Henry Hill’s downfall started long before he ever became somebody in the mob. He was just a kid from a poor neighborhood in New York, one of seven children, with a father who struggled to keep food on the table. But the streets around him were full of gangsters, and to Henry, those men looked like movie stars. They had money.
They had power. They walked into any restaurant or nightclub and the chairs emptied out for them. That was what he wanted. That was the life.
He got his first taste of it as a teenager, running errands for Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. Paulie was one of the most violent men in the city, but he trusted Henry because Henry was half Sicilian. He gave the boy more responsibility, treated him like a son. Henry loved that.
He looked up to Paulie like a father. He barely knew what it meant to be a criminal yet, but he knew he wanted to be around these people. Paulie introduced him to Jimmy Burke, known as Jimmy the Gent. Jimmy was charm itself, handing out twenty-dollar bills, always dressed sharp, always surrounded by admirers.
Henry was hooked. Jimmy got respect everywhere he went, and Henry wanted that respect more than anything. Behind the charm, though, Jimmy was ruthless. You didn’t cross him.
You didn’t mess around. Henry saw that side of him soon enough, but it didn’t scare him off. It just made him want the life more. One day, Henry went with Paulie to visit a woman Paulie was seeing on the side.
Henry thought it was just a routine stop. But the woman had made the worst mistake a mob mistress could make. She had contacted Paulie’s wife and let the affair slip. Paulie walked into her house with Henry right there and beat her savagely with a baseball bat.
She ended up in the hospital with a broken neck and broken bones. Henry learned something that day. The mob could forgive almost anything, but not betrayal. Not talking.
Not breaking the code. And it didn’t matter if you were a woman or a child. The lesson stayed with him forever. By the early 1960s, the new JFK airport was moving billions of dollars in cargo.
The mob figured out the opportunity fast. Jimmy Burke became the king of the airport hijackers. Fur coats, jewelry, watches, anything valuable passing through those cargo terminals, Jimmy could get his hands on it. Henry was eager to get a piece of that action.
For his first heist, he was paired with a young brute named Tommy DeSimone. Tommy was six foot four, close to two hundred and forty pounds, and he loved violence. Henry was the opposite. He was smooth, calm, he could talk his way through anything.
They were different in every way, but they became close friends. Tommy was a loose cannon, and Henry knew it. But for this job, Tommy’s temper stayed in check. Henry sweet-talked his way through airport security.
Then he used the oldest trick in the book, two fingers pressed against a guard’s back, making him believe there was a gun. The guard opened the loading bay without a fight. Henry tied him up. They drove out with trailers full of merchandise.
No violence. No blood. No risk of being hurt. Henry was intoxicated by how easy it was.
Within minutes, he had his hands on thousands of dollars in stolen goods, and nobody got hurt. For Henry, that was the perfect heist. With his share of the money, he finally had the cash to live like his idol. He went to the best clubs, wore the best clothes, always the center of attention.
But he knew the mob respected a man more when he had a wife. A married man had more to lose. That was the reason he courted a young woman named Karen Friedman. At first he didn’t even like her that much.
But she was a straight-talking New Yorker, and she was innocent. Karen had no idea what she was getting into. He took her to the Copacabana. Sammy Davis Jr.
was performing. Henry sent over champagne, and Karen watched him move through the room like he owned it. She realized this guy had potential. Within months they were married and living in the suburbs of Long Island.
But Karen soon figured out that Henry’s heart belonged to the mob. He was addicted to the excitement, the glamour, the feeling of being somebody. Karen wanted a normal life, a stable home, a future for their kids. Henry couldn’t take that seriously.
He was an excitement junkie. He always wanted to be on the edge. It wasn’t long before he returned to JFK airport, the scene of his first big score. The foreign airlines were careless.
The cargo buildings had almost no security. Henry got a tip that nearly half a million dollars in cash was being stored at the Air France depot, locked behind a single door. All he needed was the key. Instead of using violence, Henry came up with an elegant plan.
He got the guard drunk. He arranged for a prostitute to keep the man occupied. While the guard was busy, Henry slipped into the room, took the key ring off the man’s pants, and copied the key to the vault. Then he put it back.
