The son of
French-Canadian immigrants, Germaine was a self-proclaimed freelance
novelist and an expert "stick up man" who accompanied mobsters on
hijacking jobs. He was an associate of the
Lucchese crime family, and was initially affiliated with a crew headed by
Christopher "Christie Tick" Furnari. On January 3, 1972, Germaine was one of the gunmen of the
Pierre Hotel armed robbery, where he and his seven cohorts, after binding and gagging the hotel employees, taking the Pierre under siege, ransacked the safe deposit boxes, and plundered an estimated $28,000,000 in jewels and cash. By the late 1970s, Germaine was associated with
Henry Hill and
Jimmy "the Gent" Burke, and was involved in Hill's criminal activities following the
Lufthansa heist up to Hill's incarceration. An excellent stick-up man and burglar, Germaine was married and had one son, a chemicals salesman and small-time drug dealer named Robert Germaine, Jr. Germaine, Sr. later became Henry Hill's partner in his
heroin and
cocaine trafficking ring on
Long Island. At the time of his partnership with 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. Germaine, Sr. became a close friend of Hill after the latter hired his son Germaine, Jr. to do some landscaping at Hill's
Rockville Centre home. Germaine, Jr. became a confidential
informant and began providing information to law enforcement which led to the arrest of fifteen members of Hill's drug ring, including his own father, after he was arrested for selling $1,200 worth of
Quaaludes to undercover police in
Nassau County. He is portrayed in
Goodfellas as the uncredited
drug dealer played by
Paul Herman.
Arrest and capture Nassau County investigators raided Germaine's Long Island home wearing
bulletproof vests and wielding
riot shotguns. When the cops walked in, Germaine Sr. insisted they had the wrong man and showed them his false identification claiming he was a
freelance writer. He even showed the investigators the
manuscript he was working on. The police brought him to the station house for questioning, whereupon they brought out his police record that he had received for a robbery conviction in
Albany, New York, thus falsifying his claim. Fingerprints taken after his arrest positively linked him with a botched multimillion dollar jewelry robbery in
Manhattan. His son, a high-school dropout who worked as a chemical store salesman, testified against his father during the trial. It was later revealed that Germaine Jr. turned into an informant for the police because of his own arrest for trafficking in cocaine and barbiturates supplied by his father. In 1980, Robert Germaine Jr. was shot and killed in
Kew Gardens, Queens on orders from
Jimmy Burke. The hitman was
Angelo Sepe, an associate of Burke. ==Writing career==