Henry Hill Jr.: 1943-2012

Henry Hill in 1980

Henry Hill Jr., the famed mobster turned FBI informant, whose life story was documented in the book Wiseguy, died of an undisclosed illness on Tuesday at the age of 69. 

Ray Liota portrayed Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. 

Hill was associated with New York’s Lucchese crime family throughout the 1960s and into the 1980s. He began his life of crime at the age of eleven, running errands for Paul Vario, a captain in the Lucchese family.

Hill completed his first major robbery when he and Thomas DeSimone—who was portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas—robbed Air France of a shipment of $420,000 in April of 1967.

Hill became an FBI informant following a 1980 arrest on a narcotics-trafficking charge, and testimony he delivered led to 50 arrests. He, his wife, and their two children, entered the witness protection program and changed their names, but were expelled from the program in the early 1990s following several arrests on drug-related charges. 

In 2010, Hill was inducted into the Museum of the American Gangster in New York.