Henry Hill

Hill spent twenty-five years in the Lucchese family's orbit and was never going to be inducted into it. His father was Irish, which under the rule the American organisation had applied since the 1930s disqualified him permanently, and he knew that from the beginning.

That is the fact the whole story runs on. A man who cannot be made has no protection he has not bought, no standing in a dispute, and no reason — once the arrangement stops working — to keep the confidence of men who were never going to give him a seat.

The airport

Hill grew up opposite the cab stand Paul Vario worked from and was running errands for the crew before he was a teenager. What he became was a competent all-purpose earner: cigarettes, loansharking collections, stolen goods, and cargo out of the airport that became Kennedy.

In 1967 the crew took roughly four hundred and twenty thousand dollars in cash from an Air France shipment. Nobody was convicted of it. The lesson available to a young associate was not subtle.

What actually ended it

The version most people know ends with the Lufthansa robbery in December 1978 and the killings that followed. The record is less tidy.

Hill was arrested in April 1980 on narcotics charges — a drug operation he was running on his own account, in defiance of a family rule that existed precisely because sentences for narcotics were long enough to turn people.

He entered witness protection and testified against Vario and James Burke, both of whom were convicted.

After

Hill talked to the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, whose 1985 book became the source for the film five years later. He was expelled from witness protection in the early 1990s after further arrests, lived openly under his own name, and spent his last two decades as a minor public figure telling the story to anyone who asked.

He died in Los Angeles on 12 June 2012, the day after his sixty-ninth birthday.