Goodfellas quotes

View Quote What Jimmy really loved to do, what he really loved to do was steal. I mean he actually enjoyed it. Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guys in the movies.

View Quote And when the cops, they assigned a whole army to stop Jimmy, what'd he do? He made 'em partners.

View Quote By the time I grew up, there was thirty billion a year in cargo moving through Idlewild Airport and believe me, we tried to steal every bit of it. It was an even bigger money-maker than numbers and Jimmy was in charge of it all. Whenever we needed money, we'd rob the airport. And to us, it was better than Citibank.

View Quote For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

View Quote For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal. We had a, we had a serious problem with Billy Batts. This was really a touchy thing. Tommy had killed a made guy. Batts was part of the Gambino crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch a made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an okay, or you'd be the one who got whacked.

View Quote Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends.

View Quote It took the jury six hours to bring us in guilty. The judge gave Jimmy and me ten years like he was giving away candy.

View Quote See, you know when you think of prison, you get pictures in your mind of all those old movies with rows and rows of guys behind bars. But it wasn't like that for wiseguys. It really wasn't that bad. Excepting that I missed Jimmy. He was doing his time in Atlanta. I mean, everybody else in the joint was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. But we lived alone. And we owned the joint.

View Quote It took me about a week of sneaking around before I could unload the Pittsburgh stuff, but when I did, it was a real score. I started using Sandy's place to mix the stuff and even with Sandy snorting more than she mixed, I could see that this was a really good business. I made twelve thousand dollars in my second week. I had a down payment on my house and things were really rolling. All I had to do was every once in a while was tell Sandy that I loved her. But it was perfect, I'm telling ya. As long as I kept getting the stuff from Pittsburgh, I knew Paulie would never find out. Within a couple of weeks, it got to be so big I needed some help. So I got Jimmy and Tommy to come in with me.

View Quote That's how it happens. That's how fast it takes for a guy to get whacked.

View Quote It made him sick to have to turn money over to the guys who stole it. He'd rather whack 'em. Anyway, what did I care? I wasn't asking for anything and besides, Jimmy was making nice money with me through my Pittsburgh connections. But still, months after the robbery they were finding bodies all over. When they found Carbone in the meat truck, he was frozen so stiff it took them two days to thaw him out for the autopsy.

View Quote You know, we always called each other good fellas. Like you said to, uh, somebody, 'You're gonna like this guy. He's all right. He's a good fella. He's one of us.' You understand? We were good fellas. Wise guys. But Jimmy and I could never be made because we had Irish blood. It didn't even matter that my mother was Sicilian. To become a member of a crew you've got to be one hundred per cent Italian so they can trace all your relatives back to the old country. See, it's the highest honor they can give you. It means you belong to a family and crew. It means that nobody can **** around with you. It also means you could **** around with anybody just as long as they aren't also a member. It's like a license to steal. It's a license to do anything. As far as Jimmy was concerned with Tommy being made, it was like we were all being made. We would now have one of our own as a member.

View Quote It was revenge for Billy Batts, and a lot of other things. And there was nothing that we could do about it. Batts was a made man and Tommy wasn't. And we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians. It was real grease ball shit. They even shot Tommy in the face so his mother couldn't give him an open coffin at the funeral.

View Quote [after Karen points gun at him while he's sleeping] I got enough to worry about getting whacked on the street! I gotta come home for this! I should ****ing kill you!

View Quote For a second, I thought I was dead, but when I heard all the noise I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they had been wise guys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead.