On January 14, 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked into a modest two-story house in Queens, New York, expecting to be made a soldier in the Lucchese crime family. Instead, four men were waiting in the basement. The door clicked shut behind him. He never walked out.
His wife, Angela, reported him missing the next morning. His body was never found. He was 28 years old.
Some say he was strangled with piano wire. Others say he was shot in the back of the head. What everyone agrees on is that Tommy DeSimone died because he killed too many people the wrong way, in front of the wrong eyes, for reasons that had nothing to do with business.
The cinematic Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas was played by Joe Pesci and earned an Oscar. But the real Tommy DeSimone was worse. Much worse.
The movie showed two killings. Billy Batts in the trunk of a car. Spider on the basement floor. But according to FBI files, federal informant testimony, and Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, the real DeSimone was tied to at least six other murders the movie never showed.
This is the story of those killings. The ones Martin Scorsese cut.
Tommy DeSimone was born June 6, 1946, in South Ozone Park, Queens. He was the youngest of eight children. His father was a quiet, religious laborer. His mother ran a working-class Italian household.
Two of his older brothers were already running with the Gambinos by the time Tommy was a teenager. His sister Phyllis became the mistress of James Burke, the gangster known as Jimmy the Gent, when she was just 16.
Tommy didn’t choose this life. He was born into the middle of it.
By 12, he was running errands for wiseguys at Robert’s Lounge in Ozone Park. By 14, he was driving stolen cars. By 16, he was a known associate of the Lucchese family’s Vario crew.
He was big. Six feet tall, 200 pounds, with a boxer’s build. Nothing like the wiry Joe Pesci. He carried two .38 specials at all times. That’s why his street name was Tommy Two Guns.
People who knew him described him as cold and distant. Henry Hill, who would later testify against him, said Tommy was the scariest person he ever met.
The first murder came in 1968. Tommy was 17 years old.
He was walking down a Brooklyn sidewalk with Henry Hill on a summer afternoon. He spotted a man he’d never seen before. A total stranger. A pedestrian in his mid-40s walking the other direction.
Tommy turned to Henry and smiled. He said, “Henry, watch this.” Then he pulled out one of his .38s and shot the man dead in broad daylight.
The victim’s name was Howard Goldstein. He had no connection to organized crime. He was just a man walking home.
Hill asked Tommy why. Tommy shrugged. He said, “Well, I’m a mean cat.” And they kept walking.
That story, repeated by Henry Hill to FBI special agent Edward McDonald during witness protection debriefings in 1980, is the foundation of everything that came after. Tommy didn’t kill for money or territory. He killed because killing made him feel real.
Between 1968 and 1970, Tommy worked his way up in the Vario crew under capo Paul Vario. He did loan sharking, truck hijackings, and cigarette boosting at JFK Airport. But Paulie kept getting complaints. Tommy was hurting people who didn’t need to be hurt.
In June 1970, the situation escalated.
William Bentvena, known as Billy Batts, was a made man in the Gambino family. He had just done six years in federal prison for narcotics. On June 11, 1970, he was celebrating his release at the Suite, a nightclub in Queens owned by Henry Hill.
Tommy walked in. Words were exchanged. Batts mocked Tommy. The room went silent. Tommy left.
Two weeks later, Batts was at the bar again. Tommy and Jimmy Burke beat him unconscious with their fists and a pistol. They dragged him to Burke’s car and drove upstate.
When Batts started groaning in the trunk, they pulled over near a dirt road in Sullivan County. Tommy stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife while Burke shot him. They buried him in a shallow grave behind Robert’s Lounge.
Six months later, when Burke realized a strip mall was being built on top of the burial site, they dug the body up and reburied it somewhere in upstate New York. The grave has never been found.
Here’s what Goodfellas didn’t show you. The killing of Billy Batts was unsanctioned. You did not kill a made man without permission from his boss. Tommy and Jimmy didn’t have permission. The moment that body went into the trunk, Tommy DeSimone became a marked man in the Gambino family.
Murder number three came months later. The man Goodfellas called Spider. The kid who got shot in the foot for not bringing Tommy a drink, then shot dead at a poker game for talking back.
