When Henry Hill’s wife goes to see Jimmy Burke (down on the East Side), she gets a bad vibe. Burke tells her to go to an address down the street-and she realizes that she is about to be “whacked”. she runs away, gets in the car and scrams.
My question: I thought that Mafia wives were sacrosanct-you could whack a man, but you never hurt a woman. Burke obviously thought that she was talking to the police-so why didn’t they just grab her there, instead of letting her escape?
At the end of the day they are criminals and thugs. Everything else is Mythology.
She wasn’t a mafia wife and Jimmy wasn’t mafia either.
I guess the point was that everyone was starting to rat out everyone. No-one could be trusted. Also, add bucketloads of cocaine into the equation and paranoia is bound to follow.
And we did see Jimmy kill at least one woman (not a “Mafia wife, true”)–Belle, Morty’s wife. So not killing a woman doesn’t seem to apply to him.
They had already killed Louie Cafora’s wife earlier in the movie - remember they were both in the car, shot in the head, so why would you think Karen would be immune?
In the real crime, Jimmy killed Cafora’s wife and Tommy’s girlfriend.
As to why Jimmy sent her down the street to get whacked - I’d guess the building they were in right then was a more legitimate place, that Jimmy wanted to keep free of crimes.
Exactly. There’s no code, no rules, just criminals.
I don’t doubt that Jimmy was sending Karen down to be killed and that was my immediate take when watching the movie. But, just now, I started to wonder: After this scene, Jimmy meets Henry and asks him to take a guy down to Florida. Henry realizes that he wouldn’t come back alive and that’s the moment that drives him to the feds.
If Karen had been killed, you would think that THAT would have driven Henry to the feds. Maybe you’d want to kill Henry first and trust that Karen would stay silent out of fear, or maybe you’d take out Karen while Henry was being killed in Florida – but killing Karen first while acting like everything is “normal” with Henry doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Morty’s wife wasn’t killed. She called Hank and Karen after Morty didn’t come home. The guy who bought the Cadillac for his wife, the 2 of them were killed (in that great scene with the music from Layla).
Whoops, my mistake. Sorry! And I should know better. I just saw it last week.
“It made him sick to have to turn money over to the guys who stole it. He’d rather whack em.”
And it’s Morrie, not Morty.
Remember when Adrienne got whacked in The Sopranos? She was only a common-law wife, true, but she would have been taken for a ride even if she and Christopher had been legally married, since she was a rat!
I don’t think Jimmy was sending her down there to get whacked. The guys in the building hardly looked like they were waiting for her. In my opinion she just got spooked. She even admitted to Henry that she just got scared.
I always thought that scene was out of place as well.
Henry was far more of a danger to Jimmy than Karen was, she would only know general information about Jimmy compared to the specific details Henry could give if he was a rat. So why try to whack Karen first, when that would only alert Henry and make him even more likely to flee or go to the cops?
Maybe thats the value of the scene. Because we aren’t sure if he meant to whack her or not it gives a sense of the paranoia surrounding Jimmy at the time.
I think it that scene was meant to be ambiguous, very much like the final scene in The Sopranos. It was meant to put us in Karen’s shoes, with the constant fear that someone may be trying to kill you but never being really sure.
I just watched the scene again, and while there’s no incontrovertible proof, there’s a lot of evidence that she was going to get whacked:
Jimmy asked her what kind of questions the feds had been asking Henry.
Karen told Jimmy that Henry didn’t know she was meeting with Jimmy.
Jimmy gave Karen a few grand, for no reason.
Jimmy carefully watched her walk down the block to the store with the dresses, directing her the whole way, while looking around to see if anyone else was watching them.
When she panicked & turned away, Jimmy started yelling “Nah, nah, go ahead, it’s right in there!” Why would he care so much if she got the dresses?
They had a station wagon waiting with a fake license plate to move her body afterwards. 
I think as soon as Karen told him Henry didn’t know she was there, her fate was sealed. It also addresses the “Why would they whack Karen first?” question - it wasn’t planned in advance, it was just an opportunity to be taken. Whack Karen without Henry’s knowledge, then set up a meeting with Henry and whack him then. That way they’re both taken out without any fuss.
True. You’ve got the whole unreliable narrator thing going on there since we’re seeing it through her experience. I suppose that, perhaps Jimmy only meant to scare her or even that he was buttering her up to make it look like everything was cool even as he planned to have Henry killed, but I wouldn’t have wanted to go down into that building either.
And the paranoia surrounding Karen.
I always thought she was being pimped out in that scene.
Exactly. It’s left intentionally ambiguous to give us (the audience) a sense of paranoia and dread.