The guard never knew. Henry walked into the depot with his crew, unlocked the safe room, stuffed as much cash as they could carry into a suitcase, and walked out. Four hundred eighty thousand dollars. More than six million in today’s money.
No violence. No one hurt. Henry had earned a reputation as a guy who could make the mob rich without bloodshed. He was moving up the ladder.
He finally had the respect of the people he had respected his whole life. But just as he was on the verge of the big time, he got cold feet. Karen pushed him to go straight. With Paulie’s blessing, Henry bought a club called the Suite in Queens.
Paulie even told his crew to stay away from the place. Henry was a natural host. He loved treating people well. For a moment, it seemed like he might actually make something legit of himself.
Then Jimmy and Tommy showed up. They had a new idea. America was getting hooked on cocaine, and the five families had banned drug dealing. They were terrified that narcotics arrests would turn guys into informants.
But the profits were enormous, and Henry’s club was off the radar. He started dealing. He was violating Paulie’s edict, and if Paulie found out, Henry would be killed. But the drugs got to him.
He started using his own product. He got careless, obsessive. He was on the way to disaster. Tommy DeSimone got hooked too.
Cocaine made him even more unhinged. One night, a made man named Billy Bats, just out of prison, made a joke at Tommy’s expense. Tommy snapped. He beat the man to death with his pistol right in front of Henry.
It was an explosion of pure violence, and Henry was trapped in the middle of it, watching, unable to stop it. Billy Bats was a made man. Sworn to the mafia, protected by the code. Killing a made man meant death.
Henry had helped dispose of the body. From that moment, his fate was sealed. He was bound to Jimmy and Tommy forever. There was no way out.
Then came the biggest score of their lives. A bookmaker named Marty Krugman told Henry about a massive shipment of untraceable cash and jewelry moving through the Lufthansa terminal at Kennedy Airport. Henry went straight to Jimmy with the tip. He provided floor plans and security information.
Jimmy assembled a crew of hardened armed robbers, but Henry wasn’t included. He wasn’t a reliable violent gangster. Jimmy and Tommy were known killers. Henry was just the guy who could get them information.
Under cover of darkness, the crew beat up a guard and got inside the terminal. They brutalized the employees, took their driver’s licenses, told them they knew where they lived. Terror worked. The employees led them to the vault.
They cleaned out over five million in cash and more than a million in jewelry. It was the largest robbery in American history. Henry was proud. He had helped make it happen, even if he wasn’t there.
The FBI assigned more than a hundred agents to the case. Ed McDonald, the head of the organized crime strike force in Brooklyn, took joint charge. Informants talked fast. Within days, the FBI knew the Burke crew was responsible.
But they needed proof. They planted bugs in cars but got nothing but bad disco music and engine noise. They showed a Lufthansa guard photographs of the crew, but the robbers had worn masks. It looked hopeless.
Then a lucky break. One of the employees remembered a man who had removed his ski mask to cool his face. He identified Tommy DeSimone. The terrified witness refused to testify, but the FBI knew they were on the right track.
They found the getaway van. A gang member named Stax Edwards was supposed to destroy it, but he hadn’t. They put it in a garage and tore it apart forensically. Then they tracked Edwards to his apartment.
He wasn’t talking, though. He was dead. Six bullets in his head and chest. Jimmy Burke was coming apart.
He thought the walls were closing in, so he decided to kill everyone involved in the robbery. Marty Krugman disappeared. A man named Richard Eaton was found strung up in a freezer, and he barely had anything to do with the heist. The FBI kept reaching for witnesses, but they were dead before they could be found.
Jimmy was willing to kill anyone, no matter how small their connection. Henry was helpless. He knew deep down he was a weak link too. But then came good news.
Tommy DeSimone was going to become a made man. It meant he was untouchable. Jimmy was proud of him. Henry felt a little safer.
But the promotion was a lie. It was a ploy. Paulie knew Tommy had killed Billy Bats. In the mafia, that meant death.
Tommy was whacked. He never got made. He just got killed. Henry understood what it meant.
