This is the second of three stories as told by career criminals involved in organized crime who turned government witness to avoid certain death.

At the age of 12, my ambition was to be a gangster. To me, being a Wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a Wiseguy was to own the world. You know, we always called each other good fellas. Like you’d say to somebody, ‘You’re gonna like this guy. He’s alright. He’s a good fella. He’s one of us.’ You understand? We were good fellas. Wiseguys. e Henry Hill’s life as a gangster was immortalized in the Nicholas Pileggi book Wiseguy, and later in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film GoodFellas. Born on June 11, 1943, to an Irish father and a Sicilian mother, Henry found the neighborhood mobster Paul Vario (a capo in the Lucchese family) and his crew intoxicating. They had the money, cars, and prestige that young Henry wanted. From his early days of washing cars for Vario’s crew, he soon escalated to robberies and became a wholesaler of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, earning enormous amounts of money. Everything he wanted was there for the taking, except the respect of his father. The lack of his father’s approval of his lifestyle seemed to drive him even closer to Vario, who referred to Henry as his nephew. Becoming tight with Jimmy Burke, who became his mentor, and Tommy DiSimone, led Henry deeper into “the life”, to the point of no return. Twice he tried to escape “the life” and the violence: once by joining the Army, and once by moving to a different area after he married his wife Karen, and opening a restaurant called The Suite. He hoped it would be legitimate, but his old friends started coming in and soon the restaurant became a mob hangout. The Suite drew attention after Tommy DeSimone killed “Billy Batts” from the Gambino crime family there. Soon he found himself back in the thick of mob life. “For most of the guys, killings were accepted. Murder was the only way everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. Sometimes, even if people didn’t get out of line, they got whacked. I never killed nobody—at least not on purpose. I shot at people, but we didn’t stick around to find out what happened.” Involved in some of the biggest robberies at New York’s JFK Airport, Henry not only had the money, but also the respect he longed for. The robbery of Air France, and later the six-million dollar Lufthansa heist, made him an insider that knew too much, and the risk of being murdered by his own crime family escalated. Henry turned to drugs to deal with all the violence and pressure. He described his friends Jimmy Burke and Tommy DeSimone, (played by Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in the film GoodFellas) as murdering psychopaths. “The whole crew were homicidal maniacs. Just about every guy was a cold-blooded murderer. It was tough for me. I lived in fear every fuckin’ day of my life.” In 1987, Henry was arrested for cocaine trafficking and he turned state’s evidence, cooperating with the FBI. After helping to convict 50 mob members, he joined the Witness Protection Program and moved 10 times with his family. In the early 1990’s he was released from witness protection and reassumed his own name. “The government said a couple of hundred million dollars went through my hands. But I just blew it on slow horses, women, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” Sitting with Henry while he was here in Vegas, you could hardly imagine him being the GoodFellas character that has made him so well known today. Maybe he’s softened with age, but I think he just got involved in something that he just couldn’t or wouldn’t get out of. Life as a “schmuck”, as he called it in the movie, was just not exciting enough for him. Here’s what Henry had to say one morning in Vegas as he drank his Jack and Cokes and told us about the true tales of the GoodFellas movie that he claims is at least 98 percent true.

SLV: It must seem like you’ve lived many lives: the young boy, the gangster part of you, the part that was in the Witness Protection Program, the movie consultant, and now the reformed you, Henry.
HILL: I survived the mob as a youngster. I survived the government. They put me through the ringers, and I survived Hollywood. Now, I don’t know what I’ve got to survive.
SLV: Are you consulting for any movies these days?
HILL: Yes, and I’ve got a TV show now. They’re doing a Young Henry Hill. Nicholas Pileggi, Scorsese and Warner Bros. A network just bought it. There is going to be a series called The Young Henry Hill or The Young Goodfella, I have no clue.
SLV: Do you know who’s playing you?
HILL: No. It’s just in the beginning works. I’ll be executive producer and consultant.
SLV: You came along after all of your sisters. Your father must have adored you. Was he really hard on you and why were you able to do anything against him?
HILL: Number one, I was very dyslexic. To this day, when I write a phone number down, I write it backwards. It’s just the way my brain operates, and they didn’t know what it was back in the day. In school, my four older sisters were all “A” students. One became a nun. Here I was, the first son of my father, and they didn’t know what dyslexia was. He thought I was a knucklehead. I didn’t get a lot of things at school. I didn’t know how to read or write until I was in my twenties, believe it or not. I never read a book. I memorized everything to advance a grade or two ahead in school.
