STORY:
The film opens with three men driving in their vehicle late around evening time on an expressway. In the vehicle are Henry Slope (Beam Liotta), Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). Henry hears a loud thud while Jimmy and Tommy are asleep. Henry suddenly realizes that they need to stop and check the trunk as they try to determine the cause of the sound. We see a beaten man wrapped in several bloody tablecloths when they open it. Jimmy shoots the man four times with a revolver after Tommy, enraged, stabs the man multiple times with a kitchen knife. We hear Henry's voiceover say, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster," as he slams the trunk lid shut.
We now travel back several decades to see what will happen before this scene.
During the 1950s, youthful Henry Slope adores the Lucchese wrongdoing family hoodlums in his authentic, dominatingly Italian area in East New York, Brooklyn, and in 1955 stops school and goes to work for them. Henry's criminal career is supported by the local mob capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), who is based on the real-life Lucchese mobster Paul Vario, and Paulie's close associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro), who is based on Jimmy Burke.
Henry teams up with Tommy, a young man, and they sell Jimmy's cartons of cigarettes to factory workers, a crossing guard, and some police officers. Two detectives show up while Henry is selling them, take the money and the load, and Henry is arrested. Tommy runs away to inform Paulie's brother Tuddy. Henry appears in court and receives a warning. Jimmy tells him he did well despite "getting pinched" and offers him a substantial reward for his silence, which Jimmy refers to as a "graduation gift." Henry told the police, without naming anyone, the two most significant aspects of their occupation: Never criticize your friends and never speak up." Henry is warmly received by the group as a whole.
As grown-ups, Henry and Tommy (Joe Pesci) contrive with Conway to take a significant part of the billions of dollars of freight going through John F. Kennedy Worldwide Air terminal. They assist in a key heist and steal more than $500,000 from the Air France cargo terminal. Henry earns Paulie's trust by robbing her, for which he receives a significant portion of the proceeds. Nonetheless, on the grounds that Henry is half-Irish, he realizes he can never turn into a "made man", an undeniable individual from the wrongdoing family. Jimmy Conway, who is also Irish, cannot either.
Henry's friends become more daring and dangerous over time. Tommy has an explosive temper and a psychotic need to prove himself through violence, and Conway enjoys hijacking trucks. He asks "Spider," a young waiter played by Michael Imperioli, to dance like The Oklahoma Kid and then shoots him in the foot to humiliate him. A couple of evenings later, when Bug faces a very inebriated Tommy, Tommy (egged on by Jimmy) unexpectedly attracts his firearm and fires Bug the chest, killing him immediately. Tommy is completely uninterested and politely asks Jimmy where he can find a shovel to bury Spider, despite Jimmy's anger at Tommy for shooting Spider.
Additionally, Henry meets and falls in love with Karen, a young Jewish woman played by Lorraine Bracco; They visit the Copacabana club twice to three times per week, where a well-known continuous Steadicam shot was shot. Karen is uneasy about her boyfriend's career, but she is also "turned on" by it, especially when Henry gives her the bloody pistol to hide after he viciously pistol whips her neighbor for trying to force himself on her. Henry eventually weds Karen, which necessitates persuading Karen's parents that Henry is half Jewish.
In June 1970, Tommy (helped by Jimmy Conway) severely kills Billy Batts (Blunt Vincent), a made man in the contending Gambino wrongdoing family, over a straightforward affront Batts tosses at Tommy. They could all be killed by the Gambinos if they find out about the murder, which is a serious offense. Henry, Conway, and DeVito bury Batts' body in an abandoned field after stopping at Tommy's mother's house for a late-night meal and to pick up a shovel. This brings us back to the car trunk scene from the beginning of the movie. They are forced to exhume, move, and rebury the badly decomposed body when they find out six months later that the land has been sold. This is a task that makes Henry physically sick and Tommy and Jimmy think is just another simple task.
