The REAL Tommy DeSimone Wasn’t Funny — He Was Evil ht
January 14th, 1979. A cold Sunday night in New York. Tommy DeSimone leaves home dressed for glory, not for burial. A double-breasted black suit, blue shirt, silk tie. He thinks he is finally going to get his button. He thinks all the bodies, all the robberies, all the years under Paul Vario and Jimmy Burke are about to pay off.
Instead, he walks into a basement room lit low enough to hide faces and bright enough to see the trap. In the version Henry Hill later stood by, John Gotti is there. So are other men Tommy has no business seeing at a Lucchese induction. Tommy sits down. >> >> Then, the gun comes out. Three shots to the head. Quick, clinical, final.
His body is never recovered. His mother has no grave to visit. His friends stop saying his name too loudly. And one of the most violent men in New York is gone. This was not just another neighborhood punk. Tommy DeSimone was the real-life inspiration for Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, >> >> except the real man may have been worse.
Smaller than his reputation and louder than his good sense, he had what every crew wanted and what every crew feared, nerve, no hesitation, and no brakes. He could steal a truck before dawn, drink through lunch, laugh with you at dinner, and shoot somebody before midnight because a joke landed wrong.
Guys like that make money fast. They also make enemies faster. This is the story of how Tommy’s death got simplified into one clean Hollywood answer when the real street answer was messier, colder, and a lot more revealing. >> >> Billy Batts mattered. Of course he mattered.
You do not kill a made Gambino >> >> and walk away clean. But Batts was not the whole bill coming due. Tommy kept adding to the debt. Spider showed what he was becoming. Ronald Foxy Geroth made it personal. The Lufthansa fallout made him dangerous to keep alive. And by the time Tommy was promised a ceremony, he was not being rewarded. He was being delivered.
Here is the question the movie leaves hanging. >> >> If Batts alone signed Tommy’s death warrant in 1970, why was Tommy still breathing years later? Why was he trusted on bigger scores? Why was he still being used? To answer that, you have to understand how the mob really worked. A murder could put you on a list, but timing, money, politics, and personal vengeance decided when your name got called.
Tommy came up around Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, Queens, at 114-45 Lefferts Boulevard. One of those places that looked ordinary from the outside and taught criminal economics inside. This was Paul Vario territory. >> >> Trucks got targeted there. Stolen goods got fenced there. Young guys watched older guys and learned that the life was not just about force.
It was about access. Who had the keys? Who knew the schedules? Which cops looked away? Which warehousemen had gambling debts? Henry Hill learned that lesson there. Jimmy Burke mastered it. Tommy absorbed it like gasoline on concrete. The basic hijack system was simple.
That is why it made so much money. First, find the opportunity. Airports, garment centers, food distributors, electronic shipments. Anything moving late at night with weak security. Second, get the inside connection. A driver with a bad habit. A loader behind on rent. A dispatcher willing to whisper which trailer held the expensive stuff.
Third, the execution. A car bumps the truck at a light or boxes it in at a lonely stretch. Men jump out fast. Driver gets a gun in the face. Trailer gets rerouted. Fourth, the money. A $100,000 shipment never sold for 100,000 on the street. It sold for 30 or 40 cents on the dollar to a fence who could move it in hours.
Still, that meant 30 or 40,000 dollars from a score that might take 20 minutes. Fifth, the problem. Somebody always talked or showed off or spent too big too soon. Tommy was built for that life. Not because he was disciplined, because he wasn’t. A calm man worries about consequences. Tommy lived in the first five seconds of any situation.
That made him useful when hesitation killed jobs. It also made him a catastrophe waiting for the wrong room. He was close to Jimmy Burke, who understood that a reckless guy can still be valuable if you point him like a weapon. Henry Hill later described Tommy as the crew’s natural killer. The guy you sent when fear had to be immediate.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the crew was earning from hijackings, loans, stolen goods, and whatever else could be bent into cash. Loan sharking deserves its own translation because people hear the phrase and miss the machinery. The opportunity was desperate working people and gamblers who could not borrow from banks.
