On the morning of January 14, 1979, Thomas DeSimone stood before a mirror in his childhood home in Ozone Park, Queens, adjusting a tie that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. At thirty-two, six-foot-two and 225 pounds, he cut the figure of a man about to receive something he had wanted his entire criminal life. He believed that within the hour he would become a made man, a full member of the Lucchese crime family. He kissed his mother goodbye, and those who saw him later recalled that he seemed excited, like a child on Christmas morning.
He climbed into a car with two men he trusted and rode eight miles through gray January streets toward a house in Brooklyn. He was never seen again. In less than thirty minutes, he would walk through a door, find the house empty, and utter two words, “Oh, no,” before a bullet entered the back of his skull. The version of Tommy DeSimone’s death immortalized in Goodfellas shows him being killed in a bar by John Gotti’s crew, quick and almost dignified.
The reality is more complicated. At least four different accounts exist of how he 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 scrap compactor in Philadelphia.
A third claims a chainsaw was involved, and his body has never been found. To understand his death, one must understand his life. Tommy was one of nine children born to George DeSimone, a legitimate glass installer who kept his head down. The son did not follow that path.
By his teenage years, Tommy was running errands for Paul Vario’s Lucchese crew in Queens. He never finished more than high school, never held a real job beyond construction work that was a front. What he had instead was a reputation. He was enormous, athletic, and volatile.
Henry Hill, who would later betray everyone he knew to save himself, remembered him as a big guy who looked like a college athlete but was a stone killer. The man who shaped Tommy most was not his father but James Burke, an orphan from Hell’s Kitchen who had been in reform schools since age eleven 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.
Along with Henry Hill, the three became inseparable. They drank together, stole together, and beat men nearly to death together. The first killing that lit the fuse came on the night of January 11, 1970, in a bar in Queens. Billy Batts, a made Gambino soldier, had just been released from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary nine days earlier.
He was throwing himself a welcome home party when Tommy walked in with Burke and Hill. Batts, old school and secure in his rank, made a mistake. He looked at Tommy’s shiny polished shoes and mocked him, asking what they were, dancing shoes, saying he looked like a little girl. In the rigid caste system of the Mafia, a made man could insult an associate and expect the associate to accept it.
Tommy DeSimone was not built to accept anything. What followed took five to ten minutes. Tommy hit Batts first, then Burke joined in. They beat him with fists and the butt of a pistol.
Batts went down, his face unrecognizable, bleeding from the ears, but still breathing. The others in the bar looked away. Henry Hill helped drag the unconscious body out the back and into the trunk of a car. They drove 150 miles north to a dog kennel owned by Burke associates in upstate New York.
When they opened the trunk at the burial site, Batts was still alive, moaning. They did not bury him. They left him in that trunk for two weeks. When Burke and DeSimone returned on January 25, they found Batts still breathing.
They finished him with a shovel and a tire iron. Billy Batts was a made man. Killing a made member of another family without permission was a capital offense in the Mafia’s code. The Gambinos knew almost immediately who had done it, and John Gotti, who had grown up on the same streets and considered Batts a childhood friend, did not forget.
But Tommy was protected by the Luccheses, and killing him without their permission would start an interfamily war. So the Gambinos waited. They kept score. The second killing came in the summer of 1974.
Tommy was dating the sister of Ronald “Foxy” Gerothe, a low-level Gambino associate from Canarsie. He was beating her badly. When Foxy confronted him, perhaps punching him, he crossed a line Tommy believed had only one response. One day, Tommy walked to Foxy’s apartment in Canarsie carrying a .
38 revolver in a brown paper bag. He knocked. When Foxy opened the door, Tommy pulled the revolver and fired a single shot. Foxy went down in his own doorway, and his sister, who witnessed everything, could say nothing to anyone.
The Gambinos added Foxy’s name to the ledger right below Billy Batts. By the mid-1970s, Tommy had become something rare and dangerous in the New York underworld, a man who killed without authorization, without hesitation, and without remorse. There was Remo Cersani, strangled in the back seat while Burke drove. There was Billy Batts.
There was Foxy Gerothe. There was Stanley Diamond. Each killing followed the same pattern: close range, minimal warning, mechanical efficiency. Henry Hill later offered the most chilling epitaph anyone ever received from a friend: Tommy killed like he was wired that way.
