Henry Hill

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1955, an eleven-year-old boy named Henry Hill crossed the street from his Brooklyn home and wandered into a dispatch cabstand, hoping for a part-time job after school. The men who gathered there were local mobsters, and Hill had admired them from a distance for years. Within a few years he was running errands for them. Within twenty-five years he would be sitting across from federal agents, deciding whether to turn on every one of them. Henry Hill became one of the best-known names in American organized crime, and the world learned his story through a book and a film. How does a dyslexic schoolboy from Brownsville end up inside the Lucchese crime family's circle? What did that circle actually do all day? And what becomes of a man after he stops being a mobster but never stops being famous for it?

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• 2. Cabstand Education

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  Henry Hill Jr. was born on the 11th of June 1943 in Manhattan. His father, Henry Hill Sr., was an Irish-American electrician, and his mother, Carmela Costa, was a Sicilian immigrant. Hill and his seven siblings grew up in Brownsville, a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn. Hill was dyslexic and did poorly in school. In the book Wiseguy, he claimed his father had come from Ireland at the age of twelve, after the death of the elder Hill's own father.

  The regulars at the cabstand included Paul Vario, a caporegime, or captain, in the Lucchese crime family. In 1956, at the age of thirteen, Hill met James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, a notorious hijacker and Lucchese associate. Hill was serving drinks and sandwiches at a card game, and Burke's tipping dazzled him. He later recalled: "He was sawbucking me to death. Twenty here. Twenty there. He wasn't like anyone else I had ever met."

  A year later, Vario's younger brother Vito, known as "Tuddy", and Vario's son Lenny gave Hill a prized union card in a bricklayers' local. Hill became a "no show" on a building contractor's payroll, guaranteeing a weekly salary of $190. He never kept the whole amount, because the rest was divided among the Vario crew. The card also let him collect daily policy bets and loan payments from construction sites. With this "legitimate" job in hand, Hill dropped out of high school and worked only for the Varios.

  His first arson came when a rival cabstand opened around the corner. Its owner was a newcomer to New York from Alabama. After midnight, Tuddy and Hill drove over with a drum of gasoline in the backseat. Hill smashed the cab windows, stuffed gasoline-soaked newspapers inside, and threw in lit matchbooks.

  At sixteen, Hill was arrested for the first time, and the record is one of the few official documents carrying his real name. He and Lenny had tried to buy snow tires for Tuddy's wife with a stolen credit card. Under a rough interrogation, Hill gave his name and nothing else. Vario's attorney arranged bail, and a suspended sentence followed. His silence earned the respect of both Vario and Burke. Burke, like Hill, was of Irish ancestry and so could never become a "made man". The Vario crew did not mind. They welcomed associates of any background who made money and refused to cooperate with authorities.

  In June 1960, at seventeen, Hill joined the United States Army and served with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He said the timing was deliberate. The FBI's investigation of the 1957 Apalachin meeting had triggered a Senate inquiry into organized crime. That inquiry produced a published list of nearly 5,000 names of members and associates of the five New York crime families. Hill searched a partial list and could not find Vario among the Lucchese names.

  During his three-year enlistment, Hill kept up his mob contacts and kept hustling. Put in charge of the kitchen detail, he sold surplus food, made loan-shark advances on soldiers' pay, and sold tax-free cigarettes. Before his discharge he spent two months in the stockade for stealing a local sheriff's car and brawling in a bar with Marines and a civilian. Back in New York in 1963, he began his most notorious years of arson, intimidation, stolen cars, and truck hijacking.

  In 1965, Paul Vario insisted that Hill join his son on a double date at Villa Capra, the restaurant of Frank "Frankie the Wop" Manzo. That is how Hill met Karen Friedman. By her account the date went badly, and Hill later stood her up for a dinner. They made up, though, and began dating at the Copacabana and other nightclubs. Their wedding took place in North Carolina, and most of Hill's mob associates came.

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• 3. The Suite

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  Shortly before midnight on the 6th of April 1967, Hill and a Lucchese associate named Tommy DeSimone drove to the Air France cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. They carried an empty suitcase, the largest Hill could find. An inside connection, Robert McMahon, had told them simply to walk in, since people often came to claim lost baggage. The two entered the unsecured area unchallenged and opened a door with a duplicate key. By small flashlight they loaded seven bags of cash into the suitcase and walked out. No alarm sounded, no shots were fired, and nobody was hurt. The theft went unnoticed until the following Monday, when a Wells Fargo truck arrived to collect the money for the French American Banking Corporation. Hill later believed this job made the Mafia at large fond of him.

  Hill put his share toward a restaurant on Queens Boulevard called The Suite. He meant to run it honestly and keep some distance from his mob associates. Within months, members of Lucchese and Gambino crews had moved in en masse, and the place became another mob hangout. High-ranking Gambino men, in Hill's words, "were always there".

