Well, they're criminals, violent at that. Their actions have reprecussions for them, even if a morality tale is discounted as a reason for their downfall in the film. So "crime ultimately doesn't pay" could be seen as the crux of the story, even though Noodles walks away with a suitcase full of money in the end, but without love.
That said, the story was based on several fictional dramas. Leone used Jack London's novel "Martin Eden" as an inspiration, it's about a man who becomes cynical and disillusioned with his surroundings, fittingly here for a world of harsh crime, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby", about a man who chases wealth and power to impress the woman he loves, but ends in unexpected tragedy, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087843/trivia?item=tr0786115
Noodles' tragic romance with Deborah is taken from Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra," so that explains the heightened drama there, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087843/trivia?item=tr0786123
I'm not familiar with the major basis, Harry Grey's (Herschel Goldberg) partly autobiographical book "The Hoods". Leone met Grey, "the real" Noodles, several times, and while Leone absorbes as much as he could about the world Noodles inhabitated, Leone describes him by "The grotesque realism of this elderly gangster" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087843/trivia?item=tr0785887
Herschel "Harry Grey" Goldberg himself was (presumably happily) married with three kids, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Grey, and http://msb247.awardspace.com/sources/palmsprings.pdf, or https://web.archive.org/web/20160314220658/http://msb247.awardspace.com/sources/palmsprings.pdf, so, while Leone was fascinated with Grey's story and the world around it, he chose to spice it up with several fictional tragedies. That may be why it feels a little artificial, it mostly didn't actually happen the way it's depicted.
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