quickly about, tracking, panning, zooming, cutting, and all that sort of thing. I like it when two images go together and they move.”

  His way of seeing is evident in the first three minutes of Goodfellas. After the Warner logo, the movie’s titles begin; these were designed and executed by Saul Bass, in this case in collaboration with his wife, Elaine. The opening titles are somewhat reminiscent of those Bass designed for Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho: stark white typeface over black. Each title—“A Martin Scorsese Picture,” the principal cast’s names, etc.—zips at high speed from right to left, and is followed by a copy of that card, now static, for a few seconds, centered on the screen; on the soundtrack, the whirr of cars passing underscores the movement. The first set of opening credits ends with the text: “This film is based on a true story.”

  Goodfellas, indeed based on a true story, is a movie as much about Martin Scorsese’s relationship to its subject as it is about its subject. While the director’s movies, up until this point, had often featured crime and criminals in their worlds, Goodfellas was—arguably—his first gangster movie proper. (Because of the proximity of the characters in Mean Streets and Raging Bull to mob interests, some consider those gangster pictures, or closely akin to them.) But it made such an impression that in the world outside of informed cinephilia, Scorsese is often referred to solely as a maker “of gangster movies.”

  Once it backs away a little from the grotesqueries of its opening scene, the movie is acute in detailing the lure of the lifestyle. (The voice-over line immediately following the first is “To me, being a gangster was even better than being president of the United States,” which is even funnier/sadder now than it was then.)

  Scorsese has frequently recollected watching gangster movies with his friend, the screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks. He tells a story of the first time they looked at the Howard Hawks picture Scarface, made in 1932 and starring Paul Muni. All but forgotten today, the film became such a touchstone for both the Cahiers du Cinéma–influenced critics of the ’50s and ’60s and the so-called “movie brats” who transformed Hollywood in the 1970s that the 1983 remake directed by Brian De Palma (himself once one of those self-same movie brats) was considered authentically sacrilegious at the time it was announced. “There’s a wonderful scene where all these cars line up outside a coffee shop, the guys get out, kneel down, and fire into the shop with machine guns, wrecking everything,” recalled Scorsese. “This goes on for a long time. Then Paul Muni says to George Raft, ‘What are they shooting with?’ and he replies, ‘Tommy guns.’ Muni then says, ‘Great, I’ll go get one,’ and he comes back with a gun and starts firing with it! Jay and I looked at each other and both said, ‘We really love these guys.’ It’s strange that we don’t normally like people who are killing other people, but the way they’re presented in this film is extremely glamorous.”

  Scorsese encountered Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, an inside-the-mob chronicle, in the winter of 1986. Here, for the first time, a mob soldier, Henry Hill, willingly and with no state or federal coercion, told all to Pileggi, an investigative reporter since the late 1950s. Scorsese had grown up in New York’s Little Italy in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was rife with Italian American mobsters. The book, Scorsese recalled, depicted “something I knew from my own experience”:

  “I grew up on the East Side, which was a very closed community of Sicilians and Neapolitans, and it took me years to work out what was happening among the organized crime characters. But I was aware of these older men and the power they had without lifting a finger. As you walked by, the body language would change, you could just feel the flow of power coming from these people, and as a child you looked up to this without understanding.”

  In Mean Streets, his critical breakthrough feature of 1973, Scorsese positioned this world of power on the periphery of the immediate world of its aimless young male characters. Charlie, the central figure among them (played by Harvey Keitel), is halfheartedly running collections for his minor-mobster uncle while protecting his irresponsible hellion friend Johnny Boy (De Niro) from an inept wannabe loan shark. In Goodfellas, too, the locus of power is at a remove. Its central figure, Henry Hill, is a mob “soldier” who, because he is only half-Sicilian, can never be a “made man” or a fully “protected” member of the mob. (Given that the guy in the trunk in the movie’s opening scene, Billy Batts, was himself a made man, one thing the story ultimately reveals is that this whole concept was a critical fallacy in mob life.)

  Scorsese’s interest in the mob was a two-way street: Henry Hill frequently rec
ounted how he “kidnapped” the reclusive mob underboss Paul “Paulie” Vario (Paul Cicero in Goodfellas) to show him Mean Streets, so impressed was Hill by the accuracy of its depiction of life among the Little Italy mooks. Vario was reportedly similarly impressed.

