ON THE RUN

A raw-boned, horror-strewn account of life with a drug-addicted mobster father, written in alternating voices by his two children.

Henry Hill was a smalltime wise guy. “He stole, fenced, bootlegged, loan-sharked, and extorted,” writes son Gregg. It started with a little arson, some point-shaving of basketball games at Boston College, but then came the drugs: cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and pills. Henry sold; Henry partook. Henry got mean and viciously beat on his family. Henry may also have had some small part in the famous Lufthansa heist that netted $5.8 million. People associated even tangentially with that theft, still unresolved and still the biggest cash robbery in US history, had a tendency to disappear. The feds made it simple for Henry, who had just been arrested for dealing drugs. “Go to prison and probably get killed. Go back on the street and definitely get killed. Or cooperate.” So the family entered the witness protection program, and things got only worse. According to Gregg, a full-blown cynic (“I was always uncomfortable, which I suppose a ten-year-old boy should be when his mother is smuggling contraband into a federal penal institution”), and Gina, the innocent (“I guess we were never what other people would call a normal family”), their father could never keep his trap shut or stay away from booze and drugs. They had to flee safe harbor after safe harbor as each became compromised by their father’s penchant for notoriety. (Gregg, the more entertaining writer, remarks of Omaha, Nebraska: “If they can find us here, they can find us anywhere.”) Finally, after Henry has nearly killed each member of the family numerous times in his narcotized hazes, everyone deserts him, including witness protection. He is, remarkably, still alive—after a fashion. Just as remarkably, so are Gregg and Gina.

Stephen King couldn’t have made up this tale of a father’s savagery and its god-awful toll.