On January 14, 1979, Thomas DeSimone believed he was about to become a made man. The 32-year-old Lucchese associate dressed in his finest suit, kissed his mother goodbye, and climbed into a car with two men he trusted. He never came back.
The ride from Ozone Park, Queens, to a house in Brooklyn took about 30 minutes. When DeSimone walked through the door, he found the house empty. According to the most widely accepted account, he said two words, “Oh, no,” before a bullet entered the back of his skull.
The killing was carried out by Thomas “Tuddy” Cicero, a Lucchese soldier who had known DeSimone since he was a teenager. The man who drove him to his death was his own associate. His body has never been found.
The version of events shown in Goodfellas is far from accurate. The film depicts DeSimone being killed in a bar by John Gotti’s crew, quick and clean. The reality is darker and more complicated. At least four different accounts exist of how he died, who pulled the trigger, and what happened to his remains.
Some versions claim he was tortured for hours. Others say he was shot once and disposed of in a Philadelphia scrapyard compactor. One account mentions a chainsaw. No forensic evidence exists, and no one has ever been arrested.
DeSimone was born into a working-class family in Ozone Park. He was one of nine children. His father was a glass installer who kept his head down. Tommy was different. By his teenage years, he was running errands for Paul Vario’s Lucchese crew.
He was a large man, 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, with the face of a college athlete and a violent temper. Henry Hill later described him as a “stone killer.” That description was not an exaggeration.
The man who shaped DeSimone most was James Burke, an Irish orphan from Hell’s Kitchen. Burke was smarter and more vicious than most of the Italians above him. He became DeSimone’s mentor and surrogate older brother. Burke taught him that the shortest distance between a problem and a solution was a bullet.
The three men, 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 set everything in motion.
The victim was Billy Batts, a made member of the Gambino family. Batts had just been released from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after serving eight years for heroin. He threw himself a welcome home party. Freedom lasted nine days.
On January 11, 1970, Batts was drinking in a Queens bar when DeSimone walked in with Burke and Hill. Batts made a comment about DeSimone’s shoes, calling them “dancing shoes” and comparing him to a little girl. It was an insult meant to remind DeSimone of his place in the hierarchy.
DeSimone did not take it. He hit Batts first, then Burke joined in. They beat him with fists and the butt of a pistol. Batts went down, bleeding from his ears but still breathing.
They dragged him out the back and put him in the trunk of a car. They drove 150 miles north to a dog kennel owned by Burke associates. When they opened the trunk, Batts was still alive. They left him there for two weeks.
When they returned on January 25, Batts was still breathing. They finished him with a shovel and a tire iron.
Killing a made man without permission was a capital offense in the Mafia. The Gambino family knew almost immediately who was responsible. But they could not act without starting a war with the Lucchese family. So they waited.
The second killing that sealed DeSimone’s fate happened in the summer of 1974. DeSimone was dating the sister of Ronald “Foxy” Jerothe, a low-level Gambino associate. He was beating her. When Jerothe confronted him, DeSimone responded the only way he knew how.
He walked to Jerothe’s apartment in Canarsie, Brooklyn, carrying a .38 revolver in a brown paper bag. He knocked on the door. When Jerothe opened it, DeSimone fired a single shot. Jerothe died in his own doorway. His sister saw everything.
By the mid-1970s, DeSimone had become something rare and dangerous in the New York underworld. He killed without authorization, without hesitation, and without remorse. His victims included Remo Cersani, strangled in the back seat of a car while Burke drove, and Stanley Diamond.
Henry Hill later said DeSimone killed like he was wired that way. Not with passion or anger, but with mechanical efficiency. The problem was not that DeSimone was violent. Violence was the currency of their world. The problem was that he was uncontrollable.
In December 1978, DeSimone was allegedly part of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport. The crew walked out with approximately $5 to $6 million in cash and jewels. It was the largest airport robbery in American history.
The aftermath was a bloodbath. Burke became paranoid and began eliminating crew members who could identify the participants. DeSimone was sent to handle Stacks Edwards. He shot him five times in the head.
The Lufthansa heist created a new problem. A witness inside the building identified DeSimone from a photo array. The FBI was now circling. DeSimone had become a liability to everyone.
There was one more factor. DeSimone’s brother, Anthony, was an FBI informant. In the Mafia’s logic, if one brother is a rat, the other brother is a risk. The DeSimone name had become poison.
By January 1979, Paul Vario had a problem with no good solution. DeSimone had killed a made Gambino man, killed a Gambino associate, been identified in the largest heist in American history, and his own brother was feeding intelligence to the FBI. Any single one of these was enough to get a man killed.
Vario chose to sacrifice DeSimone. He told the Gambinos where DeSimone would be and when. More than that, he participated in the cruelest possible version of the betrayal. He told DeSimone the meeting was a making ceremony.
DeSimone had wanted to be made his entire criminal life. Vario weaponized that ambition. He turned DeSimone’s dream into the bait that would walk him through the door of an empty house in Brooklyn.
On the morning of January 14, 1979, Cicero and Bruno Facciola picked up DeSimone. They drove south toward Brooklyn. DeSimone sat in the back, in good spirits, wearing his best suit. No one in the car told him the truth.
The car pulled up to an unremarkable house in Brooklyn. Cicero told DeSimone to go in, that the others were waiting. DeSimone walked to the front door and went inside. The house was empty.
In that instant, DeSimone knew. He said two words, “Oh, no.” Cicero stepped behind him and fired a single shot into the back of his head at point-blank range. DeSimone was dead before his body hit the floor.
That is the version most widely accepted. But there are at least three others. One version claims John Gotti’s crew got their hands on DeSimone and made it last for hours. Another names Thomas Agro as the shooter. A third claims the Gambinos denied any involvement entirely.
The disposal of the body is its own mystery. The most mundane version says DeSimone was buried in an unmarked location. A darker version involves the Atlantic Ocean. The most detailed account comes from an associate of Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski, who told investigators that Burke requested DeSimone’s body be taken to a Philadelphia scrap metal yard and melted down as scrap steel.
If true, DeSimone’s remains were processed into raw steel. No funeral, no grave, no marker. His wife reported him missing the next day. His two daughters grew up without ever knowing what happened to their father.
DeSimone’s brother Anthony was murdered in a separate hit carried out by Thomas Agro. Two brothers killed within weeks of each other. One for being uncontrollable, one for talking.
The honest answer to how DeSimone actually died is that we do not know for certain. At least three different men have been named as the killer. At least four different methods of body disposal have been described. The only point every account agrees on is this: DeSimone walked into that house alive, and he never walked out.
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. DeSimone became Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci.
The character was 5-foot-4. The real DeSimone was 6-foot-2. The character was killed in a bar by Gambino men. The real DeSimone was lured to an empty house by his own crew. The character’s death was a sudden shock. The real DeSimone’s death was nine years in the making.
The movie erased the role of the Lucchese family in DeSimone’s death. Goodfellas presents it as a Gambino hit carried out by enemies. The reality is that DeSimone was handed over by his own boss, driven to his death by his own associate, 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 DeSimone’s life for peace with the Gambinos.
The film also reduced DeSimone’s motive for death to a single killing. The killing of Foxy Jerothe 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 profited enormously from the story. Book deals, movie consulting fees, media appearances. 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 DeSimone would never have done. He talked.
DeSimone was 32 years old when he died. His body has never been found. 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 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. He died like the mob, quietly, efficiently, and without a trace.