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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | I'm not mad, I'm proud of you. You took your first pinch like a man and you learned the two greatest things in life. Look at me; never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut. | „ |
| ~ Jimmy Conway to Henry Hill. |
Jimmy Conway (known colloquially as The Gent) is the main antagonist of Martin Scorsese's 1990 mobster film Goodfellas.
He is a big shot Irish-American associate of the Lucchese mafia family. Conway starts off as a generous and almost fatherly figure, but greed and paranoia eventually mold him into a ruthless killer.
He was portrayed by Robert De Niro.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- He beat and shot Billy Batts to death along with Tommy DeVito just because Batts had teased Tommy at a bar. While never said outright, it's likely Jimmy decided to go along with this because Batts had returned from Italy to re-claim the powerful position Jimmy had assumed in his absence. He even joked about Billy Batts's body parts as he buried him.
- He had Morrie stabbed in the skull with a screwdriver because he wouldn’t stop insisting his “deserved” share after the successful Lufthansa Heist, despite not having participated in it.
- While exhuming Batts’ decomposing corpse, he made jokes alongside Tommy about the details, nearly making Henry puke from the wretched stank.
- Growing paranoid and greedy, Jimmy had everyone involved in the Lufthansa Heist brutally murdered and shoved into trash cans and freezers. He even had Johnny Roastbeef's wife murdered simply because Roastbeef had bought her an expensive Cadillac, which could raise questions about his sudden boosted economy.
- He tried to trick Henry (to whom he'd been a father figure up to now)'s wife Karen into walking into an abandoned building where she would be murdered by two burly men.
- In the end he even tried to have Henry whacked, as the struggling young man had become a liability to him.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- He cared about Tommy and was moved to tears hit where it hurts after hearing about his execution. However, given Henry had to keep him from presumably unleashing his fury on passerby’s as well as him destroying the Phone Booth, this is a very minor prevention.
- He congratulates Spider for not taking any crap from Tommy, and actually gives him some money as praise, and when Tommy shoots Spider, Jimmy is clearly disgusted by this and goes so far as to call Tommy "a sick maniac", believing Spider didn't deserve to die.
Trivia[]
- James Burke, the gangster who Jimmy Conway was based off of, was actually described as more heinous than his movie counterpart. Not only did he commit all the same crimes in the film, but committed several more murders while he was imprisoned and during other thefts. Henry Hill's sister, Lucille, described him in an interview in 2012: “They couldn’t show [Jimmy ‘The Gent’] as bad as he really was. If you ever met pure evil, it was that man.”
External Links[]
- Jimmy Conway on the Villains Wiki
