GoodFellas (33 page)

Henry was never able to help McDonald crack Lufthansa – the case that essentially had gotten Henry into the witness program in the first place. By the time McDonald had Henry as a witness on Lufthansa, the people who could trace the robbery back to Jimmy were all dead. Except for Henry and Jimmy, there was no one left. Stacks Edwards, Marty Krugman, Richie Eaton, Tommy DeSimone, Terry Ferrara, Joe Manri, Frenchy McMahon, Paolo LiCastri, Louie and Joanna Cafora, Anthony Stabile, and even Angelo Sepe and his new girl friend, nineteen-year-old Joanne Lombardo. And during Henry's first year in the program, Germaine's twenty-year-old son, Robert junior, was shot and killed on a Queens rooftop.

Henry's confrontations with his old pals on the witness stand left him unmoved. Neither Jimmy Burke's threatening glares nor the sight of the seventy-year-old Paul Vario seemed to disturb him. Vario, Burke, Mazzei, Basile, the basketball players – everyone Henry had committed crimes with became bargaining chips he used to buy his own freedom. He initiated the investigation into the mob's ‘stranglehold' on Kennedy Airport's cargo business, along with Strike Force prosecutor Douglas Behm, that resulted in yet another indictment of Paul Vario, as well as indictments of Frank ‘Frankie the Wop' Manzo and other Lucchese family powers. He gave McDonald and his men as many cases as he could, and he sent away his old pals. It was effortless. He ate a mushroom-and-sausage pizza and drank Tab before taking the stand against Vario, and he negotiated a ten-thousand-dollar magazine article with
Sports Illustrated
before testifying about the Boston College point-shaving scheme that got twenty-six-year-old Rich Kuhn ten years in a federal prison. When Jimmy Burke was convicted of murder, Henry was almost gleeful. In the final showdown with
Jimmy, Henry had survived, and he had used the government to pull the trigger.

Of course, no matter how Henry tried to rationalize what he had done, his survival depended upon his capacity for betrayal. He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail. For Henry Hill giving up the life was hard, but giving up his friends was easy.

In the end there were no pyrotechnics, no fiery blasts of Cagney gangster glory. Henry was not going out through a hole in the top of the world. He was going to survive any way he could. In fact, out of the entire crew Henry alone managed to survive.

Today Henry Hill and his wife live somewhere in America. As of this writing he has a successful business and lives in a $150,000 two-story neocolonial house in an area with such a low crime rate that garden-shed burglaries get headlines in the weekly press. His children go to private schools. He and Karen have their own cars, and she has embarked on a small business of her own. He has a Keogh plan. One of his few complaints is that he cannot get good Italian food in the area where he has been assigned to live by the witness program. A few days after his arrival there he went to a local ‘Italian-style' restaurant and found the marinara sauce without garlic, the
linguini
replaced by egg noodles, and slices of packaged white bread in plastic baskets on the tables.

But because of his continuing work with Ed McDonald and the Strike Force prosecutors, Henry gets fifteen hundred dollars a month as a government employee, travels to New York eight or nine times a year with all expenses paid, and has food from Little Italy sent in to him at the courts where he testifies and the hotels where he stays. He is always accompanied to New York by armed marshals to make sure he doesn't get murdered or mugged. In fact, Henry is so carefully guarded and his new identity is so vigorously protected by the U.S. Marshal Service that even the
Internal Revenue had to whistle when they tried to dun the old Henry Hill for his back taxes. Thanks to the government for which he works, Henry Hill has turned out to be the ultimate wiseguy.

I want to acknowledge the contributions made to this book by U.S. Attorney Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York; Asst. U.S. Attorney Edward McDonald, who headed the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force; and Thomas P. Puccio, his predecessor. I would also like to thank Special Attorneys of the Organized Crime Strike Force Jerry D. Bernstein, Laura Ward, Douglas Behm, Douglas Grover, Michael Guadagno, and Laura Brevetti, as well as Brooklyn homicide prosecutor John Fairbanks and detectives and agents Doug LeVien, Mario Sessa, Thomas Sweeney, Steve Carbone, Joel Cohen, Edmundo Guevera, Arthur Donelan, James Kapp, Daniel Mann, Jack Walsh, Alfie McNeil, Ben Panzarella, Steve DelCorso, and John Wales.

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‘The best book ever written on organized crime'

Cosmopolitan

‘At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy was better than being president of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world'

Henry Hill

GoodFellas
is Henry Hill's story, in fascinating, brutal detail, the day-to-day life of a working mobster – his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistress, his code of honour.

Henry Hill knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he turned Federal witness to save his own life. The mob is still hunting him for what he revealed: hundreds of crimes including arson, extortion, hijacking, and the six-million dollar Lufthansa heist, the biggest successful cash robbery in US history which led to ten murders.

‘Absolutely engrossing'

New York Times

Series editors: Maxim Jakubowski and Adrian Wootton

First published as
WISEGUY
in Great Britain in 1985

This electronic edition published in 1985 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 1985 by Nicholas Pileggi

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 38 Soho Square, London, W1V 5DF

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 40882 855 7

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