Dead man walking
Posted on 03/29/2008 6:36:40 AM PDT by decimon
GoodFellas was the definitive mafia film - and it is the story of one man, Henry Hill, one of the only survivors of a ruthless gang of robbers and killers.
Hill walked the streets of New York as a king - an associate of the Lucchese crime family. He stole big, he spent big and took vast quantities of drugs.
Then he got caught and spent 30 years in the witness protection programme, telling the police all they needed to know to put his mafia bosses behind bars.
"I couldn't walk around this neighbourhood ten years ago," he says standing, smoking outside Junior's diner in Long Island City. "There'd be bullets flying all over the place."
His morning started with fried calamari washed down with a glass of wine and a shot of whiskey. But it was not the Dutch courage that meant he dared to visit his old haunting grounds on this murky spring day.
"I'm old enough to die, just as long as they do it quickly," he says, pointing to his forehead.
Hill is a very different looking man from the one shown on the big screen. He is short, grey-haired, with lines on his face.
A cigarette barely leaves his hand. The same goes for a bottle of beer.
After Junior's, it was on to his mistress's house. She was called Janice Rossi in the film, Linda in real life, and Hill confirms the famous scene where his wife, Karen, is madly pressing apartment buzzers and screaming that Janice is a "whore".
But he says in reality he was in the apartment too and had to climb down the drainpipe to get out and reach home before Karen returned.
Hill says: "If you can't love two people at once, there's something wrong with you."
I point out that his wife probably did not see it that way. "Obviously she didn't," says Hill.
After a short interlude where he tries to persuade a traffic warden not to give us a ticket - "Sistergirl, please," he says - we are off to Robert's Lounge.
The club was owned by Jimmy Burke (Robert de Niro's character in the film) and was the scene of Spider's (played by Michael Imperioli) death.
"Spider was killed in the basement," Hill says. He describes the dark room filling up with smoke and the deafening echo of bullets in the tiny space.
He says Spider was buried in the basement along with several others killed there or nearby over the years. With a grim look he says: "This is a graveyard."
'Bust some heads'
GoodFellas contained several scenes of visceral, shocking violence and it was not an exaggeration.
Joe Coffee became a policeman because the mafia shot his dad. It happened when he was eight and they did it right in front of him.
"GoodFellas is probably the best mafia movie as far as showing them for what they really are," he says today.
"The Godfather, Casino, they show them as sort of folk heroes. GoodFellas pins them down to exactly what they are - street thugs."
Hill says he never killed anyone although he did ''bust some heads", and he admits he does not know whether his victims lived or died.
He smiles as he talks of how much he stole, though.
"We stole anything we could sell," he says, as we pass a Bulova watch factory.
He claims they used to stake out the trucks as they brought shipments in and then hold up and pay off the drivers. The watches could then be sold on the black market.
His most famous crime was the Lufthansa robbery of 1978 when a reported $5m (£2.5m) was taken from a vault at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport.
Pasta sauce
Hill says the police told him more than $100m (£50m) had gone through his hands, although he himself has no idea how much he stole and spent.
He knows where it went though: "Slow horses, drugs and rock and roll."
Now he makes his money selling his story. He is promoting a new Sky Movies mafia season, and has written several books (including a cookbook - real spaghetti and marinara sauce, not egg noodles and ketchup).
He adds that he made half a million dollars advising on GoodFellas.
I ask him how he thought the victims of his crimes would feel knowing about that.
He takes a drag of his cigarette and replies: "Do you know something? I don't give a heck what those people think, I'm doing the right thing now."
The Dr. Ruth of the underworld.
Dead man walking
He’s not worth the trouble. He’s been out of the life twenty-plus years.
He pissed off a bunch of old goomba morons who died in prison when he ratted them out. Their children may hold a blood feud in their hearts, but they might lose their job at the deli if they kill him. Besides, they don't know how.
Hint to Henry: “Revenge is a dish best served cold”
That was an ending line of a good low-budget movie.
Or, as Tony Soprano famously observed: “Revenge is like cold cuts.”
"The Godfather, Casino, they show them as sort of folk heroes. GoodFellas pins them down to exactly what they are - street thugs."
Ex-squeeze me Henry, Casino, 'folk heroes'. Must be a different 'Casino' than I saw or Henry ...
And I really like Goodfellas but Casino didn't make anyone a 'Folk Hero'. It was as true as you can almost get without using real names. Like the 'crooked' Gaming Commission Chairman who at the time in real life was ... Harry Reid. Now, 'The Godfather' that work of fiction did glorify Wiseguys.
(1) In real life 'Nicky Santoro' was Tony 'The Ant' Spilotro of the Chicago Outfit.
(2) That really happened though not in Vegas, a Chicago suburb.
(3) Tony Spilotro & his brother Michael WERE beat to death and buried in an Indiana Corn Field. But the beating occurred in the basement of a Chicago suburban house.
(4) That shooting occurred actually as shown. (I can't, wont, say any more about it)
(5) 'People' weren't pleased when Tony & Michael's bodies were found so soon after getting whacked. The botched burial cost those guy's their lives.
I don't know about that. I hear they [Mafia] never forget, especially at Hill's level of betrayal.
Casino is my favorite gangster movie. Hoffa was also good. I never watched the God father movies.
Heat was also a great movie but not mafia goombahs
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