SLV: I don’t understand, because I read that you were great with numbers.
HILL: Yeah, but I wrote numbers backwards. Go figure, I was good at math.
SLV: I bet you didn’t make mistakes counting money.
HILL: No. (laughter)
SLV: What encouraged you to join up with these guys, besides the large amounts of money?
HILL: You know, I came from a real nice family, a beautiful family. My dad worked his ass off. He started the local #3 electrician’s union in New York. He worked hard! It wasn’t that I was lazy, you know. I had my own carwash business when I was eleven/twelve years old. I just didn’t want to have to carry a lunch pail. I don’t know why. I was so intoxicated by these guys and their lifestyle; looking at them everyday driving Cadillacs and Lincolns in my neighborhood, dressed to the fuckin’ nines and wearing diamond rings. I can relate to these kids in these ghetto areas, or low-income areas, and how they can be attracted to the lifestyle. I work with a lot of these knucklehead kids. I try and tell them, “That’s not the way to go,” and “You’ll wind up in the penitentiary for the rest of your life,” or “You’ll wind up dead.” That’s the way it is.
SLV: Do you think that the kids that are in the gangs today are the same or different than you were when you were that age?
HILL: It’s the same thing. You look at their role models, and they have the money and the cars. They have these ten, twelve, thirteen year-old kids in L.A. dealing dope on corners; having to deal with the drug dealers and all that insanity that goes on out there. They get addicted to the lifestyle that they want. I always thought I was a poor kid, which I wasn’t. My dad made a hell of a good living. He was the superintendent at the World Trade Towers when he retired. He controlled about 14 different foremen. All my dad wanted me to do was to become an electrician, but I just couldn’t do it.
SLV: Did you think you’d get more girls by joining up with these guys?
HILL: I never had a problem with the ladies in my life. (laughter) No, no problem with the opposite sex!
SLV: If you think back about all those different parts of your life, is there one part during which you think you were the happiest?
HILL: One of the most satisfying days of my life was the day that I agreed to go in the Witness Protection Program, believe it or not.
SLV: That was a happy day!?!
HILL: It was a great day! Honestly, I knew I was a dead man; a dead man walking. I was a little apprehensive in the beginning, but I was relieved. It was like a ton of bricks off my shoulders.
SLV: Did Karen decide at the same time that this is what you had to do?
HILL: No. She objected to it at first. The government would have taken my whole family. I’ve got five sisters and two brothers and they would have taken them all. But my family wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I was the strange one in my family for years.
SLV: Your mother was still alive at that point?
HILL: Yeah, she was. Making Amends: Henry spends some of his time talking to young men who are at risk for joining gangs or “the life”, and trying to discourage them. Because he has become somewhat of a legend in our modern culture, there’s a good chance his talks will ring a bell and discourage some from “the life”. SLV: Is there something that someone could have said to you, the way you’re talking to these kids today, that would have changed your mind?
HILL: I could see the Empire State Building from my neighborhood. My dad used to take me into Manhattan. I lived in a blue-collar neighborhood. My mom used to tell me: “Henry boy, your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” I always wanted more and more. But yeah, maybe.
SLV: What are you saying to help change these kids’ minds?
HILL: You know, I can talk to a hundred kids, but if one kid gets it, just one kid gets it—then my day is made. That kid can go on to school and maybe become a doctor or an inventor or cure cancer. That’s the way I look at it and that’s what I want.
SLV: Everyone’s seen the movie GoodFellas, so they must really appreciate your talking to them, because they certainly know who you are.
HILL: At the moment, I’m starting on The Young Henry Hill Redemption. I’ve had kids come up and tell me: “Henry, I’ve heard you talk.” Really young kids, 14, 15, 16 year-old knuckleheads, and they say: “I watched the movie and I’m going to change my life.” Do you know how good that makes me feel? I think it does more for me than it does for them.

The Lufthansa Heist: Close to $6,000,000 was stolen during this robbery. It made front page news all across the country. Jimmy Burke became upset at crewmembers who started spending as though there was no tomorrow and drawing attention to themselves. He ordered their deaths. Henry was the only one left alive who could testify against Burke’s involvement. SLV: Tell me about the Lufthansa Heist and what your role was in it.

