Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas ends with Ray Liotta standing on a suburban doorstep in a bathrobe, complaining about egg noodles and ketchup. The film wants you to believe Henry Hill disappeared safely into Witness Protection. The documented reality is the opposite. Hill was relocated ten times by the United States Marshals Service. He was expelled from WITSEC after blowing his own cover while drunk in Seattle. He had two major motion pictures about his life released within thirty days of each other. He spent twenty-two years living publicly under his real name. The men who would have killed him were already dead. The film that made him famous made witness protection impossible. The mob was not Henry Hill’s biggest threat. Henry Hill was Henry Hill’s biggest threat. Goodfellas just held the door open.
Scorsese Paid $480,000 to a Man in Hiding
The Hill cooperation deal had two financial components. The first was the federal stipend through WITSEC, which paid him approximately fifteen hundred dollars per month plus relocation expenses, housing, and identity-document support. The second was the rights deal Hill and Nicholas Pileggi structured around Wiseguy, which produced approximately four hundred eighty thousand dollars in advance payments and royalties to Hill between 1985 and 1990, before Goodfellas went into production. The rights deal was contested in court — the State of New York filed under its Son of Sam law to seize the proceeds — but the United States Supreme Court eventually ruled in Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board (1991) that Son of Sam laws were facially unconstitutional. Hill kept the money.
What that meant operationally is that the federal government was paying Hill to stay hidden while a Hollywood studio was paying him to be publicly identified. The two arrangements were incompatible. Hill chose the studio money. He gave on-the-record interviews to Premiere, Rolling Stone, and Esquire in the run-up to the film’s release. He attended the premiere. He signed autographs. He took meetings. By the time Goodfellas opened in theaters on September 19, 1990, Henry Hill had been functionally outside Witness Protection for over a year — although the Marshals Service did not formally close his file until 1991.
Ten Relocations Across Five States
Hill entered Witness Protection in May 1980 and was expelled from the program in 1991. Across those eleven years he was relocated ten times. The Marshals Service moved him through Omaha, Independence (Kentucky), Redmond (Washington), and four additional sites whose locations remain redacted in the federal record. Each relocation followed a security breach. Hill repeatedly violated WITSEC operational protocols by contacting old associates, using his real name in casual conversation, and committing additional crimes that drew local law enforcement attention. The relocations were standard remediation. The pattern was not.
The 1987 Seattle incident was the breaking point. Hill, by then operating under the cover identity of Peter Haines in Redmond, Washington, was arrested on a misdemeanor narcotics charge after a drunk-driving stop. During booking he produced his cover identification but, when asked his name verbally by the arresting officer, gave his real name. The local newspaper reported the arrest under both names. The FBI was forced to relocate him within seventy-two hours. The Marshals Service issued a final warning.
Hill Blows His Cover in Seattle
The 1989 incident finished it. Hill, drinking heavily at a Seattle hotel bar, told the bartender his real name, the names of the men who had wanted to kill him, and a partial summary of the federal cooperation that had put them in prison. The bartender called the local Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which assigned a reporter to follow up. The reporter located Hill, confirmed the identification, and wrote a profile that ran in early 1990. The Marshals Service formally expelled Hill from the program. He was no longer a protected witness. He was a private citizen with a famous past, a forty-thousand-dollar Hollywood advance check, and a Witness Protection-trained understanding of how to disappear that he had spent ten years failing to apply.
Nicholas Pileggi Writes Wiseguy
The financial mechanism that pulled Hill out of WITSEC was a book deal Pileggi had been working on since 1980. Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family went into bookstores on December 1, 1985 and became an immediate New York Times bestseller. The book stayed on the bestseller list for thirty-eight weeks. The hardcover and paperback rights produced enough royalties to keep Hill financially solvent independent of his federal stipend. Pileggi shared the cooperation interviews with his wife — Nora Ephron — for the duration of the writing process.
Ephron used the household source material to develop a script she had been working on independently — a comedy about a mob informant relocated to suburban America. The script became My Blue Heaven, which she co-wrote with director Herbert Ross and which went into production in 1989. Both projects — the Pileggi-Scorsese drama and the Ephron-Ross comedy — drew from the same set of cooperation interviews, the same household phone calls, and the same primary informant. Hill was the source for both films. The household paid him in book royalties. The studios paid him in option fees and consultant credits.
