May 1980, a split level house on a quiet suburban street in Rockville Center, Long Island. Federal agents pull up to the curb. Inside, Henry Hill is packing. Not for a trip, for the rest of his life. The man who spent 20 years as a Lucasi crime family associate who helped pull off the $5,875,000 Lufansza heist at JFK airport, who ran a narcotics empire that stretched from Long Island to Pittsburgh to Tampa.

That man has just agreed to become a government informant. His testimony will eventually put 50 people behind bars. His wife Karen is in the kitchen. His 13-year-old son, Greg, and 11-year-old daughter, Gina, are upstairs. They are given 1 hour to pack. Not suitcases, garbage bags. Everything they own, everything they know, every friend they have gone.

Within hours, the Hill family goes from the Copa Cabana to a government safe house. From ringside tables and envelopes of cash to aliases and fake social security numbers. From the most connected crew in Brooklyn to a rented house in Omaha, Nebraska with $1,500 a month and a new last name nobody can pronounce without laughing. But the moment Henry Hill decided to save himself, he sentenced his family to something far worse than anything the mob had planned for him.

Because his children didn’t choose this life. They didn’t choose witness protection. and they didn’t choose to have a father who couldn’t stop breaking the rules, even when those rules were the only thing keeping them alive. Karen Hill, the mob wife who flushed $60,000 in cocaine down the toilet during the raid, would eventually vanish so completely that no journalist has located her since.

Greg Hill, the son who walked away from his father at 19 and never came back, would become a lawyer under a name nobody recognizes. Anggina Hill, the daughter who had every reason to cut her father out of her life forever, would fly across the country to rescue his abandoned third child from foster care.

This is what happened to Henry Hill’s children and how the sins of the father followed them into lives they never asked for. Subscribe if you want more stories about the families left behind by organized crime. Henry Hill Jr. was born on June 11th, 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Henry Senior, was an Irish-American electrician who worked long hours and drank longer ones.

His mother, Carmela Costa, was a Sicilian immigrant who kept the house running for eight children in a cramped apartment in Brownsville, one of the roughest neighborhoods in the burrow. Across the street from the Hill apartment sat a cab stand and social club that belonged to Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucazi crime family.

Vario’s crew ran the neighborhood. They controlled the taxi dispatch. They ran loan sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and labor rackets out of a storefront that looked like a pizzeria from the outside. By the time Henry was 11 years old, he was running errands for Vario’s men, parking their Cadillacs, carrying messages, lighting their cigarettes, and watching how they moved through Brownsville like they owned every block.

He loved it. He never went back to school. By his late teens, Henry had met the two men who would define his criminal career. The first was James Burke, known on the streets as Jimmy the Gent, a legendary hijacker who worked the cargo routes at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and who had a reputation for two things.

Splitting the score generously with his crew and killing anyone who became a problem. The second was Tommy D. Simone, a compact, volatile enforcer with a temper that made him dangerous to everyone, including the people who were supposed to be on his side. Together with Henry, the three of them formed the core earning crew under Vario’s protection.

Henry’s career escalated fast. On April 7th, 1967, he helped Burke and his crew robbed the Air France cargo building at John F. Kennedy International Airport, walking away with $420,000 in cash. On June 11th, 1970, Henry’s own birthday, he participated in the murder of William Billy Batsbentvina, a Gambino family associate.

Bats was beaten nearly to death in a bar, loaded into the trunk of a car, and buried in a shallow grave. When the body was discovered still breathing, Burke and Dimone finished the job. In 1972, an extortion conviction sent Henry to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he served 4 years.

He used the time to build a drug distribution network inside the prison. After his release on July 12th, 1978, he plunged even deeper into narcotics, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and quaaludes, trafficking across state lines in direct violation of the Lucasy family’s prohibition on drug dealing. That violation would eventually cost him everything.

On December 11th, 1978, Henry helped plan the Lufthanza heist. $5,875,000 stolen from a cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the largest cash robbery in American history at that time. He also helped orchestrate the Boston College point shaving scandal of 1978 and 1979, paying basketball players to manipulate scores for gamblers.

In the middle of all of this, the robberies, the murders, the drugs, there was a family. Karen Freriedman was born on January 16th, 1946 and raised in Lawrence, Long Island, part of the affluent five towns area of Nassau County. She came from a middle-class Jewish family. She worked as a dental hygienist.

She met Henry through Paul Vario in 1965 on a double date at a restaurant called Villa Copra. Henry stood her up for the second date. Karen showed up at the cab stand and confronted him about it in front of his friends. He liked that. They eloped to North Carolina on August 26th, 1965.

