In January 1979, a young man in Queens dressed in his best suit, combed his hair, and climbed into a car he believed was taking him to the most important night of his life. He had been told he was finally getting made, earning full membership in the Lucchese crime family. He never arrived.
His name was Thomas James DeSimone. On the streets he was known as Two Gun Tommy, Tommy D, and in his worst moments simply as the animal. He was the man Joe Pesci played in Goodfellas, the film that convinced the world it understood the mob.
The movie got a lot right. But it skipped one murder entirely, a killing that planted the seed of Tommy's own destruction and that the official version still gets wrong today. Hollywood says Tommy killed Foxy Cerone to protect his sister's honor. The street version is messier, and it always is.
What really drove Tommy DeSimone to walk up to Foxy's apartment door and pull the trigger was not protecting anyone. It was jealousy, rage, and the same psychotic possessiveness that made him both the most dangerous man in the room and the most doomed.
Tommy DeSimone was born on June 6, 1946, the youngest of eight children in South Ozone Park, Queens. His father ran a printing shop. On paper there was nothing particularly criminal about the family, but in that neighborhood in the late 1940s and 1950s, the line between legitimate and criminal was more of a suggestion than a rule.
Ozone Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Southeast Queens were gangster country. The same streets that produced Tommy DeSimone also produced John Gotti. The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, where Gotti ran his crew, was practically around the corner from where Tommy grew up.
Tommy had two brothers, Robert and Anthony, both of whom would eventually associate with the Gambino crime family. Anthony would be murdered by mobster Thomas Agro in 1979, the same year Tommy vanished. Tommy also had a sister named Phyllis, who became the long-time mistress of Jimmy Burke, the man the movies called Jimmy Conway.
The DeSimones were tangled into organized crime from every direction before Tommy ever made a choice about it. But his path into the life was not inevitable. There was a decision point, as there always is.
His teenage years revolved around boxing, lifting weights, and a punching bag he kept in a spare room. He collected pocket knives in an old cigar box under his bed. He had a short fuse and drank almost a gallon of whole milk a day. He was wiry and intense, the kind of kid who looked younger than his age because he was trying so hard to look older.
In 1965, at age 19, Tommy was introduced to Paul Vario, a caporegime in the Lucchese crime family who ran his crew out of East New York, Brooklyn. Vario was the man Goodfellas called Paulie: respected, feared, patient, everything Tommy was not.
Henry Hill, already one of Vario's earners and a few years older than Tommy, described their first meeting in the book Wiseguy. Jimmy Burke brought in this skinny kid wearing a wiseguy suit. Hill taught him the cigarette business, and they started selling stolen cigarettes at construction sites, garment factories, and sanitation department garages.
Pretty soon they were making $300 to $400 a day in cash. For a 19-year-old kid from Queens in 1965, that was a fortune. But the money was not what drove Tommy DeSimone. What drove him was the feeling of being feared. He needed it, and he was built around it.
Henry Hill said Tommy committed his first murder at around age 22, killing a man named Howard Goldstein, who had done nothing except be in Tommy's way at the wrong moment. When Hill confronted him, Tommy said, "Well, I'm a mean cat." That was Tommy's philosophy in four words: not calculation, not business, pure predatory instinct.
By 1967, Tommy DeSimone was already a proven earner and a reliable weapon, and Jimmy Burke had bigger plans. Air France was the carrier of American currency exchanged across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era, and the airline contracted to return that money to US banks.
Linen bags, each containing $60,000, were shipped to the Air France cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Sometimes up to $1 million a week passed through that building. The security guarding all of it was a single private guard who took his meal break just before midnight.
On April 7, 1967, Jimmy Burke got a tip from an inside man at the terminal. An Air France employee named Robert McMahon, drowning in gambling debts, told Burke that a delivery of between $400,000 and $700,000 would be coming in, and that the best window was just before midnight when the guard stepped away.
At 11:40 p.m., Henry Hill and Tommy DeSimone walked into the Air France cargo terminal at JFK. No masks, no guns drawn. They just walked in carrying the largest empty suitcase Hill could find, like two men picking up lost luggage.
McMahon had given them a duplicate key. They found seven linen bags in the dark using a small flashlight, loaded them into the suitcase, and walked out. No alarm, no shots, no one hurt. The theft was not even discovered until Monday morning when a Wells Fargo truck arrived and found nothing there.
The $420,000 was split multiple ways, clean as anything these men ever did. But that was not the crime that built Tommy DeSimone's legend. That came three years later, on a June night in 1970, when Tommy did the one thing that would eventually get him killed.