Henry's marriage decays when Karen finds he has a paramour, Janice Rossi (Gina Mastrogiacomo). As Henry wakes up, Karen uses a gun to confront him. When she brings down the weapon, Henry stifles her and shouts that he has an adequate number of at the forefront of his thoughts stressing over being "whacked in the city" without awakening with a firearm in the face. Jimmy and Paulie pay Henry a visit at Janice's apartment and tell him that having affairs is bad for business. Paulie promises that he will persuade Karen that Henry is worthy of being returned and that Henry will soon return to his home. Henry and Jimmy will travel to Florida in the interim to locate a thief who owes Paulie money.
In the wake of beating and hanging the obligation ridden Florida player over a lion confine at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Henry and Jimmy are gotten and shipped off jail for a considerable length of time on the grounds that the person's sister was a typist for the FBI. There, Henry bargains medications to different detainees to keep above water and to help his family, and, when he gets back to them, he has a worthwhile medication association in Pittsburgh. Henry is advised to avoid dealing drugs by Paulie due to the fact that mob leaders who allow their men to operate illegally risk receiving substantial prison sentences.
Henry joins Tommy and Jimmy, Karen, and his new mistress Sandy (Debi Mazar) in a complex cocaine smuggling operation in defiance of Paulie's directive. Around the same time, in December 1978, Jimmy Conway and his friends planned and carried out a record-breaking offscreen heist worth $6,000,000 from the JFK Airport Lufthansa cargo terminal. When some of his friends foolishly flaunt their gains in plain sight, possibly drawing the attention of the police, Jimmy begins to become increasingly paranoid shortly after the heist. More terrible, subsequent to promising to invite Tommy into the Lucchese family as a "made man," the senior individuals from the family briskly shoot him in the head in reprisal for Billy Batts' passing and his careless way of behaving. Henry and Jimmy, in particular, are upset by the murder because they are expected to simply accept it and move on.
In an extended, masterful sequence titled "Sunday, May 11th, 1980," Henry's complicated Mafia career takes many different turns: He must coordinate a significant shipment of cocaine; bring Jimmy a few pistols, but Henry won't let you take them from him; prepare an enormous meal for his family; Reconcile him with Sandy, his mistress, who processes the cocaine he sells; manage Lois, his clueless babysitter and drug courier; avoid federal authorities who have been monitoring him for several months without his knowledge; and please his shady drug connection clients, all while being a nervous wreck from not getting enough sleep and taking in too much of his own product.
Because she can't fly without her lucky hat, Lois demands that Henry take her home. As he backs out of his driveway, the police take Henry and Lois into custody. Sandy is booked along with Henry and Lois, and the police bring a lot of equipment from Sandy's apartment covered in coke. After destroying all of the cocaine that was hidden in the house and convincing her mother to put up their house as collateral for bail money, Karen frees her husband from jail. When Karen admits that she destroyed the $60,000 worth of coke that Henry had planned to ship when he was caught, the couple break down together, leaving Henry and his family without a means of support.
Paulie and the rest of the mob abandon Henry following his arrest. Henry finally meets Paulie, who reprimands him for lying about selling drugs. Paulie turns away from him after giving him a few thousand dollars. Jimmy is informed by Karen when they meet that Henry has regained his composure and that Henry has not been disclosing any crucial information about Jimmy or the other members of the mob. Jimmy tells Karen to look at some stolen dresses in one of his storefronts before she leaves. When Karen sees two workers who look suspicious, she feels afraid. Jimmy's message to Henry and Karen is crystal clear: If they discuss their connections, they run the risk of being humiliatingly eliminated.
Henry makes the decision to work as an FBI informant because he is convinced that he and his family are doomed to die. He testifies against Paulie and Jimmy in court before he and his family enter the federal Witness Protection Program and disappear into anonymity to save their lives. "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook" is his current status as an "average nobody." Tommy fires a pistol directly into the camera in the film's quick final shot, a nod to The Great Train Robbery's final shot and a hint that Henry will never fully leave the criminal life.
The film closes with a couple of title cards (over Sid Horrendous' rendition of "My Way") showing what was the fate of Slope, Paulie Cicero (Vario) and Jimmy Conway (Burke). Paulie and Conway will spend the majority of their lives in prison, and Henry's marriage to Karen ended in divorce, with Karen receiving custody of their children. Paulie kicked the bucket in jail in 1988. According to Conway's title card, he was eligible for parole in 2004, but he passed away from lung cancer in 1996 while still in prison.
