♪ ♪
MAN: Yo, what's going on?
MAN: As you can see...
MAN: Me and my crew have this, we compress it,
we cut it and we distribute it to other vendors.
MAN: We're breaking it down,
use like baking soda, cutting it up and everything.
It'll value up to more, like double or triple, depends how you cut it.
But you can't (bleep) it up.
MAN: Would you like to try some?
CAMERAMAN: I'm okay thank you.
MAN 2: Make sure you cover my face up.
CAMERAMAN: Yep, I'm not filming ya.
MAN: Okay, okay relax.
Just finish with him so we can get him out of here.
MAN: Well, I knew the Mafia were in this game,
but I don't know if they still are.
Okay, that's it, too much. You can cut it.
MAN: Yes, that's enough.
REPORTER: Shake this square world and blast off for kicksville.
NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY: Just say no.
MAN: The Mafia is a major player in the international drug underworld.
MAN 2: At the end of the day, it's all about the dollar, it's all about the dollar.
REAGAN: American people want the mob and its associates brought to justice and
their power broken.
HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the war on drugs was an abject failure.
REPORTER: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?
(overlapping chatter)
WILLIAMS: Just so we all agree here,
it's never good to glorify a mobster but if
you're a fan of the genre, it's okay to love Goodfellas.
REPORTER 2: Henry Hill is not nearly as handsome as actor Ray Liotta who played Hill in
the film Goodfellas.
CREW: We're rolling cameras.
RICK: My name is Rick Leahy.
I was the first FBI Agent that operated Henry Hill.
I don't think anybody could have predicted the role Henry would ultimately play,
and I don't just mean in the movie Goodfellas.
ED: Henry Hill became this infamous character, you know, in organized crime lore.
Henry was one of those that really made cooperating a thing.
RICK: Henry sent over 50 people to prison.
(sirens)
KAREN: It's been 40 years since I've, since I've spoken about this.
You know, I was very young,
just 18, going on 19, when I met him.
I'm Karen Hill and I was the wife of Henry Hill.
He did take me to like the Copacabana.
You know we'd get to see the shows there.
We met Peggy Lee,
Sammy Davis Jr, one of my favorites,
the Supremes.
It was like something from a movie, I think.
He was just happy‐go‐lucky,
and I was raised a little stricter and it was like sunshine,
you know, he was like sunshine.
I laughed a lot.
We got married in 1965.
I didn't know who Paul Vario was.
I really didn't know until after we were married and who these people were.
GINA: My dad from the time I can remember, he never called me by my first name,
he always called me Princess.
My name is Gina Hill and I'm Henry Hill's daughter.
My father had a terrible time paying attention in school and it's ultimately
what led him to the cab stand.
Uncle Pauly ran the cab stand and it was
basically the headquarters for all their operations,
legal and illegal.
Pauly was like a dad to my father.
GINA: There's five families,
five mafia families from New York.
Uncle Pauly was a Capo and the Lucchese family.
My father could not be a made man because of
he wasn't 100% Sicilian,
but it didn't matter.
Uncle Pauly gave him basically the key to the city,
as they say in the mob world.
It gave him the respect and it gave him the protection that my father would need to
continue criminal activities going forward.
Everything from gambling, prostitution, arson,
you name it, they were doing it.
Except drugs.
My Uncle Pauly was very against drug dealing.
RICK: Mafia rules were don't get engaged in narcotics trafficking.
They were very concerned about somebody being prosecuted under the narcotics laws and
subsequently turning informant.
RICK: I was in the Queen's office.
We're very, very close to Kennedy Airport and a significant portion
of the air traffic into Kennedy is freight.
BOB (over TV): Billions of dollars' worth of merchandise from all over the
planet passes through Kennedy Airport's cargo area.
RICK: If you were someone who was inclined to be a truck hijacker,
you had literally just wandered into the enchanted forest.
Well, Jimmy Burke was very big in truck hijackings.
