It is January 14th, 1979, a Sunday morning in Ozone Park, Queens. Thomas DeSimone is standing in front of a mirror, adjusting his tie. He is 32 years old, 6’2, 225 lb of muscle packed into a suit that costs more than most people’s rent. He looks like a man who is about to receive something he has wanted his entire life, and in a way, he is.
Today, Tommy DeSimone believes he will become a made man, a full member of the Lucchese crime family. The ceremony he has been promised would make him untouchable. It would mean that no one, not the Gambinos, not the feds, not the ghosts of the men he has killed, could lay a hand on him without starting a war. He kisses his mother goodbye.
She will later tell people that he seemed happy, excited even, like a kid on Christmas morning. He walks out the front door of the house where he grew up, climbs into a car with two men he trusts, and rides 8 mi through the gray January streets of New York City toward a house in Brooklyn. He will never be seen again.
In fewer than 30 minutes, less time than it takes to watch a single episode of a sitcom, Tommy DeSimone will walk through a door, realize no one is inside, and hear two words escape his own mouth before a bullet enters the back of his skull. Two words, “Oh, no.” But here is what Goodfellas did not tell you.
The movie shows Tommy getting whacked in a bar by John Gotti’s crew, quick, clean, almost dignified. The reality, at least four different accounts exist of how Tommy DeSimone actually died, who pulled the trigger, and what happened to his body afterward. One version says he was tortured for hours.
Another says he was shot once and fed to a scrapyard compactor in Philadelphia. A third says a chainsaw was involved. His body has never been found and the reason he was killed, the movie says it was about one murder, Billy Bats. The truth is that Tommy DeSimone had been writing his own death warrant for nearly a decade, one body at a time.
By January 1979, there were at least four separate reasons the mob wanted him dead. Any single one of them would have been enough. By the end of this video, you will know exactly what happened in that house in Brooklyn and why the real story is darker, stranger, and more human than anything Hollywood ever put on screen.
If stories like this fascinate you, the ones history tried to bury and Hollywood tried to rewrite, hit that subscribe button and the bell so you never miss one. Now, let me take you back to the beginning because to understand how Tommy DeSimone died, you need to understand how Tommy DeSimone does not begin with a bullet.
It begins with a family, Ozone Park, Queens in the 1950s, a neighborhood of row houses and chain-link fences where every other family had a connection to somebody and the somebody was always connected to the mob. Tommy was one of nine children born to George DeSimone, a glass installer who worked with his hands and kept his head down.
The father was legitimate, the son was not. By the time Tommy was a teenager, he was already running errands for Paul Vario’s Lucchese crew. He never finished more than high school, never held a real job longer than a few months of construction work that was really just a front. What Tommy had instead of a career was a reputation.
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He was enormous, 6’2, 225 with the face of a college quarterback and the temperament of a lit fuse. Henry Hill, who would later betray everyone he ever knew to save his own skin, remembered Tommy this way. Tommy DeSimone was a big guy, 6’2, 225, looked like a college athlete, but he was a stone killer.
That is not an exaggeration. Hill was many things, a liar, a drug addict, a snitch, but when it came to describing violence, he had no reason to embellish. The violence was already unbelievable enough. The man who shaped Tommy most was not his father. It was James Burke, an orphan from Hell’s Kitchen who had been in and out of reform schools since the age of 11 and had graduated to armed robbery before he could legally drive.
Burke was Irish, which meant he could never be made, but he was smarter and more vicious than most of the Italians above him. He became Tommy’s mentor, his surrogate older brother, the man who taught him that the shortest distance between a problem and a solution was a bullet. Burke loved Tommy. That love would not save him.
And then there was Henry Hill, Brooklyn-born, half Irish, half Italian, a school dropout at 11 who started as a gofer at the airport and worked his way into the crew by being useful and keeping his mouth shut. Hill was the opposite of Tommy, cautious where Tommy was reckless, calculating where Tommy was explosive.
The three of them, Burke, Hill, and DeSimone, became inseparable. They drank together, stole together, and on a night in January 1970, they beat a man nearly to death together. That night is where everything begins to unravel. But this story has more than one side. The men Tommy DeSimone killed were not abstractions.
