Goodfellas Hid Tommy’s 3rd Kill — The One That Mattered ht

this prick. This must be doing his stuff, too. You know, >> you know the shot. It’s maybe 10 seconds of screen time, and it’s one of the most quoted moments in the history of crime cinema. Tommy Devito walks through a door in his best suit, expecting a room full of made men waiting to induct him into the family.

Instead, the room is empty. A bare floor, folding chairs pushed to the wall, no table, no ceremony, no one. He gets it immediately. [music] His face changes. Joe Peshy plays the recognition in about half a second. The flash of understanding that there is no ceremony. There was never going to be a ceremony and the door behind him is not going to open again. Then a gunshot.

His body drops and Ray Leota’s voice over calmly explains what happened. It was among the Italians. Real [ __ ] [ __ ] They even shot Tommy in the face [music] so his mother couldn’t give him an open coffin funeral. 13 seconds, one shot, done. Good Fellas gave you a death that clean because it needed to keep moving.

The movie is 2 and 1/2 hours long. It covers 30 years and Tommy’s death is a plot point on the way to Henry Hill’s collapse. Scorsese couldn’t stop and explain why Tommy really died because the real answer involves three unsanctioned murders spread across 9 years. an interf family political negotiation between the Lucaz and Gambino crime families, one attempted sexual assault that the film never mentions, and the personal revenge of a man who would become the most famous mob boss in American history. The movie gave you one reason for Tommy’s death. The real story has at least four, and they contradict each other in ways that every competing documentary on YouTube has either ignored or gotten wrong. Thomas James [music] D. Simone was born on May 24th, 1950, though some genealogical

records list June 6th, 1946 in either Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Queens, New York, depending on the source. The records conflict on both the date and the place, which tells you something about how carefully this man’s background was obscured even before he had anything to hide. By the time he was 15, he was already working for the mob.

That sentence sounds like an exaggeration. It isn’t. His uncle and grandfather were both organized crime figures. Two of his older brothers were associates of the Gambino family. His sister Phyllis became Jimmy Burke’s mistress when she was 16. Burke was already married. Tommy didn’t fall into the mafia. He was born standing in it.

At 19, he was introduced to Paul Vario, a capore regime in the Leche crime family through Henry Hill. Hill later described meeting D. Simone for the first time, a skinny kid who was wearing a wise guy suit and a pencil mustache. What Hill didn’t say in that first description, but would say many times later, was that the skinny kid grew up by his late 20s, Tommy D.

Simone stood 6’2 and weighed 225 lb, nearly all of it muscle. Here’s your first contrast with the film, and it’s not a small one. Joe Peshy is 5’3. Scorsese cast the shortest actor in the ensemble to play the largest man in the real crew. That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t a limitation. Scorsesei understood something about violence on screen that most filmmakers miss.

[music] A big man being violent reads as expected. A small man being violent reads as unhinged. Peshi’s size made Tommy Devito feel more dangerous, not less, because every act of aggression looked like it was coming from a place of overcompensation, of a man constantly trying to prove something, and it won him the Academy Award for best supporting actor.

But it inverted the reality. The real Tommy De Simone didn’t need to compensate for anything. He was physically imposing, genuinely fearless, and according to everyone who knew him, completely without hesitation when it came to killing. Henry Hill said on multiple occasions that he believed D. Simone was a genuine psychopath, and he didn’t mean it as street talk.

He meant it clinically. Des Simone’s first murder, according to Hill, happened when he was 17. He and Hill were walking down a street and Tommy spotted a stranger, a man named Howard Goldstein, who had no connection to anything. “Henry, watch this,” he said, and shot the man dead. No motive, no argument, just a demonstration, like a kid showing off a new toy.

Whether that story is entirely true is debatable. It comes from Hill, whose reliability as a narrator is a recurring problem we’ll get to, [music] but it establishes the pattern that defined D. Simone’s entire career. Violence without permission, without strategy, and without thought for consequences. And it’s that pattern, not any single killing, that eventually got him murdered.

