Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  Scorsese and Schoonmaker cut back to the shadowed close-up of Henry’s name and the camera tilts to the left to highlight Janice’s name the same way. There’s a close-up of Karen at eye level and Bracco looks almost directly into the camera lens. And downstairs, in medium close-up, holding one of his daughters and looking a little worn out, Liotta’s Henry asks, “What are you talking about?”

  Talking about his films in general and Raging Bull in particular, Scorsese has remarked that he wants the viewer to see as he sees. Here he’s putting his camera eye in the service of Karen Hill, in a context of anger and possessiveness that’s usually the domain of his male characters.

  Their argument shifts to the issue of Karen’s survival. “Nobody’s helping me. I’m all alone.” Paulie is now out—and indifferent to Karen’s plight. And so Henry’s independence is further established. And Karen has to become his accomplice. “All I need is for you to keep bringing me the stuff.” And here we first hear of “the guy from Pittsburgh,” who will become the guys from Pittsburgh, “such creeps” as a future accomplice will put it.

  Karen already knows Paulie won’t be pleased. Henry insists that she forget Paulie:

  “Don’t worry about him. He is not helping us out. Is he putting any food on the table?” In less than seven minutes we’ve gone from Big Night to Desperate Living.

  “We gotta help each other—we just gotta, listen, we gotta be really, really careful while we do it,” Henry concludes. And there’s a long pause.

  Karen has found her hook. She doesn’t even necessarily fully understand the risk that Henry is taking. But she knows that his need here is real. She takes a deep breath before saying, “I don’t wanna hear a word about her anymore, Henry.”

  “NEVER,” he responds instantaneously. One is reminded, perhaps, of the question Alec Baldwin asks of the hapless salesmen in 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross: “HAVE YOU MADE YOUR DECISION FOR CHRIST?” Here, Henry has.

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  The extreme marriage therapy undergone by the Hills seems to have done some good. As Henry comes out of the steel door, barbed wire above his head, he strides forward with a smile as the camera, on a crane, swoops down and in to meet him. He’s got a cocky half smile as he looks to his left. The camera pans, almost a whip, to an equally nonchalant Karen leaning against the car.

  Henry is ready for a new life. In a POV shot, the current residence is viewed and assessed and found wanting. “Karen, get packed, we’re moving out of here.” She asks with what. Well, among other things, the guys in Pittsburgh owe him fifteen grand.

  The revitalized marriage will find its sense of twisted teamwork; right now Henry is all “don’t worry about it.” The subsequent visit to “Uncle Paulie’s” will do nothing to deflate him.

  An overhead shot of a plate of meat and sauce says the feast is back on. But Paulie would like a word. Taking Henry out to the backyard they walk placidly past the patio furniture. There’s a shrine to the blessed Virgin in the left side of the frame. Paulie is very direct, even in front of Mary: “I don’t want any more of that shit.” Henry feigns ignorance, and Paulie says: “Just stay away from the garbage, you know what I mean.”

  The authority in his voice suggests that he’s taking a strong moral stand. He continues: “I’m not talking about what you did inside. You did what you had to do. I’m talking about now. From now. Here and now.”

  Henry can now lie to Paulie without even thinking, knowing that Paulie probably knows he’s lying. “Paulie, why would I wanna get into that?” Henry knows that’s a weak one, and so does Paulie: “Don’t make a jerk out of me. Just don’t do it.” And soon we get to the gist of Paulie’s objection. There’s not even a pretext of “moral” consideration, it’s all self-interest: “I ain’t gonna get fucked like Gribbs. You understand. Gribbs is seventy years old. The fucking guy’s gonna die in prison. I don’t need that. So I’m warning everybody. Everybody. Could be my son, could be anybody. Gribbs got twenty years just for saying hello to some fuck who was sneaking behind his back, selling junk. I don’t need that. Ain’t gonna happen to me, understand?”

  Goodfellas is frequently cited as a scruffy grandson to, and maybe outright deconstruction of, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 The Godfather. Because of that film’s 1940s time frame, the autumnal warmth of many of its settings, and so on, many have misperceived it as a portrait of a “noble” crime family. But the early central figure of the film, Don Corleone, while not inclined to gloat about the malfeasance he rules over, is a clear-eyed pragmatist rather than a moralist when it comes to defining limits.

