Under the circumstances, Henry made his decision: he became part of the Justice Department's Federal Witness Protection Program. In jail Henry heard the news: his own protector, Paul Vario, the seventy-year-old mob chief in whose house Henry had been raised from childhood, was through with him and James 'Jimmy the Gent' Burke, Henry's closest friend, his confidant and partner, the man he had been scheming and hustling with since he was thirteen years old, was planning to murder him.

And even if he didn't talk, Henry Hill knew that his own friends would kill him just as they had killed nearly everyone who had been involved in the Lufthansa robbery. If he talked, the police knew that Henry Hill could give them the key to dozens of indictments and convictions. He knew, literally, where the bodies were buried. He was only a mechanic, but he knew everything. But the arrest of Henry Hill was a prize beyond measure. His arrest was just another of dozens of the slightly exaggerated multimillion-dollar drug busts that police make annually in their search for paragraphs of praise. There were no front-page stories in the newspapers and no segments on the evening news. When Henry Hill had been arrested only three weeks earlier, it hadn't been big news. The Brooklyn district attorney's office wanted information about a body they had found in a refrigeration truck which was frozen so stiff it needed two days to thaw before the medical examiner could perform an autopsy. Treasury agents were looking for the crates of automatic weapons and Claymore mines he had had stolen from a Connecticut armory. The Organized Crime Strike Force wanted to know about the Boston College basketball players he had bribed in a point-shaving scheme. The Justice Department wanted to talk to him about his connection with a murder that also involved Michele Sindona, the convicted Italian financier.

The New York City police were in line behind the feds to ask him about the ten murders that followed the Lufthansa heist. The federal prosecutors were asking him about his role in the $6 million Lufthansa German Airlines robbery, the largest successful cash robbery in American history. He was in the Nassau County jail, facing a life sentence in a massive narcotics conspiracy. ON TUESDAY, MAY 22, 1980, a man named Henry Hill did what seemed to him the only sensible thing to do: he decided to cease to exist.

Wiseguy life in a mafia family