If the mob knew about Billy Bats, they knew everything. Tommy had committed the murder, but Henry had helped dispose of the body. He wasn’t a made man. He had no protection.
It was only a matter of time before they came for him. He kept dealing drugs anyway. It was a desperate gamble. Under mafia law, selling narcotics was a death sentence.
He lived in constant fear that someone was coming to kill him. One night, he thought the executioner had finally arrived. He braced for the bullet. But the man was a cop.
Henry was arrested for narcotics trafficking by the Nassau County Police. Within twenty-four hours, he was turned over to the FBI. This was the break they had been waiting for. Jimmy and Tommy’s crew knew that if Henry talked, he could take them all down.
Henry knew it too. He faced twenty-five years to life, or death at the hands of the mob. At first, he tried to bargain. He wanted to give up small-timers, bookmakers, loan sharks.
He hoped the guys would still like him. But then the agents played a wiretap recording. Jimmy Burke wanted Henry dead. Paul Vario wanted him dead for dealing drugs.
There was nobody on his side. He hit a brick wall. His wife and kids were in danger. He had nowhere to turn.
Henry cracked. He gave them everything. He had a lifetime of crime with these men, and he could testify against all of them. He was a reliable, invaluable witness.
In exchange, they put him and his family into the witness protection program. The Hill family disappeared from the records. Henry made secret trips back to New York under armed guard to testify against the entire Lucchese crime family. He was guarded around the clock.
He was terrified. He knew if the mob found him, they would kill him. His testimony put Paul Vario behind bars for ten years. The man who had been like a father to him, Henry sent to prison.
He knew it was Paul or him. He wrote off Jimmy Burke too. His evidence helped convict Jimmy of killing Richard Eaton, the man found in the freezer. Jimmy the Gent Burke was sentenced to life in prison.
In the end, Henry’s testimony put away fifty members of organized crime. He became the most infamous mob rat in history. The marshals relocated the Hill family to Omaha, Nebraska. New names, new life.
This is where the movie ends. But real life was different. Henry was in more danger than ever. Jimmy Burke had learned Henry was hiding in the Midwest.
Paulie was hunting for him too. The marshals forced the family to move again, another part of the country, another new identity. But Henry couldn’t adapt. He missed the old life.
He started drinking heavily. He started using drugs. He was full of guilt and self-loathing. He hated himself for snitching on his friends.
He couldn’t resist telling people who he really was. He would have a couple of drinks and spill everything, bragging about the Lufthansa job. He wanted attention more than he wanted to stay safe. His wife left him.
The witness protection program kicked him out. He fell in with a gang of drug traffickers, and the DEA was watching them. Henry went back to prison, to Terminal Island, a penitentiary run by a mob family with ties to Paul Vario. The prison was ruled by inmates.
Henry was in more danger inside than outside. In desperation, he contacted Ed McDonald. He asked for a letter explaining the threats against his life. McDonald agreed to explain Henry’s value as a witness.
The judge gave him a suspended sentence and ordered him into drug treatment. Then word came that Paul Vario had died. Henry felt a wave of relief. But Jimmy Burke was still alive.
Henry lived every day looking over his shoulder. When he got out of treatment, he had nothing. No money. No protection.
He was a sitting duck. But then an author named Nicholas Pileggi approached him, and Martin Scorsese turned his story into a movie. Goodfellas made Henry a star. He met Ray Liotta.
He met Robert De Niro. He signed autographs. Hollywood made him untouchable, ironically. The mob stayed away from him.
Those who wanted him dead no longer went near him. Jimmy Burke died of lung cancer in 1996. Henry outlived all of them. Forty years after the Lufthansa heist, the loot was never fully recovered.
Henry spent much of it on street-level drug deals. He never put money in the bank. He never invested. He just burned through it.
He didn’t regret turning on his friends. He understood it was the only way to survive. He never looked back. He lived through the mob.
He lived through witness protection. He lived through prison. On the day after his sixty-ninth birthday, he died in his bed at home in Los Angeles. He died the night after a great birthday party.
It was an extraordinary life for a small-time wise guy who thought he could beat the system. And in the end, he actually did.