On June 11, 1970, at the Suite nightclub, Henry Hill's place in Queens, a party was held for William Bentvena, known as Billy Bats. He was a made man in the Gambino family out of John Gotti's crew, fresh out of six years in federal prison on a drug charge.
The place was set up with food, booze, and girls. It was a good night. Then Billy Bats made a joke. He looked across the room at Tommy DeSimone and asked, laughing, whether Tommy still shined shoes. It was a callback to something from years earlier, when Tommy had briefly worked as a shoeshine boy as a kid.
Bats meant it as a rib, as ball-busting between men who knew each other. But Tommy was not built for that kind of ribbing. He leaned over to Hill and Burke and said quietly, "I'm going to kill that fuck."
They told him to cool it. Billy Bats was a made man, an untouchable, a soldier in the Gambino family. If Tommy so much as raised his hand to Bats, Tommy was dead.
For the rest of the night, Tommy held it together. He even sent his girlfriend home. That was the tell. Henry Hill saw him do it and knew what was coming. Tommy whispered to Hill to keep Bats there, then went for a bag, a body bag, a plastic mattress cover so Bats would not bleed all over the floor.
When Tommy came back, he pulled out a .38. He pistol-whipped Bats across the side of the skull, then again. Jimmy Burke wrapped his arm around Bats from behind and held him while Tommy beat him bloody. They dragged the body to the trunk of Henry Hill's car.
On the Taconic State Parkway driving upstate, they heard sounds from the trunk. Bentvena was still alive. Tommy and Burke beat him to death with a shovel and a tire iron on the side of the road. Burke had a friend who owned a dog kennel upstate, and they buried Bentvena there.
Three months later, the friend sold the kennel to housing developers. Burke told Tommy and Hill to go dig up the body and move it. They eventually put what was left of William Bentvena into an industrial compactor at a New Jersey junkyard. He was erased.
That was the plan. But ideas cannot be erased. The Gambino family knew one of their made men had gone missing, and Gotti's crew had a very short list of suspects. Tommy was not just building a body count. He was building enemies.
The next murder would be the most personally combustible of his career, and it is where the story Goodfellas never told begins. Ronald Giarusso was born May 24, 1947, one year younger than Tommy. Everyone in Ozone Park knew him as Foxy.
Foxy was handsome, fast, and magnetic, the kind of guy who walked into a room and immediately got the attention Tommy wanted. He was a bank robber, a hijacker, a stick-up man, and he had earned a reputation in mob circles for his quickness during bank robberies. He operated out of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. He was John Gotti's protege.
Tommy and Foxy ran in overlapping circles, which was inevitable. In South Ozone Park and East New York in the early 1970s, there were only so many social clubs, card games, and criminal networks. These men could not avoid each other. For a while, some accounts describe them as friends.
But the friendship had a fracture line running through it. The official version, the one in court records and most references, says Tommy DeSimone was dating Foxy's sister. After their relationship ended, Tommy beat her up. Foxy found out and threatened to kill Tommy.
Then there is the version that circulates in mob circles, the one researchers kept hearing when they talked to people who were actually there, and the one that makes Tommy's behavior and his specific brand of violence make far more sense. According to multiple accounts, Foxy was not just connected to Tommy's sister. Foxy was connected to Tommy's wife.
Tommy DeSimone married Angelica Spione, known as Cookie, in 1973. Her brother was Joe the Barber Spione, a Lucchese associate. The marriage made sense on paper, two families in the life aligned through blood and business.
But Tommy was not a faithful man. He had multiple mistresses, including a woman named Theresa Ferrara, who would later be found murdered and dismembered, another body connected to the orbit of Tommy DeSimone.
When you are a man who cheats constantly, who is possessive and explosive and incapable of accepting any challenge to your authority, the worst possible thing the world can do is cheat back. The theory circulated in serious mob research is that Foxy and Cookie DeSimone were having an affair, that Tommy found out, and that what followed was not Tommy protecting his sister's honor but Tommy's jealousy detonating like a shaped charge.
It was not just personal betrayal. It was humiliation, a public disrespect of the kind that in his world had to be answered with blood. Not because the rules required it, but because Tommy DeSimone could not tolerate the idea that any man in his world thought he could take something of his without consequences.
There is a version where the affair theory and the sister theory are both partially true. Maybe Foxy had history with Tommy's sister and separately with Tommy's wife, and Tommy knew about both. The accounts conflict, and the truth, as it often does in this world, lives somewhere in the disputed middle.
