Henry Hill: The Real Life Goodfella

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He wasn’t a mob boss, underboss, or any other high-ranking member of the mafia. He didn’t even have a gangster’s name; he was just a mid-level associate. So how did Henry Hill become one of the most famous mobsters of all time? The answer lies in “Goodfellas,” Martin Scorsese’s iconic masterpiece, hailed as one of the greatest crime movies of all time. It tells the story of Henry Hill from his beginnings as a young thug to becoming a wise guy working for the Lucchese crime family, to testifying against his former associates and entering the witness protection program. The movie made Henry Hill famous, but there was another important aspect that made this situation unique: “Goodfellas” was based on the book “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family,” a true crime account by Nicholas Pileggi, which chronicled Hill’s exploits in the mafia and presented a detailed and ruthless account of the life of a mobster told from a first-hand perspective, with the help of Henry Hill himself. Unsurprisingly, the book will serve as our main source today as we bring you the story of the man who always wanted to be a gangster in order to become somebody in a neighborhood full of nobodies.

Henry Hill was born on June 11, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, one of eight children to Henry Hill Sr. and Carmela Costa. Although his mother was Sicilian, his father had Irish heritage, which limited Hill’s options in his criminal career. To rise through the ranks of the mafia and become a “made man,” he needed to be a full-blooded Italian—no exceptions were made. This meant that Henry Hill could only ever be an associate, no matter how valuable or effective he proved himself to be.

His fascination with the mob came from a young age. There was a cab stand right across the street from his home that served as a local gangster hangout. Young Henry would spend ages looking out of his window in awe at all the men who went there, who were unlike everybody else in the neighborhood. They arrived at the cab stand driving long black Lincolns and Cadillacs, wore platinum watches and diamond rings, and had on big expensive coats. Henry didn’t exactly know who they were; he just knew that he wanted to be like them.

In 1955, when he was 12 years old, Henry took the first step toward his new career path and walked into the cab stand looking for a part-time job. There, he met Paul Vario, who owned the cab stand along with a few other businesses in the neighborhood. Vario was a caporegime with the Lucchese crime family and had his own crew, which included his brothers. In the movie “Goodfellas,” he was identified as Paul Cicero and was played by Paul Sorvino. Vario liked the kid, so he made him his gopher, sending him on small errands such as buying cigarettes or delivering messages.

A while later, the two began making daily rounds together, driving around in various black Impalas, with Henry waiting in the car while Vario went out to bring people in for conversations or collections. By the time he turned 13, Henry was already making more money than he knew how to spend. He bought his first fancy suit and combed back his dark slick hair so that from a distance he looked like a mini version of the gangsters he admired. School didn’t interest him anymore; he often skipped class to work for Vario or sneak into the racetrack or just hang out at the cab stand.

When he turned 14, Henry was presented with a union card and put on the payroll as a bricklayer, even though he didn’t actually have to do anything. Most of his weekly salary went to various expenses, but that was the push that finally made him drop out of school altogether. Around that same time, another important figure walked into Henry’s life: James Burke, aka “Jimmy the Gent,” an associate of Vario who often showed up to the card games. In Hill’s own words, Jimmy was already a legend, even though he was only 25 years old at the time.

The first time they met, Henry was blown away by the way Jimmy was spreading his cash around. While other gangsters were pretty cheap, Jimmy Burke was spending hundreds of dollars on tips without a care in the world. Henry saw the doorman get a $100 bill just for opening the door for Jimmy, while he got a $5 tip every time he brought Jimmy another beer or sandwich. Once Jimmy started taking a shine to the kid, those $5 bills turned into $20s.

According to Hill, Jimmy Burke was one of the most successful hijackers in the city, specializing in cargo trucks going to and from the airport. He targeted hundreds of trucks a year and earned his nickname from his habit of putting a $50 bill in the wallet of the driver he was robbing. At the same time, Hill considered Burke to be a very dangerous and paranoid man who would not hesitate to kill someone who angered him. His violence and unpredictability were tolerated because he was one of Paul Vario’s biggest earners. Just like Henry Hill, Burke had Irish heritage, which meant he too could never become anything higher than an associate.

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Hill committed his first serious crime when he was around 15 years old. Someone had opened a rival cab stand around the corner from Vario’s and tried to undercut him by lowering prices and offering discounts. Fixing this problem was left up to Henry, Paul Vario’s brother, and a drum of gasoline. One night, after everyone at the rival cab stand had left, the two went from taxi to taxi. Henry broke the windows with a hammer, and Tuddy shoved gasoline-soaked newspapers inside. Afterwards, Tuddy backed off to a safe distance, and Hill ran from one cab to another, throwing matches inside each one of them.