GINA: I really loved Uncle Jimmy.
I loved him so much.
KAREN: He was a smiling Irishman.
He loved the song, Danny Boy.
That's what we'd put on and he loved it.
GINA: Every one of my dad's friends had a great side to them,
just like my dad.
ED: Jimmy Burke, Henry Hill, were part of that crew.
And that crew generates money, illicitly.
RICK: These guys had their fingers pretty deeply into the airport.
They had been dealing with truck hijackings for years.
RICK: And then they'd kick up the chain a certain percentage to the Capo,
Paul Vario, and that's how it works.
GINA: Things start looking up and my dad was able to own the restaurant‐bar and
we lived in a luxury apartment building in Queens.
And it was in that same luxury apartment that my mother told me that daddy has
to go away for a while.
KAREN: He went into Lewisburg not on drugs.
He didn't even think about that, mainly because Pauly didn't want him to do it,
so he thought that that was a closed door.
GINA: Everybody's on their own when the breadwinner goes away, so to speak.
As far as any help from my father's associate,
an occasional handout from Uncle Pauly.
No consistent help financially.
GINA: My father realized how much money he could make dealing heroin through his
associate that he met in Lewisburg.
When he came home, the risk versus the reward,
I guess he saw it as worth it at that point in time.
ED: Pauly Vario didn't want drugs in his crew.
And Henry now was always in a drug induced stupor.
Jimmy Burke became very nervous.
RICK: Jimmy Burke was not a man to be pushed particularly.
After getting the green light to conduct the Lufthansa robbery.
REPORTER: The biggest robbery in our country's history and
it happened right here in New York.
ANTHONY: Federal agents are calling it the largest cash robbery
in the nation's history.
ED: That day, December 11th, 1978, a regular day for me.
I report to the office but as soon as I got there,
we were being dispatched to the
Lufthansa cargo building and that's when we started to realize that there was an
extensive robbery, the Lufthansa Robbery.
REPORTER: Six‐million‐dollar robbery.
A band of robbers, six and perhaps seven men wearing ski masks,
drove around to the loading dock.
The robbers pistol‐whipped one guard and handcuffed nine others before escaping
in a black van.
They took 30 shipments of gold, pearls, jewelry and checks.
RICK: This was a big one. We knew who had done it.
What we couldn't do was prove it.
REPORTER: So far, the Lufthansa Robbery seems like the almost perfect crime,
except there could be one important weak link.
RICK: The van that was used was turned over to Stacks Edwards.
Stacks' job was to take that van to a facility in New Jersey where
it would be crushed.
Stacks that evening came up with another plan; see a girlfriend,
celebrate the success of the robbery and he parked in a no‐parking zone.
REPORTER: Police have recovered the getaway van.
A Brooklyn traffic cop on routine patrol spotted it abandoned on a street
in East Flatbush.
RICK: Within the matter of about 48 hours, Stacks took about four or five bullets
into the back of his head,
and they found his body the next morning.
That was the first one.
GINA: I didn't hear any conversation about Stacks, other than he disappeared,
no one's heard from Stacks.
ED: We were FBI Agents and there is no other way to investigate this
but to interview people.
But every time we'd go out to interview someone,
they would get murdered or hit within days.
REPORTER: Today, another man turned up dead in the trunk of a car,
the sixth victim in less than a week.
Police found the bodies of two known hoods down a quiet street corner in Brooklyn.
There's a lot of speculation they may have been killed because they knew too much
about that big Lufthansa Robbery at Kennedy Airport.
RICK: A large number of the players that we knew were involved in it,
ended up very dead.
So there weren't anybody that we could turn as a source.
ED: They would appear in some gruesome locations and manner in which they died.
REPORTER: Nassau County businesswoman has been missing for the past four days.
Detectives searching for the woman suspect foul play.
ED: Her name was Theresa Ferrara.
She wasn't physically involved in the crime,
but she happened to have been told about some
of the details of the Lufthansa Robbery.
