HENRY HILL (MOBSTER)

'Henry Hill' (born June 11, 1943^[1]) is an Irish/Italian American former mobster, Lucchese crime family associate, and FBI informant whose life was immortalized in the book ''Wiseguy'', written by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi, and the 1990 Martin Scorsese movie ''Goodfellas'', in which Hill was played by Ray Liotta. He was the owner of a restaurant called The Suite.

Contents

Early life

Fallout between Hill, Vario, and Burke

As an informant and after

Books

Trivia

See also

Notes

Sources

Early life

Henry Hill grew up in a poor working class family in East New York, Brooklyn, then a largely Italian neighborhood. His father was an electrician of Irish descent, his mother was of Sicilian descent, and they, Henry and his six siblings lived in a small house. From an early age he admired the local mafiosi that socialized across the street from his home, who included Paul Vario, a ''capo'' in the Lucchese crime family. In his early teens, he began running errands at Vario's cabstand, shoe shine stand, and pizzeria.
Hill's first arrest came when he attempted to use a stolen credit card to buy tires at a gas station. Refusing to say anything to the police, he earned the respect of many fellow mobsters especially truck hijacker and Lucchese Family associate Jimmy Burke, who saw great potential in young Henry. Hill soon dropped out of high school to devote all his time working for gangsters. Burke, like Hill, was unable to become a made member of the Mafia due to his Irish ancestry. However, the Mafia was happy to have associates of any ethnic background so long as they made money and did not cooperate with the authorities.
In 1960, Hill joined the army and was stationed at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, for three years. He was a member of the 82nd Airborne paratrooper unit there, but he maintained contact with Vario and his other friends in New York the entire time. Hill continued to hustle while in the service, selling extra food, loan sharking salary advances to his fellow soldiers, and selling tax-free cigarettes. Before being discharged Hill spent two months in a military stockade for brawling and stealing a sheriff's car.
In 1963, he returned to New York, beginning the most celebrated phase of his criminal career. Hill, along with close friends Burke, and Tommy DeSimone, and others in Burke's Robert's Lounge crew, hijacked trucks, sold stolen goods, imported and sold untaxed cigarettes, engaged in loan sharking, bookmaking, and planned airport robberies, carrying out the Air France Robbery in 1967 and the huge Lufthansa heist in 1978, and committed numerous mob related murders.
In 1965, Hill met his wife Karen. The two first eloped to North Carolina, and later had a large Jewish wedding, to which most of Hill's gangster friends were invited. After the birth of their 2 children they rented an apartment in a 2-family home in Island Park, NY (1968).

Fallout between Hill, Vario, and Burke

Hill was paroled in 1978 after serving six years of a ten-year prison sentence for extortion. Hill and Burke had severely beat up and pistol whipped a gambler in Tampa, Florida who owed a union official friend of theirs a large gambling debt. Burke was also released on parole around the same time as Hill.
While in prison, Hill had made contact with a Pittsburgh drug dealer named Paul Mazzei. Hill had sold drugs while in prison to help support his wife and two children on the outside. After his parole, Vario revealed he knew about Hill dealing drugs while he was in prison and warned him now that he was out, not to deal behind the family's back. Vario strongly opposed the trade of drugs in his crew because prison sentences imposed on anyone convicted of drug trafficking were so lengthy that the accused would often become informants in exchange for a lighter sentence (this turned out to be exactly what Hill would do). Hill nevertheless started a major interstate drug trafficking operation with Mazzei, the potential to earn large amounts of money being too great to resist.
Hill began wholesaling marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and quaaludes, earning enormous amounts of money. He grew increasingly at odds with Vario and the Lucchese Family because of his fear of being killed if they found out he was trafficking in drugs. After the murders of several of his friends by Burke following the Lufthansa Heist and the disappearance of his close friend Tommy DeSimone, who, Hill believed, had been delivered by Vario into the hands of, and murdered by the Gambino crime family for killing two made members without permission, he became increasingly paranoid.
Hill and Mazzei also set up a point shaving scheme, which was put in place when Mazzei convinced Boston College center Rick Kuhn to participate. Kuhn encouraged teammates to join the scheme, which became a scandal. Hill also claimed to have an NBA referee who worked games at Madison Square Garden during the seventies in his pocket, because of the debt he accrued gambling on horse races. ^[2]
In 1980, Hill was arrested on a narcotics trafficking charge, bonded out of jail, and shortly afterwards, was re-arrested as a material witness in the Lufthansa robbery. He became convinced that his former associates planned to have him killed. Vario, for dealing drugs, and Burke, to prevent Hill from implicating him in the Lufthansa robbery. This fear was confirmed by a surveillance tape played to him by federal investigators, in which Burke tells Vario of their need to have Hill "whacked." ^[3]

