LOS ANGELES — Henry Hill, who went from small-time gangster to big-time celebrity when his life as a mobster-turned-FBI informant became the basis for the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas,” has died at age 69.

Longtime girlfriend Lisa Caserta told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Hill died Tuesday of complications from longtime heart problems related to smoking.

An associate in New York’s Lucchese crime family, Hill told detailed, disturbing and often hilarious tales of life in the mob that first appeared in the 1986 book “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family,” by Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist Hill sought out shortly after becoming an informant.

“Henry Hill was a hood. He was a hustler. He had schemed and plotted and broken heads,” Pileggi wrote in the book. “He knew how to bribe and he knew how to con. He was a full-time working racketeer, an articulate hoodlum from organized crime.”

In 1990 the book, adapted for the screen by Pileggi and Scorsese, became the instant classic “Goodfellas,” starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta as Hill, a young hoodlum on the make who thrives in the Mafia but is eventually forced by drugs to turn on his criminal friends and lead the life of a sad suburbanite.

Unlike older Mafia tales, which focused on family and honor, “Wiseguy” and “Goodfellas” mostly dwelled on how utterly awesome it was to be in the mob — on the gangster as rock star — at least until the life caught up with you.

Born in Brooklyn to an Irish father and an Italian mother, Hill’s life with the mob began at age 11 when he wandered into a cabstand across the street in 1955 looking for work, and soon knew the life of these silk-suited soldiers was for him.

“The men at the cabstand were not like anyone else from the neighborhood,” Pileggi wrote. “He had watched them double-park their cars and never get tickets, even when they parked smack in front of a fire hydrant.”

He began running errands for the men at the stand that soon led to small-time crimes. He was first arrested at age 16 for using a stolen credit card in an attempt to buy tires for the brother of gang leader Paul Vario, and impressed the gang leaders for refusing to squeal on them.

Far bigger crimes awaited, including the 1967 theft of $420,000 in cash from the Air France cargo terminal at JFK airport in New York, among the biggest cash heists in history at the time.

And in 1978, Hill had a key role in the theft of $5.8 million in cash from a Lufthansa Airlines vault.

But the crew involved in the heist would soon turn on each other, and several would end up dead, leaving Hill extremely paranoid he could be next, he later told Pileggi.

More afraid of his associates than prison, Hill decided he had no choice but to become an informant, and signed an agreement with a Department of Justice task force that would prove more fruitful than anyone imagined.

Hill’s testimony did send dozens of men to prison, many for the Lufthansa heist, and he and his wife Karen, played by Lorraine Bracco in the movie, went into hiding together, spending years fearing murderous retribution from his old colleagues.

In the early 1990s, after several drug arrests, Hill was booted from the witness protection program.