The real ‘Goodfella’
LOS ANGELES — Henry Hill spent much of his life as a “goodfella,” believing his last moment would come with a bullet to the back of his head. In the end he died at a hospital after a long illness, going out like all the average nobodies he once pitied.
Mr. Hill, who went from small-time gangster to bigtime celebrity when his life as a mobster-turned-FBI informant became the basis for the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas,” died Tuesday at age 69, longtime girlfriend Lisa Caserta said Wednesday.
Mr. Hill had open heart surgery last year and died of complications from longtime heart problems related to smoking, she said.
“He was a good soul towards the end . . . he started feeling remorseful,” she said.
An associate in New York’s Lucchese crime family, Mr. Hill told detailed, disturbing and often hilarious tales of life in the mob that first appeared in the 1986 book Wise
by Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist Hill sought out shortly after becoming an informant.
“Henry Hill was a hood. He was a hustler. He had schemed and plotted and broken heads,” Pileggi wrote in the book. “He knew how to bribe and he knew how to con. He was a full-time working racketeer, an articulate hoodlum from organized crime.”
In 1990 the book, adapted for the screen by Pileggi and Scorsese, became the instant classic “Goodfellas,” starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta as Mr. Hill, a young hoodlum on the make who thrives in the Mafia but is eventually forced by drugs to turn on his criminal friends and lead the life of a sad suburbanite.
The film became a constantly quoted pop cultural phenomenon that provided the template for the modern gangster story.
In the book and the film he talks about how hard it was to lead an ordinary life after years steeped in gangster glamour.
“I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was a phone call away,” Mr. Hill says in the film. “Today, everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my like a schnook.”
Unlike older Mafia tales, which focused on family and honor, and “Goodfellas” mostly dwelled on how utterly awesome it was to be in the mob — on the gangster as rock star — at least until the life caught up with you.
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Liotta, as Mr. Hill, says in the movie. “For us to live any other way was nuts.”