The inside connection was always trust. A bookmaker, a bartender, a local tough guy who knew who was drowning. The execution was quiet. A man borrowed 5,000 dollars on a Monday and by the next Monday he owed the vig, the weekly interest, whether he won or lost. Miss a payment and the debt grew teeth. The money was beautiful for the crew because the same 5,000 could keep earning forever.
The problem was territorial ownership. A loan book was not just money. >> >> It was status. It belonged to someone. That matters when Billy Batts comes home. It may have 1970, >> >> William Billy Batts Bentvena, a made Gambino member, is back around the neighborhood after prison. Hollywood gave the world one famous story about why Tommy killed him.
The shine box insult, the old joke, the wounded ego. That kind of thing did happen in mob social clubs. Pride got men killed all the time. But there was another reason that made much more business sense. While Batts was away on drug charges, Tommy and Burke had taken over parts of his loan sharking business.
Batts getting out did not just threaten Tommy’s pride. It threatened revenue. It threatened who got paid every week. And in that world, money arguments often wore the mask of personal arguments. So the insult, if it happened as remembered, was the spark. The fuel was already there. Batts was a made man. Tommy was not.
That alone should have ended the conversation. You could not touch a made guy from another family without permission from the top. But Tommy did not think in constitutional terms. He thought in immediate terms. Batts embarrassed him. Batts wanted back what Tommy was earning from. Batts was alive.
Tommy decided to change one of those facts. The murder itself tells you how impulsive he was and how enabled he had become. Batts is beaten at a party, then finished off, then stuffed into a car trunk, then buried. Then dug up again when the burial site gets too risky. That is not disciplined organized crime.
That is a crew improvising around a terrible decision. And the problem was bigger than one corpse. Batts had people. Batts had standing. Batts had a family that would not forget. The Gambinos did not go to war over it right away because wars cost money and attract law enforcement. But a marker had been laid down.
Tommy was now a guy who had crossed the line that does not get erased. >> >> What happened next shocked everyone. Not because it was shocking for Tommy, because it showed there was no learning curve at all. A few weeks later came Spider, Michael Gianco, the young kid hanging around the card games.
Goodfellas turned Spider into a brutal but almost darkly comic scene. Real life was uglier. Spider was a low-level victim of crew culture, the kind of kid desperate to belong around men who treated humiliation as entertainment. Tommy had already shot him in the foot once. That alone tells you the climate. Then, after more drinking, more needling, more showing off, Tommy shot him dead.
Not a made man, not a political disaster like Batts. But psychologically, this killing matters. Batts could still be rationalized inside Tommy’s twisted logic as business and insult. Spider was different. Spider was practice. Spider was appetite. You have to understand what Jimmy Burke saw in that moment.
Not a moral problem, a utility problem. A guy who kills too easily can still be useful if the crew needs bodies buried and witnesses erased. But that same guy becomes impossible to protect long-term. Everybody around Tommy knew he was valuable. Everybody around Tommy also knew he was becoming radioactive. Years pass and Tommy keeps earning.
That is the piece casual viewers miss. If Batts alone had demanded immediate justice, Tommy likely would not have been around for the next major phase. But he was. Because money buys time. Because Paul Vario had his own crew interests. Because Jimmy Burke could use him. Because the mob does not always kill you at the moment you deserve it.
Sometimes it waits until killing you is convenient. And then came Ronald Foxy Gerothy. Foxy is the part of the story movie skip because he complicates the clean version. >> >> He was not just some random associate. Street accounts and later reporting identify him as a John Gotti protege and a respected hijacker moving in those same outer borough circles where crews overlapped, drank together, schemed together, and sometimes murdered one another.
>> >> Sal Polisi, who knew that world firsthand, described Foxy as part of the first three families hijack crew. Exactly the kind of connected dangerous young earner a future boss like Gotti valued. Tommy had been dating Foxy’s sister. That relationship went bad. By mob lore, Tommy beat her.
Foxy intervened. That made it personal in a way business disputes never quite are. A stolen shipment can be negotiated. A debt can be restructured. But a man humiliating your sister and then disrespecting you in front of people who know both of you, that sits in the blood. The accounts vary on the exact exchange at Foxy’s door, but the documented street version is brutally simple.
