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. Nicholas Pileggi: Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

Wiseguy life in a mafia family