To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States. I mean, being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren’t like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double parked in front of a hydrant. And nobody ever gave them a ticket in the summer when they played cards all night.
Nobody ever called the cops. People looked at me differently and they knew I was with somebody. I didn’t have to wait in line at the bakery on Sunday mornings anymore for fresh bread. The owner knew who I was with and he’d come from around the counter. No matter how many people were waiting, I was taken care of first.
Our neighbors didn’t park in our driveway anymore, even though we didn’t have a car. At 13, I was making more money than most of the grown-ups in the neighborhood. I mean, I had more money than I could spend. I had it all. One day, one day, some of the kids from the neighborhood carried my mother’s groceries all the way home.
You know why? It was out of respect. Henry Hill wasn’t just a movie character. He was a real mobster who lived in the shadows of New York. From the age of 11, he was running errands for the mafia and eventually became an associate in the Luchi crime family. His criminal life was an explosive mix of danger, power, and betrayal.
But everything fell apart when he became an informant, revealing the mafia’s dark secrets. and stuck until my mind was fun. I got 20 years to sit and think of what I’ve done. This life of sin has got me in. Well, it’s got me back in prison once again. New York in the 1940s seemed to have the biggest and best of everything in America, the number one port, the busiest garment district, the finest nightclubs, and of course, the most powerful mafia families.
The city was buzzing with war related activity when Carmela Hill brought home her first son from the hospital on June 11th, 1943. The homemaker and her husband Henry, an electrician working in the Brooklyn Navyyard were overjoyed. They already had four daughters, and finally they had a boy. They named him Henry Jr.
Henry Boy, as they called him, joined his parents and four sisters in a three-bedroom house in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was a warm neighborhood filled with people who had just come out of the ghetto. People climbing the ladder through education, going to school, and aspiring to become somebody.
Henry’s mother, Carmela, had arrived in America from Sicily at the age of two, and grew up in an orphanage after her mother died. At 17, she met a 19-year-old Irishman and heavy drinker named Henry Hill at a neighborhood dance. Henry was a union electrician who supported his mother and two younger brothers.
Carmela felt an immediate attraction. The young man wasn’t just handsome, but clearly responsible. The couple exchanged marriage vows in 1929. By 1951, they had eight children, five girls and three boys. including Henry Jr. Carmela took great pride in her Sicilian cooking and young Henry saw an opportunity for himself in the kitchen.
He realized that by joining his mother there, he could not only learn to cook but also get a little extra attention. By the age of 8, he already looked like a little gangster. He was always getting himself into mischief. One of his favorite tricks was rumaging through his father’s toolbox and leaving the tools scattered in the yard.
Another was sneaking into the basement to drink his father’s favorite peach lour. Even as a child, Henry was already very skilled at covering his tracks and letting someone else take the blame for his antics. I always admitted my mistakes while he hid his and pinned them on me. I was always the one who took the blame for his mischief.
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Henry didn’t just run from his responsibility. He often dragged others into his misadventures. One day in 1953, when he was 10 years old, he committed a petty theft by fishing coins out of the subway gates, bringing along his younger brother, Michael, who suffered from spobipida. A passer by moved by the sight of Michael on crutches gave him a few coins.
For Henry, this unexpected generosity sparked the idea for a new scam. One day, as he was coming up from the subway, his father spotted him and prepared to punish him harshly. He was convinced that what Henry had just done was the worst mistake he could possibly make. He was always the subject of my father’s disappointment more than his anger.
And I don’t think that anger ever had as much impact as the disappointment did. Henry Senior didn’t hesitate to take out his frustrations on his children, especially when he was drunk. When he was sober, everything was fine. But when he was drunk, it was like having an elephant in the house, trampling everything in its path. Henry would deliberately provoke him, constantly challenging his authority.
The most serious act of defiance came in 1955 when Henry Jr. was 11 years old. He had started hanging around a taxi stand just across the street from his house which was run by a man named Paul Vario. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Vario was a capo, a mid-level boss in the Luchese crime family, one of the wealthiest in New York.
Vario and his crew made no effort to hide their special status in the neighborhood. They had power, absolute power, and money. A dangerous combination, but an incredibly alluring one, and Henry was irresistibly drawn to it. As a result, Vario hired young Henry to wash and park the cars of all of his crew members.
Henry was fascinated by the mobster’s flashy lifestyle and began to see Paul as a father figure. He was impressed by Pauliey’s money and influence, and Paulie seemed to like him. No matter what Henry did, he could always say he was working for Paulie, which gave him almost free reign in the neighborhood.