What is not disputed is what happened on December 18, 1974. Tommy DeSimone went to Ronald Giarusso's apartment in Ozone Park, Queens. He knocked on the door. Foxy opened it. Tommy shot him multiple times at point-blank range.
He got up and walked out. He did not try to hide the body. He did not call for cleanup. He left Foxy lying in the doorway of his own apartment and drove away, just like that, as one witness account described it. Foxy was 27 years old, and John Gotti, in a social club somewhere in Ozone Park, had just lost another one of his men.
What separates the murder of Foxy from the dozen other reckless things Tommy DeSimone did is the context. With Billy Batts, at least there was an argument that it was a heated dispute that escalated. With the others, there were reasons, however twisted.
But Foxy was John Gotti's man, the Bergin crew's man, and Gotti was already, in 1974, one of the most powerful and connected rising figures in the Gambino family. Tommy killed Foxy without permission, without clearing it through Vario or Burke or anyone in the chain. He just did it.
That decision, that singular act of unauthorized violence rooted in personal jealousy, put a debt on Tommy's head that John Gotti would never forget. In the Mafia, debts like that do not expire. They just wait.
But Tommy kept moving. He always kept moving. Four years after the Foxy murder, he would be part of the biggest score of his life.
On December 11, 1978, at 3:12 in the morning, at the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport, a security guard named Kerry Whalen was doing his rounds when he saw a black Ford Econoline van pulling into the cargo bay. He walked over to check it out and was hit across the forehead with the barrel of a .45 caliber automatic before he could say a word.
What followed took exactly 64 minutes. A crew of masked men, which included Tommy DeSimone, moved through the terminal with military precision. They took $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, a total of $5.875 million, the single largest cash robbery in United States history at that time. In today's money, that is roughly $28 million.
Jimmy Burke had planned it for months. He had an inside man, a driver, a lookout crew, and an escape route. The only thing he did not plan for was Parnell Edwards.
Parnell Stacks Edwards, a musician turned criminal who was part of the extended Burke crew, had one job: drive the getaway van to New Jersey and destroy it. Instead, he went to his girlfriend's apartment in Canarsie and parked the van in front of a fire hydrant.
Police found it two days later. The plates were stolen, but Stacks' fingerprints were all over the interior. Within hours, the van was connected to the Lufthansa heist and Stacks was connected to the van. Paul Vario ordered Tommy to handle it.
Tommy DeSimone and Angelo Sepe found Stacks Edwards at his girlfriend's place. They walked in and shot him five times in the head. Tommy walked out without a word, according to accounts from people close to the crew.
But there was a problem Tommy could not shoot his way out of. During the Lufthansa heist itself, one of the robbers had pulled up his ski mask. A Lufthansa cargo worker identified Tommy DeSimone's photograph afterward. His name was now officially attached to the biggest heist in American history.
Burke began cleaning house. Everyone connected to the heist who was a liability started disappearing. Bodies turned up in Brooklyn freezers, on the West Side Highway, in the backs of trucks. At least six Lufthansa crew members were killed or vanished in the months following the robbery.
Theresa Ferrara, Tommy's own mistress, was found dismembered. Joe the Barber Spione, Tommy's own brother-in-law, was murdered after refusing to help set Tommy up. Even the people who tried to protect Tommy were getting killed for it.
The walls were closing from two directions. The FBI was tightening around Burke, and John Gotti had never stopped counting the debt Tommy owed for Foxy and Billy Batts, both of Gotti's men, both killed without permission, both unavenged.
Gotti went to Paul Vario and laid out the case. Tommy DeSimone had killed two made men connected to the Gambino family, unauthorized, with no permission and no respect. A sit-down was held, and Vario was asked for his approval.
Henry Hill later described what Burke told him. They were made guys with the Gambinos, and Tommy had killed them without an okay. Nobody knew Tommy had done it, but the Gambino people had somehow gotten the proof. They had a sit-down with Paulie, and they got Paulie's okay to kill Tommy. Even Jimmy could not avenge Tommy. It was a Sicilian thing.
Think about that. Jimmy Burke, the most feared and well-connected Irish mob figure in the entire New York underworld, could not stop what was coming. Because Tommy had done the one thing the entire structure of organized crime was built to prevent. He had killed made men without asking anyone.
The lure was beautiful in its cruelty. Tommy DeSimone had wanted one thing his entire adult life: a button, full membership, the formal recognition that he was one of them, not an associate, not a worker, a made man.
The irony was crushing, because Tommy was ineligible for official membership in the Lucchese family for most of his career since his father was not of full Italian descent. But by late 1978, that barrier had quietly shifted. Word got to Tommy that they were going to make him. He believed it. Of course he believed it. It was the thing he had been chasing for 20 years.