  The restaurant is also where the most notorious killing in Hill's story took place. According to Wiseguy, William "Billy Batts" Bentvena came home from prison in 1970, and a welcome-home party was held at Robert's Lounge, a bar owned by Burke. Hill said Bentvena joked to DeSimone about whether he still shined shoes, and DeSimone took it as an insult. Two weeks later, on the 11th of June 1970, Bentvena was at The Suite near closing time when DeSimone ambushed and pistol-whipped him.

  The men believed Bentvena was dead and put him in the trunk of Hill's car. They stopped at DeSimone's mother's house for a shovel and lime. Then they heard noises from the trunk and realized the man was alive. DeSimone and Burke killed him with the shovel and a tire iron. Burke had a friend who owned a dog kennel in Upstate New York, and Bentvena was buried there. About three months later the friend sold the kennel to housing developers. Burke ordered Hill and DeSimone to dig up the body and dispose of it elsewhere.

  Hill gave two accounts of where the body ended up. In Wiseguy, it was crushed in a car crusher at a New Jersey junkyard owned by Clyde Brooks. On the commentary track for the film Goodfellas, Hill said it was first buried in the basement of Robert's Lounge and only later crushed.

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• 4. Prison and Wiretaps

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  In November 1972, Burke and Hill were arrested in Tampa, Florida, for beating a man named Gaspar Ciaccio. Ciaccio allegedly owed a large gambling debt to their friend, the union boss Casey Rosado. Both men were convicted of extortion and sentenced to ten years at the United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg. Inside, Hill was held alongside Vario, who was serving time for tax evasion, and several men from John Gotti's Gambino crew. A man from Pittsburgh taught Hill, for a fee, how to smuggle drugs into the prison.

  Outside the walls, Hill's marriage was coming apart. Karen had an affair with Vario while her husband was in jail. DeSimone attempted to rape her and beat her when she resisted. It has been speculated that Vario took revenge by telling the Gambino family of DeSimone's part in the Bentvena killing. The Gambinos then killed DeSimone.

  Hill was paroled on the 12th of July 1978, after four years, and went straight back to work. He moved into drug trafficking, and Burke eventually joined in, though the Lucchese family forbade its members to deal drugs. Using contacts he had made in prison, Hill wholesaled marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and quaaludes. The profits were enormous.

  The operation was undone by a child. A young courier of Hill's "ratted" him out to narcotics detectives Daniel Mann and William Broder, who nicknamed the boy "The Youngster". He told them that Hill was connected to the Lucchese family. The detectives put Hill under surveillance and collected "thousands" of wiretaps. Hill and his crew spoke in code, which made the recordings strange to read.

  On a wiretap dated the 29th of March, a caller from Pittsburgh asked about golf clubs and dogs. Later in the same call he proposed: "You front me the shampoo and I'll front you the dog pills.... what time tomorrow?" Hill answered, "Anytime after twelve." The detectives kept listening, and in 1980 their patience led to an arrest.

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• 5. Heists and Fixes

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  The 1978-79 basketball season gave Hill a different kind of crime. He and two gamblers from Pittsburgh set up a point-shaving scheme at Boston College by persuading center Rick Kuhn to take part. Kuhn was a high school friend of one of the gamblers, and he encouraged his teammates to join. Hill also claimed to have an NBA referee in his pocket, someone who worked games at Madison Square Garden during the 1970s. According to Hill, the referee had run up gambling debts on horse races.

  On the 11th of December 1978, an estimated $5.875 million was stolen from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at Kennedy airport. The haul was $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry. At the time, it was the largest cash robbery ever committed on American soil. The plot started when a bookmaker named Martin Krugman told Hill that Lufthansa flew currency into its cargo terminal. Burke then set the plan in motion. Hill did not take part directly, yet the robbery would soon be the reason federal prosecutors wanted him as a witness.

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• 6. The Informant

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  After his arrest on narcotics charges in 1980, Hill became convinced that his friends were planning to kill him. He believed Vario wanted him dead for dealing drugs, and Burke wanted him dead to keep him from implicating Burke in the Lufthansa heist. Hill heard a wiretap on which Angelo Sepe and Anthony Stabile said he was "no good" and "a junkie" and should be killed. Burke told them not to worry about it. Then federal investigators played Hill a surveillance tape on which Burke tells Vario they need to have Hill "whacked".

  When Hill got out on bail, Burke asked him to meet at a bar Hill had never heard of. Hill never went. Instead he and Karen met Burke at Burke's sweatshop. Burke asked for the address in Florida where Hill was supposed to kill Bobby Germaine's son together with Anthony Stabile. Hill knew that if he traveled to Florida he would be murdered.

