Mobster who inspired Goodfellas dies at 69

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Henry Hill (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

LOS ANGELES -- Henry Hill, who went from small-time gangster to big-time celebrity when his life as a mobster-turned-FBI informant became the basis for the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, died Tuesday. He was 69

Longtime girlfriend Lisa Caserta told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Hill died of complications from longtime heart problems related to smoking.

An associate in New York's Lucchese crime family, Hill told detailed, disturbing and often hilarious tales of life in the mob that first appeared in the 1986 book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, by Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist Hill sought out shortly after becoming an informant.

"Henry Hill was a hood. He was a hustler. He had schemed and plotted and broken heads," Pileggi wrote in the book. "He knew how to bribe and he knew how to con. He was a full-time working racketeer, an articulate hoodlum from organized crime."

In 1990 the book, adapted for the screen by Pileggi and Scorsese, became the instant classic Goodfellas, starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta as Hill, a young hoodlum on the make who thrives in the Mafia but is eventually forced by drugs to turn on his criminal friends.

The film became a constantly quoted pop cultural phenomenon that provided the template for the modern gangster story.

Unlike older Mafia tales, which focused on family and honour, Wiseguy and Goodfellas mostly dwelled on how utterly awesome it was to be in the mob -- on the gangster as rock star -- at least until the life caught up with you.

Born in Brooklyn to an Irish father and an Italian mother, Hill's life with the mob began at age 11 running errands that soon led to small-time crimes. Far bigger crimes awaited, including the 1967 theft of $420,000 in cash from the Air France cargo terminal at JFK airport in New York, among the biggest cash heists in history at the time.

And in 1978, Hill had a key role in the theft of $5.8 million in cash from a Lufthansa Airlines vault, a heist masterminded by Jimmy Burke, the inspiration for De Niro's character in Goodfellas.

But the crew involved in the heist would soon turn on each other, and several would end up dead, leaving Hill extremely paranoid he could be next, he later told Pileggi.

He was also selling drugs behind the back of his boss Paul Vario, and in 1980 was arrested on a narcotics-trafficking charge.

More afraid of his associates than prison, Hill decided he had no choice but to become an informant, and signed an agreement with a Department of Justice task force that would prove more fruitful than anyone imagined.

"If he talked, police knew that Henry Hill could give them the key to dozens of indictments and convictions," Pileggi wrote.

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 14, 2012 D2