Billy Batts was a made member of the Gambino family, a South Philadelphia kid who had grown up hard, done eight years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, and come home expecting to pick up where he left off. Foxy Gerathy was a low-level Gambino associate from Brooklyn, whose only crime was loving his sister enough to confront the man who was beating her.
These were men with families, with friends, with crews who would remember what was done to them. And in the world Tommy De Simone inhabited, memory was a death sentence. To understand why Tommy De Simone was murdered on a Sunday morning in January 1979, you need to understand the world he moved through, not as a movie set, but as a system.
A system with rules that Tommy could not stop breaking. The Lucchese family in the late 1970s was one of New York’s five families, smaller than the Gambinos, quieter than the Colombos, but deeply embedded in the airports, the unions, and the garment district. Paul Vario ran the Queens crew. He was not flashy. He was not violent, at least not personally.
What Vario was was political. He understood alliances, debts, and the cost of keeping someone alive who kept making enemies. Billy Batts, real name William Bentvena, was a Gambino soldier, born around 1932 in South Philadelphia, Italian family, childhood friend of a young John Gotti in the streets around Ozone Park.
Batts was old school. He had done eight years in Lewisburg for heroin. And when he walked out on January 2nd, 1970, he expected the world to be exactly the way he had left it. He threw himself a welcome home party. Freedom tasted good. It would last exactly nine days. John Gotti was 30 years old in 1970, a rising soldier in the Gambino family, and he remembered his friends.
When Bats disappeared after that night in the bar room, Gotti did not forget. He did not forgive. He was an Ozone Park native, same streets as Tommy, and in his world, killing a made man without permission was not just a crime. It was an insult that demanded blood. Gotti filed it away. He could wait. The Gambinos were patient.
Ronald Foxy Gerol was a different kind of problem. A low-level Gambino associate from Canarsie, Brooklyn, Gerol was not powerful. He was not connected enough to start a war, but his sister was dating Tommy DeSimone, and Tommy was beating her badly. When Gerol confronted Tommy about it, punched him, according to some accounts, he did not understand that he was confronting a man who solved every problem the same way.
Chivalry in this world was a death sentence. Tommy had two daughters with his wife Angela, known as Cookie. He was a family man in the technical sense. He came home, he paid the bills, he played the role, but the role was a mask over something empty and predatory. He carried a .38 revolver in a brown paper bag the way other men carried a sandwich to work.
Henry Hill would later say that Tommy killed like he was wired that way. Not with anger, not with hesitation, with the mechanical ease of a man performing a routine task. Think about that for a moment. A .38 in a brown paper bag, he would walk up to someone’s front door looking like he was delivering lunch. The person would open the door, and the last thing they would see was a man who looked like a movie star holding a crumpled paper bag with something heavy shifting inside it.
The Lucchese crew that Tommy ran with was small, three to five core members on any given job. Burke was the brains, Hill was the logistics, Tommy was the muscle and the madness. On the response side, the critical players were Taddy Cicero, a Lucchese soldier who ran a bar in Queens and had known Tommy since he was a kid, and Bruno Facciolo, another Lucchese associate.
The important detail is this: Tommy’s own family betrayed him. The men who picked him up that January morning were not Gambinos. They were Lucchese, his own people. Sometime in late 1978 or early January 1979, Paul Vario sat with a problem that had no good solution. Tommy DeSimone had killed a made Gambino man, Billy Batts, without permission.
He had killed Foxy Cerotha, a Gambino associate, without permission. He had been identified as a gunman in the Lufthansa heist, the biggest airport robbery in American history, which meant the FBI was circling, and his brother Anthony was feeding information to the FBI, which made the entire DeSimone name radioactive. Vario had two choices.
He could protect Tommy, shield him, hide him, go to war with the Gambinos over a man who could not stop killing people he was not supposed to kill. Or he could hand him over. There is no record of what Vario said, no quote, no memoir, no FBI transcript captures this moment. But the outcome tells you everything.
Vario chose to sacrifice Tommy DeSimone. He told the Gambinos where Tommy would be and when. More than that, he participated in the cruelest possible version of the betrayal. He told Tommy that the meeting was a making ceremony, that Tommy was finally going to receive the thing he had wanted his entire criminal life, to be made.
