Anthony Stabile, a character from the film “Goodfellas,” was killed as part of a larger mob cleanup orchestrated by the character Jimmy Conway to eliminate potential witnesses after the Lufthansa heist.
In the 1990 crime film “Goodfellas,” directed by Martin Scorsese, Anthony Stabile is portrayed as a member of the Lucchese crime family. The character is based on a real-life mobster, but his fate in the film is a fictionalized account. In the movie, after the successful Lufthansa heist at JFK International Airport, which resulted in a massive cash and jewelry theft, the character Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro, becomes paranoid about the authorities closing in. To secure his own safety and to prevent any of the participants from talking to the police or becoming liabilities, Conway orders the murder of several people involved in the heist.
Anthony Stabile, played by Frank Sivero, is one of the individuals who is killed in the aftermath of the heist. His death is part of a montage sequence that shows several characters being murdered, their bodies discovered in various locations, as the classic piano coda of Eric Clapton’s “Layla” plays in the background. This sequence is one of the film’s most memorable and serves to illustrate the brutal reality of life in organized crime, where loyalty is often trumped by self-preservation and paranoia. The real-life inspiration for the character, Anthony Stabile, was indeed associated with the Lucchese family, but his actual fate differed from the film’s portrayal.