  It’s not upstanding of him to deny the undertaker Bonasera’s request for murder in the movie’s opening scene. He’s just using logic and enacting a variant on Old Testament vengeance. Bonasera’s daughter still lives, so her assaulters will still live. But an eye will be taken for an eye.

  When “the Turk,” Sollazzo, approaches Corleone with a sweet deal in exchange for financing a narcotics operation, Don Vito drolly asks, after finding out his projected cut, “Why do I deserve this generosity?” Well, he will earn it by going to the cops and politicians he has in his power and asking them to clear the way for Sollazzo. And there’s the rub. Marlon Brando’s words are perfectly clear as his Corleone lays it out to Sollazzo: “I must say no to you. And I’ll give you my reason. It’s true, I have a lot of friends in politics. But they wouldn’t be friendly very long if they knew my business was drugs instead of gambling, which they regard as a harmless vice, but drugs is a dirty business. It doesn’t make any difference to me what a man does for a living, you understand. But your business is a little dangerous.”

  There’s no moral consideration here. Corleone will eventually capitulate. But only after his son Michael, for whom he had a legitimate career planned, kills Sollazzo in retaliation for an attempt on the don’s life. Michael goes into exile; Corleone’s second son Sonny is assassinated. Corleone’s still recovering from being shot when, back against the wall, he attends a meeting of the “five families.”

  Corleone is eloquent on this occasion, too: “I believe this drug business is going to destroy us in the years to come. I mean, it’s not like gambling or liquor or even women. Which is something most people want nowadays and is forbidden to them by the pezzonovante of the church. Even the police departments that have helped us in the past with gambling and other things are gonna refuse to help us when it comes to narcotics. And I believe that. Then. And I believe that now.” (Pezzonovante, a dialect compound word with a literal meaning along the lines of “ninety-cent piece,” is slang for “big shots.”)

  You can still feel a seething resentment in the room over Corleone’s withholding. Playing mediator, Richard Conte’s Barzini glibly assures the don he’ll be remunerated for his minimal participation. “After all, we are not communists.”

  The Detroit don, Joseph Zaluchi, played by Louis Guss, is the one to make something like a point of morality: “I don’t want it near schools, and I don’t want it sold to children. That’s an infamia.” His touching concern is undercut severely in his next declaration: “In my city we’d keep it to the dark people, the coloreds. They’re animals, anyway, so let them lose their souls.”

  The cultural critic Greil Marcus cites this scene, with a couple of inaccuracies (forgiven, since he was writing without benefit of home video, and because he can often be some kind of genius even when he’s wrong) in his 1975 book Mystery Train, discussing the revenge modes in low-budget movies known as “blaxploitation,” which thrived at the time of his writing. He considers “the reality behind one very carefully thrown-away line from The Godfather (a movie, it is worth remembering, that attracted millions of black Americans, even though it had no black characters, let alone any black heroes). ‘They’re animals, anyway,’ says an off-camera voice, as the dons make the crucial decision to dump all their heroin into the ghettos. ‘Let them lose their souls.’”

 
In Goodfellas we’ll hear Paulie say that divorce is not possible because “we’re not animale.” Marcus continues: “The Mafia may have missed the contradiction in that line, but Francis Coppola certainly did not; neither did the black men and women in the theaters. They suffered it; in Lady Sings the Blues, Diana Ross was stalking screens all over the country showing just what it meant.” Lady Sings the Blues was a film biography of Billie Holiday in which Ross depicted the ravages of heroin addiction. Zaluchi understands he will consign whole communities to that hell, because selling it near his people’s schools is “infamia.”

  “That audience had a right to revenge,” Marcus concludes, summoning up the black avenger of song, Stagger Lee, and dozens of ’70s blaxploitation movies such as Trouble Man.

  In contrast to the crass moral feints and dodges of the “noble” 1940s gangsters, Paulie’s objections play more like blatantly enlightened self-interest. Corleone’s prediction that “this drug business is going to destroy us in the years to come” is arguably vindicated in Goodfellas, even if Paulie’s downfall is not ultimately predicated on an association with Henry as a drug dealer.