She was 19 years old. A traditional Jewish ceremony followed in New York where Henry agreed to convert to Judaism. He later admitted he lied about his religion. The money came immediately. ringside tables at the Copa Cabana where the Mater D knew Henry’s name. Closets full of designer clothes.

Brand new Buick Rivieras parked in the driveway. Karen carried a pistol in her purse and thought nothing of it. The family lived in a comfortable home on a treelined block in Rockville Center Long Island. And for the outside world, they looked like any other suburban family. The only difference was that everything they owned, the house, the cars, the vacations, the private school tuition, was paid for by armed robbery, extortion, hijacking, and the sale of narcotics that destroyed entire neighborhoods. Greg, the older child, was born around 1966 or 1967. He was the quiet one, the watcher, the child who noticed that the men who came to the house with envelopes and kissed his father on the cheek carried guns under their jackets. Gina, the younger, was born around 1968 or 1969. She was the daddy’s girl, the one who believed her mother when Karen

said everything was fine. Neither child would keep believing that for long. Karen was not a passive wife. When Henry went to Lewisburg in 1972, she did not step away from the life. She stepped deeper in. She smuggled drugs and contraband into the prison, strapping packages to her body and walking past guards.

She developed her own cocaine habit. She had an affair with Paul Vario during Henry’s imprisonment, a detail Good Fellas left out entirely. Tommy Desimone reportedly attempted to assault Karen during this same period. And one theory holds that Vario had D. Simone killed partly in retaliation. The couple’s home became a revolving door of drugfueled parties.

According to accounts Greg and Gina gave in their 2004 memoir, guests at these gatherings snorted cocaine off Gina’s Miss Piggy Mirror and openly offered drugs to the children. Both children watched their father beat their mother. They watched him come home at 4 in the morning wired and raging.

They grew up with cash on the kitchen table and blood on their father’s shirt. And they learned early that the two things were connected. By 1979, Henry’s cocaine addiction was consuming him. He was paranoid. He was sloppy. He was using the product he was supposed to sell. The FBI was watching his every move.

And the men above him, the men who had protected him since he was 11 years old, decided he was a liability worth eliminating. This life built on blood money had a fatal weakness. Henry Hill could not stop using the drugs he was selling and the men who once called him brother decided he was better off dead.

On April 27th, 1980, federal agents arrested Henry on narcotics trafficking charges. They sat him in a room. They played him a tape. On it, Jimmy Burke is talking to Paul Vario. Burke says Henry has to go. He knows too much. He’s a loose end. Burke is already cleaning house. Bodies connected to the Lufansza heist have been turning up across New York in dumpsters, in freezer trucks, in the trunks of abandoned cars on side streets in Brooklyn.

Henry is next on the list. Arrest. On May 27th, 1980, Henry signed a cooperation agreement with Edward Macdonald, head of the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force. He became a government witness. Within days, the family is swept into the United States Marshall’s Witness Security Program, WITSC. Greg is 13. Gina is 11. 1 hour to pack.

Garbage bags. No goodbyes. No phone calls. No last look at their bedrooms. The first stop is Omaha, Nebraska. The family becomes the Hannes family. They receive $1,500 a month from the government. They live in a rented house in a neighborhood where everybody knows everybody except them.

Their first meal in witness protection is at a pizza chain called Godfather’s Pizza. Henry, with his thick Brooklyn accent and gold chains, stood out in Omaha like a fire alarm. Within 2 months, the FBI intercepted a conversation. Burke knew Henry was somewhere in the Midwest. The family needed emergency relocation. In Independence, Kentucky, Henry bought a cowboy hat.

He played Willie Nelson Records and spent his days at the racetrack. Then he co-wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about the Boston College point shaving scandal under his own name. The FBI was furious. Private investigators linked to Burke were spotted in the area. Another move followed. Redmond, Washington, east of Seattle, became the longest stay.

Henry used the alias Martin Lewis, a combination of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Karen went by Kylin. The children used the last name Scott. In Nicholas Pelgi’s 1985 book, Wise Guy, the children were changed to two daughters named Judy and Ruth to protect their real identities. But Henry could not stop being Henry.

He dealt cocaine and marijuana in Washington. He drank heavily. He racked up DUI arrests. He contacted former associates back in New York. In the fall of 1981, while still legally married to Karen, he drove to Virginia City, Nevada, and bigously married a Mormon hairdresser named Sher Anders.

The marriage license listed his Washington address, handing Burke’s lawyers a trail to follow. When Wise Guy was published in 1985, news helicopters circled the family’s Redmond home. The cover was blown. In 1987, Henry was convicted of cocaine trafficking in federal court in Seattle. The US Marshalss formally expelled him from the witness security program after 7 years. He did not tell his family.

