I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this memoir by Henry Hill, the mob associate whose life was the source for one of my favorite mob books, Wiseguy and one of my favorite mob movies, Goodfellas. Last year I read On the Run A Mafia Childhood by Greg and Gina Hill, Henry's two children. Vario (Paul Cicero in the film) was far from the relatively coolheaded powerbroker Paul Sorvino portrayed. A federal prosecutor called Vario, who served jail time for rape and had a notoriously unhinged temper, "one of the most violent and dangerous career criminals in the city of New York.” And while Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway comes across as cunning and conniving with a brutal streak, the real Jimmy “The Gent” Burke was, according to Hill, a “homicidal maniac,” brutally violent and responsible for at least 50 to 60 murders. 11. Paul Sorvino almost dropped out of Goodfellas because he was having trouble connecting to his character's cruelty.

Henry's life was colorful to say the least and he lived it to the fullest. I was sad to hear that he passed away, particularly because I thought he was onto something with his cookbooks and talk of a cable tv cooking show which would have been stellar and to see Henry do something on the up and up for a change would have been the icing on Henry's cake. Venice Film Festival". FilmAffinity. 1990. Archived from the original on October 14, 2013 . Retrieved November 3, 2013.

Costar Michael Imperiolicredited the mob movie with launching his path to stardom. “I don’t know if I would have had the same career had I not done Goodfellas,” he told the same outlet in 2010. “Probably not. Would I have been cast on The Sopranos? Who knows if there would have been a Sopranos?” Burke strangled Jimmy Breslin almost to death after he wrote a piece on Paul Vario. That should have made it to the movie. On December 11, 1978 Burke pulled off the Lufthansa heist. Thomas DeSimone AKA Tommy DeVito Modern Times". Sight and Sound. December 2002. Archived from the original on March 12, 2012 . Retrieved August 27, 2008. for 30: Playing for the Mob. ESPN. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015 . Retrieved March 24, 2015. According to Pesci, improvisation and ad-libbing came out of rehearsals wherein Scorsese let the actors do whatever they wanted. He made transcripts of these sessions, took the lines the actors came up with that he liked best, and put them into a revised script that the cast worked from during principal photography. [23] For example, the scene where Tommy tells a story and Henry is responding to him—the "Funny how? Do I amuse you?" scene—is based on an actual event that Pesci experienced. Pesci was working as a waiter when he thought he was making a compliment to a mobster by saying he was "funny"; however, the comment was not taken well. [29] [30] It was worked on in rehearsals where he and Liotta improvised, and Scorsese recorded four to five takes, rewrote their dialogue, and inserted it into the script. [31] The dinner scene with Tommy's mother (portrayed by Scorsese’s mother, Catherine) was also improvised, with the only scripted line being, "Did Tommy tell you about my painting?" Tommy's mother's painting of the bearded man with the dogs was painted by Nicholas Pileggi's mother and based on a photograph from the November 1978 edition of National Geographic magazine. [32] The cast did not meet Henry Hill until a few weeks before the film's premiere. Liotta met him in an undisclosed city; Hill had seen the film and told the actor that he loved it. [12]

Pileggi, Nicholas (1995). Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas (Firsted.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-80832-1. Paul Sorvino played Paul Cicero in Goodfellas. His real name was Paul Vario, and he was born in New York City. Vario was a captain in the Lucchese family. At one point he was underboss. When he was 11, in 1925, Vario got a seven month juvenile detention term for truancy. In the 1950s, he worked as a journalist for Associated Press and New York magazine, specializing in crime reporting for more than three decades. [2] Career [ edit ] Hill did a six year stretch with Burke for beating John Ciaccio for skipping a bet. A month later, Hill was busted because Ciaccio’s sister worked for the FBI. A judge found Hill and Burke guilty of extortion on November 3, 1972 and was housed at United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, along with Paul Vario. Most of John Gotti’s crew was there at the time too.The book retells his life mirrored in the movie to include his early life, coming up as a gangster associate to the Lucchese crime family, the drugs and guns, and the famous Lufthansa heist. More than the movie, Henry Hill goes into the other crimes, mob personalities, fixing games, robberies, union extortion, and other underworld activities the film let out. The memoir goes further into his life (and his family's life) after entering into the Witness Protection Program (WPP). He consistently admits throughout the book his substance/alcohol abuse problem. This was also a continued problem even after getting into the WPP with substance abuse problems. Nicholas Pileggi ( / p ɪ ˈ l ɛ dʒ i/, Italian: [piˈleddʒi]; born February 22, 1933) is an American author, producer and screenwriter. He wrote the non-fiction book Wiseguy and co-wrote the screenplay for Goodfellas, its 1990 film adaptation, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Two other Scorsese films outrank Goodfellas when it comes to this specific profanity: the word is dropped 422 times in Casino and a whopping 506 times in The Wolf of Wall Street. 18. Debi Mazar's Goodfellas trip was real. The 100 Greatest Movie Characters". Empire. Archived from the original on November 7, 2011 . Retrieved December 2, 2008.