Whether Vario felt anything, guilt, regret, the weight of sending a man he had known since childhood to his death with a lie on his lips, no one knows. What we know is the mechanics. Vario told Cicero, Cicero told Fachiolo. They planned the pickup. They chose the house. And they let Tommy believe, all the way to the door, that he was about to become untouchable.
That is not strategy. That is slaughter dressed up as a promotion. And this is where the Goodfellas version falls apart completely. The movie shows Tommy getting dressed up, excited, walking into a room, and then bang, quick, almost merciful. What the movie does not show is the nine years of accumulating reasons, the four separate death warrants, the fact that his own boss, the man who was supposed to protect him, was the one who set the trap.
In the movie, Tommy is betrayed by enemies. In reality, he was betrayed by everyone. To understand the death, you have to understand the killings that caused it. And the first one, the one that lit the fuse, happened on a January night in 1970, in a bar in Queens that smelled like cigar smoke and stale beer.
The barroom lounge, January 11th, 1970, approximately 11:30 at night. Billy Batts is there, celebrating. He has been out of Lewisburg for nine days. He is drinking, laughing, catching up. The air is thick with smoke. The lighting is dim, and the jukebox is playing something no one will remember. Tommy DeSimone walks in with Burke and Hill.
They sit down. Drinks are poured. And then Batts makes a mistake that will cost him his life. He looks at Tommy’s shoes, shiny, polished, expensive, and says something along the lines of, “What are those, your dancing shoes? You look like a little girl.” It is possible that Batts meant it as a joke. It is possible that he was testing Tommy the way made men tested associates, a reminder of the hierarchy.
You are not one of us. I can say what I want to you. In the rigid caste system of the Mafia, a made man could insult an associate, and the associate was expected to take it. Tommy DeSimone was not built to take anything. What happened next took between 5 and 10 minutes. Tommy hit Bats first, then Burke joined in.
They beat him with fists, then with the butt of a pistol. Bats went down. They kept hitting him. The other people in the bar did what people in that world always did. They looked away. Henry Hill helped drag the unconscious body out the back and into the trunk of a car. Bats was bleeding from his ears. His face was unrecognizable, but he was breathing.
They could hear it, a wet, ragged sound that meant life was still clinging to him despite everything they had done. This was not Tommy’s first killing. It was not even his most casual. Around this same period, Tommy strangled a man named Dominic Ramo Sassani in the back seat of a car while Jimmy Burke drove. Henry Hill described it years later with a flat affect of a man recounting a commute.
He strangled Remo Sassani right in the car because Jimmy told him to. Wrapped a cord around his neck while Burke drove. That is the detail that tells you who Tommy DeSimone was, not the violence. Plenty of men in that world were violent. The ease, the way he could end a man’s life in a moving car and then go eat dinner. This is important, and I want you to hold on to it because when we get to the way Tommy died, the way it actually happened, not the movie version, you will understand something.
Tommy spent 9 years killing people the same way, close range, no warning, mechanical efficiency. And in the end, he died exactly the same way. The universe, or at least the Gambino family, has a sense of symmetry. They drove Bats north 150 miles from Queens up through the dark January highways of upstate New York to a piece of property owned by Burke Associates, a dog kennel.
3 hours of highway with the radio on and Billy Bats underneath them in the trunk still making sounds. The trunk of the car was supposed to be a coffin, but when they opened it at the burial site, Bats was still alive, moaning. They did not bury him. They drove back to the city. They left him there in the trunk for 2 weeks. Let that land.
14 days, a man locked in the trunk of a car in January in upstate New York. The cold may have kept him alive longer than 2 full weeks. A man who had celebrated his freedom from prison lost it and spent longer in that trunk than he had spent outside Lewisburg’s walls. When Burke and DeSimone returned on January 25th, they opened the trunk and found Billy Bats still breathing.
Still conscious enough to make sounds. They finished him with a shovel and a tire iron. Billy Bats was a made man. In the Mafia’s code, killing a made member without the permission of that member’s boss was a capital offense, not metaphorically, literally. The Gambino family knew almost immediately that Bats was gone. They knew who had done it.
