But being involved in creating 22 episodes of a television show, with six people in a writers' room – you have to say it's a help.' Loss is loss, it doesn't change that fact.

Work takes your mind in a direction you might not otherwise go. 'To say the only antidote to grief is work is one of the oldest cliches,' he suggests.

Writing Vegas has been his lifeline in the past six months, he says. Though whenever I mention Ephron's name in the conversation that follows, his eyes fill up a little and his voice struggles briefly to hold its easy composure.

He is careful, when we talk, not to reveal too much of that. And he carries about him too just a hint of the distracted wildness of his grief. He has a rich Italian-American New York voice, with some of the twang of the wiseguys he documented – his parents were first-generation immigrants from Calabria, just across the water from Sicily. He is a deeply charming man, full of stories, and the kind of animated listener who could clearly get gangsters to open up to him, and stay on good enough terms to come back for more. Sitting behind his desk on the lot of Vegas, Pileggi wears the traces of those legends on his face. 'My kids, Nick, spring, fall… Dinner at home just the two of us… Pride and Prejudice… Pie…' (She also listed those things she wouldn't mourn: 'Dry skin, email, bras, funerals…') In what turned out to be a collection of farewell essays, she closed by listing the things she would miss when she finally had to go. And during the time he was writing those films, he was also one half of a legendarily joyous Hollywood marriage, to Nora Ephron, fellow journalist and writer of Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.Įphron died in June last year, having kept her leukaemia secret from all but her closest family for six years. Pileggi then became a notable screenwriter, with credit for another Scorsese movie, Casino, among others. Now a courteous and energetic 79, he was a legendary crime reporter in New York for more than 30 years, mostly writing inside stories about the mob, before one of those, the book-length Wiseguy, was picked up by Martin Scorsese and, with Pileggi's help, turned into the film Goodfellas. Pileggi's name often has the word 'legendary' attached to it. The cast of the TV series Pileggi has conceived and co-written, Vegas, are out on location when I visit, so he is pretty much alone here, among the lovingly recreated props and vintage neon-lit backdrops of his own make-believe. To reach it you walk along a low-rise strip out of 1960s Las Vegas where exuberantly finned Cadillacs are parked up at the roadside, and then past the blackjack and roulette tables of a cavernous casino, filled with all the chandeliered luxury of 50 years ago. N icholas Pileggi's office is at the back of a film lot in a suburb north of Hollywood.

Wiseguy by nicholas pileggi