On June 11, 1970, a made man walked into a bar in Queens to celebrate his freedom after eight years in federal prison. By midnight, he was beaten unconscious, stuffed in the trunk of a car, and buried in a shallow grave upstate. The film *Goodfellas* told millions of viewers that William "Billy Bats" Bentvena died because Tommy DeSimone couldn’t take a joke about shining shoes. That version of events is incomplete. The killing wasn’t a crime of passion. It was a business decision.
The movie presents the murder through the eyes of Henry Hill, filtered through his memory and limited knowledge. Henry was 26 years old that night. He wasn’t in the room for every conversation between Jimmy Burke and Tommy DeSimone before the attack. He didn’t know every calculation that went into what happened. The film gives you the emotion. It doesn’t give you the motive. When you understand the real motive, the death of Billy Bats stops looking like a tragedy and starts looking like a calculated move to protect income.
William Bentvena was born in 1933 in New York City. By his 20s, he was a soldier in the Gambino crime family, one of the five families that controlled organized crime in the city. The Gambinos were the most powerful family in the country at the time, with Carlo Gambino still serving as boss. To be a made man in that organization carried serious weight.
Bats was an earner. He ran loan sharking, bookmaking, and hijacking operations. He had valuable connections at Idlewild Airport, which later became JFK. He knew how to move stolen goods and how to exploit airport infrastructure for criminal profit. Those connections generated consistent, reliable money that flowed up through the Gambino family. His capos got their cut. The bosses got their tribute. Everyone up the chain benefited from his earning.
In 1962, Bats went to federal prison on a heroin conspiracy charge. His sentence was 15 years. While he sat in a cell, his rackets didn’t disappear. They were redistributed. Someone had to collect loan shark payments, manage the bookmakers, and keep the money flowing to the bosses. That someone got comfortable and started thinking of those operations as their own.
Jimmy Burke was that someone. Burke wasn’t Italian, which meant he could never be made. No Sicilian blood meant no button. He knew this his whole life, so he built something different. He built influence. He built a network so valuable and so deeply embedded in the infrastructure of Kennedy Airport that the Lucchese family needed him, even if they would never fully claim him.
Burke ran operations out of Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park. He handled hijacking, fencing, loan sharking, and bookmaking. He had truck drivers on his payroll, airport workers tipping him off about valuable cargo, and Port Authority contacts looking the other way. In the years Bats sat in prison, Burke expanded. He brought in Henry Hill and cultivated Tommy DeSimone. He built a crew that was earning consistently.
Some of that earnings came from operations that had originally belonged to Bats. Contacts Bats had developed at the airport. Relationships Bats had built with cargo handlers and freight workers. Burke had stepped into that world and made it his own. By the time Bats walked out of prison in early 1970, Burke had been running pieces of his territory for the better part of a decade.
Burke understood something clearly. The moment Bats came home, he would start asking questions and reclaiming what was his. That’s standard in the mafia. You do your time, you come home, you get back what belongs to you. Burke had no intention of letting that happen.
Burke’s problem with Bats wasn’t personal. He didn’t hate the man. Bats hadn’t disrespected him or threatened his life. Burke’s problem was structural. Bats alive meant renegotiation. It meant sitting down and working out what Burke gave back and what he kept. It meant the income Burke had been collecting flowing in a different direction. Burke was a man who understood that you don’t give things back once you have them. Not if you don’t have to.
Burke couldn’t kill Bats himself. He was an associate of the Lucchese family going after a made man in the Gambino family. If he did that openly, he would be signing his own death warrant. But Tommy DeSimone was different. Tommy had a temper that everyone in the life already knew about. If Tommy killed Bats in a rage, in a moment of personal insult, that was Tommy being Tommy. Burke could stand back and say he tried to stop it.
The question isn’t whether Burke planned it. The question is whether Burke, knowing Tommy’s temper and knowing Bats would be in that bar, made a deliberate choice to let the spark happen and then helped fan the flame.
On the night of June 11, 1970, Bats was holding court at the Bamboo Lounge. He had been out of prison for less than two months. He was celebrating, telling stories, and accepting handshakes from men who had known him for years. Henry Hill was there, watching. Tommy DeSimone walked in with his girlfriend. He was 20 years old and had already built a reputation that made people nervous.
Bats saw Tommy and greeted him. Then he started. According to Henry Hill’s testimony, Bats made a comment about Tommy shining shoes as a kid. It was the kind of dig used to remind younger guys of their place. Tommy took it. He sat down and had a drink. But Bats didn’t stop. He kept going, each comment pushing the same button.