  But Henry shrugs it all off. Now using Janice’s friend Sandy as an accomplice for cocaine-cutting (“All I had to do was every once in a while tell Sandy that I loved her”), he discovers “a really good business.” Sandy apparently snorts more than she mixes, and given the amount of cocaine they’re seen chopping up with a playing card, that’s a lot of cocaine. (The “equipment” they’re using, which also includes a lot of kitchen utensils, speaks of an operation that’s something less than pro-am.) The real-life Sandy was Robin Cooperman, who had no relation to Janice/Linda; rather, she worked at an air-freight company. In Wiseguy Henry complains to Pileggi that on his visits to Robin she would always want to “have a talk about their relationship,” which sounds much less interesting than the frisky mode they’re seen in at first in the movie.

  * * *

  As they snort and canoodle, the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” plays, ragged and raw. Scorsese, a committed Stones person (he has used tracks by individual Beatles on his soundtracks, but never a song by the full group), finds room for the Stones in almost every period-appropriate picture he can, and pulled out “Shelter” several times after this. In 1995’s Casino a live version of the song is used, while 2006’s The Departed practically makes a leitmotif of the tune.

  The fact that his supplier is in Pittsburgh makes it easy for Henry to sneak around Paulie, and soon Jimmy and Tommy, whom Paulie had also warned Henry away from—Tommy is “crazy, he’s a cowboy, he’s got too much to prove”—are in on the action, strategizing from Jimmy’s appointment at the Department of Probation, very cheeky.

  One amusing real-life detail in Wiseguy that didn’t make it into the movie was a member of Henry’s 1978 drug crew named “Bobby Germaine, a stick-up man who was on the lam and was pretending to be a freelance writer.” Wiseguy also goes into substantial detail about Hill’s other criminal enterprises at the time, including jewelry fencing. And the big one, one entirely unrelated to drugs: a scheme to rig college sports betting by getting the Boston College basketball team to shave points off their games. The team was not obliged to lose, which as Pileggi notes made the corrupt players feel like they were saving their honor; they only had to not go over the point spread. (For those readers out there who are not inveterate gamblers, understand that sports gamblers don’t just bet on wins and losses but on point differentials and God knows how many other things depending on what innovations the bookmakers come up with.)

  The main reason Hill was not a physical participant in the Lufthansa heist was because he was in Boston, lining things up for a game and its incoming bets. “Some people might not know it,” Hill told Pileggi, “but betting lots of money on college basketball is a very difficult thing to do.” When prosecutor Ed McDonald took charge of Henry in 1980, the Boston College alum was so affronted by these crimes that he insisted on trying the case himself. As it happens, the first publishing event in Henry Hill’s life was not Pileggi’s Wiseguy but a February 16, 1981, article in Sports Illustrated titled “How I Put the Fix In.”

  * * *

  Morrie stands, hands on hips, as his wife, Belle (Margo Winkler, wife of producer Irwin; she is in several Scorsese films, perhaps most memorably as a receptionist who variously calls Rupert Pupkin “Mr. Pumpkin,” “Mr. Pipkin,” etc., in The King of Comedy) almost reels in awe of the black-and-gold patterned wallpaper in the Hills’ new house. The Stones are replaced by smooth tenor Jack Jones and “Wives and Lovers,” whose opening lyric is “Hey/little girl/comb your hair/and fix your makeup.”

  “Four and a half months of DIRT!” Karen exclaims as the camera pans to the white sofa with faux leopard skin draped over the back, the two framed arrangements of fanned Asian cards, a real fan hung above that. Karen’s hand comes into the frame holding a very clunky remote control to reveal the interior design’s pièce de résistance. What once might have been a chintzy fireplace alcove is now a mosaiced wall of fragmented gray rectangles, in which rest colored triangles (for the most part). The remote makes the wall separate at the center to reveal shelves for liquor and pictures and what then was a full audio/video system, including a reel-to-reel tape deck.