And the clock started ticking. Not fast, not loud, but it started. Now, if you are watching this and thinking, “Why did the Gambinos not just kill Tommy right then in 1970?” The answer is politics. Tommy was under the protection of the Lucchese family. Paul Vario’s crew, killing him without Lucchese permission would start an interfamily war.
So, the Gambinos waited. They filed grievances through back channels. They applied pressure, and they kept score. Every body Tommy added to the list was another line item on a bill that would eventually come due. Here is something else the movie gets wrong. Goodfellas makes it look like the Bats killing was an impulsive bar fight that spiraled.
In reality, there is evidence the grave was pre-dug. That property upstate had been used before, which means at least part of this was planned. Tommy and Burke did not just snap. They walked into that bar knowing they might kill a man that night. The spontaneity was the insult. The response was premeditated.
The burial site would not hold its secret forever. Years later, when the property changed hands, what remained of Bats was discovered during construction. What was left of him was eventually moved. Some accounts say to a New Jersey junkyard, compacted with the rest of the scrap. Even in death, Billy Bats could not rest.
But Bats was only the first name on Tommy’s ledger. The next killing, the one that truly sealed his fate, would happen 4 years later at an apartment door in Brooklyn with a .38 revolver and a brown paper bag. Summer of 1974. July or August, the exact month is disputed, but the heat is not. Tommy DeSimone has been dating Ronald Foxy DiMeo’s sister, and he has been beating her. Foxy DiMeo was not a powerful man.
He was a low-level Gambino associate, a guy from Canarsie who worked the edges of the life without ever getting deep enough to be protected by it. But he loved his sister, and when he saw the bruises, he did what most brothers would do and what most mobsters would not. He confronted Tommy directly. Some accounts say he punched Tommy.
Others say he threatened to kill him. Either way, he crossed a line that, in Tommy’s mind, only had one response. On a day in the late summer of 1974, Tommy walked to Foxy Geroth’s apartment in Canarsie, Brooklyn. He carried the brown paper bag. He knocked on the door. Gerothy opened it. The distance between them was less than 10 ft, less than the length of a car, close enough to see the color of his eyes.
Tommy pulled the revolver from the bag and fired a single shot. Gerothy went down in his own doorway. The gunshot echoed through the narrow apartment hallway. The smell of gunpowder mixed with whatever had been cooking on the stove. Gerothy’s sister was in the apartment. She saw everything. Tommy turned around and walked away.
He drove off within minutes. No one was charged. Stop and think about who is watching. Foxy’s sister. She just saw her brother killed at his own front door by the man who was beating her. And she cannot say a word. Not to the police, not to anyone outside the life. Because in that world, talking gets you killed faster than punching someone does.
Foxy tried to protect his sister and died for it. His sister survived by staying silent. But Foxy Gerothy was a Gambino associate, however low-level, however unconnected, he belonged to someone. And the Gambinos added his name to the ledger, right below Billy Batts. The bill was growing. By the mid-1970s, Tommy DeSimone had become something rare and dangerous in the New York underworld, a man who killed without authorization, without hesitation, and without remorse.
The man who looked like a college athlete was assembling a resume of corpses that would have gotten anyone else killed years earlier. There was Remo Cersani, the way he had been strangled in the backseat while Burke drove. There was Billy Bats, beaten in a bar and finished with a shovel 2 weeks later.
There was Foxy Jerothe, shot at his own front door. There was Stanley Diamond, another victim whose death Tommy carried out with the same mechanical indifference. Each killing followed the same pattern, close range, minimal warning, the brown paper bag or a quick approach that gave the victim no time to react. Henry Hill, who watched all of this from close range and said nothing until it was profitable to talk, later offered what might be the most chilling epitaph anyone has ever received from a friend.
Tommy killed like he was wired that way. Not with passion, not with anger, with the flat, efficient repetition of a man performing a task he had been built to perform. A furnace burns, a clock ticks, Tommy killed. The problem was not that Tommy was violent, violence was the currency of their world. The problem was that Tommy was uncontrollable.