His son Greg would discover that fact years later, reading FBI files. The program designed to keep the Hill family safe had been sabotaged from the inside by the man it was built to protect. Karen Freriedman Hill spent 19 years married to Henry and seven years in witness protection because of him.

She spent the rest of her life making sure no one would ever find her again. In the old life, Karen had been somebody. She walked into restaurants and waiters scrambled. She wore fur coats paid for with hijacking money and never questioned where the cash came from. She once hid a pistol in her underwear and pointed it at Henry’s face during a fight. She was not a timid woman.

She was not someone who sat quietly and looked away. She had chosen the life as much as Henry had, maybe more consciously since she walked into it at 19 and stayed. But witness protection stripped every piece of that identity away. No more copa, no more Buick Rivieras, no more envelopes from men who treated her husband like royalty.

Instead, she had a rented house in Nebraska, a fake last name, and a government check that barely covered groceries. During the witness protection program years, Karen was the one who kept the household standing. She cooked meals on a budget that would have been unthinkable during the Long Island years.

She enrolled the children in new schools under new names and coached them on what to say when classmates asked questions. Where they were from, what their father did for work, why they had moved. She answered the neighbors curiosity with rehearsed stories. She managed all of this while Henry gambled away their stipend at racetracks, snorted cocaine in the bathroom, brought strangers home at 2:00 in the morning, and married another woman in Nevada without telling her.

She had smuggled drugs into Lewisburg for this man. She had flushed $60,000 in cocaine during the 1980 raid for this man. She had endured the affair with Vario and the assault by D. Simone because of this man. But witness protection broke something in Karen that the mob never did.

The belief that Henry could change. That he could be the husband and father she kept pretending he was. Every new city, the same cycle. Every new name, the same man underneath it. Karen filed for divorce around 1989 or 1990 after the family’s expulsion from the witness protection program. The proceedings dragged on for more than a decade.

The divorce was not finalized until 2002. And by then, Karen had already accomplished what the entire federal witness protection program never fully managed. She had disappeared. Not into a government safe house with a handler and a monthly check. into genuine self-made anonymity.

She moved somewhere no one has publicly identified. She changed her name. She severed contact with anyone who could connect her to the Hill name. She never gave a public interview about Good Fellas. She never met Lorraine Braco, the actress who portrayed her and earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for the role.

She never issued a statement about Henry’s death in 2012. She never appeared on a talk show. She never wrote a memoir. She never sold her story to a tabloid, a publisher, or a documentary crew. As of early 2025, Karen Freriedman Hill is believed to be alive. She would be approximately 79 years old. She is living under an assumed name in an undisclosed location.

A source close to the family confirmed she was alive at the time of Henry’s death. Beyond that, nothing. No photographs, no social media accounts, no property records linked to her birth name, no trace whatsoever. The woman who once lived the Copa Cabana lifestyle, who once carried a pistol and confronted her husband’s mistress on her own doorstep, who once flushed a small fortune in narcotics down the toilet rather than hand it to the FBI.

That woman chose total silence. She vanished more effectively than the federal government ever managed to hide her, and she has stayed invisible for over 30 years. Greg Hill knew something was wrong before anyone told him. He was the older child, the one who watched and listened and counted the lies. He watched his father come home at strange hours with blood on his clothes.

He saw Henry grab Karen by the hair and slam her into a wall. He sat at dinner while men with thick necks and thicker accents handed his father envelopes of cash. He understood that the money came from somewhere dangerous, but he was too young to articulate it and too afraid to ask.

When the family entered the witness protection program, Greg was 13, old enough to feel the full weight of losing everything. His name, his school, his friends, his neighborhood, his identity. In Brownsville, he had known who he was. Even if the knowledge was dangerous, he was the son of a connected man.

People treated him with respect because of his father’s name. In Omaha, he was nobody. In Kentucky, he was nobody again. In Redmond, he was still nobody. Every relocation meant starting from zero. New town, new alias, new lies to memorize. He could not join sports teams because coaches needed paperwork he could not provide.

He could not make close friends because close friends asked questions he could not answer. Every friendship he started was built on a foundation of invented stories. And he was the only person in his school who knew the foundation was hollow. The isolation would have been enough to damage any teenager.

But inside the house there was no relief. Henry’s cocaine binges lasted for days, sometimes weeks. His mood swung between euphoria and black rage with no warning. He would come home at 3:00 in the morning, dump bags of groceries on the kitchen counter, as if that made up for the screaming the night before, and then disappear again.

