Dead bodies under a bar. Back-stabbing friends. Hooking up with the boss. Goodfellas may have
forever glamorized life in the mob, but the real events it's based on are so much darker.
In Goodfellas, Henry Hill goes
from life as a kid on the street to a full-fledged gangster.
"As far back as I could remember I always wanted to be a gangster."
In real life, Hill took a little break from life on the streets and briefly pursued a career in
the U.S. Military. According to military community publication We Are the Mighty,
Hill joined the 82nd Airborne at age 17. The article mentions how Hill had joined
the military as a way to escape a senate probe into union connections to organized
crime. It also mentions how he used his time there to continue his criminal activities.
According to the We Are the Mighty article, Hill was a loan shark in the
military and got into plenty of fights while serving. When his enlistment time was up,
Hill returned to his life of crime, becoming a different kind of soldier for New York's
Lucchese [loo-KAY-zee] crime family. Having briefly served the government that eventually
brought him down, it seems that Henry Hill was a study in contradictions.
Henry Hill was involved in a lot
of schemes with the Lucchese family. Ironically, one of the biggest ones, and the one which really
brought him and some of his closest associates down, was a point-shaving scheme with the 1978–79
Boston College basketball team. This is one of the stories that transcends Goodfellas,
as some have called it the worst point-fixing scheme in sports history. Not only because it
was so easily found out, but because it worked out so poorly for the gangsters.
Stories differ across the board. Some players say the scheme never
took place beyond some preliminary conversations,
while some gangsters say they had multiple players in their pockets. In terms of the payout,
a few gangsters claimed to have raked in hundreds of thousands. Others, meanwhile,
say they didn't score more than a few thousand. Nevertheless, the scheme accomplished one goal:
It brought down Jimmy Burke, also known as Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. Henry Hill's testimony about
Burke's involvement in this half-baked scheme is what finally got Jimmy "The Gent" behind bars.
Goodfellas ends with Henry Hill in
witness protection living a life in the suburbs.
"I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."
Luckily for Hill, though, he wouldn't live out the remainder of his life as an average
suburbanite under a false identity. He also wasn't being actively hunted by the mafia,
either. As noted in his New York Times obituary,
Hill was kicked out of hiding due to some questionable moves. Hill's obituary noted:
Henry Hill also revealed his identity often while in witness protection,
meaning he basically snitched on himself — just to a different set of people. However,
Hill was never killed by the mafia — even after going public about who he really was — as most of
the people he feared were already in prison. He eventually died of health problems that
reportedly included heart disease and other illnesses related to heavy cigarette use.
In Goodfellas, Henry meets his eventual wife Karen on a double
date with Tommy DeVito. It was just two friends with two girls,
and Hill even stands up Karen on the second date. This timeline is somewhat accurate, except for the
fact that Henry Hill was actually invited on a double date by Paul Vario's son,
Paul Vario Jr. In the film, this would be Paul Cicero's son, who is not seen in the movie.
By going on the date, Hill wasn't just doing his buddy a favor; he was helping out his boss's son.
Little Paulie was trying to go on a date with a Jewish girl who refused to go on a date without
it being a double date. So, of course, who does he call up but one of his fellow wiseguys. The
rest of the early courtship plays out the same in real life as it does in the movie.
Paulie Cicero seems relatively "moral" compared to the other madcap gangsters
in Goodfellas. Yet he has one line that goes beyond the script. While convincing Henry to
go back to his wife, who's upset over Hill's many infidelities, Paul says to his friend:
"I know how to talk to her, especially to her."
The "especially to her" line seems strange unless you take it to mean that Paulie has a
special relationship with Karen. In Hill's book Gangsters and Goodfellas: The Mob,
Witness Protection, and Life on the Run, he writes that Karen had an affair with Paul Vario,
Cicero's real-life counterpart, while Henry was in prison. It makes sense
given how tough it was for Karen to keep afloat while Henry was in jail.
Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas
was a perpetual bachelor with a violent intensity that seemed to be grounded in an inferiority
complex. In real life, though, DeSimone was a big man with a wife. He
was also no less psychotic, though. In Goodfellas, we see Tommy frighten his closest friends
by pretending to be offended by being called funny in the epic and tense "funny how" scene.
