Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) idolizes the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar, predominantly Italian neighborhood in East New York, Brooklyn, and in 1955 quits school and goes to work for them.
Henry is taken under the wing of the local mob capo, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) (based on the actual Lucchese mobster Paul Vario) and Cicero's close associate Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) (based on Jimmy Burke) who help to cultivate Henry's criminal career.
Henry's friends are depicted as daring and dangerous. Conway loves hijacking trucks, and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci in his Academy Award-winning performance based on Thomas DeSimone) has an explosive temper and a psychotic need to prove himself through violence. At one point, he humiliates and then murders an innocent and unarmed young man "Spider" (played by a then unknown Michael Imperioli).
The film charts Henry's rise within the mob through cleverly executed robberies, and the mob code which prevents him and other members of Irish descent becoming "made men," full members of the crime family. The events in the film include his part in the 1967 Air France Robbery at JFK airport, the brutal 1970 murder of the family "made man" Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), and the 1978 $6,000,000 Lufthansa heist, also at JFK, as well as quieter scenes such as his regular visits with his girlfriend to the famous Copacabana Club. After a life of crime, and falling out of favor with the family, he turns informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and gives evidence against his former associates Conway and Cicero in court. He laments that he now has to live the rest of his life "like a schnook", after being given an anonymous identity by the Federal Witness Protection Program.
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