Goodfellas: How The Cast Compares To The Real Gangsters (2024)

Martin Scorsese’s classic gangster flick Goodfellas' real people don’t match up to the movie in every way, despite its impressive cast. As with any Hollywood adaptation, plot structure and character arcs require a bit of alteration from reality. Goodfellas tells the story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who gets involved in the New York City mafia at a young age and works his way up the ranks until turning state’s witness in 1980. Goodfellas takes viewers deep into the New York mafia underworld during the 1970s.

Martin Scorsese is known for movies about violence and crime, and the director has a fascination with stories about men who seize — and ultimately lose — power. The true story behind Goodfellas is a complicated tale of mafia scheming and brutal murders, and the film mostly sticks to the facts. The heist of cash and jewelry from Germany’s Lufthansa airline at JFK International Airport was a real event. The Goodfellas characters are based on real individuals, although it changed their names and aspects of their lives.

Henry Hill

Played By Ray Liotta

Audiences follow one of the Goodfellas' real-life characters, Henry Hill, from an eager teen who "always wanted to be a gangster" to his career as a Lucchese family associate, and much of the film lines up with Hill’s actual life. Hill started his career carrying cash from debtors to Paul Vario, a Lucchese capo (a mafia captain). By the time he was arrested for drug charges in 1980, Hill helped plan multiple heists and was involved in murder cover-ups. Hill’s addiction to cocaine makes him a more paranoid, volatile character.

Hill also ran his own side business as a drug trafficker. Aside from the Lufthansa heist, Hill was also involved in college basketball rigging. In many ways, though, Hill was more of a contact point for the Lucchese family. He found ways for them to get involved with schemes that were already in motion or aided with the criminal acts of his friends. While Goodfellas ends with Hill entering witness protection, his real story goes on. Hill was removed from the program after an arrest for ongoing drug-related crimes.

His wife filed for divorce in 1990, and he was arrested several more times throughout the remainder of his life and suffered from alcohol abuse in his later years. Before his death of heart disease in 2012, Hill put himself back into the spotlight, appearing on radio and television shows to talk about his time in the mafia. Despite this, his former associates never made any attempts on his life.

Most of the differences between Hill and Ray Liotta are physical. Goodfellas' Hill is a more stereotypical Scorsese gangster: hair slicked back and eyes piercing with danger. Mugshots of the real Hill show him with bushy, unkempt hair and wrinkled clothes; Hill wasn’t the fine-tuned criminal shown in Goodfellas. Additionally, Goodfellas depicts Hill as having two daughters, but he had a daughter and a son who was never interested in his father’s business and excelled in school.

Jimmy Conway

Played By Robert De Niro

Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro, is based on Jimmy Burke, another associate of the Lucchese family. Like Hill, Burke had Irish heritage and could never be a “made man” in the Italian mafia. However, he was the mastermind behind many of the family’s biggest heists. Burke was raised in a variety of abusive foster homes before finding the Lucchese family. He began mafia work as a hijacker; his proclivity for tipping the drivers whose trucks he stole gave him his nickname, Jimmy “The Gent.”

He mentored both Hill and Tommy DeSimone (Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas), and De Niro’s portrayal seems to be relatively authentic. According to Hill, Burke was quiet and calm until his temper flared — if he felt slighted in any way, he wasn’t beyond revenge, including murder. Before he was married, some believe Burke murdered and dismembered his fiancee’s ex-boyfriend. As in Goodfellas, Burke also took part in the murder of William “Billy Batts” Bentvena.

According to Hill, many of Burke’s enemies are buried on the property of Burke’s club, where the attack against Bentvena began. Burke later went on to mastermind the Lufthansa heist depicted in the film. In reality, his son, Frank, was a driver in the heist, and afterward, Burke ordered or was involved in the murders of around nine of his accomplices.

While De Niro’s slick, clean-shaven look may be accurate to Burke’s appearance, Burke's arrest photos show a physically very different, balder man to the gangster Goodfellas portrayed. Burke was eventually arrested for college basketball point fixing after Hill testified to federal officials. While in prison, Hill further implicated Burke in the murder of a drug dealer. This increased Burke’s sentence by 20 years, and he died behind bars.