In late December 1978 or early January 1979, Tommy was told the ceremony was ready. Peter Vario, Paul's own son, would drive him. Bruno Facciolo would ride along to vouch for him. You do not get more official than that, and you do not bring a gun to your own initiation.
Tommy put on his best suit, dressed for the coronation, and got in the car. He was driven to a location that has never been officially confirmed. The most credible accounts, including Henry Hill's testimony to the FBI in 1980 and his subsequent books, point to John Gotti as the man at the end of the road.
The 1995 book The Lufthansa Heist, co-written by Hill himself, states that Gotti used a silencer-equipped Colt .38 and shot Tommy three times in the skull once Tommy realized what was happening. According to mob informant Sal Polisi, Thomas Agro was the actual killer and the death was slower. The accounts disagree on the details of his final moments. They agree on the outcome.
Tommy DeSimone was 32 years old when he died on January 14, 1979. His wife, Cookie, reported him missing. She said she had last seen him a few weeks earlier, when he had knocked on her door and borrowed $60. That was the last transaction of Tommy DeSimone's life.
His body was never recovered. One account from a former mob associate named Greg Bucceroni states that Tommy's remains were driven to a scrap metal yard in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, crushed inside a car, and shipped to a US Steel plant in Pennsylvania to be melted down. "Bye-bye, Tommy," the man doing the disposal reportedly said.
Another theory places the remains in The Hole, a suspected mob graveyard on the Brooklyn-Queens border near JFK, where multiple mafia bodies have been recovered over the decades. No grave, no headstone, no body, just a missing person's report filed by a woman who had not seen him in weeks when she signed her name to it.
John Gotti went on to become the boss of the Gambino family in December 1985 after orchestrating the murder of Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. He became the most famous gangster in America, the Dapper Don. He was convicted of murder, racketeering, and obstruction of justice in 1992 and died in federal prison of throat cancer in June 2002.
Jimmy Burke was convicted in 1985 for the murder of a drug dealer named Richard Eaton and sentenced to 20 years. He died in federal prison in April 1996 without ever being formally charged for the Lufthansa heist or most of the murders connected to it.
Henry Hill entered the federal witness protection program in 1980. After turning informant, he spent the next three decades in and out of trouble, in and out of witness protection, and in and out of the public eye. He wrote multiple books and died of heart failure in Los Angeles in June 2012.
Paul Vario died in federal prison in May 1988 while serving a four-year sentence for extortion. Tommy's brother Anthony was murdered by Thomas Agro in 1979, the same year Tommy vanished. His brother-in-law Joe the Barber Spione was murdered for refusing to participate in Tommy's setup. The people around Tommy DeSimone kept dying even after he was gone.
Cookie, Tommy's wife, moved on. According to accounts circulating in mob research circles, an ex-mobster became involved with her after Tommy's death. Whatever peace she found, she had earned.
Tommy DeSimone is usually presented as a cautionary tale about violence without limits, about a man so dangerous he became a liability to the people who used him. That is true as far as it goes. But the Foxy murder reveals something more specific and more instructive.
The most dangerous thing Tommy DeSimone did was not killing Billy Batts, even though that was the one the Gambinos officially hung on him. The most dangerous thing he did was let his jealousy become more important than his survival.
The affair theory, the idea that Foxy was sleeping with Cookie, explains something the official sister's honor version never quite does. It explains why Tommy walked up to that apartment door and knocked. Why he stood there and pulled the trigger without any plan for what came next. Why he left the body where it fell and just walked away.
That is not a preemptive strike against a threat. That is a man who could not see anything else in the moment except the thing he needed to destroy.
Tommy DeSimone built his entire identity on the idea that he could not be disrespected. In the end, that identity killed him, because it led him to murder the one man he never should have touched: the protege of the one captain in Queens who had the patience, the power, and the motivation to wait years for his moment.
The mafia mythology is full of men who were too good at violence to stay alive. But Tommy DeSimone's story is not really about violence. It is about jealousy. It is about a man who convinced himself that controlling everyone around him was the same thing as being powerful.
And it is about the five-year fuse he lit on December 18, 1974, when he knocked on Foxy's door in Ozone Park and pulled that trigger. He thought he was asserting dominance. He was signing his own death warrant.
The night they told him he was finally getting made, when he put on that good suit and climbed into Peter Vario's car dressed for his coronation, part of him must have known. Because Tommy DeSimone always knew exactly who he was. He just never understood what that meant.