Karen tried to manage him. She failed. Greg became his mother’s protector by default, a teenager stepping between his parents during fights, absorbing blows that were meant for someone else, carrying a burden that should never have been placed on a child’s shoulders. At 19, something inside him broke.

During the family’s time in Redmond, Washington, Greg got into a violent physical confrontation with Henry. The details remained private, but the outcome was absolute. Greg walked out of the house that day and did not come back. He did not tell Karen. He did not tell Gina. He packed what he could carry and left behind the only family he had ever known.

Not because he did not love them, but because staying meant becoming his father. He refused. Greg kept the alias Scott. He had lived with that name long enough that it felt more real than the one on his original birth certificate. He finished college on his own. He enrolled in law school and earned his degree. He passed the bar examination.

He became a practicing attorney. The specific jurisdiction, firm, and area of practice have never been made public because Greg Hill still lives under a name that no one around him connects to organized crime. He married. He had children of his own. Only his wife knew the truth about who his father was.

He never told his colleagues. He never told his neighbors. He built a legitimate career in a profession defined by the very rules and statutes his father spent a lifetime violating. The son of the most famous mob informant in America became a man whose entire livelihood depended on the law. The irony was not lost on him.

For two decades, Greg said nothing publicly. He let Henry tell the story on talk shows, in books, on Howard Stern, in bars. Then in 2004, Greg and Gina co-authored a book with journalist Shaun Flynn. It was called On the Run: A Mafia Childhood. It was published by Warner Books on September 14th, 2004. The book picks up where Goodfellas ends and tells the story the movie could not.

the terror, the instability, the abuse, the constant running. Written in alternating firstperson voices, it revealed Henry Hill not as the charismatic wise guy played by Ray Leotaa, but as a narcissistic, drugaddicted man whose children lived in constant fear. Greg appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, and the Jane Paulie Show during the book’s promotion.

He appeared with his identity disguised with different lighting and camera angles. His face never shown clearly. He told CBS News that for more than 20 years they had lived with Henry telling their story with others telling their story. This book, he said, was their story on their terms in their voice.

He said he did not write it for revenge. He wrote it because the world had seen good fellas and thought they knew what happened. They did not. They saw the copa and the Cadillacs. They did not see the garbage bags and the fake names. and the nights when his father came home so high he could not stand.

The book won the Crime Writers Association gold dagger for non-fiction in 2005. Nicholas Pelgi, who wrote Wise Guy and co-wrote the Goodfellow’s screenplay with Martin Scorsesei, said the fact that Henry’s children survived to tell their story was a tribute to their resolve. After the book tour ended, Greg disappeared back into his life.

no known social media presence, no criminal record, no public appearances since the mid 2000s. He practices law somewhere in the United States under the name Scott, raising his children, doing his work, and carrying a past that no one in his office or his neighborhood knows about. Gina Hill was 2 years younger than Greg, and that gap made all the difference in the world.

where Greg watched his father with suspicion from an early age. Gina held on longer. She sat on Henry’s lap. She laughed at his stories. She wanted to believe that the man who brought home toys and told jokes and made everyone in the room smile was exactly what he said he was, just a guy who worked hard.

She was 11 when the family entered Witsk. young enough that the first relocation felt more like an adventure than a disaster, but old enough that the damage accumulated. She remembers guests at the house snorting cocaine off her belongings. She remembers not being able to tell a single person at school the truth about her family.

She remembers watching her mother cry. Gina stayed with her parents longer than Greg did. She was there for more of the wits years. The moves, the name changes, the midnight arguments, the mornings when Karen would smile and make breakfast as if nothing had happened the night before.

She saw Henry come home wired and paranoid from cocaine at dawn. She heard the fights through the walls. She watched her mother pack boxes again and again and again. Each new city meant a new school. Each new school meant new lies. Each new friendship carried an expiration date that only Gina knew about.

She absorbed the instability the way her brother did, but processed it differently. Less anger, more confusion. She loved the man who was hurting her family, and the contradiction tore at her in ways she would not fully understand until adulthood. After Karen separated from Henry, Gina returned to New York. She enrolled at New York University.

For the first time in her life, she was choosing where to live, choosing who to be, choosing a name that she could keep. She was building something of her own, an education, friendships, an identity that had nothing to do with the mob or the government or the man who had dragged her through 10 cities in 7 years. She married.

She started a family. She was by all outward appearances doing the thing that children of criminals almost never manage to do. She was moving forward on her own terms. Then came the phone call. Around 1997, Henry fathered a son named Justin with a girlfriend named Dawn. Henry was drinking heavily and using drugs daily.