Soon, school faded into the background, and the taxi stand became Henry’s full-time job. When the school sent letters to his parents warning that he wasn’t attending classes, his mob friends knew exactly what to do. They pulled the mailman aside and had a little talk with him. By this point, Henry’s real father was slowly starting to give up on his eldest son.
The more Henry pushed his father away, the closer he grew to Paul Vario and the mafia. Vario soon promoted the young Henry, now 12, making him a runner. He started making pizzas at a mafia run pizzeria located on the same block as the taxi stand. The teenager didn’t care about his father’s disapproval. He felt like he was a part of something bigger and more important than his own family.
After all, he was on his way to becoming a gangster. [singing] Well, I got me a telephone and it sure is neat. I can chat with my friends. Ain’t that a treat? The 1950s were a golden era of profits and power for the New York mafia, and the young Henry Hill was determined to get his share of the pie.
He was drawn to the excitement, the power, and the glamour of what he saw before him. Becoming a movie star with influence was truly what he desired, in addition to the adrenaline of being a gangster. But it was while watching card games that Paulie introduced him to the man who would shape his criminal career, Jimmy the Gent Burke.
Henry was immediately captivated by the charisma of this gangster. Henry loved that Jimmy Burke was respected wherever he went. Whether in a restaurant or a nightclub, chairs would immediately be pulled out for him to make room. Jimmy had a huge impact on him. Handing out $20 bills, and that was exactly what Henry Hill wanted him.
He aspired to that kind of wealth, that kind of luxury. But behind this extravagant facade, Jimmy was a ruthless gangster. As his reputation grew, Henry began accompanying the copo Paulie on his outings. For the teenager, it was a privilege, but he was about to discover the harsh realities of the mafia life. When Paulie visited his mistress, Henry thought it was just a routine visit.
But the woman, madly in love, had made the critical mistake of contacting Pauliey’s wife. With Henry present, Paulie went to her house and savagely beat her with a baseball bat. He sent her to the hospital with a broken neck. This was a shocking lesson for Henry. The mafia can forgive anything except an informant.
Women, children, or anything else. If you break that code of silence, the consequences can be extremely severe. It was a lesson Henry would remember for the rest of his life. chick. You ever get lost down and a side bro? I know. [music and singing] In 1957 when Henry was just 14 years old, Paulie offered him another type of special status, a membership card for the brick layers union.
Obtaining this card proved that you were a legit member of the union and eligible to receive a union salary. Even better, it allowed you to get a fake job. All you had to do was show up once a week to collect your pay. The card gave Henry access to any construction site in the city, allowing him to collect bets and payments.
This was a particularly hard blow for Henry’s father, who had hoped his eldest son would follow in his footsteps within the union. His only dream was to see his sons join him in the electricians union, which at the time was an organization passed down from father to son. But Henry never made any effort to meet his father halfway, even trying to do things that would make him proud.
The young gangster was more interested in pursuing his criminal career than pleasing his father. At 16, he had his first arrest for using a bad check. Just hours after the arrest, members of the organized crime world managed to get him out of the justice system, even celebrating his release with a feast.
From that point on, he was inducted into the underground world. He took full advantage of everything the mafia lifestyle had to offer. Easy money, beautiful women, and the best tables at New York’s most popular nightclubs. Yet, a part of Henry remained loyal to his real family and his father’s values. including patriotism.
In 1960, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the army as a paratrooper. His father was more than happy to sign the papers for his underage son. He was assigned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where he became a cook and a member of the prestigious 82nd Airborne Division. Whatever reasons had pushed Henry to enlist quickly faded and the army became just another business opportunity.
He started practicing userie, organizing underground bedding, and even selling stolen food from the kitchen. As a result, he was eventually arrested and discharged from the army in 1963. At 20, he was back in Brooklyn and rejoined Vario’s crew. He did everything the mafia asked of him: Ugerie, extortion, and even transporting stolen goods.
Over the years, he reconnected with Jimmy Burke, who at the time was working as a cargo hijacker for Vario, specializing in stealing goods at John F. Kennedy Airport. Aware that their Irish origins kept them from fully integrating into the mafia. The two men developed a close and lasting relationship.
Henry began transporting the cargo Jimmy stole from JFK airport, including electronics, jewelry, and clothing. He had certain qualities that made him a successful gangster. He was an excellent hustler with a natural charm. Women were often drawn to his ease, including a 19-year-old dental hygienist from Long Island named Karen Frerieded.
