Goodfellas author Nicholas Pileggi has lifted the lid on the real gangster who inspired Martin Scorsese’s mafia masterpiece, and one shocking moment that didn’t make the book.
Widely regarded as one of the best films in cinema history, Goodfellas turns 35 today.
In the 1990 classic, Ray Liotta led the way as mobster Henry Hill, who rose through the ranks of a New York crime syndicate before turning on his associates and becoming a police informant – Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino also made up the all-star cast.
The movie was based on Pileggi’s legendary 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy, following the gangster’s longtime association with the Lucchese crime family.
Speaking to Metro ahead of the milestone anniversary, the true crime writer, who was also behind the Goodfellas screenplay, explained that he spent five years profiling Hill to accurately bring his story to life.
The idea for the book first came from the late gangster lawyer’s so that he could earn enough money to pay for their services – Pileggi was personally picked to pen his life story thanks to his background growing up around ‘wise guys’ and covering the crime beat for over a decade with Associated Press.
‘I just listened to him and put it in the book, I tried not to get in the way,’ he told us.
Unfortunately, he found himself at the center of the drama during a trip to Seattle when Hill – who died in 2012 at the age of 69 – was in the witness protection program, as the visit quickly resulted in blood and broken glass.
‘I flew into Seattle airport, and he met me in a car,’ he said, recalling their journey to a restaurant. ‘There were some people in the car with him, friends from out there. They didn’t know who he was – he was living under an assumed name … these people only referred to him by the witness name, they didn’t even know he was Henry Hill.
‘When we got to the restaurant, I had to go to the [bathroom] … as I came out, there was the maître d’ and he’s bleeding down the front of his head. And there was Henry with a bottle of champagne, or wine, in his hand.
‘Henry had just hit the guy in the head with the bottle, the guy’s bleeding and leaned over. I said, “Come on, we got to get out of here!” So we leave the restaurant, and the guy is keeled over. We get in the car, and Henry drives away. I just left the guy in there bleeding from the head.’
Pileggi shared his panic that the police would be called immediately.
‘They’re going to look to get the guys who hit him, and kick the s**t out of us. I’m the idiot writer, [I told him] “Henry, we’ve got to get out of here”. He said, don’t worry about it.
‘[I said] “What do you mean, don’t worry? We can’t stay on the highway, they have cops on the highway looking!” He pulled over to another restaurant. He left the car out, the license plates were there for any police car to go by. We went in and had lunch, came out, got in the car, and went back to his place. He did not care.’
Describing himself as a ‘Nervous Nelly’, Pileggi said he didn’t see him hit the guy, but it was a ‘great insight’ into the life they lived.
‘That was what it was like for five years, writing a book about Henry Hill, and going around with him. I wasn’t supposed to…’
Pileggi confessed that he shouldn’t have even known Hill’s location while he was in witness protection – the Marshalls or FBI agents served as their main contact because the mob were ‘looking to kill him’.
‘The FBI didn’t want me near him,’ he admitted. ‘Because if somebody killed him, they would have killed me too, if I was standing next to him.’
Though not quite as dramatic, the movie – which comes in at a yawn-inducing two-and-a-half hours – also ran into backstage issues as Scorsese faced pressure from bosses to shave down the runtime.
In fact, one of the most famous scenes, where Henry spends the day of his arrest being stalked by a helicopter, almost didn’t see the light of day.
‘A lot of people wanted to cut that. You could cut 20 minutes off the movie if you get rid of that. Marty would not let them do that. He insisted – and thank heavens he was able to fight the studio on that,’ Pileggi said.
‘Marketing people said, “You can’t make a movie [that long]. It’s a gangster movie, two hours [tops]. It’s not the Godfather”. Indeed, it isn’t, but Marty fought for it, and he got it. I think it helps keep the movie as good as it is.
‘You don’t want to cut off the bottom half of the Mona Lisa because the canvas is too expensive.’
The pushback clearly worked as Goodfellas became an instant classic upon release – it landed a string of award nominations, including the best supporting actor Oscar for Tommy DeVito star Joe Pesci and a nod for Pileggi himself.
Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, both Wiseguy and the corresponding movie were packed with descriptions of beatings, brutal murders, mob hits, drug use and sex.
In fact, the movie opens with Jimmy (De Niro), Tommy and Henry opening the trunk of a car, revealing a severely beaten man hidden inside, and coming together to viciously kill him, as the latter says in a voiceover: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster’.
Despite the mobster’s track record, Pileggi insisted that there was no story too grisly to leave out of Wiseguy – but shared that the ‘scariest’ moment of all didn’t even come from Hill, but instead from his wife, Karen.
‘Karen discussed the fact that, when Henry had flipped and Jimmy Burke was worried about Henry talking, he invited her to this factory he had where he had all these stolen goods,’ he remembered.
‘She goes down the street and, as she’s about to go into the store, she sees somebody in there, and said, “I didn’t want to go in.” [When asked why] she explained, “Well, I don’t know. There was a house painter in there.”
‘What she was telling me was, when she looked in the store, she saw a murderer.’
Pileggi admitted that the slang term used to describe hit men passed him by at the time – it wasn’t until years later that he understood she wasn’t talking about actual painters and decorators, but instead a man hired to kill her.
‘A house painter is somebody who shoots you, and you paint the wall with the guy’s blood,’ he clarified. ‘When she told me a house painter, I thought she literally meant a house painter. I had no idea she meant an assassin!
‘I had no idea she was telling me that inside she saw a murderer, a professional assassin, and that’s why she didn’t want to go in there. Because she knew if she went in, she might not come out. He would shoot her, kill her, and take the body out the back.’
While the movie credits ended with the couple living their final days anonymously in suburbia, the reality was quite different as the Hills were eventually expelled from the witness protection program in 1987 due to his behavior – and split shortly after.
Touching on how his own relationship with Hill adapted after Wiseguy and Goodfellas were put out into the world, Pileggi added: ‘I couldn’t get rid of him. Once the movie came out … he cashed in on it.
‘He did a mafia cookbook, he wrote books about being in the mob. His children wrote a book about being the children of the guy in the mob.
‘He cashed in on the Henry Hill experience of having had a movie made about him. It became one of his primary sources of income.’
When asked how the victims of his crimes would feel about his Goodfellas fame in 2008, Hill simply told the BBC: ‘Do you know something? I don’t give a heck what those people think, I’m doing the right thing now.’
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