As an informant and after

Hill chose to become an informant to avoid a prison sentence and possible execution by the Mafia. Henry Hill's testimony led to 50 convictions. Jimmy Burke was given 20 years in prison for fixing Boston College basketball games and also later sentenced to life in prison for the murder of scam-artist Richard Eaton. Burke died of cancer while serving his life sentence, on April 13, 1996. He was 64.
Paul Vario received 4 years for helping Henry Hill obtain a no-show job to get him paroled from prison. Vario was also later sentenced to 10 years in prison for extortion of airfreight companies at JFK Airport. He died, aged 73, on November 22, 1988 while in a Texas prison, of respiratory failure.
Hill, his wife Karen, and their two children entered the U.S. Marshals' Witness Protection Program, changed their names, and moved to undisclosed locations in Omaha, Nebraska, then Independence, Kentucky, and eventually Redmond, Washington.
Hill was arrested in 1987 in Seattle, Washington on narcotics-related charges. In 1989, Hill and his wife Karen were divorced after 24 years of marriage.
Hill (along with his wife) was expelled from the witness protection program in the early 1990s.
After the Seattle incident, Hill claimed to be clean until he was arrested in North Platte, Nebraska in March 2005. Hill had left his luggage at Lee Bird Field Airport in North Platte, Nebraska containing drug paraphernalia, glass tubes with cocaine and methamphetamine residue.
Hill worked for a time as a chef at an Italian restaurant in Nebraska and his spaghetti sauce, Sunday Gravy, was marketed over the internet. As of February 2007 the website had been taken down .
Hill battled alcoholism for years, claiming at one point that prison had saved his life. In fall 2006, Hill appeared in a photo shoot along with Ray Liotta for ''Entertainment Weekly''. . According to the article, Liotta convinced Hill to enter alcohol rehabilitation. Henry lives in Malibu, Ca. with his fiance Lisa, hes selling his artwork on EBay, called ''mob art'', doing interviews with ESPN, MSNBC, Howard Stern, and BBC. Hill is opening up another restaurant in West Haven, Ct. in Oct 2007 and writing another book about the Final 4 with Peter Doyle--Henry is doing better than he has in a long time ^[4].

Books

Hill has authored or co-authored three books:

★ (2002) ''The Wiseguy Cookbook''

★ (2003) ''A Goodfella's Guide to New York''

★ (2004) ''Gangsters and Goodfellas : Wiseguys, Witness Protection, and Life on the Run''

Trivia

★ According to Martin Scorsese and Ray Liotta, the real Hill has a cameo in ''GoodFellas'' as a chef in the three-minute non-stop tracking shot of Henry and Karen going through the Copacabana's kitchen facilities.

★ Despite having put Paul Vario in prison, where he died, Hill says in ''Gangsters and GoodFellas'' that if the Vario family saw him in New York, they would probably say hi to him.

★ Henry Hill appeared on Sirius Satellite Radio’s The Howard Stern Show on Thursday, January 26, 2006 to promote his Sunday Gravy pasta sauce. A very drunken Hill had to be babied out of the studio after the appearance, which was videotaped for On Demand Television’s Howard TV. In a funnier moment from the appearance, Stern 100 reporter [Lisa G. [1]] misunderstood Henry’s request for a caramel macchiato as “I want to come on your face”.

★ April 22, 2007: Henry Hill is currently shooting pilots for a Reality Show with Executive Producer Michael Shevloff.

★ On the special 2-DVD Edition of ''Goodfellas'', he and Edward McDonald provided commentary in a section called "Cop and Crook".

See also

★ The Real GoodFella
[[2]

Notes

1. Nicholas Pileggi (1985). ''Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family''. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-44734-3. p.13,28 gives 1943 as year of birth.
2. Mike Philbrick. ''Reformed mobster believes Donaghy might not be alone.'' ESPN Page 2 http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=philbrick/070727&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab5pos1
3. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=philbrick/070727&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1
4. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1543127,00.html

Sources

★ The Heist By Ernest Volkman & John Cummings (1986)

★ Wiseguy By Nicholas Pileggi (1990)

★ Fixed: How Goodfellas Bought Boston College Basketball By David Porter (2000)

★ On The Run - A Mafia Childhood By Gregg & Gina Hill (2004)

★ Gangsters and Goodfellas: Wiseguys . . . and Life on the Run By Henry Hill & Gus Russo (2005)

★ Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster By T. J. English (2005)

★ ''Sophia Loren: A Biography'' "''Nightmare in New York''" by Warren G. Harris