Not with passion, not with anger, but with the flat repetition of a man performing a task he was built to perform. The problem was not that Tommy was violent, violence was the currency of his world. The problem was that he was uncontrollable. And everyone in that world understood something Tommy did not: he would never be made.
As long as Billy Batts and Foxy Gerothe went unavenged, the Gambinos would block his membership. The final weight came from the Lufthansa heist. On December 11, 1978, a crew organized by Jimmy Burke, allegedly including Tommy DeSimone, walked into the Lufthansa cargo building at JFK Airport and walked out with approximately five to six million dollars in cash and jewels, the largest airport robbery in American history. The aftermath was a bloodbath.
Burke became paranoid almost immediately, and crew members began to disappear. Tommy was sent to handle Stacks Edwards, a heist participant, and shot him five times in the head. But the heist created a new problem that dwarfed the Gambino grudge. The FBI pulled every resource, pressed every informant, and showed mug shots to every witness.
Someone identified Tommy from a photo array as one of the gunmen. Tommy was now a liability to everyone. And then there was one more reason, the one created by his own brother. Anthony DeSimone, also connected to the Gambino family, was an FBI informant.
In the logic of the Mafia, if one brother is a rat, the other brother is a risk. The family name had become poison. 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. Sometime in late 1978 or early January 1979, Vario made his choice. He would sacrifice Tommy to appease the Gambinos. He told Tommy that a making ceremony had been arranged, that Tommy was finally going to receive the one thing he had wanted his entire criminal life.
Vario weaponized Tommy’s ambition. On January 14, 1979, the car arrived sometime between ten and eleven in the morning. Behind the wheel was Thomas “Toddy” Cicero, a Lucchese soldier who had known Tommy since he was a teenager. In the passenger seat was Bruno Facciola.
They drove south toward Brooklyn. Tommy sat in the back, wearing his best suit, in good spirits. No one in the car told him the truth. The car pulled up to an unremarkable house in the Flatlands area of Brooklyn.
Cicero told Tommy to go inside, that the others were waiting. Tommy stepped out, walked to the front door, and went in. The house was empty. No table set for a ceremony, no portrait of a saint, just an empty room that smelled of damp wood.
In that instant, Tommy understood. He said two words: “Oh, no. ” Thomas Cicero stepped behind him and fired a single shot into the back of his head. That is the most widely accepted version.
But there are others. Some associates claimed that John Gotti’s crew got their hands on Tommy and made it last for hours. A mob informant named Joe Dogs Iannuzzi told the FBI that a Gambino associate named Thomas Agro did Tommy, and Agro also killed Anthony DeSimone in a separate hit. The Gotti crew denied any involvement, claiming it was an internal Lucchese matter.
The disposal of the body is its own mystery. The most mundane version says Tommy was buried in an unmarked location that has never been found. A darker version involves the Atlantic Ocean. The most detailed account came from an associate of Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski, who told investigators that Burke requested the dead body be taken to a Philadelphia scrap metal yard, where it was melted down as scrap steel.
If true, Tommy DeSimone’s remains were crushed into an anonymous cube of metal. His wife Angela reported him missing the next day. The case went cold almost immediately and has never been solved. His brother Anthony was murdered within weeks.
The DeSimone family lost two sons in a single January. 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.
The character was five-foot-four; the real Tommy was six-foot-two. The character was killed in a bar by Gambino men; the real Tommy was lured to an empty house by his own crew. The movie erased the role of the Lucchese family entirely. The betrayal did not come from across enemy lines.
It came from inside the room. The movie also reduced Tommy’s death to a single killing, Billy Batts. The killing of Foxy Gerothe, the Lufthansa identification, the brother’s informant status, all of it was simplified into one bar fight. Henry Hill profited enormously from the story.
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 person in this story because he did the one thing Tommy would never have done. He talked.
Tommy DeSimone was thirty-two years old when he died, a body that has never been found. His two daughters grew up without ever knowing what happened to their father. 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 fictional character played for laughs and horror by an actor who looked nothing like him. The real Tommy DeSimone did not die like the movies.
He died like the mob, quietly, efficiently, and without a trace.