ED: Her legs, her arms,
her head, her breasts were cut off and she was recovered in the
Hudson River somewhere in New York,
and we were able to identify her through an
appendix scar that she had.
GINA: Marty Krugman was the big one.
I overheard my mom and my dad fighting terribly over
what happened to Marty.
I'm listening to this like around the corner, you know, eavesdropping.
All I heard was,
"Karen, I don't (bleep) know,
he's probably cut up into a million pieces by now."
KAREN: He begged for Marty Krugman's life.
He said, "Jimmy, what is he gonna do? He was harmless."
ED: Anybody who had any information about the robbery was killed
by Jimmy Burke.
Marty brought the scheme to rob Lufthansa to Henry.
Henry of course brings it to Jimmy Burke who actually commits it.
Henry was the linchpin.
RICK: Henry was a very valuable witness.
So our concern was somebody was gonna get to him and there would go our prime
witness in a case that we're having a very difficult time finding prime witnesses,
'cause we were pulling too many of them out of the trunks of their cars.
GINA: The reality of his friends disappearing and doing recreational drugs,
it all came together like a perfect storm.
It was clearly frying his brain and affecting his decision making.
KAREN: He made his connections out of state.
I saw cocaine and some heroin,
pills, people coming in and out, and I'd say to him,
"what are you doing?"
GINA: It was just a hot mess, as they say,
and I don't think he could see his way out of it.
ROBERT: All kinds of narcotics come through Kennedy Airport.
Seizures have been primarily coke and heroin for a number of years now.
ROBERT: We try to stay one step ahead of the smugglers and we do a pretty good of it.
So, if you're thinking about coming to Kennedy Airport with narcotics,
you'd better be well prepared.
ROBERT: How long do you think you're gonna be here sir?
MAN: Only two weeks.
ROBERT: Any food?
MAN: No, no, no.
ROBERT: And what's this?
We're gonna open it up and hopefully for you it's just fruit.
Does that look like fruit salad to you?
This is the can that we started to open out at the exam table.
This is a positive test for cocaine.
It's about five kilos.
We're looking at a retail value probably over $500,00 by the time it's all
chopped up and sold.
GEORGE: Long Island has always tried to avoid the problems of New York City.
It's very suburban, lots of trees, parks.
When I first started in the narcotics squad,
the drug use really started to increase.
REPORTER: Narcotics of all kinds may be coming in through Long Island.
JERRY: There was a local level drug dealer,
that he didn't drive a fancy car,
he didn't live in a fancy home,
so he was pretty much under the radar so to speak.
GEORGE: Unbeknownst to us,
the FBI was running a case on him and so
the FBI didn't know we were running one,
we didn't know the FBI was running one.
GEORGE: That's as good as I can do it.
JERRY: We used every resource we had; electronic surveillance,
aerial surveillance with helicopters, static surveillance.
DETECTIVE (over speaker): Detective Aylward, shield numbe 469, conversation between
Karen Hill and Henry Hill.
KAREN (over phone): Hello.
HENRY (over phone): Yeah. KAREN (over phone): Hi, hold on
KAREN: You know a neighbor, he said,
"I saw people going through your garbage and then they took bags of it away."
GINA: And I went to him and I said,
"daddy, there's guys filming the house, guys in suits."
He just looked at me and he says,
"yeah I know and they're also listening to the phones."
KAREN: If I go to make a phone call, you know,
they're just talking to one another.
KAREN: I said, "excuse me I'd like to make a phone call."
And I heard click,
and of course I put the phone down and I picked it up,
there was a dial tone.
JERRY: They had arrest warrants and they also had search warrants for his
residence and his, you know, stash house.
And it was time to shut it down and make the arrests.
GEORGE: I was assigned with my fellow detective Richie Hip,
to sit on Henry's house,
and we're all set up and Richie leans over to me and says,
"that's Henry, coming out of the house.
