In the world of American organized crime, few names carry the weight of the Gambino family. And on January 14, 1979, in a quiet house in Queens, a man named Tommy DeSimone walked through the front door believing he was about to become a made member of the Lucchese crime family. He had dressed carefully, with the confidence of a man who had spent his entire life pursuing this exact moment. What he walked into instead was an empty room, shadows, and men he did not recognize moving toward him.
In his final seconds, DeSimone understood the truth: he was never getting made. He was getting collected. Thomas Anthony DeSimone was born on May 24, 1950, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his family relocated to New York while he was young. His brothers were already connected to the criminal underworld, meaning Tommy was raised inside the life rather than stumbling into it.
By his teenage years, he was committing street crimes, and by his early twenties, he had already killed. Those who knew him described a 6-foot-2, physically imposing man who styled his hair like Errol Flynn, carried two pearl-handled pistols—earning him the nickname “Two Gun Tommy”—and possessed a terrifying lack of impulse control. He did not kill strategically or when ordered; he killed when insulted, when embarrassed, or when his temper simply overwhelmed him. A bartender who made a wrong joke, a made man who disrespected him, a rival family associate who threatened him over a woman—DeSimone responded to every provocation with lethal, permanent force.
DeSimone worked as an associate for the Lucchese family under capo Paul Vario, operating out of Roberts Lounge in South Ozone Park, Queens, alongside Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill. Their operations included hijackings, loan sharking, and gambling. DeSimone was considered a good earner and genuinely fearless, which made him useful. But every man around him understood that his violence would eventually become catastrophic.
In organized crime, a man who cannot control his violence is not an asset; he is a ticking clock. They kept using him anyway, right up until the moment they didn’t. To understand why DeSimone died, one must understand the political architecture of the Five Families. New York in the 1970s was divided between the Gambinos, Luccheses, Genoveses, Colombos, and Bonannos, five organizations coexisting because of an unwritten set of rules treated as absolute by every man in the life.
The most important rule was simple: you do not kill a made man without permission from the boss himself. A made man was institutional property, and harming one without authorization was a structural violation that could collapse the entire system if left unaddressed. Permanent willingness to kill those they knew from the source is a structural violation that could collapse the entire system if left unaddressed. permanent willingness to kill those they knew from the source is a structural violation that could collapse the entire system if left unaddressed.
permanent willingness to kill those they knew from the source are structural violations that could collapse the entire system if left unaddressed. By the 1970s, the Gambinos were the most powerful family in New York, having been built methodically by Carlo Gambino. Rising through its ranks was a capo named John Gotti, not yet the tabloid figure he would later become, but already dangerous in the particular way that patient, ambitious men are dangerous. Gotti’s power did not rest solely on violence; it rested on memory.
He remembered every slight, every violation, every name, and he did not react immediately. He filed things away and waited for the right political conditions before collecting. In the mafia, patience is the most expensive currency there is, because most men cannot afford it. Their tempers and egos will not allow it.
Gotti’s would. That made him genuinely terrifying to anyone who had ever crossed him, because they never knew when the bill was coming—only that it was. DeSimone crossed the Gambinos twice. Both violations were logged in Gotti’s ledger, and both times DeSimone walked away thinking he had gotten away with it.
He had not. Nobody ever really gets away with it; they just haven’t been collected yet. The first violation occurred on June 11, 1970, at the Bamboo Lounge in Queens. Billy Batts, whose real name was William Bentvena, was celebrating having been released from prison less than two months earlier after serving six years on a heroin conspiracy charge.
While Batts was inside, his rackets did not sit empty. Jimmy Burke, who was not Italian and could never be made, had stepped in to run Batts’s loan sharking and bookmaking networks, expanding them and building relationships over a decade. When Batts returned expecting to reclaim what was his, Burke had no intention of giving any of it back. That night, Batts began insulting DeSimone, making comments about him shining shoes and not being made.
DeSimone’s rage was real, and when the lounge emptied, he beat Batts unconscious with his fists and steel-toed shoes. According to Henry Hill’s testimony, Burke stood by and let it happen, and when it became clear Batts was badly hurt but still breathing, Burke made the decision to finish it. They wrapped Batts in tablecloths, placed him in the trunk of Henry Hill’s car, drove upstate, and buried him in a shallow grave, pouring lime over the body. The Gambinos suspected Burke and DeSimone, but suspicion without proof could not justify moving against another family’s associates.
The clock had started, and it would run for nine years. The second violation came in December 1974, four years after Billy Batts. This killing is almost entirely omitted from the film *Goodfellas*, but it matters enormously. DeSimone killed Ronald Giaratano, known as Foxy, a Gambino associate connected directly to John Gotti’s crew out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club.