Like many young Jewish women from the five towns area of Long Island. Karen was drawn to this type of mafia gangster like a moth to a flame. In 1965, after only three months of dating, the couple ran away to North Carolina to get married. Upon returning to New York, Henry converted to Judaism, and the couple held a Jewish wedding, but Karen’s parents were far from thrilled that their new son-in-law was a gangster.
As for Henry’s parents, they had no problem with his religious conversion, but his father strongly opposed the guest list and refused to attend the wedding. He walks by every day at at school and I feel a fool. [singing] My heart skips a beat, but I turn away. I don’t know [singing] what to say. He doesn’t know my secret love for him.
Where do I begin? A few weeks after the wedding, Henry was back on the streets with Jimmy Burke and the rest of his associates. Like most mobsters, Henry was rarely at home. He roamed the neighborhoods, setting up scams. He excelled in illegal gambling, lone sharking, and underground lottery schemes. He, Burke, and the members of Paul Vario’s mafia crew stole anything of value on the black market.
At first, Karen managed to turn a blind eye to her husband’s criminal activities. Then, in December 1965, he was arrested for transporting untacked cigarettes across state lines. He spent a few hours in jail and paid a fine. Karen could no longer fool herself into thinking Henry was just a regular union tile setter. Rather than get angry, she fully embraced the mafia lifestyle.
She saw the money and she appreciated it as much as Henry did. Karen became a female gangster. A year after their marriage, they had their first child, a boy named Greg. Two years later, their family grew with the birth of a daughter, Abigail. Karen was frustrated to realize that her gangster husband was an absent father.
Henry often left the house, staying away for days or even weeks, leaving Karen to raise their children alone. She also came to understand that Henry was regularly cheating on her. Henry lived by the gangster credo. Fridays were for the mistresses and Saturdays were for the wives. Of course, Karen wasn’t stupid.
None of the gangsters wives were. They accepted turning a blind eye in many situations. Whether it was a business they chose, the work they did, the way they earned their money, or their personal lifestyle. A lifestyle that for Henry included a growing problem with alcohol. A problem that was perhaps the only thing Henry truly shared with his father. He was the worst of drunks.
There was no one he didn’t pick a fight with. There was no one to reprimand or reason with him. He had stopped caring about himself or anyone else. But what mattered to him was the mafia and making money. Soon he would find himself in a dangerous situation by committing the one type of crime Paul Vario had warned him against, drug trafficking.
In the early 1970s, Henry Hill had firmly established himself within the New York criminal underworld. He was a loyal button man, willing to do whatever it took to serve his mafia family. In October 1972, he was handling business for the mafia family in Tampa, Florida.
The 29-year-old was accompanied by his mentor and fellow Irishman, Jimmy Burke. They confronted a man in a bar who owed money to the family. Henry and Jimmy demanded that he pay his debt using the typical mafia methods. They achieved their goal through various means, including violent beatings that left the man in a pitiful state.
When that didn’t seem sufficient, they took him to the zoo and threatened to throw him into the lion’s den. However, what Henry and Jimmy didn’t know was that the man they were terrorizing had a sister working for the FBI. As a result, Hill and Burke were charged with kidnapping and attempted murder.
They managed to escape these charges, but the federal government wasn’t done. They were subsequently prosecuted for extortion. A jury found them guilty, and they were each sentenced to 10 years in prison. In September 1974, Hill began serving his sentence at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. He was surprised to find that for a gangster, prison wasn’t much different from the streets.
Even his surrogate father figure, Paul Vario, was serving time for fraud. While incarcerated, Henry realized that drugs were the most valuable commodity in prison. He started selling cocaine and marijuana to the guards and other inmates. His suppliers gave the contraband to his wife who then smuggled it back into prison. This was a dangerous step as Vario and all the other mafia bosses were firmly opposed to drug trafficking.
In the fall of 1978, Henry was granted parole and returned to New York. Money had been tight for Karen and the children during his incarceration. So Henry’s first concern was getting cash and fast. He decided to dive into the drug trade, a notoriously perilous business. Even worse, Henry decided to become a drug addict himself.
He was involved in almost everything he could do to make money. It was at this moment that Henry Hill, freshly out of prison, received a very valuable piece of information. He learned that a shipment worth millions of dollars in jewelry and untraceable cash would be stored in the Lufansza cargo hold at JFK airport in New York.
