Henry Hill (Goodfellas)

Henry Hill (born December 11, 1943 - June 12, 2012) was a former American mobster, Lucchese crime family associate, and FBI informant whose life was immortalized in the book Wiseguy, written by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi, and the anti-villain of the 1990 Martin Scorsese film GoodFellas, in which Hill was played by actor Ray Liotta.

Early life
Hill grew up in a lower income working class family in East New York, Brooklyn. His father, Henry Hill, Sr., was an Irish-American electrician, and his mother, Carmella Hill, was a Sicilian American. Henry and his seven siblings lived in a small house. From an early age he admired the local mobsters that socialized across the street from his home, who included Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. In his early teens Hill began running errands at Vario's cabstand, shoe shine stand, and pizzeria.

Early criminal career
Hill's first experience in gang life began with parking cars and doing other odd jobs for the Lucchese crime family. Hill's first arrest came when he attempted to use a stolen credit card to buy tires at a Texaco gas station. Refusing to say anything to the police, he earned the respect of Lucchese Family associate Jimmy Burke, who saw great potential in young Henry. Hill soon dropped out of high school to devote all his time to working for gangsters. Burke, like Hill, was unable to become a made member of the Mafia because of his Irish ancestry, but the Mafia was more than happy to have associates of any ethnic background as 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 maintained contact with Vario and his other friends in New York throughout his enlistment. 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 notorious phase of his criminal career. Hill, along with Burke and Thomas DeSimone, and others in Burke's Robert's Lounge crew, hijacked trucks, sold stolen goods, imported and sold untaxed cigarettes, engaged in loan sharking and bookmaking, and planned airport robberies, carrying out the Air France Robbery in 1967 and the huge Lufthansa heist in 1978, as well as committing numerous mob-related murders. The Lufthansa score was one of the largest heists in history. The Lucchese family did not deal in any drugs because of the lengthy prison sentence that came with the drug trafficking charges.

In 1965, Hill met his wife, Karen. The two first eloped to North Carolina where they had a large wedding, to which most of Hill's gangster friends were invited. After the birth of their two children they rented an apartment in a two-family home in Island Park, New York in 1969.