"Funny how? I mean what's funny about it?"
We also see him shoot and kill Spider, played by Michael Imperioli, in
the film, which happened in real life according to accounts. In Nicholas Pileggi's book
Wiseguy, on which the film was based, Henry Hill also details how Tommy DeSimone, at just 17, was
walking with Hill when he decided to show off by shooting and killing a random man in cold blood.
Furthermore, DeSimone supposedly killed his own best friend, according to some sources
and the Pileggi book. He's also mentioned across most outlets as being over 6 feet tall
and a burly enforcer, despite being played by the small-statured Pesci in the film.
Jimmy Burke, also known as Jimmy Conway, was an Irish gangster and a bit of a mentor to Henry
Hill. It makes sense, then, that he would lead his own son into the lucrative life of the mafia.
Burke reportedly included his son, Francis James Burke, in the Lufthansa heist.
In Wiseguy, Hill recounts how proud Tommy DeSimone was to take James on his first hit:
Unfortunately, it didn't work out as well for Frank as it had for his pops. James was
found shot dead at 26, while his father was in jail. The police claimed the murder was
drug-related. One can only imagine the reflection Jimmy "The Gent" was going
through after having seen his son and DeSimone, who was almost like a son,
get whacked, while Burke himself was planning on killing his own protege.
In Wiseguy, Henry Hill explores a bit deeper the fact that Paul Vario, and by extension
everybody under Vario including him, was a capo in the Lucchese crime family.
Most people with some knowledge have heard of the "Five Families" and the Lucchese crew was
one. The Gambino crew was another, and around the time of the events in Goodfellas,
the legendary John Gotti would take control of the Gambinos. In the movie,
Hill even mentions that Billy Batts was a Gambino family member, thus the reason Tommy
DeVito has to pay for murdering him. Given all the stories about feuds between mafia families,
one might wonder why Vario would kill one of his up-and-coming soldiers. Around this time,
however, the Gambinos and the Luccheses were very close.
In 1962 Carlo Gambino's eldest son married Tommy Lucchese's daughter in a
1,000-person wedding that garnered quite a bit of
press. That means that the heads of two of the families were literally family.
Being a mob picture, most of the action in Goodfellas happens in bars and lounges,
and no location is more front and center than Robert's Lounge. That's probably because Jimmy
Conway owned it. While he refers to it when he tells Billy Batts drinks are "on the house,"
the fact that Jimmy had a lounge and later a jacket warehouse speaks to the "legitimate"
businesses he owned. Jimmy Conway didn't do too bad for a guy who could never be made.
In real life, Robert's Lounge was a legendary mobster social club and yes, Jimmy Burke did own
it. When the bar was raided, bones were eventually found in the basement. One set was said to have
belonged to Marty Krugman — the inspiration for Morris Kessler, the wig king, who tips Jimmy off
to the Lufthansa heist in the movie. The other set of bones was said to have belonged to Tommy
DeSimone. That revelation makes all of Jimmy's sadness and anger over Tommy DeVito's death in
the movie seem that much stranger given that he helped the mafia hide DeSimone's body.
It is a bit frightening
to discover that the real-life Tommy DeSimone was more violent and uncontrollable than the
character played by Joe Pesci. In real life, DeSimone was equal parts premeditated and
impulsive with little concern for human life. He had no problem crossing lines,
such as when he murdered Billy Batts. But another line he crossed, according to Henry Hill,
was attempting to beat up and rape Hill's wife, Karen. As Hill writes in Gangsters and Goodfellas,
Hill goes on to claim he didn't find out until a decade later and would have done
something about it had he known. The irony is that Karen's husband wasn't even the man
DeSimone really had to worry about. Later on in the book, Hill says that Paul Vario
found out about this attempted rape, which is what finally convinced him to kill DeSimone as
retribution for the Batts affair. Since Vario was allegedly having an affair with Karen,
DeSimone might as well have been signing his own death warrant the moment he put his hands on her.