Gina and Gregg Hill were only 11 and 13 years old when their father, Henry Hill, decided to leave the Mafia and testify against his former friends and affiliates. Henry faced threats from the Mafia as well as drug dealing charges. As a result, he, his children and his wife Karen Hill entered the federal Witness Protection Program.

In the book “On the Run: A Mafia Childhood,” recently released in paperback, Gina and Gregg tell their intense, compelling and intimate account of life in the program and how they moved on.

Obsession with Mafia life has been so pervasive in the U.S. that even less prominent figures have become icons. Henry Hill, never a formal Mafia member because of his Irish blood, was a close friend and crime partner with the infamous Lucchese family. He took part in the biggest cash robbery in United States, the “Lufthansa heist” of 1978. After Hill entered the Witness Protection Program, federal agents grew furious over his media interviews, as well as his interviews with author Nicholas Pileggi. (The resulting book, a biography of Hill, was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”.)

But as many Mafia shows fail to provide the family’s perspective, so did Hill’s biography. Eventually, his children decided to tell their own version of what happened.

The language in "On the Run" is intentionally simple, as Gina and Gregg take turns describing their childhood in the voices of the children they used to be. The book seems to have had an ambitious editor: some of Gina and Gregg’s stories are so different, they seem to have been exaggerated for drama.

Nevertheless the book is captivating. The brutally honest accounts make the book impossible to put down, as they describe everything from parties with porn stars openly having sex in their living room to Henry’s continued and increasingly physical abuse of his wife and his ongoing alcohol abuse.

The family creates new identities, new names and new lives more than once, since Henry continues to keep touch with friends in New York, puting all of their lives in danger. The suspense keeps you reading until the end. Don’t pick this book up unless you have time to finish it.