  * * *

  “The only reason I was able to write Wiseguy,” Nicholas Pileggi tells me, “is because Henry Hill defied the FBI, and the marshal service, by giving me his telephone number, so I was able to reach him while he was in the witness protection program.”

  At the time of our meeting, Pileggi is eighty-five years old but has the bearing of a man at least twenty years younger. Trim, energetic, and voluble, the onetime journalist now makes his living writing and consulting on television series and movies, and divides his time between Los Angeles and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  He grew up in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, an area that, like Scorsese’s East Side, was watched over if not entirely ruled by the Italian American mob. “I grew up in that world, in that environment. My father had come here, as a young man, from Calabria—we’re Calabrese, my mother, too. He was a musician, played trombone in the movie theaters, in the days before sound film. There was a lot of work for guys like my father. Being Calabrese, he came over with people who later emerged as major organized-crime figures, like Albert Anastasia, and Frank Costello, and Joe Adonis, and they were all Calabrese. This set them apart from the Sicilian Mafia, which was moving into New York around the same time. And later on, as the mob wars began, these were all people my father knew. And I knew of them; it was an environment that I felt comfortable with and I always had access to them.”

  But he wasn’t tempted to enter their way of life. Instead, he was seduced by literature and writing. “I went to Long Island University, was the Class of ’55, if you can believe it—so many years have passed! I was an English major, and I had great teachers who would take us through line-by-line analyses of Ulysses, of T. S. Eliot. I just loved it. I worked for the school newspaper. Soon I decided I want to live in the city, without really knowing what I wanted to do there.”

  Pileggi’s cousin, the writer Gay Talese, had gotten a job as a copy boy at the New York Times before having to complete an ROTC commission. He gave Pileggi’s father a tip, which he passed on to his son, which was that the AP was hiring.

  “The address was 50 Rockefeller Plaza, I was so naive, coming from Brooklyn, and I thought I was looking for an A&P, as in the supermarket!” Soon Pileggi sussed out that he was being directed to the then-headquarters of the Associated Press, where Joe Kelleher hired him as a messenger/copy boy. “That’s how easy it was!” Pileggi marvels today.

  At the AP, the atmosphere was defined by shoe-leather reporters, with whom Pileggi eventually found himself working. “If you were a police reporter, you knew first-grade detectives, and your sister was married to a cop. It was very blue-collar, and very connected in that way. This was long before Woodward and Bernstein. The police reporters at the time all had that kind of street experience, most of them had never gone anywhere near a college campus. I was unique among the police reporters in that way. And I fell into covering this world that I grew up in, the world of crime.

  “This is before Valachi,” Pileggi says, referring to the mobster Joe Valachi, who testified before a Senate committee on organized crime in 1963, and whose story became the subject of a 1968 book by Peter Maas. “This is the middle ’50s; the Kefauver Committee had come up but nobody really paid attention. And so I wound up covering these guys before they were being covered.” And the mob guys would talk to him, because they knew him. They would use him as a sounding board for inter-and intramob dish, and because Pileggi knew everybody, he always had choice morsels to feed in order to get choice morsels back.

  “These guys would gossip about the other family, they would tell you about theirs, then I’d go to the other guys they’d been talking about and ask them about that—and they liked talking to me. Remember, there are five ‘families’ in New York City and there’s not much in the way of newspaper articles, there’s no internet. They find things out only by meeting somebody at a social club, or going for a walk...now that I’ve put myself in the mix, they can ask me, ‘What’s going on with the Chin?’ and so on. While reporting, I also became their communications facilitator, one they trusted.” (“The Chin” was Vincent/Vinnie “the Chin” Gigante, a mobster who in the late 1960s famously faked insanity to avoid arrest and prosecution, a tactic that worked out pretty well for him until the 1990s, when he was tried and convicted for murder; he subsequently died in prison in 2005.)

  Pileggi cultivated that trust socially. One of the through lines in the movie Goodfellas is the importance of food in Italian American social life. Pileggi won the trust of mobsters not just through neighborhood and family connections—he made an impact via their appetites, too.

