Henry Hill

For other uses, see Henry Hill (disambiguation).

Henry Hill, Jr.
FBI mugshot taken in 1980.
Born	(1943-06-11) June 11, 1943 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Known for	Former Mobster
Spouse(s)	Lisa Caserta Karen Friedman 1965-2002 (filed for divorce in 1990, finalized in 2002)
Children	3
Parent(s)	Henry Hill, Sr. (Irish-American) Carmella Hill (Sicilian-American)

Henry Hill (born June 11, 1943) is a former American mobster, Lucchese crime family associate, and FBI informant whose life was immortalized in the book Wiseguy, written by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi, and the 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, in which Hill was played by Ray Liotta.

Early life

Hill grew up in a poor working class family in East New York, Brooklyn. His father, Henry Hill, Sr., was an Irish-American electrician, and his mother, Carmella Hill, was a Sicilian American. Henry and his seven siblings lived in a small house. From an early age Henry admired the local mobsters who socialized across the street from his home, including Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. In his early teens Hill began running errands at Vario's cabstand, shoe shine stand, and pizzeria.

Hill's first experience in gang life began with parking cars and doing other odd jobs like cleaning out Paul Vario's boat and supplying Vario's crew with cold beer and wine. When Hill turned fourteen in 1957, Paul Vario's younger brother Vito "Tuddy" Vario and older brother Lenny Vario presented Hill with a union card in the bricklayers' local on a construction site, and told Hill he would get paid $190 a week. He was given the card so that he could be put on a building contractor's payroll as a no-show and his salary divided among the Varios. He was also given the card to facilitate the pickup of the daily policy bets and loan shark payments from local construction sites. Hill would earn deep respect not only because he knew Paul Vario, but also because he was a member of the union. Once Hill had a legitimate job, he stopped going to school for months. Hill said that he got back home from the cabstand one night, and his father had a belt in his hand and a letter from his truant officer in the other. The letter said Hill hadn't been in school in months, so he said he got a beating from his father; the next day Tuddy and his crew drove Hill over to a nearby post office, so Hill could to point out which mailman was his. When his mailman came, Hill said "then out of the blue, the two guys got out of the car and snatched the mailman." Tuddy told the mailman that if he sent any more mail to Hill's house, Tuddy was going to shove the mailman in the pizza oven feet first. After that Hill didn't get any mail from the post office again until his mother complained about it.

Hill made his first arson attempt when a new cabstand called "Rebel Cab Company" opened on Glenmore Avenue; it was just around the corner from the Vario Cabstand. The owner of the Rebel company was new in New York City. He was from Alabama, and Tuddy told the owner to shut down the cabstand because there wasn't enough business for two cabstands, but the owner refused. Tuddy told Hill to meet him after midnight, so Hill went to the cabstand that night to find Tuddy was waiting for him with a gasoline drum in the back seat of his car. Hill and Tuddy went to the rival cabstand, and Hill first smashed the windows of the cabs while Tuddy got newspaper soaked with gasoline. Tuddy gave Hill some match books to throw in the cabs. Hill had to be given a signal to light the fire from Tuddy to be sure no one was watching. When Tuddy gave the signal to Hill, he lit every match book and threw them into every cab. Hill said he heard one explosion after another, but he was running so fast from the explosion he never had a chance to look back.

Hill's first arrest took place when he was sixteen. Hill and Paul Vario's son Lenny attempted to use a stolen credit card to buy snow tires for Vito "Tuddy" Vario's wife's car at a Texaco gas station, and at the time Tuddy didn't check if the credit card was stolen. When Hill and Lenny got back from buying the tires, Hill walked inside Vito "Tuddy" Vario's place, and two police detectives grabbed Hill while Lenny took off. The police arrested Hill and took him to Liberty Avenue station. The only thing Hill said to the police was his name, and the police roughed him up because they didn't believe a kid named Henry Hill would hang out with guys like Paul Vario. He later earned the respect of Lucchese Family associate Jimmy Burke, who saw great potential in young Henry. Hill soon dropped out of high school to devote all his time to working for gangsters. Burke, like Hill, was unable to become a made member of the Mafia because of his Irish ancestry, but The Vario Crew was happy to have associates of any ethnic background as long as they made money and did not cooperate with the authorities.