Giaratano was not a made man, but he had Gotti’s sponsorship, which carried its own form of institutional protection. In the mafia, killing someone’s guy without permission is a message: your people don’t matter to me. The motive for Giaratano’s murder is not confirmed in court records or sworn testimony. The version that has circulated through mob circles for decades is that DeSimone was involved with Giaratano’s sister, the relationship went badly, and DeSimone assaulted her.
When Giaratano threatened to kill DeSimone over it, DeSimone went to Giaratano’s apartment and shot him first. Enduring street knowledge in organized crime survives for a reason; enough people knew enough pieces that the story held together across years and investigations. What is not disputed is the outcome: Giaratano was dead, and the Gambinos knew who killed him. In Gotti’s ledger, the entry was made.
The murders of Billy Batts and Ronald Giaratano were two separate violations, but they were part of a larger pattern. Tommy DeSimone killed Parnell “Stacks” Edwards in December 1978, shooting him six times in his Ozone Park apartment because he had forgotten to dump a van after the Lufthansa heist. Henry Hill testified that DeSimone had killed multiple other people throughout the decade, on contract and purely personal. Paul Vario, DeSimone’s own capo, knew all of it, and he knew the Gambinos had grievances.
But DeSimone was useful; he earned, and he scared people into paying debts. Vario kept making the political calculation that DeSimone’s value outweighed his cost, until it didn’t. By late 1978, the aftermath of Lufthansa was drawing FBI attention onto Burke’s crew, and DeSimone’s visibility made him a problem for his own family. At some point, Vario stopped calculating whether to protect DeSimone and started calculating whether protecting him was worth the cost.
The answer came back no. When the Gambinos formally requested permission to kill DeSimone, Vario either approved it or did not object. In that world, silence is consent. After the Jerothe killing, the Gambinos could not ignore the loss of a connected man.
Gotti traced the killing back to DeSimone and added it to the ledger. The murder was a direct breach of the principle of institutional protection, and Gotti had been waiting since 1974 for an opportunity to collect. By January 1979, DeSimone had spent nine years living on borrowed time without understanding it. He believed his violence made him untouchable, and every killing reinforced that belief.
In reality, his violence was exactly the reason he had to die. The mechanics of how the Gambinos collected him were simple and cruel. They told him he was finally being made. They told him the ceremony was happening, that he was being inducted into the Lucchese family.
DeSimone had spent his entire adult life wanting this; being made meant protection, status, and recognition. On January 14, 1979, he got the call and dressed himself carefully. He showed up at a house in Queens expecting wine and made men welcoming him into the brotherhood. Instead, he walked into an empty room with men he didn’t recognize moving toward him.
Henry Hill later said DeSimone understood instantly what was happening. The door closed. Multiple gunshots were heard. Tommy DeSimone, 28 years old, died in that room.
His body was never found. Charles Carneglia, a Gambino hitman connected to Gotti, was later linked to the execution by multiple sources, but Gotti’s direct involvement has never been confirmed in court. The men who killed DeSimone never needed to be dangerous; they just needed to wait. Martin Scorsese’s *Goodfellas* tells a version of this story in which DeSimone dies because he killed a made man, a clean narrative of cause and effect.
But that version makes his death feel almost fair and proportionate, and reality does not have moral architecture. DeSimone was not killed because the universe balanced its books on Billy Batts. He was killed because he had become structurally incompatible with organized crime. He crossed the Gambinos twice on record, created FBI exposure for the Lucchese family at the worst possible moment, and gave his own capo a reason to step aside rather than defend him.
The movie strips out Ronald Jerothe entirely, removing the accumulation principle. It turns DeSimone’s death into a story about one mistake rather than the story of a man whose entire personality was a mistake. The real lesson is colder: the Gambinos killed DeSimone because he kept violating the system, and no system can function when violations go uncollected. Violence is not power in the mafia; it is a tool with a proper use.
When used correctly, with authorization and within the political framework, a man is an asset. When used personally and impulsively across family lines without permission, a man transforms into a liability. In the mafia, liabilities are written off permanently. DeSimone killed again and again, and nothing happened, and he walked around Queens for nine years like a man who had gotten away with it.
What he never understood is that getting away with it and being safe are two completely different things. The Gambinos were never going to forget. They logged, they waited, and they collected. Henry Hill survived because he understood one thing DeSimone never did: the life was a business, and you cannot accumulate enemies you can’t pay off.
Hill flipped and entered witness protection in 1980, testifying about everything. He died in 2012 still telling the story. Tommy DeSimone died in 1979 at age 28, his body never found. Jimmy Burke died in prison in 1996, never formally charged with Billy Batts.
Paul Vario died in prison in 1988. John Gotti eventually became boss of the Gambino family and died in prison in 2002. The men who collected on DeSimone all outlived him.
In organized crime, patience is the only currency that never loses value.