Turncoat lovedmoblife
Henry Hill, a hard-bitten mafioso who became a star witness in the prosecution of several top New York mob figures and whose criminal exploits were glamorised in the 1990 film GoodFellas, died on June 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 69.
Longtime friend Lisa Caserta said he had complications from a heart ailment.
Since age 11, Hill had thrived in the lawless environs of mafiarun New York, rising to become a trusted ‘‘wiseguy’’ in the Lucchese crime family.
For more than 25 years, he served under the stewardship of mob boss Paul Vario and worked closely with James ‘‘Jimmy the Gent’’ Burke. In the name of the Lucchese family, Hill said he helped engineer a point-shaving scheme involving the Boston College basketball team and took part in a spectacular heist worth $6 million in cash and jewels from a Lufthansa cargo facility at John F Kennedy International Airport.
Despite his numerous transgressions, Hill was adamant he never committed murder. But he did bury in shallow graves the corpses of the mob’s enemies – more than a dozen of them.
In 1980, his role in a vast narcotics trafficking operation led to his downfall. Sitting in the Nassau County Jail in New York, he faced a possible lifetime prison sentence unless he cooperated with the authorities.
He decided to talk. To his onetime mafia colleagues, Hill was a turncoat with a price on his head. To the Justice Department prosecutors who sent such miscreants to prison, Hill was a prized asset requiring vigilant protection.
He helped secure many convictions, and his testimony led to prison sentences for Vario, his former mentor, and Burke, his closest confidant.
He entered the federal witness protection programme and lived in Nebraska, Kentucky and Washington state. He also sold his life story to Simon & Schuster for nearly $100,000. The 1985 book, Wiseguy, by New York crime journalist Nicholas Pileggi, became a bestseller.
‘‘The hardest thing for me was leaving the life I was running away from,’’ Hill said in the book. ‘‘Even at the end, with all the threats I was getting and all the time I was facing behind the wall, I still loved the life.’’
Pileggi’s book became the basis of the celebrated 1990 mobster movie GoodFellas, starring Ray Liotta as Hill and Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci as fellow hoods.