HILL: It’s still one of the biggest cash heists of all times. The day I got home from prison, I met with Marty “Morrie” Krugman, who was a good friend of mine. I had a nightclub in Queens in Forrest Hills. Morrie had a hair salon called For Men Only right next door and did hair weaves for guys. It was an uppity neighborhood. When I left to go to prison in ’72, I gave him my bookmaking business. So he started dealing with all these bookmakers. There was gambling at the airport and people would come through his shop, and a couple of guys who owed him a lot of money worked for Lufthansa Airlines. They told him that a lot of money was coming in. I mean money came in everyday from overseas. So we put the plan in action, Morrie and myself. When Jimmy got home a few months later, I turned it over to Jimmy. I was the guy that initiated the whole thing.
SLV: Was Tommy DeSimone killed because of the heist?
HILL: He was killed for a number of reasons. A guy that he had whacked, Foxy, who was John Gotti’s protégé—there were a number of reasons why he was killed.
SLV: They killed a lot of the people who were involved with the heist.
HILL: It had nothing to do with the robbery, but Tommy did take his mask off during the robbery, so they saw his face.
SLV: Did Joe Pesci play him accurately?
HILL: They toned it down quite a bit!
SLV: They toned it down!?!
HILL: Yeah, the movie was rated X when it was done. They cut 36 minutes out of it, because it wouldn’t get approved. There was so much violence, but not much sex. It was just so violent. Tommy was a fuckin’ homicidal maniac. He was constantly strung out on coke.
SLV: The scene where he’s telling a story and you tell him he’s funny and he responds: “What’s so funny about me?” Was that true?
HILL: That was Joe Pesci. Pesci was a waiter while he was going to acting school and that nonsense when he was in New York. While he was a waiter in the Bronx, he actually saw that happen when there were some wiseguys at a table. Then he did it in one take for the movie. Scorsese just said: “Keep ‘em rolling.”
SLV: So that didn’t really happen to you?
HILL: No, that was Pesci, and he won an Academy Award for it.
SLV: Was De Niro’s portrayal pretty accurate?
HILL: Yeah. Burke was a fuckin’ maniac, too. If you crossed the line with him, you didn’t get a second chance. He’d take you to dinner and then kill you. I coached De Niro. He wouldn’t walk out of his trailer without knowing: “How does Jimmy hold his cigarette?” He was drinking shots, because that’s what Jimmy did, so it was: “How did he hold his shot glass?” I mean, I was so green to that business when I started coaching De Niro, and the things that he would ask. I had no clue what he was looking for as a method actor. I even taught De Niro the correct technique for pistol-whipping a victim.
SLV: It sounds like De Niro wanted to become Jimmy for the film.
HILL: He did.
SLV: What about Paulie? You had a pretty close relationship with him at the beginning. Was he portrayed well by Paul Sorvino?
HILL: He was. Paulie used to call me his nephew. He was a father figure to me, but at the end of the day, he ordered my death. I mean it was all about money. It was all about money, greed and egos! Eight million dollars back in 1978 was a lot of money. I wish I had my half a million and put it in cd’s to this day. It was all of our greed. That’s all that business and life is about, the almighty dollar… and egos. Those people, that’s all they had going for them, and brutality.
SLV: In the movie they showed everyone going to Paulie’s house for Sunday dinner with all the family. Was that true?
HILL: Of course! We were a family. We didn’t associate with anybody outside of our crew of people. We just didn’t do it.
SLV: When Nicholas Pileggi wrote Wiseguy, did he contact you?
HILL: When I flipped and decided to become a rat or stool pigeon, it was in the headlines everyday, in the New York Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, everywhere. It made front page once or twice a week. The government didn’t really know what they had when I started cooperating.
SLV: Who contacted you for consulting? Was it Scorsese or De Niro?
HILL: It was Pileggi. I helped write the screenplay, but I messed up. I didn’t have a good agent, I’ll tell you that right now. I should have gotten screen credits. I should have gotten “story by” which I didn’t get. I got 7% back in money that I haven’t seen a nickel of.
SLV: Really!
HILL: Honest to God. Maybe my grandkids will see it. Who knows? That’s Hollywood!