  “Just as I began that job, my father took me to a restaurant in Little Italy called Paolucci’s, on 149 Mulberry Street. And they were Calabrese. And my father asked Mr. Paolucci to make sure I ate properly. I had started out working the night shift, so I would get to the restaurant after work at about three in the afternoon, before they’d opened. So I had to knock at the door and they’d let me in. It wasn’t a restaurant that had an off-the-street clientele. They didn’t want strangers. Really, the only people who ate there were Mafia bosses and Mafia guys. And when they saw that I was there, they asked the owner, ‘Who’s that?’ and they said, ‘Oh, that’s okay, that’s Nicola’s son.’ I wound up having dinner in there, or lunch in there, or early dinner in there, with every mob boss on Mulberry Street. And they would recognize me. So if I was walking down the street and Aniello Dellacroce”—the Gambino crime family underboss nicknamed “the Tall Guy”—“was standing outside the Ravenite Social Club, I would nod, he would nod. And as life went on, I started asking the Paoluccis to make dishes that my grandmother made. There was one dish ended up on the menu called Pork Chops Pileggi. Which is sautéed pork chops, sliced potatoes, onions, and hot vinegar peppers. All sautéed together. And all these mob guys loved it and began ordering it. Which also furthered my cachet. And my access.”

  One would think both the cachet and the access would diminish once Pileggi’s stories were published on a regular basis. He laughs wryly when I bring up the idea. “At the Associated Press all those years, I never got a byline. That was just the way it was done; it was a wire service and all stories were just credited to the Associated Press. And these guys didn’t even have any idea of what the Associated Press, or the AP, was. They didn’t know that the seven newspapers in New York at the time were using my stories, usually combining them with bits of their own staffers’ reporting, and giving those reporters the byline—Eddie Kirkman at the Daily News, say—with an ‘additional reporting’ credit going to the Associated Press. So there was never any trouble.”

  If the mob guys had no idea what Pileggi was up to, newsroom insiders had taken notice. In 1968 Clay Felker founded New York magazine, and invited Pileggi on staff. As much as Pileggi loved his affiliation with the AP (he now refers to his stint there as among the happiest years of his career), Felker offered him more freedom, more scope, longer pieces (and a byline). It was the right move at the right time. “By then, 1968,” Pileggi observes, “the mob is really a big story.”

  Public awareness of Italian mob activities had expanded in 1957. The so-called “Apalachin Meeting,” a summit of mobsters convening in Upstate New York, was descended upon by law enforcement, resulting in the detainment and indictment of well over fifty mob bosses. In 1968 Peter Maas’s book The Valachi Papers, spurred by the 1963 testimony of Joe Valachi, was published and became a bestseller. (The book was turned into a not-terribly-successful 1972 mob picture starring Charles Bronson, a credible movie tough guy but not a particularly credible movie Italian American.) Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, fictionalizing a boatload of mob lore, would be published in 1969, and become a bestseller.<
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  This public exposure was ostensibly tearing at the fabric of the mob code of ethics—a code that Wiseguy and subsequently Goodfellas would reveal had always been sheer bluster, anyway. Omerta and such notwithstanding, mobsters loved seeing approximations of themselves in bestselling books and on movie screens. So Pileggi no longer needed the anonymity that had shielded him so effectively.

  “Instead of looking at The Godfather like this curse, they loved it,” Pileggi says of the crew he wrote about in Wiseguy. “They were empowered by it. Henry Hill told me he and the guys all got in a car and drove from Long Island to Manhattan to the Paramount Theater to see the first screening of The Godfather. This is a car full of gangsters, guns under their car seats. Henry said, ‘I came out of the theater, I was so happy to be a gangster. I never wanted to be anything else.’ This was his validation.”

  * * *

  “I think Wiseguy would have been a very different book had Henry Hill not been Henry Hill,” Pileggi says. It wasn’t just that Hill, who was hidden by the feds after assisting in cases against Paul “Paulie” Vario and Jimmy “the Gent” Burke among others, had approached Pileggi (initially through an attorney) not just ready but eager to talk. It was Hill’s ability to talk, and to remember.

  After the initial contact, which led to Hill’s flouting of his protected-witness status, Pileggi learned that Hill had both the vocabulary and the memory of a born storyteller. “I had asked a hundred mobsters, ‘What was your first big score on the numbers?’ And they would say, ‘I don’t remember.’ Didn’t remember the score, didn’t remember what they did with the money, shrugged, and said, ‘What the hell, you’re talking twenty years ago, I don’t remember.’ Henry Hill, I asked the same question, ‘What was your first big score with the numbers?’ He said, ‘I got six hundred dollars.’ I said, ‘What’d you do with the money?’ He said, ‘I bought a yellow Bonneville convertible, it was the greatest day of my life. I’ve played the numbers ever since.’ I mean, that’s golden.