Let me walk through the three kills that sealed his fate because the movie only shows you one of them clearly mentions another in passing [music] and skips the third entirely. The first was Billy Bats. William Billy Bats Bent Vina was a maid man in the Gambino crime family born January 19th 1921. Though one set of census records suggests 1933, the majority of sources place him in 1921, which would make him 49 when he died.

Not the young hothead the movie implies. He was a soldier with real standing who’d done time on federal drug charges. When he got out of prison in late May 1970, there was a welcome home party at Robert’s Lounge, Jimmy Burke’s bar in Queens. Bent Vina saw De Simone and made a joke about the old days.

Shine these shoes, a reference to a job Tommy had as a kid. The shoe shine comment happened there. The movie plays this straight. Tommy takes offense and weeks later beats Bats to death. The real story has the same bones, but the motive was bigger than an insult. While Bent Vina was in prison, Burke and D Simone had taken over his lone shark business.

It was generating serious money. With Bats back on the street, they’d have to give it up. The shoe shine comment gave D. Simone emotional cover for something that was also financially motivated. 2 weeks after the party on June 11th, 1970, D. Simone caught Benvina at the Sweet Hills separate nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, [music] and pistolhipped him, screaming, “Shine these [ __ ] shoes.

” He and Burke beat him until he appeared dead, loaded him into Hill’s car trunk, stopped at D. Simone’s mother’s house for a knife and a shovel. Heard sounds from the trunk and finished him with the shovel and a tire iron. In the movie, Bats is shot. In reality, it was a beating and a stabbing 30 or 40 [ __ ] times.

Hill later said, “Here’s the part that matters for the larger story. Bentina was a maid member of the Gambino family. Killing him without authorization from both the Lucesi and Gambino leadership was a death penalty offense under mafia rules. D. Simone had just started a clock and it would tick for 9 years.

The second kill the movie shows you is Spider. Michael Spider Denko was a young bartender working card games at Robert’s Lounge. D. Simone demanded a drink. Jenko forgot it. D. Simone pulled a gun and shot him in the foot, ordering him to dance. A week later, Giano was back wearing a full leg cast. And when D.

Simone started mocking him again, the kid told him to go [ __ ] himself. The room went quiet. Burke, impressed by the guts it took, handed Jono some money and then jokingly teased D. Simone about going soft. De Simone’s response was immediate. He shot Jono three times in the chest and killed him.

Nobody says a word, Hill wrote. But now I’m convinced Tommy is a total psychopath. Burke, furious, made D. Simone bury the body alone in the basement. The movie handles this almost verbatim. What it doesn’t tell you is that this death mattered because it further established a pattern that Paul Vario, Tommy’s boss, could not ignore.

Vario ran a crew that made its money through truck hijackings, loan sharking, and airport theft. Those operations required a certain level of discipline. D. Simone was making them all visible. The third kill, and the one that probably mattered most, on December 18th, 1974, De Simone killed Ronald Foxy Gerroth at his apartment in Ozone Park, Queens.

Gerroi was a protetéé of John Gotti, then a rising soldier in the Gambino family, who would later become its boss. The backstory. Des Simone had been dating Gerro’s sister and beat her up. Gerroth threatened to kill Des Simone. When D Simone heard about the threat, he went to Gerrothy’s apartment.

Gerroy punched him between the eyes when he opened the door. Des Simone shot him dead. This killing, even more than Billy Bats, is what triggered the political machinery that would eventually grind Deimone to pieces. Bats was a soldier who’d been away for years. Geri was young, active, and directly connected to John Gotti with two Gambino affiliated men now dead at D. Simone’s hands.

The Gambino family had a standing grievance against the Lucesi crew that sheltered him, and Gotti had a personal one. Now, here’s where the story gets tangled in a way that no other YouTube documentary about this topic has properly unpacked. Four years passed between the Gerro killing and D Simone’s disappearance.