In 1960, Hill joined the Army and was stationed at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, for three years. He was a soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division, but maintained contact with Vario and his other friends in New York throughout his enlistment. Hill continued to hustle while in the service, selling extra food, loan sharking salary advances to his fellow soldiers, selling tax-free cigarettes. Before being discharged, Hill spent two months in a military stockade for brawling with a farmer, brawling with Marines in bars and stealing a sheriff's car. Hill claims the reason he joined the army was to stay away from his old friends and that the "heat" was too hot.

In 1963, he returned to New York, beginning the most notorious phase of his criminal career. Hill, along with Burke and Tommy DeSimone, and others in Burke's Robert's Lounge crew, hijacked trucks, sold stolen goods, imported and sold untaxed cigarettes, engaged in loan sharking and bookmaking, and planned airport robberies, carrying out the Air France Robbery in 1967 and the huge Lufthansa heist in 1978. The crew also committed numerous mob-related murders. The Lufthansa robbery was one of the largest heists in history.

In 1965, Hill met his wife Karen. The two started going on usual dates at the nightclub Copacabana, where Karen was introduced to Henry's lifestyle. She was impressed by Henry and said in Wiseguy "we always sat up close at the stage, and Sammy Davis Jr. sent us champagne." The two later eloped to North Carolina where they had a large wedding, to which most of Hill's gangster friends were invited.

Air France robbery

On April 7, 1967, Hill and Tommy DeSimone pulled the Air France robbery. Hill heard from Robert "Frenchy" McMahon that his employer Air France was handling a shipment of $480,000. The main problem was a guard with a key guarding the safe. They identified the guard's weakness as women. They got the guard drunk and took him to a motel, where there was a prostitute they hired waiting to distract him. When the guard took off his pants, they took the key to make a copy of it, then replaced it without the guard's knowledge. The next day the guard went to work and Hill and DeSimone now had a copy of his key to the safe. At 11:40pm on a Saturday, Hill and DeSimone drove to the Air France cargo parking lot with a rented car with false plates. They left with $480,000 dollars. Hill and DeSimone paid tribute to the mob chiefs who considered Kennedy Airport their turf. They gave $60,000 to Sebastian "Buster" Aloi, the 57-year-old capo for the Colombo crime family, and another $60,000 to their own capo, Paul Vario.

Billy Batts

After the birth of their two children, Hill and Karen rented an apartment in a two-family home in Island Park, New York in 1969 and bought a restaurant called "The Suite". Hill intended the restaurant to remain legitimate, but his old friends began coming and it became a mob hangout. Its legitimacy waned on June 11, 1970, when Hill and his crew threw a "welcome home" party at Robert's Lounge (owned by Jimmy Burke) for William "Billy Batts" Devino, a made man in John Gotti's crew and a member of the Gambino crime family. Devino had just gotten out of prison after serving a six-year term for drug possession. Hill states in that Devino saw DeSimone and asked him if he still shined shoes, which DeSimone took as in insult. Several minutes later, when the issue was apparently forgotten, DeSimone leaned over to Hill and Jimmy Burke and said "I'm gonna kill that fuck", which Hill saw as a serious threat.