The following year, Hill was arrested for the first time alongside another one of Vario’s associates, Paul’s son Lenny, when the two tried to use a stolen credit card. Henry got roughed up during the interrogation but did exactly as he was supposed to do and refused to sign or say anything. He kept quiet during his arraignment as well, and the lawyer on Vario’s payroll got him off on bail. Afterwards, there was a big party in Henry’s honor, first at a bar and then at a cab stand to celebrate his first arrest. It seemed like Henry’s rise within the Vario organization was guaranteed.

However, in 1960, the 17-year-old did something unexpected that left everyone perplexed: he enlisted in the army, where he would spend the next three years of his life. Why exactly he did this remains uncertain, although he claimed it was due to all the extra attention that the mafia was receiving from law enforcement at the time. Some even speculated it may have been an attempt to go straight. But if anything, Henry put the skills he had learned from his time at the cab stand to good use. When he started working in the kitchen, he saw that a lot of food was being thrown out because the army always ordered more than necessary. He quickly established a network of restaurants and hotels in the area surrounding Fort Bragg, where he was stationed, and began selling the extra food to them. With the money he made, Hill set up a loan sharking business for the other soldiers and then started hosting card and dice games.

His time in the army ended in the stockades, serving two months after getting into a drunken brawl with some marines and then stealing a sheriff’s car. In 1963, Henry Hill returned to New York and resumed his career as an up-and-coming mobster working for Paul Vario. At first, he was often paired up with Lenny Vario because they were around the same age. However, Paul soon moved Lenny to work as a bartender in a fancy restaurant known as the Azores, which was owned and often frequented by Tommy Lucchese, head of the entire family. That was when Henry started working more often with Jimmy Burke.

As fans of “Goodfellas” know, there was a third man in the team. In the movie, he was Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci. In real life, he was Tommy DeSimone, the youngest and craziest one of the group. His grandfather and uncle both served as heads of the Los Angeles crime family at different times, while his older brothers worked for the Gambino family in New York. So, DeSimone had always been around this life; it seemed inevitable that he too would eventually join a crew. He started working for Paul Vario when he was 15 years old. Hill remembers the day he first met Tommy, who was seven years younger than him. Jimmy the Gent brought him around the cab stand. Hill described him as a skinny kid wearing a wise guy suit and a pencil mustache. Because Jimmy was a friend of the DeSimone family, he wanted Henry to take Tommy under his wing and make him part of the cigarette-selling operation he was handling at the time.

The two quickly became friends and partners in a whole bunch of other rackets, such as stealing cars, lending money, committing fraud, and fencing stolen goods. From 1966, they also started doing hijackings with Jimmy Burke. They were still just street-level wise guys, though, and they needed a big caper if they were to move up in the world. In 1967, this came in the form of a major airport robbery. Just to clarify, this is not the Lufthansa heist depicted in the movie, which came about a decade later. This was a smaller, much more straightforward job that basically saw Henry and Tommy walk in with an empty suitcase, fill it with money, and walk out without anyone ever realizing it.

Once they started working with Burke, the two began meeting people who were part of Jimmy’s network of informants, who tipped him off about good scores. One of them was Bobby McMahon, nicknamed “Frenchie,” because he had worked for Air France for a long time. He told Hill over a contract that the airline had to bring in U.S. dollars from businesses in Asia and deposit them in American banks. He also told them that security was pretty lax at the cargo terminal at JFK International, where the money was kept until it was ready for a bank pickup.

The biggest obstacles the crew had to overcome were a locked door and a stubborn security guard who wouldn’t take a bribe. They solved these problems by having Frenchie distract the guard one night by taking him to a steam room to meet some girls, which gave them time to steal his key, make a copy, and return the original without the guard noticing. The night of the heist, Henry and Tommy walked into the cargo terminal when the guard was on his meal break. They were carrying the biggest empty suitcase they could find and entered the storeroom without a problem. They knew what the money bags looked like—white canvas bags with red seals. They crammed seven of them inside Henry’s suitcase and simply left the airport without a care in the world, walking away with $420,000. The theft wasn’t discovered until the following Monday.

In his later years, Henry Hill always proclaimed that he had been a money man for the mob and stressed time and time again that he never killed anybody. With that in mind, he also admitted that he saw plenty of people get murdered and that he helped dispose of their bodies. This was not the case with Tommy DeSimone, whom Henry described as a total psychopath. Hill admitted that he didn’t know exactly how many murders DeSimone had committed. He and another mobster named Stanley Diamond killed a union guy in his own home. They were just supposed to rough him up, but Tommy beat him to death out of anger. Having to drive all the way to New Jersey and back on Jimmy’s orders, Tommy strangled one of Burke’s old partners, called Remo, with piano wire out of fear that he was talking to the police.

