Henry Hill Biography

Breaking from the tradition of mob silence, underworld crime figure Henry Hill captured national attention when he testified against his mafia associates in the 1980s. For twenty-five years, Hill had been a member of the Lucchese Crime Family, the most powerful of the five original New York crime syndicates. His testimony helped to put away several crime figures, including the mob boss who had been his mentor. His story formed the basis of the best-selling book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (1985).

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941, Hill idolized mobsters in his youth. At the age of twelve he decided being a mobster "was better than being president of the United States" (N. Pileggi, Wiseguy, [1985]). The ones he admired worked for Paul Vario, then the Lucchese family's powerful underboss in Brooklyn. Vario and his lieutenant, James Burke, took the would-be gangster under their wing. Following a stint in the U.S. army in the early 1960s, Hill returned to New York to spend the next quarter century working for them.

The outfit was among the most violent in New York. Hill coerced business owners into giving protection money, committed armed robbery, set fire to buildings, and hijacked vehicles. After serving a brief sentence for extortion, he moved on to even bigger schemes. In time, his duties included trafficking in heroin, cocaine, and other drugs.

Although never rising through mafia ranks, Hill put his wits to work for it in planning and executing major crimes. In 1978, he helped fix nine Boston College basketball games in a point-shaving scheme that became a national sports scandal. Even more spectacularly, he helped to engineer a record-breakingheist: the 1978 robbery of $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry from the Lufthansa air cargo terminal in New York's Kennedy Airport, the largest cash burglary in U.S. history.

Indicted on drug conspiracy charges and subsequently implicated in the Lufthansa heist, Hill cut a deal with prosecutors. His motive was partly survival: Burke had ordered the slaying of over a dozen mobsters who had knowledge of the heist, and Hill feared being next. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he served as the star witness in the point-shaving trial that convicted Burke and three others. In a separate case, Hill's testimony sent Vario to prison, too. He then entered the Federal Witness Protection Program in the early 1980s and went into hiding, selling his story and cooperating with the author Nicholas Pileggi on Wise Guy.

After the success of the book, the New York Superior Court ruled that the state could seize profits under its so-called Son of Sam law, a victim's rights statute meant to deny financial gain to criminals. However, in a First Amendment ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held the statute was overboard. The book subsequently became the basis for director Martin Scorsese's film Goodfellas (1990), featuring actor Ray Liotta as Hill. Subsequently, Hill emerged from hiding and toured the nation giving lectures.