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 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.
