Goodfellas and Wise GuysHenry Hill, Tommy DeVito, and Jimmy Conway are three men who are products of their environment. The crowd catered to a core part of each of their personalities. For Tommy, it was a place where he could feed his ego and masculinity complex. For Henry, a purpose; a way to provide for both his family and his “family.” Eventually, though, the way they held the crowd in such high regard began to deteriorate over the course of the storyline. Tommy violated the mob's most important rule when he killed Billy Batts; Henry and Jimmy went behind the crowd to deal cocaine. Both Jimmy and Henry display gradually increasing amounts of paranoia over the course of the film Goodfellas. In Jimmy, paranoia existed after the robbery; he slowly killed each partner as a way to protect himself from their potential betrayals or mistakes. At one point Henry even suspects that Jimmy tried to kill him and Karen - two lifelong friends - because he feared that Jimmy would report him to the police. However, given their professions, there is almost a sort of inevitability that the three will end up dead or in prison. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Living “unjustly” means you can never truly relax; you face existential threats from all sides. The feds always tormented Karen and the rest of the mob wives with search warrants when they were looking for bribes. There was always the threat of ambitious subordinates and selfish superiors demanding respect and tribute. We must therefore always be vigilant to never make mistakes. Ironically, Henry complains to Karen that he's "not as stupid as some of the other mobsters" and that he'll never get caught. However, over the course of the film we see two important things happen to Henry. First, his ego inflates; he thinks he is old enough to deal cocaine without the mob knowing and without their protection, which is ultimately what led to him being caught. He, Tommy, and Jimmy have started acting with this "I'm invincible" mentality now that they're high up in the mob; they believe that, whatever happens, they are too important for the mob to eliminate them as they have done with so many others. That mindset leads them to become careless and eventually make mistakes; Tommy killed a mob boss and a kid, Jimmy and Henry felt they were above the mob's rules and got caught for it. The other thing that started to happen for Henry is that those mistakes started to lead to paranoia. You can see it after Tommy kills Billy Batts; Henry can't focus on the conversation while Tommy and Jimmy casually have a late dinner with Tommy's mother, as if there wasn't a dying man in the trunk of their car. This paranoia only increases when Henry begins using the cocaine he had been dealing. And it is this paranoid behavior brought on by an inflated ego that ultimately costs Henry his life in the mob. He is captured, chased away by the mob and is forced to denounce his family for protection. Psychological pressure was what broke him, pressure caused by the crowd's disregard of the "ground rules" and the eventual realization that he was too involved and that there was no crowd to protect him from his own mistakes..