SLV: You told me that Paulie was the most violent man you’d ever met.
HILL: He ruled! He called the shots! If he wanted you dead, that was it. There was no one that was going to intercede. I saw Paulie bust a woman’s collarbone with a baseball bat. Honest to God! She was a barmaid in one of the bars he owned. She had told Paulie’s wife that he was screwing around with another chick. He made me pull up to her house, ‘cause I used to drive Paulie a lot. He grabbed the baseball bat from the back and said to keep the car running, and he ran up the stairs with the fuckin’ baseball bat. A woman! He broke her collarbone! He beat her so badly, she was in a body cast for about six months. So she had told his wife Phyllis that he was screwing around, something stupid, but how could you hit a woman with a baseball bat?
SLV: You don’t seem like the violent type. How did you deal with the violence?
HILL: I’m not! I’m not! I never killed anybody. I dealt with it with alcohol and drugs. Honest to God. But if you showed a sign of weakness, then you were considered a threat, so you had to play that stupid macho bullshit! So I did. I was a good actor. I saw some horrible, horrible shit. I did some pretty nasty stuff, but I never shot nobody. It’s a subculture that’s very violent.
SLV: So that had to do with part of the drug use, too. Did the movie exaggerate the excess or was it about that bad?
HILL: It was that bad. I was pretty strung out there for a lot of years, even in the Witness Protection Program. Nicholas Pileggi said: “Henry, I think drugs helped you get through it.” You know, I’d self-medicate. I did.
SLV: Are you still having a problem with drugs today?
HILL: No, but when I’m in Vegas, I like to drink. But I’m absolutely clean from drugs for ten years. Becoming A Rat: “I knew I was going to get whacked and it came pretty close. So it was either me or them. I knew it, and they knew it. Initially, I had a lot of remorse and it took me a long time to forgive myself for what I did, for being a rat. But I knew I saved a lot of lives by putting a lot of horrible people away. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.” Eventually there was a multi-million dollar contract put out on Henry’s life by both Vario, for dealing drugs, and Burke, who wanted to prevent Henry from implicating him in the Lufthansa heist. A surveillance tape where Burke tells Vario they need to have Henry whacked was played by the federal investigators to get Henry to cooperate. Henry decided to become an informant. He was facing 25 years to life behind bars or he had to cooperate with the feds. “There was a time in my life when I would have put a fuckin’ gun in my mouth and blown my brains out before becoming a fuckin’ rat.” To avoid a certain death by the Mafia, he testified, and then entered the U.S. Marshalls’ Witness Protection Program in 1980. His testimony lead to 50 convictions, including Jimmy Burke who was given 20 years in prison for fixing Boston College basketball games, and a life sentence for murder. Burke died of cancer while in prison at age 64. Paul Vario received 10 years in prison for extortion of air freight companies at JFK Airport. Vario died of respiratory failure at age 73 while he was also incarcerated. SLV: When you were in the Witness Protection Program, the Marshalls weren’t happy because you kept in touch with people back in New York.
HILL: I was booted out of the Program. The Marshall told me: “Henry, stop it.” But these guys weren’t going to tell me I couldn’t call my mother. I’m going to call my mom.
SLV: They kicked you out because you called your mom?
HILL: Yeah, you had to use their phones, so they could scramble it. I knew that to call my mom was no problem. This was important to me.
I don’t know.
SLV: What did your kids understand about this whole process when you moved? Did they know why or anything about “the life” then, or not until they got older?
HILL: I think they did. The government did a great job. My son has turned out great and so has my daughter! I attribute that to Karen.
SLV: Do you ever see Karen and the kids?
HILL: Of course! Mafia Children: Henry’s son and daughter wrote a book called On The Run: A Mafia Childhood that tells the story of their family in the Witness Protection Program. Gregg and Gina tell about the day they took them down to the FBI headquarters in Brooklyn: “We learned we were moving and then the agents gave us green garbage bags and said to be ready to go in an hour. And from that moment on, our lives changed.” They were then shipped off to Omaha, Nebraska, where Henry took on the identity of Martin Lewis, a supposed insurance adjuster. Later, they were relocated to rural Kentucky when the heat was on again. Gina said in an interview: “We took it very seriously, even though we were children. We live with that today and people don’t know who we are, other than our family and our spouses.” Gregg added: “You have to understand, he was a rat who put dozen of mobsters in jail. We take our security very seriously. We always knew our father wasn’t legitimate. Our parents tried to shelter us from most of his activities, but it was hard to ignore when there were Hefty bags filled with marijuana, cocaine and guns, and hit men in our living room.”
