At first Nicky didn’t understand why anybody would want to write or read a book about him. “What do you want to do, make people commit suicide? The people on the earth today don’t give a damn about the things I got to say. Who the hell cares about Nicky D. from L.I. C.? Nobody ever heard of me. What are you nuts!” After a while he’d call me up with something very important that I had to “make sure gets printed in that thing.” A few weeks after the book came out, I was over at his place, and Nicky was trying to decide who should play him in the movie — should it be Robert DeNiro or Joe Pesci? I told him not to hold his breath.