He passed the information along to his mentor and closest friend in the mafia, Jimmy Burke. Burke, along with the rest of Paul Vario’s mafia crew, began planning the heist of the century. Nobody knows for sure just how much was taken in the daring pre-dawn raid at the Latansa cargo terminal at Kennedy airport. The FBI says $2 million.
Port Authority police say $4 million. The city cop [screaming] says not anything, but they’re promised to break their silence soon WITH A PRESS [screaming] CONFERENCE. AND W WILL BE THERE TO COVER it live from the scene of the heist at JFK. It looks like a big one. Maybe the biggest THIS TOWN HAS EVER SEEN. Stay tuned.
Walk into the room. The music. This heist was at the time the largest armed robbery in American history. Five men entered the Lufansza cargo area, held it up, and escaped with over $5 million in cash and another $1 million in jewelry. While Henry Hill wasn’t directly involved in the robbery itself, he claimed he received a $50,000 cut for tipping off Jimmy Burke with the information.
It was the proudest moment of Henry’s criminal career. He and Jimmy had made mafia history, but pride quickly gave way to paranoia. Some of the mobsters who had pulled off the heist began drawing attention by spending their new wealth on flashy cars, fur coats for their mistresses, and expensive gifts. Exactly the kind of behavior that could attract law enforcement scrutiny.
Jimmy Burke was furious with their recklessness and he had a brutal solution. He and Paul Vario began eliminating anyone who could connect them to the heist, justifying it as a necessary step to protect themselves. Over the next year, bodies started piling up, and Henry’s nerves were fraying. For years, Henry had looked to Jimmy like a big brother.
Now, he wasn’t so sure. Jimmy was the kind of man who could look you in the eye, give you a warm hug, and then drive an ice pick through your skull without missing a beat. Henry no longer trusted Jimmy, but he still did business with him. They were now dealing cocaine and heroin together, and Henry had become addicted to both.
Between the drug abuse and the street level dealing, Henry’s life was spiraling out of control. He became paranoid, convinced that the police were watching his every move. One evening in early May 1980, Henry was at home in Rockville Center, Long Island. He was on the phone setting up a drug shipment to Pittsburgh, all the while cooking dinner for his family and his drug mule.
The plan was to head to the airport together, but just before leaving, the courier realized she had forgotten her hat and refused to travel without it. As Henry drove her back to retrieve it, police surrounded his car and arrested him. Now he was in jail facing serious drug trafficking charges. His violation of the mafia’s strict no drug rule was now out in the open.
On top of that, 13 men tied to the Lufansza heist had already been murdered. Henry feared he would be next. After all, he could link Jimmy not just to the heist, but also to the drug trade. Jimmy had every reason to silence him permanently. Henry was a liability, a ticking time bomb. Paul Vario was the only man who thought he might be able to protect Henry.
But his arrest had deeply disappointed Paulie. With few allies left in danger closing in, Henry knew he had to make his next move very carefully. But I got nowhere else to go. Paulie, take this. Now I got to turn my back on you. She was unlike any girl I’ seen. Every time Henry Hill got into trouble with the law, his New York mafia friends were always there to help him.
But not this time. In May 1980, he was incarcerated in a Long Island prison charged with drug trafficking. His wife Karen was also indicted as an accomplice, having been caught helping Henry manage his drug business. Henry, then 36 years old, knew that if he went to trial, Wiretaps would reveal that his mob associate, Jimmy Burke, was involved in cocaine and heroin trafficking.
He feared it was only a matter of time before he and his family would be killed. After all, he had broken the mafia’s strict rule against drug dealing. A rule his mafia boss and surrogate father, Paul Vario, had warned him never to break. He was convinced that Vario wouldn’t protect him from Jimmy Burke’s wrath. Whether it was paranoia or reality, Henry firmly believed Burke was ready to kill Karen, their children, and him.
The reason was that he knew too much about what Burks and Vario’s crews were doing. They were simply too much of a liability at that point. On Friday, May 16th, Henry posted a $100,000 bail to secure his release. Two days later, he met with Burke at a discrete cafe in Long Island. Jimmy assured Henry he wanted to help him avoid prosecution and get back on his feet.
By then, federal prosecutors, fearing Hill would flee after posting bail, had obtained a new arrest warrant against him. They told the judge they needed Henry as a material witness, someone who had firstirhand knowledge of criminal activity. Henry would have to talk or he and his wife would go to prison. On May 23rd, 1980, Henry Hill agreed to testify against the mafia and entered the witness protection program.
