Leonard Lauder is crying foul over turncoat mobster Henry Hill’s claim that he took Estée Lauder out for cocktails while simultaneously robbing her townhouse of more than $1 million in jewels and furs.
Hill, who inspired the movie “GoodFellas,” made the claim to author Daniel Simone before his death in 2012. Hill said he and his men bound and gagged the cosmetics queen while ransacking her Manhattan home in 1978 — but that he untied Estée and took her for cocktails at PJ Clarke’s while his goons were stealing the goods.
But Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies, told us: “It is a totally made- up story and an obvious attempt to sanitize a crime. I arrived at my mother’s home 10 minutes after the robbers left. They had broken the door down, she had been held captive, she had been punched in the face and she was black and blue. This account is fiction. I cannot let it stand. It makes her sound like a foolish woman. She had never been to PJ Clarke’s in her life.”
We’re told that Estée, in her 70s at the time, was so devastated by the invasion that she couldn’t leave the house for days. Simone, whose “The Lufthansa Heist” is out to publishers through the Marianne Strong Literary Agency, said Tuesday of Hill’s tale, “Obviously, I wasn’t there, though Henry Hill attested to it in his various accounts to me.”