Whatever happened to Henry Hill?

Classic films always stand the test of time and 'Goodfellas' ranks up there with the best of them. Scorsese digs deep into the underworld of the mafia in New York and unveils much of the gritty detail of what went on in the real life of Henry Hill (played by Ray Liota) who grows up wanting to be a gangster but due to his paranoia and lack of trust in his colleagues turns 'rat'.



I've watched it several times but always wondered what happened to the main characters in real life, 18 years after it was released.

"Paulie" died in 1988, as acknowledged in the film's closing titles. He was the boss of the three main characters - Henry, Tommy (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy(Robert deNiro). He could have been portrayed a lot worse in the movie given some of the finer details that Scorsese left out in the film. In real life Paulie had an affair with Hill's wife Karen and when he learned that Tommy DeSimone (Pesci's character's name was changed to Tommy DeVito) had attempted to rape her he informed the Gambino family that DeSimone had two of their members, including Billy Batts, 'whacked'. The killing of Batts was immortalised in the film when Batts is killed for making fun of Tommy in Hill's bar. The scene has even by dubbed with the Simpsons by one Youtuber:





DeSimone was then assassinated on the order of John Gotti, the infamous head of the Gambino family. He was taken to a house where he was to be 'made' and then murdered by Thomas Agro - who also murdered DeSimone's brother Anthony.


Jimmy (Burke) was brought up in an orphanage in real life and suffered much physical and sexual abuse from foster fathers and foster brothers. He went on to become quite a brutal operator and the man behind the Lufthansa heist in 1978, the largest ever cash robbery ever committed on American soil. Burke went on a murderous rampage in the wake of the heist, as portrayed in the film, and the only three robbers to survive this were Tommy, Burke's son Frank James and Angelo Sepe. In the movie Sepe is found murdered in a meat wagon with the piano interlude from Eric Clapton's 'Layla' playing in the background but in real life Jimmy chose not to have him killed as he trusted him. Both Burke Junior and Sepe were to be murdered within a number of years due to drug-dealing disputes.


Ironically the US Authorities originally suspected that Burke had been involved in the Lufthansa Heist because a hostage had told them that one of the robbers was wearing highly polished shoes. Police immediately knew that it was Tommy as he had a habit of wearing extremely well shined shoes, and also knew that Tommy wouldn't be involved in a job of this magnitude without Jimmy. Despite his record, Burke was only convicted of one murder, based on Hill's testimony; and fixing Boston College basketball games. He died in 1996 of lung cancer aged 64, and 8 years before he was due for parole.


Hill was convinced that Jimmy wanted him dead after the FBI played him a surveillance tape in which Jimmy tells Paulie of their need to "have him whacked". He turned 'rat' and his testimony led to 50 convictions. The Hill family then entered the Witness Protection Program and moved to Nebraska, Kentuckey and eventually Washington where Hill was arrested on narcotics charges. His wife filed for divorce 2 years later in 1989 and both were expelled from the program in the early 1990s due to numerous crimes. He was arrested as recently as March 2005 when cocaine was found in his luggage at a US airport.

Hill is now 65 and living in Malibu, California. He sells paintings on Ebay, owns a sauce company called 'Wiseguys Sunday Gravy' and plays on the fame that Goodfellas has brought him, making appearances on the Howard Stern Show.







People can sometimes have a lot of sympathy for gangsters and the mafia who are portrayed in a personable light in movies such as Goodfellas, although to be fair to Scorsese he shows in graphic detail the brutal reality of mafia life in New York. However when you look at Hill in the 1970s it is clear that he was a drug-dealer, a drug-addict and murdered people for little or no reason. No doubt thousands of young people in particular suffered and died as a direct result of his drug-dealing activity. Replace the name 'Hill' with 'Shoukri' and you begin to understand what this man was really about. He may be a celebrity now but he was a big-time drug-dealer and did not serve a single day in jail because of his actions - people should remember that he was the equivalent of the Shoukris and Adairs we have in Belfast, and that he can't paint either!