In the film Goodfellas, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, becomes involved in the mafia at a young age: as he says in the beginning of the film;

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."

As a boy, Henry idolized the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar, predominantly Italian New York City neighborhood in East New York, Brooklyn, and in 1955 quit school and went to work for them at a local cab stand.

The local Lucchese mob capo, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) (based on the actual Lucchese mobster Paul Vario) and Cicero's close associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro) (based on actual associate, Jimmy Burke) help cultivate the boy's developing criminal career. Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Robert De Niro as Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, Paul Sorvino as Paul Cicero, and Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito....Henry and his associate Tommy (played by Joe Pesci in a widely acclaimed and Academy Award-winning performance) conspire with Conway to steal some of the billions of dollars of cargo passing through Idlewild Airport (later JFK). They help out in a key moneymaking heist, stealing over half a million dollars from the Air France cargo terminal in 1967 and paying Cicero his percentage of the take as per the mafia's code of tribute.

Henry chose to become an informant to avoid a possible execution by the Mafia or going to prison for his crimes; his testimony led to 50 convictions.

Gangster Jimmy Burke was given 20 years in prison for the 1978-79 Boston College point shaving scandal involving fixing Boston College basketball games and also later was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of scam artist Richard Eaton. Burke died of cancer while serving his life sentence, on April 13, 1996. He was 64.

Paul Vario received four years for helping Henry Hill obtain a no-show job to get him paroled from prison. Vario was also later sentenced to 10 years in prison for extortion of air freight companies at JFK Airport. He died of respiratory failure on November 22, 1988, at age 73 while incarcerated in the Fort Worth Federal Prison.

Henry, his wife Karen, and their two children entered the U.S. Marshals' Witness Protection Program in 1980, changed their names, and moved to undisclosed locations in Omaha, Nebraska; Independence, Kentucky; Redmond, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. In 1982, Henry Hill and his family were kicked out of the Witness Protection Program for continued violations of the rules of the program.

In 1989, he and his wife Karen divorced after 25 years of marriage. Because of his numerous crimes while in witness protection, Hill (along with his wife) was expelled from the program in the early 1990s

In 2010 Henry was inducted into the American Gangster Museum in New York City. Henry now live in California and spends his time doing his painting which he sells here on GotHenryHill.com and ebay. You can sometimes catch Henry on the Howard Stern Show where he is a frequent guest.