Ex-gangster who inspired ‘Goodfellas’ dies quietly

LOS ANGELES – Henry Hill spent much of his life as a “goodfella,” believing his last moment would come with a bullet to the back of his head. In the end he died at a hospital after a long illness, going out like all the average nobodies he once pitied.

Hill, who went from small-time gangster to big-time celebrity when his life as a mobster-turned-FBI informant became the basis for the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas,” died Tuesday at age 69, longtime girlfriend Lisa Caserta said Wednesday.

Hill had open heart surgery last year and died of complications from longtime heart problems related to smoking, she said.

“He was a good soul towards the end … he started feeling remorseful,” she said.

An associate in New York’s Lucchese crime family, Hill told detailed, disturbing and often hilarious tales of life in the mob that first appeared in the 1986 book “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family,” by Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist Hill sought out shortly after becoming an informant.

“Henry Hill was a hood. He was a hustler. He had schemed and plotted and broken heads,” Pileggi wrote in the book. “He knew how to bribe and he knew how to con. He was a full-time working racketeer, an articulate hoodlum from organized crime.”

In 1990 the book, adapted for the screen by Pileggi and Scorsese, became the instant classic “Goodfellas,” starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta as Hill, a young hoodlum who thrives in the Mafia but is eventually forced by drugs to turn on his criminal friends and lead the life of a sad suburbanite.

In the book and the film Hill talks about how hard it was to lead an ordinary life after years steeped in gangster glamour. Caserta, 52, and her son, Nate, 24, described the contemporary Hill as a man who maintained a mobster’s air of confidence but regretted his gangster past.

An avid painter who gave his artwork to auctions, he donated to charities, and every Thanksgiving for five years he dished out food to the poor, they said.