The characters in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas are based on real-life gangsters, but their stories had to be changed a bit to fit the narrative, and as a result, the real-life Paulie was very different from the one in the movie. Martin Scorsese has explored various genres throughout his career as filmmaker, such as psychological thriller (Taxi Driver) and black comedy (After Hours, The King of Comedy), but continues to be best known for his gangster movies – and the one often regarded as his best is the 1990 movie Goodfellas.

Based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas chronicles the life of Henry Hill, a mob associate of the Lucchese crime family, from his days as a teenager fascinated by the mafia presence in his neighborhood, to his full involvement in it. Henry’s work with the mafia started when he was a teenager and began running errands for Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and his associates, including Jimmy Conaway (Robert De Niro), with Cicero serving as a sort-of mentor to him. However, their association ended after Henry got involved in drug dealing, and he later became an FBI informant, and his testimonies were enough to send Paulie to prison.

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Paul Cicero was the head of the crime group, and though his violent actions were alluded to, nothing was shown on-screen. Instead, Cicero was portrayed more as a father figure to Hill within the mob, hosting big family meals with the rest of his associates and helping them (especially Henry, of course) when they needed. However, the real Paulie was far from the calm version seen in Goodfellas, and federal prosecutors even called him “one of the most violent and dangerous career criminals in the city of New York”. Paul Vario’s history with the mafia began when he was just a kid, and before he joined the Lucchese family, he spent seven months in juvenile detention when he was 11 years old. Vario eventually became a caporegime, and among his businesses were a flower shop, a bar-restaurant, and the cab stand that he used as his office.

Like any other gangster, Vario went to jail various times, but Goodfellas omitted these (he’s seen in jail only once, at the same time as Hill), most notably the time he was sent to prison for rape. Vario was mostly known for his very violent temper, which is the opposite of what Cicero was like. One night, when Vario and his wife were having dinner at a restaurant, the waiter accidentally poured wine on his wife’s dress. Enraged, Vario hit the waiter twice, and later that night, he sent two carloads of men armed with baseball bats and pipes to assault the waiters after the restaurant closed. When Vario was sentenced to three years in prison, Hill was serving a ten-year sentence for attempted murder, and when Vario was free, he had an affair with Karen Hill. During this time, Tommy DeSimone (DeVito in Goodfellas, played by Joe Pesci) tried to rape Karen, and it’s believed that Vario was the one who told the Gambino crime family that DeSimone was responsible for the deaths of two of their men, one of those Billy Batts, and that’s why he was killed.

Following Hill’s cooperation with the FBI, Vario was sent to prison and sentenced to four years in federal prison. While serving his sentence, he was indicted in a racketeering conspiracy involving extortion, and thanks to Hill’s testimonies, he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for extortion. Vario died in 1988 from lung failure, as a result of lung cancer while incarcerated at Fort Worth Federal Prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Paul Cicero in Goodfellas lacked the cruelty and violence of the real-life Paulie, which can be justified to an extent as the movie was all about Henry Hill, and thus all the attention had to be on his journey rather than those of his associates.

Next: Goodfellas: The Biggest Things The Movie Leaves Out About Henry Hill