On June 11, 1970, in a bar in Queens, a made man in the Gambino crime family celebrated his release from federal prison. By midnight, he had been beaten unconscious, stuffed in the trunk of a car, and buried in a shallow grave upstate. The killing of William Bentvena, known to history as Billy Bats, became one of the most famous mob murders in American culture because of the 1990 film Goodfellas. The movie presented it as a crime of passion.
Tommy DeSimone, a psychopathic young associate, snapped when Bats mocked him about shining shoes as a kid. His ego, the film suggested, sent him over the edge. But the real reason Bats died had less to do with fragile pride and far more to do with money, territory, and the ruthless economics of organized crime. Bentvena was born in New York City in 1933 and grew up in the Italian neighborhoods that produced so many men of his generation.
By his twenties, he had become a soldier in the Gambino family, then the most powerful crime organization in America under boss Carlo Gambino. Bats was an earner. He ran loan sharking, bookmaking, and hijacking, and he held valuable connections at Idlewild Airport, later known as JFK. He had built relationships with dock workers, cargo handlers, and freight employees, and those connections generated consistent, serious money that flowed up the Gambino chain of command.
Everyone above him took a cut. A soldier like Bats was not just a man; he was a revenue stream. In 1962, Bentvena was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison on a heroin conspiracy charge. He would remain locked up for the better part of a decade.
While Bats sat in a cell, his rackets did not sit in storage. That is not how the life works. When a made man goes away, his operations are redistributed. Someone else collects the loan shark payments.
Someone else manages the bookmakers and runs the numbers and keeps the money moving upward. And that someone else becomes comfortable. That someone else begins to think of the operations as his own. That someone was Jimmy Burke.
Burke was not Italian, and that one fact defined the entire ceiling of his career. Without Sicilian or Italian blood, he could never be made. He could never become a formal member of any family. Burke knew this, so he built something else.
He built an association so valuable, so deeply embedded in the airport infrastructure and the surrounding neighborhoods, that the Lucchese family needed him even though they would never fully claim him. Operating out of Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, Burke controlled hijacking, fencing, loan sharking, and bookmaking. He had truck drivers on his payroll. He had airport workers tipping him off about valuable cargo.
He had Port Authority contacts looking the other way and cops accepting what he called small bribes to keep investigations quiet. During the years Bats spent in prison, Burke expanded his operation. He brought in Henry Hill. He cultivated Tommy DeSimone.
He built a crew that earned consistently. Some of those earnings came from territory that had once belonged to Bats, from contacts Bats had developed and relationships he had forged. Burke had moved into that world and made it his own. By the time Bats walked out of prison in early 1970, Burke had controlled pieces of his former territory for nearly a decade.
And Burke understood perfectly what would happen next. A made man who does his time comes home and reclaims what belongs to him. He asks questions. He makes calls.
He starts collecting. In the mafia, that is standard practice. Burke had no intention of allowing it. Bats alive meant renegotiation.
It meant sitting down and deciding what Burke would give back and what he would keep. It meant Bats reaching out to people Burke had built relationships with and reminding them where those relationships had originally come from. It meant the income Burke had been collecting flowing in another direction. Burke was not a man who gave things back once he had them.
There was an alternative. If Bats never came home, there would be no renegotiation. Burke would keep everything. But that option required someone to act, and Burke could not act openly.
He was an associate of the Lucchese family, and Bats was a made man in the Gambino family. If Burke moved against Bats in a way that could be traced, he would be signing his own death warrant. Tommy DeSimone was different. Tommy carried a reputation for violence that everyone in the life already knew.
If Tommy killed Bats in a blind rage over an insult, that was simply Tommy being Tommy, a psychopath losing control. Burke could stand back, claim he had tried to stop it, and let Tommy take the weight. It was a risk, but a manageable one, especially if the body was never found. On the night of June 11, 1970, Bats held court at the Bamboo Lounge.
He had been out of prison for less than two months and was celebrating his return to the fold, accepting handshakes and drinks from men who had known him for years. Henry Hill was there, twenty-six years old, watching. Tommy DeSimone walked in with his girlfriend. He was twenty years old, a killer with a reputation that made people nervous when he entered a room.
