Nicholas Pileggi is an American author, screenwriter and journalist. He is the widower of director and journalist Nora Ephron. He wrote the 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy and co-wrote the screenplay for Goodfellas, its 1990 film adaptation, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Pileggi was born and raised in Brooklyn,the elder son of an Italian immigrant father, Nicola (“Nick”) Pileggi from Calabria, a musician who played slide trombone in a cinema orchestra for silent films and subsequently also owned shoe stores, and an American-born mother, Susie. In the 1950s, he worked as a journalist for the Associated Press and New York magazine, specializing in crime reporting for more than three decades.