Henry & Karen- What a couple of Dopes!

LOL, you’re actually the DOPE. I’d explain but you wouldn’t get it because you’re a DOPE

It is based on the real life guy. I'm sure these are the thoughts and attitudes the real guy said had motivated him and what he was thinking.

These were real people and real people can be dopes.

"Every voice-over is predictable "Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a gangster", "And it was all about money". Yeah real deep."

Is he supposed to be "deep"? He's a mobster. They're not typically known as "deep" people, quite the opposite they're prone to be shallow and materialistic or they'd be in a different line of work. There might be a few exceptions but I never got any impression that Henry Hill was supposed to be anything more than a typically money or power obsessed mob soldier and coked out tool. Do you think the script should have made him out to be more intelligent than he actually was?

"She's like a dope times two. She looks bugged eye and impressed as Henry walks her through the kitchen into the club. "What do you do?" She says dumbly. "I'm in construction", he says dully. "You don't feel like someone in construction." Ugh. Throughout the film, she continues to make dumb analysis decision on why she stays ("He turned me on"). "

And this is what women who are attracted to bad boys in the mob are like. They're not necessarily the sharpest tools in the drawer. Ever wonder why notorious serial killers and hardened imprisoned inmates alike have groupies and are at no shortage of female suitors? Some percentage of women, a clear plurality, are naturally attracted to bad boys. The larger their notoriety or criminal 'hardness', the bigger the turn on. This is just a fact.

I never read the book but why didn't Hendry diversify his money into assets that could placed into a trust under his childrens' names or even his parents/in-laws?

My guess is that he was all about flash and the fast life-style, as was Karen, and neither of them saved anything, unlike more organized Italian mafiosos who bought real estate and medium-sized businesses placed under their relatives' names.

Be thankful you only see the glamorized version of these lowlife scumbags. If you dive deep into what Henry, Karen, and their ilk were really like you'd really see despicable, disgusting, nasty inhuman beings.

I never read the book, but in the movie we never see Hendry develop any financial astuteness whatsoever. It's shown that he owns a bar (where Billy Batts is taken down), but that appears to be the only "front" Hendry uses to wash his illicitly earned income.

We know that he Feds can freeze his income after getting nailed for narcotics but before that he could have set up trusts and put them in his siblings, parents, and in-laws names. It's just amazing to me that with all that earning and cash he had absolutely zero "go money" when he got caught.