Chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 greatest American films of the last 100 years, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990) has done more to demythologize organized crime than any other major contemporary film, while cementing its maker's reputation as, arguably, America's greatest director still living and working at the end of the twentieth century. GoodFellas was based on Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 bestseller, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, which recounted the true story of Henry Hill. A low-level mobster who rose up through the ranks, Hill was involved in the biggest cash robbery in America's history, was caught dealing cocaine, turned State's evidence, and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. Behind its glossy and absorbing gangster-thriller surface, the film offered an unvarnished account of Mafia brutality that came to set a standard—seldom achieved since—for the moral focus of serious crime films, and illuminated public understanding of the...