Tommy reached his limit. The bar cleared out. Tommy walked over to Bats and the beating started. It was savage and total. Steel-toed shoes, broken ribs, head trauma. Burke didn’t pull Tommy off. According to Hill, Burke joined in. He held Bats down and helped Tommy finish it.
That detail matters. Burke joining in wasn’t instinct. Burke was a man who calculated. In that moment, the calculation was simple. Bats was already dying. The line was already crossed. The only way out was to make sure Bats never talked about what happened in that room.
They wrapped Bats in tablecloths, put him in Henry Hill’s trunk, and drove him upstate. They finished him and buried him in the dirt, pouring lime over the grave. Then they went back to their lives like nothing had happened.
The burial wasn’t the end of the cover-up. It was the beginning. The Gambino family knew Bats was missing. They suspected foul play almost immediately. Men like Billy Bats don’t just vanish. But suspicion isn’t proof. In the mafia, you don’t move on suspicion. You move on certainty. Accusing the wrong man could cause political catastrophe.
The Gambinos waited. They logged it. They remembered. They asked questions quietly and got no answers. Burke and Tommy said nothing. Henry said nothing. The body stayed in the ground, and for six years, the silence held.
In 1976, the land where they had buried Bats changed hands. Construction was coming. Burke got word and sent people to move the body. They dug it up and relocated it. The remains were never found. There was no construction discovery, no forensic identification, no physical evidence that ever made it into a courtroom.
By the time Henry Hill started cooperating with federal authorities in 1980, investigators finally had a detailed account. But even then, there was no body. Just testimony from a cooperating witness.
On January 14, 1979, nine years after Billy Bats died, Tommy DeSimone got a phone call. He was being made. Finally. He was going to get his button and become a formal member of the Lucchese crime family. He got dressed and showed up at a house in Queens expecting a room full of made men welcoming him in.
Instead, the room was empty. Men he didn’t recognize were moving toward him. Tommy understood instantly. He wasn’t getting made. He was getting killed. The door closed. Multiple gunshots followed. Tommy DeSimone died in that room at 28 years old. His body was never recovered.
The hit was ordered by the Gambino family. The reason officially cited was Billy Bats. But Bats wasn’t the only name on the ledger. In December 1974, Tommy had killed Ronald Jerothe, a Gambino associate connected to John Gotti. Gotti wasn’t boss yet. He was a rising capo. Ambitious, calculating, patient. Jerothe was his guy.
The Gambinos had two names on their list. Bats and Jerothe. Two unauthorized killings of their people. When they finally got permission to act, they cited both. Paul Vario, Tommy’s capo in the Lucchese family, knew the hit was coming. Tommy had become too expensive to protect. He’d killed too many people and crossed too many lines. Vario either approved the hit quietly or simply stepped aside.
Burke knew too. Tommy was his closest partner and most reliable killer. But even Burke couldn’t protect him anymore. The debt was too large. Burke stayed silent and let it happen.
John Gotti’s involvement in the actual execution has never been confirmed in court. But multiple sources place him close to it. Gotti remembered Jerothe. He was the kind of man who waited years for the right moment. In January 1979, the right moment came.
Tommy DeSimone, the man *Goodfellas* made into cinema’s most terrifying psychopath, died believing he was finally getting respected. He walked into that room thinking the life had finally rewarded him. He didn’t realize the bill had been accumulating for nine years.
*Goodfellas* is a masterpiece. The performances, the editing, the energy. Scorsese understood something true about these men. But the movie was always Henry’s story, shaped by what Henry saw and what Henry chose to remember. Henry didn’t see the economics. He saw the violence.
Billy Bats wasn’t killed because Tommy DeSimone had a fragile ego. Tommy’s rage was real. The insult landed. The beating started. All of that is true. But Burke joining in wasn’t rage. Burke helping dispose of the body and keeping his mouth shut for nine years was strategy.
The real lesson of Billy Bats is about what happens when a man who’s been gone comes back to a world that reorganized itself in his absence. Bats spent eight years in prison, earning nothing and contributing nothing. Burke spent those same eight years building something. In the logic of organized crime, that investment matters.
Bats walking back in expecting to reclaim what was his was a direct threat to everything Burke had built. Men like Burke don’t respond to threats with negotiation. They respond with elimination. Tommy provided the rage. Burke provided the decision.
Billy Bats, a made man in the most powerful crime family in America, died because he came home at the wrong time to the wrong room. Not because of a joke about shining shoes. Because of money. Because of territory. Because of the cold mathematics of organized crime. That’s the truth *Goodfellas* never told you.