  This is all pretty chortlesome. The movie is having a laugh at the Hills’ taste and inviting us to, as well. But one also recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s pronouncement that “nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” In any event, production designer Kristi Zea considered putting in the wall and the A/V system “one of the most satisfying things I did on the movie. That whole wall, I don’t know what made me do it, but I said while putting it together, ‘It’s like The Flintstones, there’s a beyond-retro garish thing about it. We got many items from an absolutely incredible furniture store on Grand Street called Roma Furniture with extraordinary lacquered, high-gloss stuff. I wanted that kind of texture because this is the beginning of the descent into hell for these characters.” In searching for accurate looks, for this film and elsewhere, Zea found that the usual suspects of vintage shelter magazines wouldn’t necessarily do. “Those were too high-end.” Even if the Hills had the money, it wasn’t their taste. “In the standard magazines of the period, there’s not as much documentation of what kind of furniture Long Island mobsters would have. So you have to dig deep into photo-journalism, certain kinds of art photography. Amy Arbus on suburbia, say. Portraits of people in living rooms.”

  * * *

  Morrie, being a guy’s guy, isn’t so excited by the new house. He’s hatched up a new scheme and wants to make sure Henry has conveyed the information to Jimmy. “Do you understand? There’s millions in there. And I’ve been bleeding for this caper,” Morrie says. He will bleed more.

  THE LUFTHANSA HEIST

  It takes a certain amount of professional brass to introduce the crew that’s about to pull off “what turned out to be the biggest heist in American history: the Lufthansa heist” and then not show the heist.

  In what will be the movie’s penultimate tracking-to-the-right-from-behind-a-bar shot, Jimmy, his hair now streaked with silver, sits with Henry looking at an above-the-bar TV showing a basketball game, about which stray comments are heard: “if they fuck this up,” of course that’s Tommy, and later “it’s a lock.” Moving down the bar, there’s mastermind Morrie. Tommy and Carbone are the guys who will “grab the outside guard and make him get us in the front door.” Cut to the pool table: Frenchy and Joe Buddha “had to round up the workers.” There’s a new face, “Johnny Roastbeef.”

  “He had to keep them all tied up and away from the alarms.” And another new face, an African American one, and today, because he’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, a very familiar one. “Even Stacks Edwards got in on it,” Henry says. “He used to hang around the lounge and play guitar. Everybody loved Stacks. What he was supposed to do was steal the panel truck and afterward compact it by a friend of
ours out in Jersey.”

  “Only Morrie was driving us nuts,” Hill says as Chuck Low’s rug man sidles up to De Niro’s Jimmy. Just as in the scene in the Hills’ new house in which he needles Henry about whether Jimmy’s going to do it and when he’s going to do it and how this will be the culmination of everything Morrie has ever worked for, now that he can get Jimmy’s ear he’s bringing the droning directly to him. “He didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just, it’s just the way he was,” Henry says.

  After a check-in with the cocaine crew—Henry and Karen prepping babysitter/drug mule Lois, Henry doing a little snorting, mixing, weighing, and scolding with/of Sandy (“Take it easy [...] it’s like a pigpen...look at all this powder”), and succumbing to her sexual solicitation—we join Henry in the shower, as the famed New York news radio station WINS (“You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world” was once its slogan) reports that “nobody knows for sure just how much was taken in the daring predawn raid at the Lufthansa Cargo Terminal at Kennedy Airport. The FBI says two million dollars. Port Authority says four million dollars...” Henry goes nuts, banging the shower tiles with his palms, screaming and laughing. Several shots in this montage have become internet memes connoting high exhilaration levels. (So, too, of course, have the shots of Henry’s uproarious laughter in the “How am I funny?” scene.)

  * * *

  One book about the Lufthansa heist was published in 1980, five years before Pileggi’s Wiseguy. The Ten Million Dollar Getaway: The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist, by Doug Feiden, a crime reporter for the Wall Street Journal. It is a solid narrative, dense and packed with dates and facts and transcriptions of interrogations and prose that often feels like the narration of a television true-crime documentary. To wit: “While a coup like Lufthansa attracts the most attention, gets the biggest headlines, contains the greatest drama, produces the most bodies, provides the quickest gratification for greedy mob schemers, and profoundly rattles the very foundations of the Mafia itself, there are other airport scams than cargo theft, and some of them present a larger threat, with consequences far more significant for law-abiding citizens.” It is rather intriguing, and perhaps a thorn in Feiden’s side, that his book originated the line “Now take me to jail,” uttered here by Jimmy Burke, not Henry Hill. Henry Hill was still a free man when Feiden wrote the account, and doesn’t figure in it.