Tommy DeVito

Played By Joe Pesci

Joe Pesci’s performance as Tommy DeVito earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but there are some differences between Pesci and Thomas DeSimone, on whom DeVito is based. There’s no doubt DeSimone was every bit as volatile as Pesci’s DeVito. His grandfather and uncle were both bosses of the Los Angeles mafia, but DeSimone chose a path outside the family. He was younger than Burke and Hill, under whom he worked as he rose through the Lucchese family ranks.

Known for carrying a gun around in a brown sandwich bag, Hill suggests that the real DeSimone was more ruthless than his Goodfellas portrayal. According to Hill, one of DeSimone’s first murders was a random pedestrian who happened to be walking by. DeVito’s murder of a young waiter, “Spider,” is one of the film’s cruelest moments, and it’s allegedly true. Also in the film is DeSimone’s murder of “Billy Batts” Bentvena.

As depicted, the body was stored in Hill’s car, which Hill, Burke, and DeSimone drove to DeSimone’s mother’s house to get shovels and lime. He also grabbed a kitchen knife, which he used to finish the murder. DeSimone was much larger than Pesci, with descriptions putting him at over six feet tall and 220 pounds. He was also quite a bit younger: Pesci was 47 when the '90s audiences sat down in theaters for Goodfellas' classic cold open for the first time, but DeSimone went missing at age 28.

Pictures also show that DeSimone was less clean-shaven, a trend among characters in Scorsese’s adaptation. What Pesci captured was DeSimone’s terrifying spirit. He’s impossible to predict, and his eyes are always scheming. His death, when he believes he will be “made” only to be killed for the murder of Batts, seems to be based mostly on fact. According to Hill, infamous mob boss John Gotti was directly involved in the real hit.

Paul Cicero

Played By Paul Sorvino

Paul Sorvino’s character, Paul Cicero, is based on Lucchese capo Paul Vario. Vario oversaw a piece of Lucchese territory in Brooklyn. A typical mafia captain, Vario stayed away from the crimes in which his soldiers and associates were involved. Instead, he oversaw much of the illegal gambling and extortion aspects of the business. He also signed off on bigger heists, such as the Lufthansa heist, and on hits such as that of DeSimone. Sorvino plays Cicero as a more classical mobster.

He always stayed one step away from his soldiers’ crimes. In reality, Vario was known for his temper: he once commanded his soldiers to beat a waiter for spilling wine on his wife’s dress. Although he was, like Sorvino, a larger man, Vario was also incredibly tall, and New York City police saw him as one of the most dangerous criminals in the city. Due to Hill’s testimony, Vario was convicted of defrauding the government and racketeering. He died in prison while serving his term.

Morrie Kessler

Played By Chuck Low

Morrie Kessler is based on Martin Krugman. Krugman was first generation Russian-Jewish, and he got his start in illegal bookkeeping. Rather than work directly for the mob, Krugman ran his operation. Through this work, Krugman became familiar with several employees of JFK Airport. Because of this connection, he was able to tell Hill about Lufthansa’s JFK vault. After the heist, Krugman became adamant he received a large piece of the money. The fact that Burke didn’t like him, marked Krugman for death.

In Goodfellas, Kessler is killed by an ice pick. The real Krugman officially went missing, but Hill has since claimed that he was murdered, dismembered, and buried on the property of Burke’s club. As portrayed by Chuck Low, Kessler is a large, brazen man who likes to play along with mobsters, but Krugman is a small man who wears large glasses to cover up the bulging eyes that resulted from his hyperthyroidism.

Billy Batts

Played By Frank Vincent

The brutal murder of Billy Batts in Goodfellas is shocking, and so is the crime on which it is based. "Billy Batts" Benventa found himself on the wrong side of Burke and DeSimone. As in the film, Benventa insulted DeSimone for having once been a shoe shiner, but Benventa was a made man in the Gambino crime family and wasn’t killed for his words. When Benventa returned from a prison sentence, he wanted control of his loansharking business back from Burke.

Burke, unwilling to turn it over, beat him — presumably to death — along with DeSimone. While Goodfellas may get the motivation wrong, the disposal of Benventa’s body is scarily accurate. His body was thrown into Hill’s car, and while Hill, Burke, and DeSimone were on their way to dispose of the body, they heard pounding noises from the trunk.

