Robert Germaine Sr was a self-proclaimed freelance novelist, an expert "stick up man" who accompanied mobsters on hijacking jobs, and later became Henry Hill's partner in his heroin and cocaine trafficking ring in New York. At the time of his partnership with Henry Hill, he was also a fugitive in connection with a botched armed robbery of a multi-million dollar wholesale jewelry store on East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York. He became a close friend of Henry Hill after the latter hired his son Germaine Jr. to do some landscaping at Hill's Rockville Centre, New York home.