The reality was less dramatic and more disturbing. Tommy was at a card game in the back room of a social club. He was drunk. A teenage bartender walked past him. Tommy pulled his .38 and shot the kid in the foot for laughs.
Two weeks later, the kid came back to work in a leg cast. Tommy started ribbing him at the same poker table. The kid finally snapped back. Tommy stood up, pulled his pistol, and shot the kid three times in the chest at point-blank range.
The other men at the table didn’t move. Jimmy Burke was furious. Not at the killing, but at the mess. They buried him under the foundation of Robert’s Lounge. Henry Hill helped dig the hole.
Murder number four came in 1972. The victim was a truck foreman named Stanley Diamond.
Tommy and another Burke crew associate were sent to lean on a warehouse foreman in rural New Jersey who had been talking to detectives about a hijacking. The orders were specific. Rough him up. Scare him. Don’t kill him.
Tommy didn’t get the message. He and his partner beat the foreman with tire irons. They kept beating. The foreman stopped moving after about three minutes.
Tommy stood up, looked at his partner, and said, “Well, he ain’t talking now.” They left the body in a wooded ditch.
When Burke found out, he didn’t speak to Tommy for two weeks. Not because Tommy killed a witness. Because Tommy did it without thinking, without a plan, without a place to put the body.
Murder number five involved a cab driver. The story circulated through the cab stand on Fulton Avenue.
Tommy was short. He needed $200 to cover a gambling debt. He went to an acquaintance, a man who drove a yellow cab in Queens, and asked for the loan. The cab driver said no. Said he didn’t have it. Said his daughter needed shoes.
Tommy nodded and walked away. Three days later, the cab driver was found in the trunk of his own taxi at the long-term parking lot at LaGuardia Airport. Two bullets in the head. The case was never solved.
Murder number six is the one that haunted Henry Hill until the day he died. The victim was Dominick Rimo Serrani, Jimmy Burke’s best friend.
In late 1973, Burke heard a whisper from a contact in the Brooklyn DA’s office. Rimo had been seen meeting a detective at a diner in Howard Beach twice. Burke didn’t ask questions. He picked up the phone and called Tommy.
The plan was simple. Tommy would pick Rimo up under the pretense of a card game and drive him to Robert’s Lounge. But Tommy didn’t wait.
About halfway through the drive, somewhere on the Belt Parkway near the Atlantic Avenue exit, Tommy pulled out a length of piano wire he kept under the driver’s seat. He looped it around Rimo’s neck from behind and pulled until Rimo’s eyes burst.
When Tommy arrived at Robert’s Lounge with the body in the back seat, Burke looked at it for a long time. He didn’t say anything. They buried Rimo behind the bocce court at Robert’s Lounge, next to where Spider was already rotting.
Murder number seven was Tommy’s actual death sentence. December 18, 1974. The victim was Ronald Foxy Jerothe, a 27-year-old associate in John Gotti’s crew.
The trouble started when Tommy began dating Foxy’s sister. Some accounts say he assaulted her. Some say he just embarrassed her in public. Either way, Foxy made it known on the street that Tommy DeSimone was a dead man walking.
Tommy heard about it. Tommy didn’t wait for permission.
On December 18, 1974, Foxy Jerothe was at a friend’s apartment in Queens. The doorbell rang. Foxy answered. Tommy was standing there.
Tommy raised a .38 and shot Foxy three times in the face at point-blank range. The first shot took out his front teeth. The second shot took off his lower jaw. The third shot was directly between the eyes.
Tommy walked back to his car and drove to Robert’s Lounge for breakfast. When Burke heard what happened, his face went white. Foxy Jerothe was a Gambino associate in John Gotti’s crew. Tommy had now killed two of their men in four years without permission.
Between 1975 and 1978, Tommy served four years in federal prison for a hijacking conviction. While he was inside, the world changed.
Carmine Tramonti, the Lucchese boss who had protected Tommy, died in prison in 1978. The new Lucchese leadership looked at Tommy’s file and saw nothing but problems. Two unsanctioned hits on Gambino men. A trail of bodies. A reputation as a loose cannon.