In that world, sensitivity to disrespect was survival. A man who allowed himself to be diminished in public without response became a target. Bats greeted Tommy and then began needling him about shining shoes as a boy. It was the kind of dig older men used to remind younger associates of their place.
Tommy sat down, had a drink, and said nothing. But Bats kept going, comment after comment, hitting the same nerve and reminding Tommy that he was an associate, not a made man. Tommy eventually reached his limit. The bar emptied out.
The beating began. It was savage and total. Steel-toed shoes into ribs and skull. And then the detail that matters most: Burke joined in.
He helped hold Bats down. He helped Tommy finish it. Burke was a calculating man, not an instinctive one, and his involvement was a decision. Once the line was crossed, once Bats was dying, the only way to guarantee he never talked about what happened in that room was to guarantee he never talked again.
They wrapped him in tablecloths, put him in the trunk of Henry Hill’s car, drove him upstate, and buried him in the dirt with lime poured over the grave. The burial was not the end of the cover-up; it was the beginning. The Gambino family knew Bats was missing and suspected foul play immediately. Men like Billy Bats do not vanish.
They do not walk away from their families, their income, and their status in one of the most powerful crime organizations in the country. Suspicion pointed toward those last seen with him, Burke and DeSimone. But suspicion is not proof, and in the mafia you do not move against men connected to another family without certainty. Accusing the wrong person could start a war.
So the Gambinos waited. They remembered. They asked quiet questions and received no answers. Burke said nothing.
Tommy said nothing. Henry said nothing. The silence held for six years. Then in 1976, construction was planned on the land where Bats was buried.
Burke got word and sent men to move the body. They dug it up and relocated it. The remains were never found. When Henry Hill began cooperating with federal authorities in 1980, he gave investigators a detailed account, but there was no body.
A cooperating witness without a body was just a story. Nine years after the murder, on January 14, 1979, Tommy DeSimone received word that he was finally being made. After his entire adult life, he was getting his button, formal membership in the Lucchese crime family. He told people close to him.
He was excited. He dressed carefully and arrived at a house in Queens expecting wine, cigars, and a room full of made men welcoming him in. Instead, he found an empty room and men he did not recognize moving toward him. He understood instantly.
He was not getting made; he was getting killed. The door closed. Multiple gunshots followed. Tommy DeSimone died at twenty-eight, and his body was never recovered.
The hit had been ordered by the Gambino family, and the reason officially cited was Billy Bats. But there was another name on the ledger. In December 1974, Tommy had killed Ronald Jerothe, a Gambino associate connected to John Gotti, then a rising capo in the family. Gotti was patient, ambitious, and he remembered.
The Gambinos had two unsanctioned murders of their people to settle, and when permission was granted, they cited both. Paul Vario, Tommy’s own capo in the Lucchese family, knew the hit was coming and made a calculation. Tommy had become too expensive to protect. He had killed too many people and crossed too many lines.
Vario either approved the hit quietly or stepped aside. In organized crime, silence is consent. Even Burke could not protect him. Tommy walked into that room believing the life had finally rewarded him.
He did not realize the bill had been accumulating for nine years. The movie Goodfellas told the story through Henry Hill’s eyes, shaped by what Henry saw and what he chose to remember. Henry saw the violence and the personalities. He recorded what happened in front of him.
What he could not see was the calculation happening behind the scenes. Billy Bats was not killed because Tommy DeSimone had a fragile ego. Tommy’s rage was real, the insult landed, and the beating began. But Burke joining in was not rage.
Burke finishing it was not passion. Burke helping dispose of the body, keeping his mouth shut for nine years, and letting Tommy take the weight while quietly keeping the operations he had built on Bats’s old territory, that was strategy. Bats spent eight years in prison, earning nothing and contributing nothing to the men on the outside. Burke spent those same years building.
In the logic of organized crime, that investment mattered, and Bats walking back in expecting to reclaim what was his was a direct threat to everything Burke had built. 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. His body was moved twice and never found. His killers walked free for years.
Only one of them ever paid the price, and even he paid it for a different debt.