Take him down."
GINA: The next thing I knew, I saw all these lights,
and strange men are ordering my mother around.
From that moment, that was the beginning of the end.
GEORGE: We put the cuffs on him and we all headed back to narcotics.
He's really being defiant, he's saying, "you got nothing on me,"
and he's being a real wise guy.
And I walked over to the evidence box and inside there was a big sifter,
they used it to cut the drugs,
and I took that sifter out and I walked over to him and I
bopped him on the top of the head with it and the powder came all over
his head and shoulders and says, "now we got plenty on you."
And all of a sudde, his whole complexion changed,
he just said, "you got me."
Later on that evening,
the FBI came to Police Headquarters to interview Henry without our knowledge.
RICK: I was in bed when the phone rang.
It's the middle of the night.
We gotta drive over to the Hempstead County Prison, Henry's been arrested.
I was like, "whoa."
So we headed over to the Hempstead County lockup and there was
Henry, bouncing all over the wall and ceilings.
He's going a mile a minute, he's speaking so quickly, I'm trying to take notes,
it was like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose,
and all he kept screaming,
and he would literally scream it,
"Burke is going to blanking kill me.
Burke is gonna kill me."
Henry knew he was a dead man walking.
He was headed for a dirt nap.
He was desperate to get out.
REPORTER: Organized criminals punished treason by death.
The witnesses who do testify against them know they are marked for execution.
For them, the Federal Government has a unique program.
ED: We had to keep Henry safe and also his family safe,
because he was a target of Jimmy Burke.
GINA: My father said,
"Princess, if it meant getting to me,
he would have stuffed you and your brother into a refrigerator."
KAREN: And that was it.
I went on the program.
RIVERA: They can't hurt you, because once you testify against them,
you're going to become invisible, disappear, go underground.
KAREN: Turning over birth certificates, driver's license,
being told I don't exist,
broke my heart.
ED: Within days, two days, Henry, he had already signed his cooperation agreement,
to fully cooperate on all matters.
MCDONALD: We were having Henry come to my office every day and we were debriefing him
about the Lufthansa Robbery.
I'm Edward McDonald,
I was the attorney in charge of the Federal Organized Crime Strike Force
in Brooklyn.
And, of course Henry said,
"well yeah, of course Jimmy was involved in the whole thing,
he planned the whole robbery and Vario knew all about it."
"Alright, well what corroboration do you have for that Henry?"
"Well, I don't have any corroboration for that." Because Burke had cleverly
gone out and executed many of the people who made him vulnerable.
I figured out pretty quickly that we were not gonna be able to make a case on
Burke for the Lufthansa robbery.
MCDONALD: His memory, off the top of his head,
wasn't so good.
He had a significant narcotics problem by the time we began to deal with him in mid‐1980.
He started using coke and he was doing Quaaludes.
ED: You could tell when he was on something.
This guy couldn't concentrate on a topic.
He knows enough to go down a road but doesn't know the details.
I asked him,
"Henry, what were you doing with Jimmy Burke and
Paul Vario to put food on your table,
in other words, what crimes were you committing?"
And he said, "oh nah, I wasn't committing any crimes,
I was just fixing some basketball games."
And I said, "you were doing what?"
He said, "I was fixing games."
And I said, "Henry, that's against the law, alright."
We brought him into McDonald's office and we sat in front of him,
I says, "Henry, tell Ed what you told me."
MCDONALD: And Henry looked at me and said, "oh yeah,
in them days we was fixing college basketball games up in Boston."
I said, "you were fixing college basketball games?
What team?"
I said, "could it have been BC,
could it have been Boston College?"
ED: A light lights up in Henry's head and says,
"yeah, yeah, it was Boston College."
MCDONALD: And I said, "alright, the joke is over."
And Henry says,
"what are you talking about, what joke?"
I said, "I went to Boston College,
I played basketball in the Freshman team there
when I was in college."