They put a soft contract on him before he even got out.
Murder number eight came in December 1978, eight days after the Lufthansa heist.
The Lufthansa heist was the biggest cash robbery in American history at that point. On December 11, 1978, Burke’s crew, including Tommy, hit the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport and walked out with $5.8 million in cash and another $1 million in jewelry.
The plan was air-tight except for one detail. The getaway van.
Stacks Edwards, a 30-year-old aspiring musician and small-time Burke crew associate, was given one job. Drive the van to a New Jersey junkyard and have it crushed.
Stacks didn’t do this. He drove the van to his girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn, parked it on the street, went inside, smoked marijuana, and fell asleep. The van sat on a public street for three days. Cops found it on December 14.
Burke was furious. Burke called Tommy.
On December 18, 1978, the four-year anniversary of the Foxy Jerothe killing, Tommy showed up at Stacks Edwards’s apartment and shot him five times in the head. Three shots in the back of the skull. Two in the temple.
Tommy and another associate walked out and drove to a diner. They ate breakfast. Tommy ordered eggs and bacon.
He was 27 years old. Parnell Stacks Edwards was the eighth person he had killed by the count federal prosecutors would eventually compile.
Here is how it ended.
A few weeks after the Stacks Edwards killing, Tommy received word through Lucchese soldier Bruno Facciola that he was about to be made. A button man. The highest honor in the life.
Tommy was ecstatic. He told Henry Hill. He told his wife Angela. He bought a new suit.
On January 14, 1979, Bruno picked Tommy up in front of the family’s house. They drove for 20 minutes. They pulled into the driveway of a residential property in Queens.
Tommy walked in first. Bruno walked in second and locked the door behind him. Four men were waiting in the basement.
According to mob informants who later spoke to FBI agent Steven Carbone, the killing was personally supervised by John Gotti, who had requested the contract from Lucchese leadership in exchange for the Lucchese family’s debt over the Foxy Jerothe murder.
Tommy was reportedly strangled with a rope. Some accounts say he was shot. The body was put into a 55-gallon industrial drum filled with concrete and dumped somewhere in the marshlands of Jamaica Bay. It has never been found.
Angela DeSimone reported her husband missing on January 15, 1979. The case remains open to this day. Tommy was 28 years old. He left behind a wife and two young children.
Here is what happened to everyone else.
Henry Hill was arrested in 1980 on a narcotics charge. He flipped. He went into witness protection. He testified against 50 associates. He died of a heart attack in 2012 at age 69.
Jimmy Burke was convicted of fixing Boston College basketball games and later for the murder of Richard Eaton. He died of cancer in federal prison in 1996.
Bruno Facciola, the Lucchese soldier who drove Tommy to his death, was himself murdered on August 30, 1990. His own crew suspected him of being an informant. They cut his throat, stuffed a canary in his mouth as a message, and dumped his body in the trunk of a stolen Cadillac.
John Gotti went to federal prison in 1992 and died there in 2002. Paul Vario, Tommy’s old capo, died in federal prison in 1988.
Goodfellas wanted you to believe that Tommy died because he killed Billy Batts. That was the dramatic frame. But the truth is messier.
Tommy died because he never understood the difference between violence and business. The mafia was always a corporation that used murder as a management tool. Killings had to make sense. Killings had to generate income, eliminate threats, or maintain order.
Tommy killed because killing was fun. He killed strangers on sidewalks. He killed friends in cars. He killed teenagers at poker tables. He killed cab drivers over $200 loans. He killed without thinking, without planning, without permission.
In a business where every dead body had to be justified to a boss, Tommy generated more bodies than any boss could justify. That’s why he had to go. Not because of one drunken night. Because of 11 years of unsanctioned killings.
The real Tommy DeSimone was not a tragic figure. He was a warning. A warning about what happens when you let a teenager commit murder for fun and call him a soldier. A warning about what the life actually costs.
Tommy DeSimone killed at least eight people that we know of. Probably more. He died at 28 in a basement in Queens. He left no grave. He left no marker. He left no last words.
Just eight names in eight FBI files and a wife who, 47 years later, still does not know where her husband’s bones are buried.