Several weeks later, on June 11, 1970, Devino went to "The Suite" (owned by Hill in Jamaica, Queens) to go drinking with DeSimone's crew, including Henry Hill, DeSimone, and Jimmy Burke. Later that night, DeSimone took his girlfriend home and Jimmy Burke started making Devino comfortable. Twenty minutes later, DeSimone returned with a .38 revolver and a plastic mattress cover. DeSimone walked over to Devino at the corner of the bar and attacked him, while Jimmy Burke held Devino down. DeSimone pistol-whipped Devino with the .38 revolver. Devino was so inebriated that he couldn't defend himself. They later covered him up with the mattress cover and put him the trunk of Hill's car. Needing a shovel to bury the body, they stopped at DeSimone's mother's home, who made them coffee and breakfast. After driving on the Taconic for half an hour with DeSimone at the wheel, they heard banging from the trunk and realized Devino was still alive. "We're on our way to bury him and he wasn't even dead," Hill said. Upon realizing that Devino was still alive, DeSimone angered and stopped the car, reaching for the shovel. They waited until there were no more headlights behind them, then DeSimone opened the trunk and smashed Devino with the shovel, while Burke grabbed a tire iron and beat Devino with it.

When they arrived at their destination, they buried Devino, covered him with lime, and drove back to New York. Due to the cold, the ground was frozen and they were unable to dig a deep grave. Three months later, the land was bought by a real estate developer, so Hill and DeSimone had to rebury Devino somewhere else, lest his body be discovered due to the shallowness of the current grave. Hill and DeSimone drove there in Hill's brand-new Pontiac Catalina convertible and dug Devino's body up, and drove to a New Jersey Junkyard (owned by Clyde Brooks) and dumped the body there. According to Hill, the car stank so badly from the decomposed body that he later had to scrap the car.

The price for killing a made man without permission is death.

Fallout between Hill, Vario, and Burke

Vacation in Florida

While Karen and Hill split up for a while, because Hill had been cheating with a woman named Linda, Hill, Casey Rosado and Jimmy Burke took a vacation to Tampa, Florida to go to Casey's parents home, meet with Casey's cousin, and collect a debt from a man named John Ciaccio. When they got to Ciaccio's bar, the three men and Casey Rosado's cousin went to the door and Casey Rosado's cousin gave Hill a .38 revolver. The cousins walked in first and then Hill and Burke did. The cousins were yelling at Ciaccio in Spanish while Hill and Burke were sitting four tables away, Burke got up and grabbed Ciaccio and said "Shut your mouth and walk out the door." Hill said "there must have been twenty-five people in the place, but nobody did anything. Later they were all witnesses at the trial." Plus a retired New York police officer was at the scene and took their license plate number. After the four men were beating the man and pistol-whipping him, he finally said he'll pay up but only half because the rest was owed to a doctor who won him on a bet. Casey's cousin believed him because he knew the doctor. They later got the money from the doctor. The four men spent the rest of the weekend drinking. A month later when Hill got back home on his way to Robert's Lounge, twelve cars were blocking the street and he put on his radio and said the FBI were "arresting union officials" and "Jimmy Burke and others are being sought." It turned out that Ciaccio's sister worked for the FBI. They were later arrested and put on trial for Kidnapping and murder. They beat the case because Rosado took the stand and convinced to the jury that Ciaccio was a liar. After they beat the case, the police came after them for an extortion charge. Just before the three were going to trial, Casey Rosado dropped dead from a heart attack for bending over and trying to tie his shoe laces. He was forty-six. Hill and Burke lost their chances for beating the case because of Rosado's death. On November 3, 1972, Hill and Burke were found guilty on an extortion charge.

Imprisonment

Hill and Burke were supposed to serve ten years in prison, but ended up served six years in different prisons. The first real prison Hill ever went to was in Lewisburg. Lewisburg had a large population of organized-crime members inside at the time, including Paul Vario, doing two and a half years for income tax evasion, and Johnny Dio, serving a long stretch for the acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel. Hill later lived with Vario, Dio, and Joe Pine, the boss of Connecticut. There were two-dozen rooms on each floor, all of them affiliated with the mob: the John Gotti crew, Jimmy Doyle and his crew, "Ernie Boy" Abbamonte and "Joe Crow" Delvecchio, Vinnie Aloi, and Frank Cotroni. By bribing guards, they got away with sleeping on comfortable beds, drinking wine, and cooking with homemade stoves made by Vario. Hill wound up meeting Paul Mazzei, who taught Hill how to smuggle drugs into prison, and with whom he often played tennis, along with Jimmy Doyle, Bill Arico, and some of the shooters from the East Harlem Purple Gang. Hill then began smuggling drugs with Paul Mazzei to support Hill's family on the outside. Two years later, Hill was transferred to Federal Correctional Complex, Allenwood, where he still smuggled drugs and food with the help of Karen. On July 12, 1978, Hill was granted an early parole for having been a model prisoner and was released. He walked out wearing a five-year old Brioni suit, carrying seventy-eight dollars in his pocket, and drove home in a six-year old Buick sedan.