And he says, "oh (bleep)," he says,
"you've gotta be kidding me."
So then I said, "well what about Jimmy, was Jimmy involved."
He said, "I didn't do anything without Jimmy,
I had to clear everything with Jimmy Burke."
(cheering)
REPORTER: Trouble at Boston College.
The Federal Organized Crime Strike Force is investigating accusations that some members
of that team accepted money from gamblers to alter the outcome of games.
GINA: I wasn't in love with Omaha, but I didn't hate it either.
MCDONALD: Henry and his family get moved to Nebraska, you know,
Henry told me about what the experience was,
it was they were fishes out of water and
he was having a tough time fitting in,
and at the same time he was also coming back
constantly to be debriefed by us and by the agents.
KAREN: A neighbor said to me, "what does your husband do?
You know because he's not there, you know,
so he doesn't have a job like locally."
I said, "he works for the government."
GINA: When my father went back to New York to testify,
Jimmy said to my father, pointing right at him,
"I bet that (bleep) is in the Midwest.
I know that (bleep) is in the Midwest."
MCDONALD: Henry was going to bars in Omaha and getting drunk.
Once he got drunk,
he would start telling people he was a big‐time gangster from
New York and that he might even say he was in the witness protection program,
involved in all these big cases.
GINA: My mother said,
"Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Pauly know where we are."
And we were whisked away like the next day, the next morning.
GINA: I fell in love with Kentucky immediately, immediately.
I knew enough to know that that was horse country,
plus Dukes of Hazard was one of my favorite
television programs at the time.
My dad had these big trials coming up, you know,
you've gotta hold up your end of the bargain.
This is it now.
REPORTER: Prosecutors first learned of the point cheating scheme from Henry Hill,
an informant with a long criminal record.
REPORTER 2: A New York grand jury will be hearing Hill's story in the coming weeks.
ED: The courtroom was packed.
It was a major event.
And Henry, he dreaded sitting before Jimmy Burke and testifying against him.
Absolutely dreaded it.
MCDONALD: Let's put it this way, he was a terrible witness.
ED: He was awful, particularly after the first day.
He would automatically go into this thug impression, you know,
and that's not what we wanted.
MCDONALD: Burke's lawyer was Mike Quero who had represented
Henry about eight years earlier.
He knew Mike Quero for years.
He'd yell at him and Quero would yell back, and he'd be fighting with him.
ED: We almost killed him because he was just so bad,
he just came off so bad as a witness.
MCDONALD: Our challenge was to corroborate what Henry said.
Well, we got the telephone numbers of all the significant players and
we got their telephone records.
We had an hour or two or three before significant Boston College games,
a flurry of phone calls.
ED: And all these phone calls were either going from Jimmy Burke's home
out to members of this conspiracy,
or phone calls going in.
Henry, he was the connection between the basketball players and the organized crime.
MCDONALD: There was no way that Jimmy Burke could distance himself
from Henry Hill.
They had to say that Henry was over at the house and Henry was the one who was
making the phone calls.
Well, the jury's saying,
"well what's he doing hanging around Jimmy Burke's house using his phone?"
ED: And in the end, that's the only piece of evidence besides Henry's testimony that
convicted Jimmy Burke on Boston College,
and for which he got 20 years imprisonment for that.
So, we didn't get him on Lufthansa, but we got him on Boston College.
BILL: The man suspected of masterminding the $5.8 million Lufthansa Robbery
is behind bars tonight.
James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke.
MCDONALD: Jimmy Burke was an incredibly powerful organized crime figure in New York in
the late 1970s and that was a significant moment for us.
ED: So Henry, he became a very infamous cooperator for the FBI.
Agents who had their own cases would rotate in and out to ask Henry specific questions.
Everybody wanted to get a hold of him because he had been involved in
organized crime all his life.
RICK: Henry could be the tip of the screwdriver used to pry the lid off all
of these events all over the United States.
