The author of Wiseguy and Casino, Nick Pileggi the man who brought you Joe Pesci's famous "How am I funny?" scene in Goodfellas. He was also the husband of fellow screenwriter and all-around goddess, the late Nora Ephron.

To make some extra change while a student at Long Island University, Bensonhurst native Pileggi says he applied for a part-time job at what he thought was A&P, the supermarket, only to discover it was actually the AP, the newswire service. Pileggi spent 16 years there, working the crime beat and covering organized crime, until 1968 when& e& numped to the then-brand-new magazine New York, where he continued to pen crime-related stories. His break as a Hollywood writer came along when Martin Scorsese hired him to adapt his true-crime book Wiseguy into a movie, which became 1990's Goodfellas and bagged Pileggi an Oscar nod. A few years later, Pileggi and Scorsese teamed up again to adapt mafia tale Casino into the 1995 Robert De Niro-fronted movie of the same name. Slightly less active these days, he's more recently acte as an executive producer on Ridley Scott's American Gangster and co-wrote the pilot of CBS's Vegas.

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