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 Goodfellas named "greatest movie" ". BBC News. October 25, 2005. Archived from the original on June 17, 2012 . Retrieved June 29, 2012. GoodFellas". Chicago Sun-Times. September 2, 1990. Archived from the original on January 11, 2012 . Retrieved October 18, 2014. By the way the legendary “Am I some kind of clown, do I amuse you…” scene is not in the book and, appa Godfrey, Alex (November 2013). "Whaddya want from me?". mrgodfrey. Archived from the original on September 4, 2014 . Retrieved August 22, 2014.

Burke’s propensity for bribing police officers meant that while he spent a stretch of time in prison in the ‘70s, his biggest crimes went unprosecuted — even when he went down years later, for his involvement in fixing college basketball games, he was never tried for murder. The reason why he never was arrested for the Lufthansa Heist, however, is quite different.Best Films of the '90s". At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper. February 27, 2000. Archived from the original on August 8, 2007 . Retrieved March 26, 2008. It is this disregard for other people that makes this such a chilling book. In this world of wiseguys, all is theirs for the taking. In fact, it made me think that if this is still the case, that anything you happen to possess that is of interest to the Mob can be taken away from you, the much-touted American concept of freedom is not very valid. At least you're not free to own things, and if you try to put your case to the law, Hill provides ample examples of how both the police and the judicial system has members on the take. Pileggi co-wrote the pilot of the CBS television series Vegas, which first aired in September 2012. [2] Personal life [ edit ]

Pileggi, Nicholas (1985). Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (Firsted.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-72322-4.a b "Goodfellas (1990) - Financial Information". The Numbers. Archived from the original on January 28, 2021 . Retrieved January 22, 2021. Karen Friedman was cleaning teeth when she met Henry Hill. She was a nice Jewish girl from a strict Jewish family from Nassau County. Her friend Dana Shapiro didn’t want to go on a date with Paul Vario’s son, Paul Jr., alone, so they paired her up with Henry Hill and they went out for drinks at the Villa Capra on Cedarhurst Avenue in Brooklyn. Speaking of The Sopranos: Between Tony Sirico, Lorraine Bracco, Frank Vincent, Michael Imperioli, and many, many more, the show shares a huge number of cast members with Goodfellas. Nugent, Annabel (September 15, 2020). "All 27 Goodfellas actors who later featured in The Sopranos". The Independent . Retrieved November 21, 2023.

So, if like me, you’ve seen the film multiple times, is it worth reading the book? Probably not. It’s good but the overwhelming sense of familiarity makes it all feel very recognisable. That said, if you really love the film then you will inevitably still get quite a lot out of reading the book including quite a lot of interesting detail about what the authorities did leading up to Henry Hill's arrest, and the aftermath of his entry into the Federal Witness Program. Witchel, Alex (September 27, 1990). "A Mafia Wife Makes Lorraine Bracco a Princess". The New York Times. Goodfellas (18)". British Board of Film Classification. September 17, 1990. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016 . Retrieved October 22, 2015. Goodfellas inspired director David Chase to make the HBO television series The Sopranos. He told Peter Bogdanovich, " Goodfellas is a very important movie to me and Goodfellas really plowed that ... I found that movie very funny and brutal and it felt very real. And yet that was the first mob movie that Scorsese ever dealt with a mob crew. ... as opposed to say The Godfather ... which there's something operatic about it, classical, even the clothing and the cars. You know I mean I always think about Goodfellas when they go to their mother's house that night when they're eating, you know when she brings out her painting, that stuff is great. I mean The Sopranos learned a lot from that." [70] Indeed, the film shares a total of 27 actors with The Sopranos, [71] including Bracco, Sirico, Imperioli, Pellegrino, Lip, and Vincent, who all had major roles in Chase's HBO series. [72] A decade prior, Liotta told GQ, "For 20 years now, there's not a day that goes by that I don't hear somebody mention Goodfellas. Unless I stay home all night. It's defined who I am, in a sense."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. Needless to say, Henry and his pals are amoral scumbags, and Hill is a sociopath whose justification for his crimes is that his needs outweigh everyone else's, and he dismisses anyone who is hardworking, honest or trusting as weak and just asking to be ripped off. HBO: The Sopranos: Interview with Peter Bogdanovich". HBO. 1999. Archived from the original on October 12, 2017 . Retrieved September 24, 2019.