Paul Vario, who had understood why Hill sold drugs in prison, warned him not do so outside prison because he risked a longer prison sentence if he got caught. However, Hill had so much money it was too hard to resist.

Basketball Scandal

Hill and Mazzei also set up a point shaving scheme, which was put in place when Mazzei convinced Boston College center Rick Kuhn to participate. Kuhn encouraged teammates to join the scheme, which became a scandal. Hill also claimed to have an NBA referee who worked games at Madison Square Garden during the seventies in his pocket because of the debt the referee had incurred gambling on horse races.

Lufthansa heist

Two months after Hill's release, Hill's bookmaker Martin Krugman described the Lufthansa Heist. Krugman said there millions upon millions of dollars in untraceable fifty- and hundred-dollar bills sitting out there in a cardboard vault at Kennedy Airport just waiting to get robbed. He said it was the ultimate score. At Robert's Lounge, the crew heard about the heist and had a meeting about it, after the meeting Hill became obsessed with Lufthansa. But the only problem was is that Jimmy Burke hated Martin Krugman. Burke never trusted him since an incident with Marty's commercial in the early 1970s. In November, Burke had everything planned for the robbery but wanted to wait until Christmas time. On Monday, December 11, 1978, at 3:12 in the morning, the robbery was committed. The robbery turned out to be the biggest robbery in history at the time. Three days later after the robbery, the FBI and NYPD knew it was the Robert's Lounge crew, they set up surveillance in the Robert's Lounge and followed the crew 24/7. Soon after, the crew began to fall. Some associates and witnesses "ratted" out some associates affiliated with the robbery, a little after, the testifiers began disappearing and their bodies were being found. Jimmy Burke killed half of the people involved with the robbery because he wanted their share of the money and to make sure they don't "rat". After Burke killed half of them, the bodies of more than 12 suspects and witnesses were discovered in various places. Burke's son, Frank James Burke who was involved the robbery also, was killed in a drug deal gone bad. Martin Krugman was killed in "Vinnie's fence company" and his body was never found. Five people became informants. Tommy DeSimone along with Hill were the only men involved with the robbery still alive at the time without the hands of Jimmy Burke.

Hill began wholesaling marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and quaaludes, earning enormous amounts of money. After the murders of several of his friends by Burke, following the Lufthansa Heist, and the disappearance of his close friend Tommy DeSimone, who, Hill believed, had been delivered by Vario into the hands of (and murdered by) the Gambino crime family for killing two "made" members without permission, he became increasingly paranoid.

Arrest

On April 27, 1980, Hill was arrested on a narcotics-trafficking charge, bonded out of jail, and, shortly afterwards, was re-arrested as a material witness in the Lufthansa robbery. He became convinced that his former associates planned to have him killed: Vario, for dealing drugs; and Burke, to prevent Hill from implicating him in the Lufthansa Heist. This was confirmed by a surveillance tape played to Hill by federal investigators, in which Burke tells Vario of their need to have Hill "whacked".

In reference to his many victims, Hill, who claims that he has never killed anyone, stated in an interview in March 2008 with the BBC's Heather Alexander that "I don't give a heck what those people think; I'm doing the right thing now."

Informant and the witness protection program

Hill chose to become an informant to avoid a possible execution by the Mafia or going to prison for his crimes; his testimony led to 50 convictions.

