Jimmy Burke endured a rough childhood which contributed to his criminal behavior later in life The time he spent in prison was for extortion, not any violent crimes. In biographies, memoirs and interviews later in life, Hill swore up and down that he’d never killed anyone, though he openly admitted to witnessing 20 murders and helping to bury the bodies of at least 10 victims. As he told biographer Nicholas Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, on which GoodFellas was based, that robbery won him big points with the mafia higher-ups. In 1967, Hill took part in robbing an Air France cargo terminal at JFK, which netted $420,000. His wife Karen, played by Lorraine Bracco in GoodFellas, was initially unaware of his crime connections, but ultimately embraced the lifestyle. He spent time in the army, though he was discharged for starting a brawl and stealing a sheriff’s car, and wound up back with the mafia in Brooklyn soon after. The son of an Irish father and Sicilian mother, he got in with the mob early, running errands for the gangsters who hung out near his family’s home in Brownsville and then graduating to more serious crimes, including arson.
GoodFellas is told from the point of view of Hill, a local Brooklyn gangster and drug dealer who worked as an associate for the Lucchese crime family, one of Brooklyn’s most notorious mafioso organizations. READ MORE: The Five Crime Families of New York City: Inside the Rise and Fall of the Mafia Hill became involved with the mob at a young age Foreign rights: Sterling Lord.It’s rare that a real-world event is more dramatic and hard to believe than what transpires in the Oscar-winning movie it inspires, but you can absolutely make the case that it applies to the 1978 Lufthansa Heist, which serves as a climactic moment in Martin Scorsese’s classic film GoodFellas, about rise and fall of Lucchese crime family associate Henry Hill. Hill's story becomes an extraordinary vantage on a demimonde that lives a high, violent, score-to-score life in which car theft, hijacking-to-order, credit-card scams, cigarette smuggling, and other hustles and schemes are as workaday as 9-to-5 at the office. Pileggi, a crime reporter for New York writing here with Hill's cooperation, does a superb job of re-creating the gangster's career, from his early days as an errand boy (at 12) to racketeer Paulie Vario in Brooklyn's BrownsvilleEast New York section, to his pivotal roles in a Boston College point-shaving scandal and the $6-million Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport in 1978. The "wiseguy'' (mob parlance for a street-level hoodlum) is Henry Hill, 30-year veteran of a Brooklyn strong-arm branch of the Luchese crime family, who turned against and helped convict his former associates five years ago and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. This is a riveting account of organized crime as a way of life.
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