He killed associates. He killed people connected to other families without asking permission. In the mafia’s rigid hierarchy, this was not toughness. It was chaos, and chaos was bad for business. And here is the thing no one in that world could say out loud, but everyone understood. Tommy would never be made. He was half Italian, yes.
He was Lucchese connected, yes. But the Gambino family had an effective veto. As long as Billy Bats and Foxy Jeroth went unavenged, the Gambinos would block Tommy’s membership. The The he dreamed of was never going to happen. Everyone knew it, except Tommy. December 11th, 1978, 3:00 in the morning, John F.
Kennedy International Airport. A crew of armed men, organized by Jimmy Burke, executed by a team that allegedly included Tommy DeSimone, walks into the Lufthansa cargo building, and walks out with approximately 5 to 6 million dollars in cash and jewels, roughly 25 million in today’s money, enough to disappear forever.
Instead, nearly everyone involved would be dead within 2 years. It was the largest airport robbery in American history. The heist itself was brilliant. The aftermath was a bloodbath. Burke, the orphan who had learned to kill before he learned to read, became paranoid almost immediately. The crew members who had participated were liabilities, potential witnesses who could identify everyone involved.
One by one, they began to disappear. Stacks Edwards, a member of the heist crew, was one of the first. Tommy was sent to handle it. He shot Stacks Edwards five times in the head, not once to make sure. Five, the kind of overkill that tells you the shooter was not being thorough. He was being something else entirely. But the Lufthansa heist created a new problem, one that dwarfed the Gambino grudge.
The FBI had never worked a case this large. They were pulling every resource, pressuring every informant, showing mug shots to every witness. And someone, a witness inside the Lufthansa building, identified Tommy DeSimone from a photo array as one of the gunmen. Tommy was now a liability to everyone, to Burke, who needed the heist participants to stay silent or dead, to Vario, who needed the FBI’s attention to go anywhere else, To the Lucchese family who needed the Lufthansa heat to dissipate, and to the Gambinos who had been waiting 9 years
for the Lucchese family to stop protecting this particular psychopath. This is where the real story diverges so far from Goodfellas that they might as well be different universes. In the movie, Tommy’s death is about one thing, killing Billy Batts. In reality, by January 1979, Tommy DeSimone had at least four separate death warrants hanging over him.
The Batts killing, the Jerothe killing, the Lufthansa identification, and one more, the one his own brother created, Anthony DeSimone, Tommy’s brother, also connected to the Gambino family, also, as it turned out, an FBI informant. The revelation that Anthony was feeding information to the federal government did not just endanger Anthony, it contaminated the entire DeSimone name.
In the mafia’s logic, if one brother is a rat, the other brother is a risk. If Anthony was talking, who knew what Tommy might say if the FBI ever got close enough to offer him a deal. The family name had become poison. This was the final weight on the scale. Paul Vario looked at Tommy DeSimone and saw a man who had killed a Gambino made man, killed a Gambino associate, been identified in the largest heist in American history, and whose own brother was feeding intelligence to the FBI.
Any single one of these was enough to get a man killed. Together, they were a verdict. Count the reasons. Billy Batts, Foxy Jerothe, Lufthansa, Anthony. Four death warrants from at least two different families, plus the FBI circling like sharks. Tommy DeSimone, the man responsible for at least half a dozen murders, the man who walked through the world like he was bulletproof, had run out of lives.
He just did not know it. And the cruelest part, the man who decided Tommy’s fate, Paul Vario, chose not just to kill him, but to kill him with hope. The making ceremony, the promise of the one thing Tommy wanted most. Vario weaponized Tommy’s ambition. He turned Tommy’s dream into the bait that would walk him through the door of an empty house in Brooklyn.
It was January 14th, 1979, a Sunday. Tommy DeSimone woke up in Ozone Park, put on his finest suit, and kissed his mother goodbye. He believed he was about to become untouchable. He had 30 minutes to live. The car arrived sometime between 10:00 and 11:00 in the morning. Behind the wheel was Thomas Toddy Cicero, the Lucchese soldier who ran a bar in Queens, and had known Tommy since he was a teenager running errands on the block.