During those four years, Tommy participated in the Lufansza heist, killed Stax Edwards on Vario’s orders and continued to be a productive earner and enforcer. If the Gambinos wanted him dead for Bats and Foxy, why wait? The answer is interf family politics. And it’s the layer three analysis that the movie couldn’t show you because it’s not dramatic, it’s bureaucratic.

Under mafia rules, Tommy De Simone belonged to the Lucesi family. He was an associate, not a made man, but he operated under Paul Vario’s protection. The Gambino family couldn’t touch him without Vario’s explicit permission. That permission had to come through a sitdown, a formal meeting between the two families.

Vario had reasons to protect D. Simone. Tommy was useful, violent, reliable for wet work, and his sister was Burke’s mistress. Giving him up would create problems within his own crew. So, what changed? According to the 2015 book, The Luft Hanza Heist, co-written by Hill and journalist Daniel Simone, at least three things converged in late 1978 and early 1979.

First, [music] De Simone lifted his ski mask during the Lufanza robbery, allowing a hostage to see enough of his face for a police sketch. This infuriated both Burke and Vario because it made D. Simone a liability in the biggest case any of them had ever been involved in. Second, and this is the detail the movie never touches, D.

Simone attempted to sexually assault Karen Hill while Henry was in prison. Hill wrote about this in his 2004 book, Gangsters and Good Fellas, published 14 years after the movie. Karen Hill was having an affair with Paul Vario at the time. When Vario found out what Dimone [music] had tried to do to Karen, it became personal in a way that went beyond business calculations.

A man had tried to assault the woman Vario was sleeping with in that world. That’s an insult to Vario himself. Third, John Gotti demanded a sitdown. According to the book, Gotti told Vario directly, “This [ __ ] D Simone whacked two of my top earners, and I let it go for a long time.

Now he wants to be made, and I’m not going to sit quietly.” Vdio, who by now had his own reasons to want Dimone gone, gave the green light, but he protected Jimmy Burke, who had also participated in the Billy Bats murder. Burke was too valuable. He was, in Hills words, an extraordinary earner. Vario would sacrifice the soldier, but not the general.

The execution happened in January 1979. The details come from multiple sources that disagree with each other, which is exactly the kind of source conflict this series exists to flag. Here’s what the book says. Peter Vario, Paul’s son, and Bruno Fatiolo drove D Simone from his home in Ozone Park, Queens, to an Italian restaurant called Don Veto on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

Des Simone was wearing a double- breasted black bill suit, a starched blue shirt, and a beige silk tie. He thought he was being made. When he entered the basement, several men were seated around a card table in candlelight. John Gotti was there. Welcome, Tommy. Congratulations, Gotti said. Pull a chair up.

This is not an ordinary day in your life. Day. Simone sat down. Within 3 seconds, Gotti pulled a silencer equipped Colt 38 from his breast pocket and shot D. Simone three times in the skull. Head forward. Blood on the green felt. Done. That account comes from the Hill Simony book which claims Hill got the details from Sal Pissi, a Gotti confidant he met in witness protection.

But there’s a problem. On the Howard Stern show in 2007, Hill said the death took a long time, that Gotti wanted D. Simone to suffer because Bats had been a personal friend. [music] In one version, three quick shots, in another, slow torture. According to a different source entirely, mob informant Joseph Joe Dog Xanuzi, it wasn’t Gotti who pulled the E.

It was Thomas Agro, a Gambino enforcer who allegedly tortured D Simone to death in Gotti’s presence. Yet another theory published in the 100 kilo case suggests Desimone was killed by Jimmy Burke himself as part of the Lufanza cleanup. So we have four accounts. Gotti with a quick three shots, Gotti with slow torture, Aggro with torture in front of Gotti, and Burke [music] acting alone.

They can’t all be true. The most widely accepted version is the Gambino revenge theory. It fits the motive, the timing, and the political structure. But the honest answer is that nobody outside the room that night knows exactly what happened. And everyone who claims to know has a reason to shape the story.

