Goodfellas saw some of the biggest criminal activities of Henry Hill, including his first arrest – but was it actually a mafia setup? Martin Scorsese has explored a variety of genres throughout his career as a filmmaker – from black comedy with After Hours and The King of Comedy to psychological thriller with Taxi Driver – but he’s still best-known for his gangster movies, which explore the Italian-American identity and themes like guilt and redemption. Although he has made various gangster movies, the one that is often considered his best is Goodfellas, released in 1990.
Based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas chronicles the life of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his days as a teenager fascinated by the mafia presence in his Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn and running errands for Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and his crew to his full involvement with them, culminating with him becoming an FBI informant. During those early days working for Paulie, Henry met Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), with whom he worked on a couple of jobs, including the one that got Henry arrested.
During the first act of the movie, young Henry is introduced to Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro), and he starts serving as a fence for him, gradually working his way up to more serious crimes. It’s during one of those jobs when Henry is arrested for the first time, which led Jimmy, Paulie, and the whole crew to respect Henry as one of them. One day, Henry and Tommy were selling cigarettes when they were caught by the cops – Tommy ran away to tell Paulie and the crew that Henry was caught, and it was Henry the one who suffered the consequences. Luckily, Henry remained silent and never told the authorities who he worked for, earning the respect of Jimmy and the rest of the Lucchese family.
However, the way Henry’s arrest happened has made viewers believe that he might have been set up by Paulie’s crew. Some viewers have pointed out that Jimmy and Paulie had all the cops around on their side and they didn’t go after Tommy, so Henry being arrested didn’t make much sense. Surely, Tommy ran away, but upon closer inspection of the scene, it seems strange that the cops didn’t see the other kid helping distribute the cigarettes. Henry, then, might have been set up by Jimmy and Paulie in order to test his loyalty, and he clearly passed the test with honors as he, like Jimmy said, never ratted on his friends and kept his mouth shut. However, some viewers have pointed out that, while some of the cops were certainly on Jimmy and Paulie’s side, the script of Goodfellas makes the distinction of the two men approaching Henry being city detectives, and they were drawn to Henry as he wasn’t exactly the most skilled when handling all the money he was receiving.
As to why they didn’t catch Tommy even though he was close enough to have been spotted by the detectives, it could have simply been that the detectives were focused on Henry and Henry only so he wouldn’t run away, which allowed Tommy to do so and tell Paulie what was going on. Although it would make sense for Henry to be set up in order to test his loyalty, that might have not been the case, but as in Goodfellas is unclear on what side the cops/detectives truly were, this scene is somewhat open to the interpretation of each viewer.