11 Quotes by Nicholas Pileggi

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

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.

Las Vegas is a city of kickbacks. A desert city of greased palms. A place where a $20 bill can buy approval, a $100 bill adulation and $1,000 canonization.

For most of the guys killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules.

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 gotta admit the truth: It turned me on.

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.

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.

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.

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.