Jimmy Burke was given 20 years in prison for the 1978-79 Boston College point shaving scandal involving fixing Boston College basketball games and also later was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of scam artist Richard Eaton. Burke died of cancer while serving his life sentence, on April 13, 1996. He was 64.

Paul Vario received four years for helping Henry Hill obtain a no-show job to get him paroled from prison. Vario was also later sentenced to 10 years in prison for extortion of air freight companies at JFK Airport. He died of respiratory failure on November 22, 1988, at age 73 while incarcerated in the Fort Worth Federal Prison.

Hill, his wife Karen, and their two children entered the U.S. Marshals' Witness Protection Program in 1980, changed their names, and moved to undisclosed locations in Omaha, Nebraska; Independence, Kentucky; Redmond, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. In 1982, Henry Hill and his family were kicked out of the Witness Protection Program for continued violations of the rules of the program.

Later life

Hill was arrested in 1987 on narcotics-related charges in Seattle, where he was living in the Wedgwood neighborhood under the name of Martin Todd Lewis.

In 1989, he and his wife Karen divorced after 25 years of marriage. Because of his numerous crimes while in witness protection, Hill (along with his wife) was expelled from the program in the early 1990s.

After the 1987 arrest, Hill claimed to be clean until he was arrested in North Platte, Nebraska in March 2005. Hill had left his luggage at Lee Bird Field Airport in North Platte, Nebraska containing drug paraphernalia, glass tubes with cocaine and methamphetamine residue.

Hill battled alcoholism for years, claiming at one point that prison had saved his life.

In fall 2006, Hill appeared in a photo shoot along with Ray Liotta for Entertainment Weekly. At Liotta's urging, Hill entered alcohol rehabilitation two days after the shoot.

Hill sells his artwork on eBay, and is a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show.

He returned to rehab in 2008, but during that period was arrested twice for public drunkenness.

He was sentenced to two years probation on March 26, 2009. December 14, 2009 he was arrested in Fairview Heights, Illinois, for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest which Hill attributed to his drinking problems.

Hill worked for a time as a chef at an Italian restaurant in Nebraska and his spaghetti sauce, Sunday Gravy, was marketed over the internet. Hill opened another restaurant, 'Wiseguys', in West Haven, Connecticut in October 2007.

Hill lives in Topanga Canyon, approximately four miles from Malibu, California with his fiancee Lisa Caserta. Lisa Caserta is Italian-American. She has appeared in several documentaries with Hill, as well as on The Howard Stern Show. He was inducted in the American Gangster Museum in 2010 in New York City. A show will air June 8th at 10 O'Clock on Natgeo's Locked up Abroad about Hill's life.

See also

• GoodFellas
• The Big Heist
• My Blue Heaven
• The Real GoodFella

Further reading

• Hill, Henry (2002). The Wise Guy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes From My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run. NAL Trade. ISBN 0451207068. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Hill, Henry (2003). A Goodfella's Guide to New York: Your Personal Tour Through the Mob's Notorious Haunts, Hair-Raising Crime Scenes, and Infamous Hot Spots. Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0761515380. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Hill, Henry (2004). Gangsters and Goodfellas: Wiseguys, Witness Protection, and Life on the Run. M. Evans and Company, Inc. ISBN 156731757X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Hill, Gregg and Gina (2004). On the Run: a Mafia Childhood. Time Warner Book Group. ISBN 044652770X.
• Volkman, Ernest; Cummings, John (1986). The Heist: How a Gang Stole $8,000,000 at Kennedy Airport and Lived to Regret It. New York: Franklin Watts. ISBN 0531150240. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Pileggi, Nicholas (1986). Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671447343.
• Porter, David (2000). Fixed: How Goodfellas Bought Boston College Basketball. Taylor Trade Publishing. ISBN 0878331921.
• English, T.J. (2005). Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster. William Morrow. ISBN 0060590025.

External links

• GoodFella Henry Official Site
• ZZZlist Interview with Henry Hill
• The Smoking Gun: Goodfella Henry Hill In Drug Bust
• The Smoking Gun: Henry Hill mugshots