Henry Hill's life story was immortalized in the incomparable Goodfellas. He lived a high-flying life as a gangster before crashing in a drug bust and ratting out his associates to literally save his own life.
The BBC's Heather Alexander tagged along as Hill revisited the old nabe:
"I couldn't walk around this neighbourhood ten years ago," he says standing, smoking outside Junior's diner in Long Island City. "There'd be bullets flying all over the place."
His morning started with fried calamari washed down with a glass of wine and a shot of whiskey. But it was not the Dutch courage that meant he dared to visit his old haunting grounds on this murky spring day.
"I'm old enough to die, just as long as they do it quickly," he says, pointing to his forehead. ...
After Junior's, it was on to his mistress's house. She was called Janice Rossi in the film, Linda in real life, and Hill confirms the famous scene where his wife, Karen, is madly pressing apartment buzzers and screaming that Janice is a "whore".
But he says in reality he was in the apartment too and had to climb down the drainpipe to get out and reach home before Karen returned.
Hill says: "If you can't love two people at once, there's something wrong with you."
I point out that his wife probably did not see it that way. "Obviously she didn't," says Hill.
After a short interlude where he tries to persuade a traffic warden not to give us a ticket - "Sistergirl, please," he says - we are off to Robert's Lounge.
The club was owned by Jimmy Burke (Robert de Niro's character in the film) and was the scene of Spider's (played by Michael Imperioli) death.
"Spider was killed in the basement," Hill says. He describes the dark room filling up with smoke and the deafening echo of bullets in the tiny space.
He says Spider was buried in the basement along with several others killed there or nearby over the years. With a grim look he says: "This is a graveyard."
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Why I have to revisit Goodfellas again in the near future (check out the Brokeback Mobsters mashup at the bottom!)