Two Films in Thirty Days
The release sequence was the killing blow to any remaining WITSEC viability. My Blue Heaven opened on August 17, 1990, with Steve Martin playing the Hill character — Vincent “Vinnie” Antonelli — in a comedic register. The film was a moderate commercial success, grossing approximately twenty-three million dollars domestically. Goodfellas opened on September 19, 1990, with Ray Liotta playing the Hill character in a serious register. The film was a critical phenomenon, earning six Academy Award nominations and grossing over forty-six million dollars domestically.
Within thirty days, two major motion pictures had identified Henry Hill by name, presented the broad outlines of his federal cooperation, and dramatized the consequences of his testimony. The Lucchese crime family, which had spent the early 1980s actively hunting Hill, had now been given a complete operational profile of where he had been, what he had said, and how he had spent the decade after testifying. Any remaining ambiguity about whether the Henry Hill in the films was the actual Henry Hill living in Redmond, Washington was resolved by Hill himself, who appeared on The Howard Stern Show, Larry King Live, and dozens of other media platforms during the press cycle.
Vario and Burke Were Already Gone
The reason Hill survived the publicity is that the two men who would have ordered his death were already dead by the time the films premiered. Paul Vario, the Lucchese caporegime who controlled the East New York crew Hill had grown up inside, died of respiratory failure at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth on May 3, 1988. He had been serving a six-year federal sentence on a tax-evasion conviction. James “Jimmy” Burke, the operational coordinator of the Lufthansa heist and Hill’s primary mentor, died of cancer at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo on April 13, 1996.
Vario was already dead when Wiseguy hit bookstores in 1985. He was certainly dead when Goodfellas premiered in 1990. Burke was alive but already inside federal custody, with no operational ability to issue contracts. The Lucchese family that had wanted Hill dead in the early 1980s had been substantially dismantled by the 1985 Mafia Commission Trial — Anthony Corallo and Anthony Salerno were both convicted that year — and the family that survived had no institutional memory of the Hill cooperation as a live priority. By 1990 there was no one left who cared enough to put a contract on Henry Hill, and the men who would have cared most were either in coffins or in prison cells.
Twenty-Two Years Living Publicly
Hill spent the next twenty-two years living openly under his real name. He gave hundreds of interviews. He appeared at film festivals. He launched a marinara sauce. He published a memoir and a cookbook. He hosted a Web radio show. He attended Goodfellas anniversary screenings as a guest. He became, functionally, a working professional ex-informant — a media personality whose entire economic value derived from public ownership of the cooperation that was supposed to have required his anonymous death. He died in Topanga, California, on June 12, 2012, of complications from heart disease, at the age of sixty-nine. The Lucchese family did not kill him. The Bonanno family did not kill him. The Gambino family did not kill him. He died in a hospital, of natural causes, after a quarter-century of voluntary public exposure.
The Most Famous Informant in America
The irony of the Henry Hill story is not that he survived. The irony is that the survival was a function of the same Hollywood exposure that was supposed to have killed him. Hill was famous enough that any move against him would have produced an immediate national press story, federal pressure, and a probable RICO indictment of every Lucchese decision-maker who could have ordered the hit. The mob does not operate well under that kind of media scrutiny. It operates well in obscurity. Goodfellas stripped the obscurity. The film and the publicity around it created a media perimeter that no rational organized crime decision-maker would attempt to penetrate. Henry Hill was not protected by Witness Protection. He was protected by Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, and the box office gross that made his death too expensive for any family to authorize.
The film’s marketing presented Hill as a man whose life was destroyed by his cooperation. The documented record presents Hill as a man whose cooperation was prolonged by the publicity Scorsese gave it. He spent twenty-two years on talk shows, in podcasts, on autograph circuits, and in front of cameras. He was the most famous informant in American organized crime history. None of his old enemies came for him. The film was the threat the WITSEC office worried about. The film also became the protective layer the WITSEC office could not have engineered if it tried. Goodfellas was more dangerous to Henry Hill than the mob ever was — and at the same time, it was the only thing that kept the mob from coming back for him.
Further Reading
- Goodfellas Never Showed Where the $5.8 Million Went
- Goodfellas Never Showed Burke’s Real Kill List
- Casino Lied to You About Geraldine McGee
Sources
- Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (Simon & Schuster, 1985)
- Henry Hill, Gangsters and Goodfellas: Wiseguys, Witness Protection, and Life on the Run (2004)
- CBS News / 60 Minutes, “On the Run” — Gregg and Gina Hill interviews (2004)
- NPR Fresh Air, Nicholas Pileggi interview with Terry Gross (1986 / 2012 rebroadcast)
- Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, 502 U.S. 105 (1991)
▶ The companion documentary covers this on YouTube
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