On June 11, 1970, a made man in the Gambino crime family celebrated his release from federal prison. By midnight, he lay beaten unconscious in a Queens bar, was wrapped in tablecloths, stuffed into the trunk of a car, and buried in a shallow grave upstate. Millions of viewers know this story from Goodfellas, which presented the murder as the work of a psychopath named Tommy DeSimone, provoked beyond control by a joke about shining shoes. That version became popular history.
But the killing of William “Billy Bats” Bentvena was not a crime of passion. It was a business decision, shaped by money, territory, and the cold arithmetic of organized crime. Bentvena was born in 1933 in New York City and came up in the Italian neighborhoods that produced most of the men in that world. By his twenties, he was a soldier in the Gambino family, then the most powerful crime organization in the country under boss Carlo Gambino.
A made man in that era carried real weight. Bentvena was an earner. He ran loan sharking, bookmaking, and hijacking, and he built valuable connections at Idlewild Airport, later renamed JFK. His relationships with dock workers and cargo handlers turned stolen goods into consistent, reliable income that flowed upward through the crime family’s structure.
His capos took their share, the bosses got their tribute, and everyone above him benefited from his productivity. In 1962, Bentvena went to federal prison on a heroin conspiracy charge, sentenced to fifteen years. He was gone for the better part of a decade, and while he sat in a cell, the rackets he had built did not disappear. They were redistributed.
Someone had to collect the loan shark payments, manage the bookmakers, and keep money moving up the chain. That someone was James “Jimmy” Burke. Burke was not Italian, and that single fact limited his entire criminal career. No Sicilian blood meant no button, no formal membership in the mob’s ruling structure.
Burke knew it his whole life. So he built something else: influence. He ran a network so deeply embedded in the infrastructure of Kennedy Airport and the neighborhoods around it that the Lucchese family needed him even while never fully claiming him. Operating out of Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, he controlled hijacking, fencing, loan sharking, and bookmaking.
He had truck drivers on his payroll, airport workers tipping him off about valuable cargo, and police officers accepting small bribes to keep investigations quiet. In the years Bentvena spent in prison, Burke took over parts of his operation. He absorbed contacts Bentvena had developed with cargo handlers and freight workers and gradually made that territory his own. When Bentvena finally left prison in early 1970, Burke understood exactly what would happen next.
A made man returning from jail expected to reclaim what belonged to him. He would make phone calls, ask questions, and reassert control over his old operations. For Burke, that meant renegotiation, and renegotiation meant losing income he had collected for nearly a decade. Burke was not a man who gave things back once he had them, not unless he had no choice.
There is no surviving wiretap or documented conversation proving that Burke and Tommy DeSimone planned the murder. But the logic is clear from how these men operated. If Burke sat down with Bentvena and negotiated, he would lose territory. If Bentvena simply did not come home, Burke kept everything.
The second option required someone to act, and Burke could not do it himself. He was an associate of the Lucchese family moving against a made man in the Gambino family. An open strike would be suicide. DeSimone was different.
He had a notorious temper, well known throughout the life. If Tommy killed Bentvena in a rage over a personal insult, it would look like an outburst, not a plan. Burke could stand back, claim he tried to stop it, and absorb only a manageable risk, especially if the body was never found. Bentvena had been out of prison less than two months when he showed up at the Bamboo Lounge in Queens on June 11, 1970.
He was celebrating his return, accepting handshakes and drinks from men who had known him for years. Henry Hill was there, twenty-six years old, watching. DeSimone walked in with his girlfriend. He was twenty years old and had already built a reputation as a killer.
In that world, tolerated disrespect was a sign of weakness, so Tommy’s sensitivity to insult was constant. According to Henry Hill’s testimony, the primary account of that night, Bentvena made a comment about Tommy shining shoes as a kid. It was the kind of dig older men used to remind younger associates of their place. Tommy sat down, had a drink, and said nothing.