Then there’s the notorious scene in “Goodfellas” where Tommy shoots and kills a kid named Spider during a card game. That one was also real, but the one that ended up sealing Tommy’s own fate was the murder of Billy Batts. Real name William Benvenuti, Billy Batts was a mobster with the Gambino crime family. In 1970, he had gotten out of prison after a six-year stint and was celebrating his release at a club owned by Jimmy Burke named Robert’s Lounge. Tommy DeSimone was 20 years old at the time and had been just a kid the last time Billy Batts saw him. Therefore, when Tommy arrived at the club, Batts made some jokes at his expense, asking if he still shined shoes. This made Tommy very angry, but there was nothing he could do about it; Billy Batts was a made man, a full member of the mafia, which made him untouchable as far as other mobsters were concerned unless they received special permission from the boss. The punishment for attacking, let alone killing, a made man would have been death.

However, Tommy DeSimone was not the most level-headed guy in the world. He kept his temper at the time, but privately he told Henry and Jimmy that he intended to kill Billy Batts. That is exactly what happened, although it wasn’t spur of the moment like in the movie. Instead, it took place a few weeks later when Billy Batts was in one of Hill’s joints. Jimmy Burke was with him, swapping stories and keeping him happy and drunk. It got late, and almost everybody went home. That was when Tommy walked up to Batts and started pummeling him in the head with the butt of his gun while Jimmy held him down. There was an associate of theirs in the club called Alex Corcione. Henry grabbed him and quickly threw him out of the bar to keep him safe, and by the time he returned, Billy Batts was dead, and Tommy was placing him inside a body bag. At least that’s what they thought. While they were driving to get rid of the body, they started hearing noises coming from the trunk. They pulled over, opened the trunk, and Tommy smashed him with a shovel, making sure that this time Billy Batts stayed dead.

The murder of Billy Batts would have consequences, but not until nearly a decade later. The first half of the 1970s was a quiet period for Henry Hill, mainly because he spent time in prison. In 1972, he was sentenced to 10 years inside Louisburg Penitentiary for extortion. He only served six, but it was during this time that Hill started dealing drugs since he had the connections to get them smuggled inside the prison. Once he was out, he continued trafficking since it was such a lucrative business. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to do this since the Lucchese family had banned the drug trade, but if anything, Hill ramped up his operation. He developed a network of mules, began handling wholesale quantities, and also brought Burke into the business. Soon enough, he was making a lot more money than he had ever made in his criminal career.

But his pals were planning something even more audacious, known as the Lufthansa heist. At the time, it was the largest cash robbery in United States history. On December 11, 1978, criminals made off with $5 million in cash plus another million in jewelry stolen from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK International Airport. Almost none of it was ever recovered, and despite a massive FBI investigation, the only person ever convicted was a small-time player named Louis Werner, who served as the inside man. Unlike the Air France heist, Henry Hill had almost no involvement in this one other than receiving the tip and passing it along to Jimmy the Gent. Although he was never charged for it, Burke was identified as the mastermind of the whole thing.

Ultimately, it may have been a good thing for Hill that he stayed out of this heist because soon after it happened, a lot of people supposedly involved in it started dropping dead. It began with Parnell “Stacks” Edwards, who drove a black Ford van that served as the getaway car. He was supposed to have it destroyed at a junkyard, but instead, he drove it to his girlfriend’s apartment, where he parked it in front of a fire hydrant. The police found it two days later and recovered multiple sets of fingerprints from inside the van. Just a week after the heist, Edwards was shot and killed in his apartment. The following months came the death of Martin Krugman, the guy who originally had the tip about the heist. By the summer of 1979, eight people associated with the robbery were either dead or missing. Most people, Hill included, regarded this as Jimmy Burke cleaning house after Edwards’ screw-up since he knew the police were on their trail. However, Hill also speculated that Jimmy may have intended to do this from the very beginning in order to increase his share of the profits.

Another person who disappeared around this time was Tommy DeSimone. Although he probably took part in the Lufthansa heist, nobody thought this was the work of Jimmy Burke. Instead, it was believed that this was revenge for the murder of Billy Batts nine years earlier, although who exactly was responsible remains a mystery to this day. Hill always maintained that it was John Gotti himself, the future head of the Gambino crime family, who killed Tommy, although he did change some of the story details over the years. Other culprits have been put forward, but there is no definitive answer as DeSimone’s body has never been