Dawn was in no better shape. Their substance abuse spiraled until the state of Florida removed Justin from their home and placed him in foster care. Henry Hill’s third child, an infant with no say in who his parents were, was alone in the system because his father could not stay sober long enough to keep him.

Gina flew to Florida. She went to court. She fought for custody of a half brother she barely knew, fathered by a man who had spent her entire childhood failing her. The legal process was not simple. She was asking a court to grant custody of a child to someone with no biological connection on the maternal side based solely on the fact that the father, a notorious informant with a drug conviction sheet longer than most rap sheets, could not care for the boy.

She won. She brought Justin home. She raised him as her own. The daughter of Henry Hill, a woman who had every reason to never speak the Hill name again. Who had watched her father beat her mother. Who had been shuttled from state to state like contraband. Who had been forced to live behind fake names in cities where she knew nobody.

Chose to rescue the one member of the family even more powerless than she had once been. She did for Justin what no one had ever managed to do for her. She gave him a home that did not move. She gave him a name he could keep. She gave him the one thing Henry Hill was never capable of providing to any of his children, stability.

Gina co-authored On the Run with Greg. Her voice in the book is raw, more willing to sit with contradictions. Where Greg’s chapters carry the controlled precision of a man who processed his trauma through logic and distance, Gina’s carry the weight of someone still grappling with how to hold love and fury in the same sentence.

She wrote about missing her father even while describing the worst things he did. She wrote about the confusion of watching The Good Fella’s premiere and seeing her childhood played for entertainment. She loved Henry Hill. She hated what he did to her family. The book allowed her to say both without choosing one over the other.

Her most recent public appearance was in 2021 in an episode of the documentary series Narco Wars where she was credited as Henry Hill’s daughter. She has no known social media presence. She lives under an alias at an undisclosed location. She raised Justin. She built a life the world knows almost nothing about.

Henry Hill spent his final 25 years selling whatever was left of his name. He wrote books. Wise Guy earned him $100,000 from Simon and Schustster. The Wise Guy cookbook came in 2002. A Good Fella’s Guide to New York came in 2003. Gangsters and Good Fellas came in 2004. He sold mob themed paintings on eBay for prices that range from a few hundred to a few thousand.

He marketed a spaghetti sauce called Sunday gravy. He opened a restaurant called Wise Guys in West Haven, Connecticut in October 2007. It closed a month later after a kitchen fire. He was paid $480,000 by Martin Scorsesei for the Goodfella’s film rights alone. He told a reporter he earned about $550,000 total from the movie.

He spent every cent. By the end, he had nothing left to sell except the story itself. And he told it to anyone who would listen on podcasts, at mob conventions, at autograph signings in strip mall parking lots. His arrest record after witness protection read like a slow collapse. Cocaine trafficking in Seattle, 1987.

Narcotics charges under the alias Alex Canini, 2001. methamphetamine possession at North Plat Regional Airport in Nebraska 2004 where he showed up to a pre-sentencing meeting with a blood alcohol level of 0.343 more than four times the legal limit. He served 180 days, two counts of public intoxication in San Bernardino, 2008, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in Fairview Heights, Illinois, December 2009.

He married Kelly Allore around 1990 and divorced her in 1996. He became engaged to Lisa Caserta around 2006 and lived with her in Topanga Canyon near Malibu. He appeared on the Howard Stern show so many times the staff kept a running count of how drunk he was. On June 12th, 2012, one day after his 69th birthday, Henry Hill died in a Los Angeles hospital from cardiac failure.

Lisa Caserta told CBS News he went out pretty peacefully for a good fella. He was cremated the following day. His children did not release statements. They did not appear on television. They did not write a sequel. Karen did not break her silence. The three people who paid the highest price for Henry Hill’s choices marked his death the way they had lived every year since entering witness protection.

quietly, privately, under names the world will never know. Greg still practices law somewhere under the name Scott. Gina still lives under an alias, raising the half brother she rescued from foster care because her father could not be bothered to raise his own son.

Karen is believed to be alive at 79, invisible in a way that would make the US marshals jealous. The man who broke every rule died famous. The people who followed the rules chose to become nobody. And in a world where the hill name once opened doors, bought silence, and guaranteed a table at the copa, being related to the most famous rat in mafia history meant inheriting his enemies along with his name.

Greg, Gina, and Karen all figured out the same thing independently in their own time. The only way to survive Henry Hill was to stop being a hill entirely.

The Goodfellas Rat: What Happened to Henry Hill’s Children? HT

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