RICK: Henry was probably doing this for four or five years,
testifying in trials.
REPORTER: Henry Hill broke the code of honor to burn many a mobster.
HENRY: You live inside a code all your life and then you break that code,
you make that decision, you know, for self‐survival.
GINA: He basically said, you know, it was him or them.
You know, you have to save yourself.
MCDONALD: Paul Vario was an extremely,
extremely powerful member of the family,
the Lucchese Family.
He was probably the biggest earner in the family.
This is the focus of our attention, ultimately, to get to Paul Vario.
KAREN: Redmond, Redmond Washington, was beautiful.
We had a house, when you looked at it from the front it looked like a ranch.
I was happy, for a moment.
GINA: There was always the idea danger could still be looming,
if you got too comfortable or too trusting in the fact that we were totally safe.
My father said,
"Princess, you don't see them, I know they're there, you know,
Uncle Pauly and the Vario crew."
KAREN: It was terrible. I didn't know what to do.
I didn't want to get killed. I didn't want my children hurt.
But he wasn't giving up the drugs.
All Ed McDonald wanted was Henry and what he needed from him,
and we were just excess baggage, that's how I felt.
MCDONALD: I remember his wife calling me and saying,
"is there something you can do, he's out of control."
I said, "look, I mean I feel for you but there's not much I can do.
We're not social workers, we're prosecutors."
This is a significant case.
We could potentially get Paul Vario.
RICK: Nobody would have ever put a wire on Henry and said,
"hey, why don't you stop by and strike up a conversation with Paul Vario."
Henry would have left that meeting in four separate boxes.
Henry became a very credible witness,
but his value was of a historical nature.
GINA: My father had such a sense of loyalty to Uncle Pauly and my
Uncle Pauly really valued that from my dad.
He really felt that dad was like a trusted son.
ED: He had falsified records for Henry Hill to be given a job so he can get parole.
He had no job, the records were false, but Vario produced all of that.
He was indicted for what we call "1001", which is lying to the FBI.
It was a simple prosecution.
Henry testified in that case.
Paul Vario, he received five years.
KAREN: He was guilt ridden.
He was guilt ridden about Pauly.
20 years of being the people that were part of our lives.
I don't think he could live with himself.
GINA: It hurt my father to have to do that to Pauly, it did.
And I think it had a lot to do with his falling deeper down that rabbit hole of drug
addiction and alcoholism.
Yes, I do.
I never said, "dad, you're using heroin,"
but my own father is in the driveway
passed out with track marks in his arms and I said,
"I don't care who kills you, 'cause you're dead to me."
And of course I didn't mean that but I was so
angry with him.
KAREN: You know I truly believe that he surfaced because he didn't care
if he lived or died.
HENRY: Howard, I am so miserable.
STERN: Really? HENRY: Yeah.
STERN: There's no joy in your life?
HENRY: No joy in my life. STERN: Listen to me.
HENRY: Do you want to know something Howard?
STERN: You're in a lot of pain.
HENRY: I'm a scumbag.
I want to get high constantly, okay.
JERRY: He wasn't swathe, he wasn't cunning,
he wasn't even a good drug dealer, you know.
But the whole fiasco of Henry Hill going down and flipping it was historic,
that had never happened before.
MCDONALD: Many Mafia guys, significant Mafia guys began to turn,
and it became a lot easier for prosecutors to bring significant prosecutions
against Mafia figures.
RICK: Guys like Henry deciding to give up everything he knows
to save his life and he ended up putting
50 people in jail to do it.
HENRY: Being part of that life,
being part of the Mafia was the worst thing I ever did.
I wasn't a good father, you know, a good husband.
I anaesthetized myself with alcohol, with drugs, constantly, you know,
to live with myself.
WILLIAMS: After a troubled life,
Henry Hill is dead at the age of 69.
GINA: As his daughter, I am just so grateful he died of natural causes.
I mean how many people get to do that in his situation?
Not too many.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.