They stopped at DeSimone’s mother’s house for a large kitchen knife, which DeSimone used to finally kill Benventa. The men buried his body near a dog kennel that belonged to one of Burke’s friends, but it was exhumed weeks later as the land was being developed. Frank Vincent, who played “Batts” in the film, had curly gray hair dissimilar to Bentvana’s shorter, darker hair, and the real “Batts” wore a pair of large glasses that further set him apart.

Why Goodfellas Changed Its Gangsters From Real Life

Scorsese Captured The Feel Of The Mob World Rather Than Get Every Detail Right

The changes to Goodfellas' real-life characters from their movie counterparts are a creative license movies often take. The reasons behind the alterations are twofold. The first is to better fit the story into one cohesive narrative. Rather than have a full ensemble narrative, Scorcese focuses on Henry Hill, revealing the mafia underground through the lens of his dealings and interactions. Telling the story of each Goodfella would've created an over-saturation of subplots, detracting from the narrative.

The murder of Billy Batts took place over a matter of weeks, rather than in a split moment after DeSimone became enraged. In addition, the Lufthansa Heist took longer than was depicted in Goodfellas. Reportedly, the perpetrators had to stalk a security guard to find out his weaknesses, then pull the keys from him after inviting a hooker to engage him. Henry Hill's desire to be in the mafia was also exaggerated, as he planned on leaving the organization a multitude of times before being sucked back in.

The second reason it was a good idea for Martin Scorcese to change the Goodfellas' real-life characters for the movie has to do with Henry Hill's testimony. Hill wasn't the most reliable source, changing his story often. He consistently danced around the murder of Billy Batts, switching his story about how events transpired. Since Henry Hill's testimony can't be deemed reliable, Scorsese needed to create a quasi-fictional narrative that would be an intriguing tale instead of a true-to-life biopic.

Scorcese can't give a perfect blow-by-blow of everything that happened during Hill's time in the mafia, and changing the Goodfellas characters and certain events was the right call. It allowed Scorcese to build his unique retelling while extrapolating information and displaying it stylishly. A film adaptation of true-life events will inevitably have to change some of the facts. For Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese chose actors who could interpret the personalities of its subjects.

From Pesci’s Oscar-winning role as Tommy DeVito to Liotta’s slow descent into drug-fueled madness, the performances are the highlights of the film. Each brings a different level of mania, callousness, and intimidation. Goodfellas is a mostly faithful adaptation, but this is relatively inconsequential to its overall cinematic legacy. By combining mafia legends, speculating on the fates of gangsters, and casting actors who didn’t always look the part, Scorsese built a classic of gangster cinema.

Other Changes Goodfellas Made To The Real Story

Hill Makes Shocking Claims About His Wives' Connections To The Mob World

While Goodfellas does a great job of capturing the key elements of the story behind Henry Hill and his life among the mob, there are small details that are left out of the bigger story that add certain nuances. While the movie depicts Henry and Tommy growing up together and forming their bond through friendship, their real-life counterparts didn't actually meet until Henry was an adult and Tommy was in his late teens.

Some of the most interesting aspects of the story that are never mentioned in the movie involve Henry's wife, Karen. Though she plays a big role in the film, she is not really seen as part of the mob world. However, Hill claims that Karen was actually having an affair with mob boss Paul Vario while they were still married. Hill goes on to claim that Tommy DeSimone assaulted Karen while Henry was in prison and that the incident was one of the major factors in Vario ordering the hit on DeSimone.

However, given Hill's penchant for lying, Martin Scorsese was wise to leave these details out of Goodfellas as well.

Goodfellas

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Goodfellas is a 1990 crime film starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta. The film was directed by Martin Scorsese and outlines the life and times of mobster Henry Hill. It's based on the book Wiseguy, written by Nicholas Pileggi.

Director

Martin Scorsese

Release Date

September 21, 1990

Studio(s)

Warner Bros. Pictures

Distributor(s)

Warner Bros. Pictures

Writers

Nicholas Pileggi , Martin Scorsese

Cast

Robert De Niro , Ray Liotta , Joe Pesci , Lorraine Bracco , Paul Sorvino , Frank Sivero