In the passenger seat was Bruno Facciola. Both men had known Tommy for years. They smiled, they shook hands, they drove south toward Brooklyn. The drive was 8 to 10 miles, 20 to 30 minutes through the winter streets of New York. The distance of a morning commute. The last drive of his life was shorter than most people’s trip to work.
Tommy sat in the back. He was wearing his best suit. His shoes were polished. His tie was straight. He was, by every account, in good spirits. This was the day he had been waiting for. After all the years, all the jobs, all the bodies, today he would be made. No one in the car told him the truth. The gray January sky over Brooklyn, the bare trees, the quiet streets of a Sunday morning in a working-class neighborhood.
The car pulled up to a house, possibly in the Flatlands area. The exact address has never been confirmed. It was an unremarkable building, the kind of place you would drive past a thousand times and never notice. Cicero told Tommy to go in, that the others were waiting. Tommy stepped out of the car. He walked to the front door. He went inside.
The house was empty. No table set for a ceremony, no boss waiting to lick his finger, no portrait of a saint to burn in his cupped hands, just an empty room that smelled of damp wood and neglect. And in that instant, in the space between stepping through the door and understanding what the emptiness meant, Tommy DeSimone knew.
There is a version of this story where Tommy fought, where he turned and reached for a weapon, where he tried to run. But every credible account says the same thing. It was over before it began. Tommy walked in. He saw the empty room, and he said two words that would be the last words he ever spoke. “Oh, no.” What happened next took fewer than five seconds, less time than it takes to read this sentence out loud.
Thomas Taddy Cicero, the man who had driven Tommy to the house, the man who had known him since he was a kid running errands in Queens, stepped behind Tommy DeSimone and fired a single shot into the back of his head at point-blank range. Tommy was dead before his body hit the floor. That is the version most widely accepted, the standard account derived from the circles around Henry Hill, and later compiled in Nicholas Pileggi’s reporting.
One shooter, one bullet, instant death. But the real story of Tommy DeSimone’s death is that there is no single real story. There are at least three, and they contradict each other in ways that have never been resolved. Version one, Cicero single shot back of the head quick and clinical. This is the account closest to what Goodfellas depicted minus the bar setting.
Version two comes from associates who claim that John Gotti’s crew, Gotti who had grown up on the same streets as Bats, who had waited nine years for this moment, got their hands on Tommy and made it last slowly, methodically, for hours before finishing him. Gotti would not have settled for a quick death. He wanted Tommy to understand what was happening and why.
Version three comes from Joe Dogs Iannuzzi, a mob informant who told the FBI flatly, “Thomas Agro did Tommy and he did Anthony DiSimone, too.” Agro was a Gambino associate, a different shooter entirely. Version four, the Gotti crew denied any involvement whatsoever. They claimed Tommy’s death was an internal Lucchese matter that Vario cleaned up his own mess without Gambino participation.
Which version is true? Nobody was ever recovered. No one was ever arrested. No forensic evidence exists. The only people who know for certain what happened in that house in Brooklyn are the people who were in that room and none of them have ever spoken publicly. What we have are informant testimonies, competing mob narratives, and the cold fact that Tommy DiSimone walked through a door on January 14th, 1979 and vanished from the face of the earth.
The disposal of the body is its own mystery. The most mundane version says Tommy was simply driven away and buried in an unmarked location that has never been found. A darker version involves the Atlantic Ocean. The most detailed account comes from an associate of Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski, Richie Beilstein, who told investigators Burke requested to take De Simone’s dead body to a Philadelphia scrap metal yard.
Melted down as scrap metal at US Steel. If true, Tommy De Simone’s remains were transported to Pennsylvania, fed into a scrap compactor alongside tons of industrial waste, and processed into raw steel. Think about that. A man who walked out of his mother’s house in a tailored suit on a Sunday morning, who kissed her goodbye believing he was about to receive the highest honor his world could bestow, and within hours his body may have been crushed into an anonymous cube of metal in a Pennsylvania steel yard. No funeral, no
grave, no marker, just a wife who would report him missing the next day, and two daughters who would grow up without ever knowing what happened to their father. Angela Cookie De Simone waited. Sunday night, nothing. Monday morning, nothing. On January 15th or 16th, the records are imprecise, she called the police and reported her husband missing.
