'My father had an angle for everything. If there was a way to make a buck off a situation, he'd figure it out. And it was easy for him to pull it off because he never thought about or cared about the consequences. Plus, he had no shame.' So writes Gregg Hill, son of Henry Hill, who wrote about his gangster life in a shelf of books and was portrayed in the film Goodfellas.

On the Run picks up where Goodfellas left off, that closing scene where the camera pulls back from Ray Liotta's Hill, dressed in a too-short bathrobe, standing in front of an anonymous house in an anonymous suburb as he begins life in the witness protection programme.

Off-screen are the two children inside the house, Gregg and Gina, who for the next four years lived in four states with four new identities, after Henry kept blowing their cover.

'My father was a cheating, wife-beating, drug-dealing, thieving, gambling, alcoholic ex-con drug addict,' writes Gregg, who in the end ran to save what was left of his own life.

Gina Hill, hoping her father would one day keep a promise, took a lot longer to stop believing his excuses. 'I'd decided that the time he tried to beat me with the two-by-four was just a terrible mistake, one of those freak episodes that everyone has once in a while,' she writes.

On the Run is a disturbing book for the matter-of-fact manner in which Gregg and Gina alternate in telling the same story of life in the witness protection programme. 'The point,' writes Gregg Hill, 'was never to rehabilitate him or care for us so much as it was to remove him from the people who wanted to kill him.'

Hill, a key player in a minor gang of mafia wannabes barred from criminal advancement in the strictly Italian hierarchy because of their Irish ancestry, literally knew where the bodies were buried. He was in on reputedly the biggest cash robbery in US history, the US$5.8m heist from a Lufthansa warehouse at Kennedy Airport.

He knew he could trade that information when he was busted for drug trafficking in 1980 - the only wrinkle in the plan being that he'd be killed if he opened his mouth. So, Hill demanded witness protection, and insisted his family go with him. 'He was a selfish piece of s***, and this was his ultimate selfish act,' Gregg writes.

Gina's story ends with her trying to get custody of her half-brother, Henry's child from a second marriage after their mother finally left. Gregg's story ends with his reflections on fatherhood. Both now live far from Henry, under aliases. Henry, dropped from witness protection in 1984, is still doing deals, the contract on his life having apparently lapsed in 1996 with the death of Jimmy 'the Gent' Burke (portrayed by Robert de Niro).