  Edward A. McDonald, head of the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force, arrested Hill as a material witness in the Lufthansa robbery. Facing a long sentence, Hill agreed to cooperate and signed an agreement with the Strike Force on the 27th of May 1980. His testimony produced 50 convictions. Hill, Karen, and their two children, Gregg and Gina, entered the U.S. Marshals' Witness Protection Program that year. They changed their names and moved between undisclosed locations.

  The men he testified against did not recover. Jimmy Burke received 12 years for the Boston College point-shaving scheme. He was later sentenced to life for the murder of a scam artist named Richard Eaton. Burke died of cancer in prison on the 13th of April 1996, at the age of 64.

  Paul Vario received four years for helping Hill obtain a no-show job that secured his parole. He was later sentenced to ten years for extorting air freight companies at JFK Airport. Vario died of respiratory failure on the 22nd of November 1988, aged 73, at the federal prison in Fort Worth.

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• 7. Stories and Recipes

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  Nicholas Pileggi published Hill's life story as Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family in 1985. Martin Scorsese adapted it with Pileggi into the 1990 film Goodfellas, which follows the rise and fall of Hill and his Lucchese associates from 1955 to 1980. Ray Liotta played Hill. The film was first titled Wise Guy. Scorsese changed it, with Pileggi's agreement, to avoid confusion with an unrelated television crime drama called Wiseguy.

  Hill received $480,000 two weeks before filming began. Robert De Niro, who played Jimmy Conway, the film's version of Burke, phoned Hill several times a day. He wanted to know how Burke walked and how he held a cigarette. Liotta, driving to and from the set, listened to FBI audio cassettes of Hill so he could copy the way he spoke. The cast did not meet Hill until a few weeks before the premiere. Liotta met him in an undisclosed city, and Hill told him he loved the film.

  Also in 1990 came My Blue Heaven, directed by Herbert Ross, with Steve Martin playing a character inspired by Hill. Its screenplay was written by Nora Ephron, Pileggi's wife, from the couple's joint research sessions. It is a heavily fictionalized account of Hill's time in witness protection. A 2001 television film about the Lufthansa heist, The Big Heist, cast Nick Sandow as Hill.

  In 2002, Hill published The Wiseguy Cookbook. It mixed stories of his childhood, mob life, and years on the run with family recipes and some of his own invention. He claimed that his last meal before his drug bust was rolled veal cutlets, pork-butt sauce, veal shanks, ziti, and green beans with olive oil and garlic. He later worked as a chef at an Italian restaurant in North Platte, Nebraska, and his spaghetti sauce, Sunday Gravy, was sold over the internet. In October 2007 he opened a restaurant called Wiseguys in West Haven, Connecticut. It closed the next month after a fire.

  In March 2008, a BBC interviewer named Heather Alexander asked Hill how his victims might feel about him profiting from his story. He replied: "I don't give a heck what those people think; I'm doing the right thing now." On the 24th of July 2010, he marked the film's twentieth anniversary by hosting a private screening at the Museum of the American Gangster. In 2014, ESPN's 30 for 30 series aired Playing for the Mob, narrated by Liotta, about the Boston College scandal. A book co-written with Daniel Simone, The Lufthansa Heist, appeared in August 2015, three years after Hill died.

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• 8. Unraveling

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  In the fall of 1981, Hill, now living as Martin Lewis, met a woman named Sherry Anders. After a quick romance the two married in Virginia City, Nevada, even though Hill was still married to Karen. Life soon came apart on several fronts. In 1987, a federal court in Seattle convicted him of cocaine trafficking, and he was expelled from the witness protection program. Karen filed for divorce in 1990 after 23 years of marriage. The divorce was finalized in 2002.

  In August 2004, Hill was arrested at North Platte Regional Airport in Nebraska after leaving behind luggage that held drug paraphernalia. On the 26th of September 2005, he was sentenced to 180 days in prison for attempted methamphetamine possession. On the 26th of March 2009, he received two years of probation after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts of public intoxication. That December, on the 14th, he was arrested in Fairview Heights, Illinois, for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Hill blamed his drinking.

  After his first divorce, Hill married Kelly Alor and later Lisa Caserta, and they lived in Topanga Canyon near Malibu, California. He fathered a third child in these years. He appeared in several documentaries and on media programs, including The Howard Stern Show, where he often turned up drunk. In 2006, he and Ray Liotta posed together for an Entertainment Weekly photo shoot. At Liotta's urging, Hill entered alcohol rehabilitation two days later.

  Hill died on the 12th of June 2012 in a Los Angeles hospital, a day after his 69th birthday. The cause was complications of heart disease after a long illness. Caserta, his girlfriend for his last six years, said he had recently had a heart attack and had a long history of heart trouble linked to smoking. His family was with him. He was cremated the next day. Caserta told CBS News: "He went out pretty peacefully, for a goodfella."

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