Bentvena kept going, pushing the same button, reminding Tommy that he was an associate, not a made man, in front of a room of other men. Tommy reached his limit. After the bar cleared, he walked over to Bentvena and started the beating, using fists and steel-toed shoes until the man was unconscious. Burke did not pull him off.
According to Henry Hill, Burke joined in, holding Bentvena down and helping finish it. That detail matters more than anything else in the story. Burke was not a man who acted on instinct. He calculated.
Once Bentvena was dying, the line was already crossed. The only way to protect everyone in the room was to make sure he never talked about what happened. They wrapped him in tablecloths, put him in the trunk of Henry Hill’s car, drove him upstate, finished him, buried him in dirt, and poured lime over the grave. Then they went back to their lives.
The burial was only the beginning of the cover-up. The Gambino family knew Bentvena was missing and suspected foul play almost immediately. Men like that do not simply vanish. But suspicion is not proof, and in the mafia, you do not move against another family without certainty.
The Gambinos waited, logged the debt, and asked quiet questions that produced no answers. Burke, DeSimone, and Hill said nothing. The silence held for six years. Then, in 1976, the land where the body was buried changed hands and construction was coming.
Burke got word and sent people to move the remains. The body was relocated and never found again. There was no forensic identification, no physical evidence that ever reached a courtroom. Just a missing made man and a story that circulated in whispers.
On January 14, 1979, almost nine years after Bentvena died in the Bamboo Lounge, DeSimone got what he believed was the news he had waited for his entire adult life. He was being made. He was finally going to become a formal member of the Lucchese crime family. He told people close to him and showed up at a house in Queens expecting a ceremony of wine, cigars, and a room full of made men welcoming him in.
Instead, the room was empty. Men he did not recognize moved toward him. He understood instantly. The door closed, shots rang out, and DeSimone died at twenty-eight.
His body was never recovered. The hit was ordered by the Gambino family. The officially cited reason was Billy Bats. But Bentvena was not the only mark on the ledger.
In December 1974, DeSimone had killed Ronald Jerothe, a Gambino associate connected to John Gotti. Gotti was not yet boss, but he was a rising capo, ambitious and patient, and Jerothe was his man. DeSimone killed him over a personal dispute without permission. The Gambinos now had two unsanctioned killings of their people to settle, and when they finally received permission to act, they cited both.
Paul Vario, DeSimone’s capo in the Lucchese family, knew the hit was coming. According to mob historians and cooperating witnesses, Vario calculated that DeSimone had become too expensive to protect. He had killed too many people and created too many enemies. When the Gambinos asked for permission, Vario either approved it quietly or stepped aside.
In that world, silence is consent. Burke knew as well, and even he could not protect his most reliable killer. The debt was too large and the creditors too powerful. John Gotti’s direct involvement in the execution has never been confirmed in court, but multiple sources place him close to it.
Whether he approved it or participated directly, the debt was collected. The tragedy of DeSimone’s death was that he walked into that room believing the life had finally rewarded him. The bill had actually been accumulating for nine years. Goodfellas remains a masterpiece, but it was always Henry Hill’s story, shaped by what he saw and what he chose to remember.
Henry saw the violence and recorded what happened in front of him, but he did not see the calculations behind it. Tommy’s rage was real and the beating happened as shown. But Burke’s participation was not rage. His help with the disposal and his silence for nine years while he kept the operations he had built on Bentvena’s old territory was strategy.
Billy Bats died because he came home to a world that had reorganized itself without him. Eight years of imprisonment meant no earning and no contribution to the men on the outside. Burke spent those same years building a network of influence. In the logic of organized crime, that investment mattered.
Bentvena walking back in and expecting to reclaim what was his was a direct threat to everything Burke had built. Men like Burke respond to threats with elimination, not negotiation. Tommy provided the rage and Burke provided the decision. A soldier in the most powerful crime family in America died not because of a joke about shining shoes, but because of money, territory, and the mathematics of organized crime.
His body was moved twice and never found. His killers walked free for years, and only DeSimone ever paid a price, and even then, for a different debt.