They took the report. They filed it. They did not investigate with any urgency because in that neighborhood, in that world, men who went missing usually stayed missing. The case went cold almost immediately. It has never been solved, and Tommy was not the only De Simone to die that month.
His brother Anthony, the FBI informant whose cooperation had helped seal Tommy’s fate, was murdered in a separate hit carried out by Thomas Agro, a Gambino associate. Two brothers killed within weeks of each other. One for being uncontrollable, one for talking. The De Simone family lost two sons in the span of a single January.
So, how did Tommy De Simone actually die? The honest answer is we do not know for certain. What we know is that at least three different men have been named as the killer. At least four different methods of body disposal have been described, and the only point every account agrees on is this. Tommy walked into that house alive, and he never walked out.
The competing versions are not errors in the historical record. They are the historical record. In the world Tommy inhabited, truth was as disposable as the bodies. And the reason he was killed, not one murder, not one mistake. Four reasons, any one of which was enough, accumulated over nine years. Billy Batts, Foxy Jeroth, Lufthansa, Anthony, the movie compressed nine years of escalating consequences into a single act of impulsive violence.
The reality was slower, more deliberate, and infinitely crueler. A man walking toward his own death for nearly a decade, adding another reason with everybody, while the people around him quietly agreed on the ending, and waited for the right moment to execute it. But the death of Tommy DeSimone was not the end of the story.
It was the beginning of a myth, one that Hollywood would reshape, simplify, and in some ways get completely wrong. In 1985, Henry Hill sat down with journalist Nicholas Pileggi and told the story of his life. The book was called Wiseguy. In 1990, Martin Scorsese turned it into Goodfellas, and Tommy DeSimone became Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, who won an Academy Award for the role.
The character was 5’4″. The real Tommy was 6’2″. The character was killed in a bar by Gambino men. The real Tommy was lured to an empty house by his own crew. The character’s death was a sudden shock. The real Tommy’s death was 9 years in the making. Here is what the movie erased entirely. The role of the Lucchese family in Tommy’s death.
Goodfellas presents Tommy’s murder as a Gambino hit, revenge for Billy Batts, carried out by enemies. The reality is that Tommy was handed over by his own boss, Paul Vario, driven to his death by his own associate Tuddy Cicero, and killed in a house selected by his own family.
The betrayal did not come from across enemy lines. It came from inside the room. The Lucchese family traded Tommy DeSimone’s life for peace with the Gambinos, and the movie, told from Henry Hill’s perspective, quietly erased this complicity because Hill himself was Lucchese, and the story was easier to sell if the killers were strangers.
The film also reduced Tommy’s motive for death to a single killing, Billy Batts. The killing Fox’s sister saw through her own doorway is absent from the movie. The Lufthansa identification, the brother’s informant status, all of it simplified into one bar fight, and one act of retribution. Hollywood needed a clean narrative.
Reality was a web of overlapping debts, grudges, and calculations that spanned nearly a decade. Henry Hill, the man who told the story, profited enormously from it. Book deals, movie consulting fees, media appearances. He entered witness protection, battled alcoholism, was expelled from the program for repeated violations, and died in 2012 in a Los Angeles hospital at the age of 69.
He outlived Burke, who died of cancer in prison in 1996. He outlived Gotti, who died in a prison hospital in 2002. He outlived every single person in this story because he did the one thing Tommy would never have done. He talked. January 14th, 1979, a Sunday morning in Ozone Park, a man in the suit he had chosen that morning kisses his mother goodbye and walks out the front door believing he is about to become untouchable.
He rides 8 miles through gray winter streets. He walks through a door. He sees an empty room and he says two words, “Oh no.” before someone he trusted ends his life from behind. Tommy DeSimone was 32 years old, a body that has never been found. His wife reported him missing the next day. His two daughters grew up without him.
And the world remembers him not as he was, a glass installer’s son from Ozone Park who became the most dangerous man in a room full of killers, but as a 5-ft 4 character in a movie played for laughs and horror by an actor who looked nothing like him. The real Tommy DeSimone did not die like the movies.