He freely admitted that his life wasn’t worth much anymore, that he expected to be executed by the people he had worked with in the Luchi family, and he realized he had no choice but to cooperate with the FBI. Henry, Karen, and their two children entered the witness protection program over Memorial Day weekend in 1980.
Hill and his wife were granted immunity in exchange for Henry’s testimony against the Luchese crime family, including the men Henry had come to see as his own family, Paul Vario and Jimmy Burke. He was still one of the few surviving people who could provide details about the still unsolved Lufanza heist, but his decision made him a marked man.
He became public enemy number one to everyone involved in organized crime. As a result, he and his family relocated to a modest home in Nebraska, but he regularly flew to New York to provide information and testify in court. With Henry’s help, the government was able to convict Paul Vario for fraud and extortion and Jimmy Burke for murder.
It was somewhat difficult for Henry to testify against Vario and Burke. He had a long-standing relationship with them, had known them since childhood, and saw Vario as a father figure and Burke as an older brother. Henry’s testimony helped send up to 30 maid men to prison. But he was never able to provide enough evidence to prove that he had orchestrated the Lufanza heist.
No one could cooperate Henry’s statements as most of the other participants in the heist were dead. Far from the streets of Brooklyn, Henry’s life as a government informant was miserable. His drinking and drug use spiraled out of control and eventually blew his cover. The first time he blew his cover, the Justice Department relocated his family to a small town in Kentucky.
There, Henry and his wife also faced difficulties. Karen kept calling her parents. Moreover, whenever Henry drank too much, he would confide in strangers, telling him that he was a mafia informant. So, they were moved again, this time near Seattle in Washington State. But Henry simply couldn’t stay out of trouble. One day in November 1980, his lawyer in New York received a strange call.
Henry told him that he had just married Sherry. The lawyer grew concerned about potential bigamy, reminding Henry that he was already married. Henry justified the act by revealing he had used his new name to legalize the marriage, thus bypassing the law. Eventually, the lawyer had the marriage anulled.
But the 39-year-old ex-convict had bigger problems. In 1982, he blew his cover for the last time. After 2 years in hiding, Hill, his wife Karen, and their two children were expelled from the witness protection program. Henry’s relationship with the federal government was fragile. So was his marriage.
Their relationship began to deteriorate a few years after entering the program. Henry was a person who cared only about himself. He devoted no time to his marriage. He lived every day looking over his shoulder, constantly afraid that members of organized crime would seek revenge, find him, and kill him. But when his past caught up to him, it wasn’t in the way he had expected.
In 1985, Henry made a deal with renowned journalist Nicholas Paley, who wrote a thriller based on Henry’s experiences in the mafia. Henry felt that if the New York mobsters were still trying to kill him, the least they could do was preserve his story for posterity and make some money from it.
And in 1986, Wise Guy became an instant bestseller. Director Martin Scorsesei bought the film rights and cast Ray Leota as Henry Hill. Henry received about a half a million dollars for the book and the film rights to his story, but he didn’t get to enjoy that financial windfall for long. Most of the money was seized by the IRS for back taxes.
Karen stayed with Henry despite their relationship being in tatters, and Henry was still addicted to alcohol and drugs. At that point, he was living on a ranch in St. Kaker, Washington. A 26-year-old woman named Kelly worked part-time for the Hills taking care of Henry’s five horses.
Like him, Kelly was also an addict, and a friendship quickly developed between them. Less than a year later, their relationship became romantic. Always on the lookout for new opportunities, Henry tried to continue his affair with Kelly while maintaining his relationship with Karen. Eventually, in February 1987, when their 21-year-old son Greg was in college and their daughter Abigail was 19, Henry left Karen for good.
[music and singing] By this time, Paul Vario had died in prison, and Henry’s old friend, Jimmy Burke, was serving a life sentence. Henry’s surrogate mafia family was gone. And now, the matriarch of his real family, was ill. In December 1990, his mother, Carmela, a Sicilian immigrant who had never stopped loving her eldest son, died at the age of 78.
[singing] As for Jimmy Burke, he too passed away, dying in prison of stomach cancer in 1996. [music and singing] Through a combination of circumstance rather than a wellthoughtout plan, Henry managed to escape both the dangers of the mafia and the risks of the witness protection program. The day after his 69th birthday, he died at home in Los Angeles.
He died in his bed the night after a big birthday party. It was an extraordinary and successful life for a man like Henry Hill. The real good fella was just a lowlevel mobster who believed he could beat the system. And in the end, he really did manage to outsmart it. And that’s how this video comes to an end.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