SLV: You met a girl named Kelly Moore, and she was an addict, too. You had a son with her?
HILL: Yes.
SLV: Do you see him?
HILL: Yes. He lives with Karen, believe it or not. (laughter) She’s raising him.
SLV: Is he headed on a good path also?
HILL: Yeah, he’s in college.
SLV: Today you’re selling all kinds of stuff including artwork, cookbooks, tomato sauce and coffee.
HILL: Yes, my tomato sauce is called Sunday Sauce. It’s from The Wiseguy Cookbook that I wrote. My mother taught me the Sicilian way of cooking.
SLV: If you had to order up a last supper, what would it be?
HILL: (laughter) A good tomato sauce on a dish of fusilli pasta. I like fusilli, the twisted kind, because I’m a little twisted. (lots of laughter) Add some good Italian sausage and some meatballs. I eat local food when I travel. I find it hard going to Italian restaurants, because they don’t make the sauce my way.
SLV: Tell me what you’d consider a really good day.
HILL: Waking up in the morning and making the sign of the cross. If I thought I would have lived this long in my life, I would have saved 2% of my money that went through my hands. I’d live on an island in Majorca with Johnny Depp and just hang out. But I’ve got my health, pretty much.
SLV: If you could go back and erase one day of your life; just take it away, and not have to go through it… what day would you pick?
HILL: That’s a question that’s never been asked of me. The day that Morrie got whacked. The day I married my third wife, Kelly. (lots of laughter) It’s horrible to say, but it’s the truth.
SLV: Who was your second wife?
HILL: One of my makeup artists. I was married to her in Carson City (NV). It was after a drinking binge. I live now in California. For an old guy, that ain’t supposed to be around, I’ve got a great life, and I appreciate it.
SLV: When was the first time you came to Las Vegas?
HILL: I first time I came to Vegas was in 1967, after we robbed Air France. I walked into Caesars and got a duplex suite with a big white piano on the first floor. I had a line at three casinos in town. I donated a lot of money to the school district in this town!
SLV: What would you like to see on your tombstone one day?
HILL: I survived. SLV

GoodFellas FAME
With GoodFellas listed as the #4 best gangster movie of all time by IMDb.com, behind legendary films like The Godfather and Pulp Fiction, the film has brought ex-mobster Henry Hill and his story quite a bit of fame. After the premiere of GoodFellas, Hill went around and revealed his true identity. In response, the government kicked him out of the Federal Witness Protection Program. Henry appeared in a photo shoot along with Ray Liotta for Entertainment Weekly in the fall of 2006. At Liotta’s urging, Hill entered alcohol rehabilitation two days after the shoot.

GoodFellas TRIVIA
•When Scorsese got wind of Pileggi’s book, Wiseguy, he immediately cold-called the writer and told him: “I’ve been waiting for this book my entire life,” to which Pileggi replied: “I’ve been waiting for this phone call my entire life.”•Henry Hill has stated that John Gotti himself was the assassin of fellow mobster, Tommy DeSimone.•GoodFellas portrayal of Tommy was a small man (actor-Joe Pesci), yet Hill explained that the real-life mobster was actually a large, burly enforcer, standing about 6’ 2”, and over 200-lbs.•Ray Liotta noted that in Pileggi’s cassette interviews with Hill, that Hill casually discussed murders and other crimes while eating potato chips.

REAPING THE BENEFITS of GoodFellas
Due to the overwhelming popularity of the movie GoodFellas,
Henry Hill has become a very famous ex-mobster. Since his
release from the Federal Witness Protection Program, he has painted art that represents his life of crime and sells it on his Web site GoodFellaHenry.com, and at events where he speaks. He also sells his own brand of coffee and spaghetti sauce, “Sunday Gravy”, that his mother taught him to make. Hill has written a cookbook called “The Wiseguy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes From Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run.” SLV

Issue 60 featuring: Kimberly Kane, Noelle Aurelia & Missy Stone