So why did Scorsesei simplify it? Three reasons. First, perspective. Good Fellas is Henry Hill’s story told through Henry Hill’s eyes. Hill wasn’t in the room when Dimone died. He wasn’t even in New York. He was in Florida. The movie can only show what Hill experienced, which is Tommy left for his ceremony.

Tommy didn’t come back. The empty room is Scorsese’s visual metaphor for the gap in Hill’s knowledge. Second, legal exposure. When the film was made in 1989 90, John Gotti was alive, free, and the [music] most powerful mob boss in America. Naming him as Tommy’s killer on screen would have been a lawsuit, a threat, or both.

The film avoids identifying any Gambino by name. Third, and this is the deeper filmmaking choice, Scorsesei needed the death to feel like a system killing Tommy, not a person. In the movie, the empty room represents the mafia itself. Impersonal, mechanical, unchallengeable. If you show Gotti pulling the trigger, it becomes a personal grudge match.

If you show an empty room and a single gunshot, it becomes institutional. Tommy didn’t die because one man hated him. He died because he broke the rules that held the entire structure together and the structure corrected itself. That’s a more powerful statement about organized crime than any revenge scene could be.

It’s also, as we’ve just laid out, a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. Thomas de Simone disappeared January 14th, 1979, age 28. Officially still classified as a missing person. His body has never been found. It’s been theorized he’s buried in the Hole, a suspected mafia graveyard on the Brooklyn Queens border near JFK airport, where the bodies of three other murdered mobsters were recovered in 1981 and 2004.

His wife Angela reported him missing after he borrowed $60 from her and never came back. Su Jung three young dong bats nai William Billy Bats Bent Vina dead at 49 June 11th 1970 made man in the Gambino family beaten stabbed buried in upstate New York exumed rearied at Robert’s Lounge. eventually crushed in a junkyard compactor in New Jersey.

Three burial sites for one body. Even in death, he couldn’t stay in one place. Ronald Foxy Gerothy dead at 27 December 18th, 1974. Shot at his apartment door in Ozone Park, protetéé of John Gotti. The killing the movie skipped entirely. Michael Spider Gianko, dead in his early 20s. Date uncertain.

Shot three times in the chest for telling Tommy De Simone to go [ __ ] himself. Buried in the basement, then moved. Notice a pattern here. The violent ones rotted in prison. The connected ones just vanished. And the one who told the story outlived them all, barely. Paul Vario, the boss who gave Tommy up, died May 3rd, 1988, age 73, respiratory failure from lung cancer at Fort Worth Federal Prison.

He never publicly acknowledged any role in D. Simone’s death. Jimmy Burke, who killed Billy Bats alongside Tommy, but was protected by Vario, died April 13th, 1996. Age 64, lung cancer. still in prison for a separate murder conviction, never charged with Lufanza. Henry [music] Hill, the man who told every version of this story and never told the same version twice, died June 12th, 2012, age 60, nine, heart failure, in a Los Angeles hospital.

He’d been kicked out of witness protection in the early 1990s for repeatedly blowing his own cover while drunk. Karen Hill lives under an assumed name. John Gotti, the man who most likely ordered and possibly carried out Tommy’s execution, died June 10th, 2002, age 60. One, throat cancer at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.

He never confirmed or denied anything. [music] Every documentary on this topic tells you Tommy died for Billy Bats. That’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete in a way that misses the entire point. Tommy D. Simone didn’t die for one murder. He died because he committed three unsanctioned killings across nine years, attempted to assault a woman under his own boss’s protection, exposed himself during the biggest heist in American history, and existed at the intersection of a political negotiation between two crime families where he was worth more dead than alive. The empty room in Good Fellas is the most honest thing in the movie. Not because it shows you what happened, but because it admits that even Henry Hill, the man who was there for everything else, wasn’t there

for this. [music] Next time, we’re stepping into Casino’s other hidden story. The woman Sharon Stone turned into an Oscar nomination. Jerry McGee’s real ending wasn’t the overdose the movie shows you. It was a 3-day collapse inside the Beverly Sunset Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

And the people who put her there are not the ones you