Foxy confronted Tommy over the abuse. Tommy went to Jeruthe’s apartment on December 18th, 1974. Jeruthe answered. Tommy shot him. Just like that. One more body. But this one landed differently from Spider and differently even from Bats. Foxy was tied to John Gotti and Gotti was not just another offended acquaintance.
He was rising, ambitious, ruthless, building his own authority. Bats had made Tommy a problem on paper. Foxy made Tommy a problem in a man’s memory. Here is where it gets interesting. >> >> After Foxy, Tommy is not killed immediately either. Again, that tells you something. In Mafia politics, vengeance can be delayed if there are bigger calculations in play.
Maybe Vario still wants to shield a productive earner. Maybe the right setup has not presented itself. Maybe Gotti is waiting until retaliation can happen cleanly, with permission, without unnecessary blowback. Whatever the reason, Tommy survives. But surviving is not the same as being safe.
Sometimes it just means the room for your execution has not been picked yet. Then the biggest score of them all starts to take shape. December 11th, 1978. JFK Airport, the Lufthansa cargo terminal. About $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry. One of the most famous robberies in American history. And again, the scheme only makes sense if you break it down the way the crew would have.
The opportunity was obvious. Large amounts of currency and valuables were moving through a cargo system that depended on routine. The inside connection came through knowledge of terminal operations and employee vulnerabilities. The execution required speed, masks, control, and discipline. Men go in armed.
Night staff gets rounded up. Employees are restrained. >> >> The cash gets loaded out. The money, if moved correctly, changes lives overnight. >> >> Burke’s crew could turn one job into years of leverage, flashy purchases and bribes. The problem, as always, was people.
According to later reporting tied to Henry Hill and Daniel Simone, John Gotti had to be cut in because the airport touched territories shared among families. He was allegedly promised support, money, and logistical help, including access to a warehouse and a way to destroy the getaway vehicle. Hill and Simone put Gotti’s cut at $200,000.
That matters because it means Tommy’s final months were unfolding inside a web where Gotti was not some distant future celebrity boss. He was already connected to the same job, the same players, the same risk. And Tommy, being Tommy, made the kind of mistake professionals do not forgive.
During the robbery, according to the later account, he lifted his ski mask to wipe sweat from his face. That sounds small. It was not. A witness gets a look. A sketch becomes possible. An investigation gets direction. In a case worth $6 million, one stupid movement could bring the FBI crashing through every door connected to the score.
Because of that, the post-heist cleanup begins. Parnell Stacks, Edwards, the getaway driver, fails to move the van as instructed. Instead of taking it to be crushed, he parks it near a fire hydrant in Brooklyn. Police find it. That is not just sloppiness. That is evidence sitting in public.
Paul Vario wants a solution. Tommy gets the job. Kill Stacks. Clean the problem. And in return, Tommy is allegedly promised what he has always wanted, his button, full membership, respect formalized. Think about the psychology there. >> >> Tommy is being handled with the one reward that always worked on him, recognition.
He wants money, yes, but more than that, he wants rank. He wants to stop being the crazy kid around made men and become one. So when he kills Stacks, he is not just following orders. He thinks he is buying his way into history. But the trap is already closing. By this point, Tommy has too many liabilities attached to his name.
Bats, Foxy, >> >> Lufthansa exposure, and one more detail that comes up in later accounts. While Henry Hill was in prison, Tommy allegedly tried to assault Karen Hill. That mattered for two reasons. >> >> First, it crossed Henry. Second, according to reporting on the Lufthansa heist, Paul Vario had his own relationship with Karen and was furious.
In other words, Tommy was no longer merely a useful savage. He was a savage who was starting to trespass on his own side. This is the real Mafia lesson. Men like Tommy do not get killed just because they are violent. Violence is a job skill in that world. They get killed when violence stops being profitable and starts threatening the people above them.
The exact order of importance can be argued. Some say Bats remained the unforgivable sin. Some say Foxy Jeruthe is what made Gotti personally demand blood. Some say Lufthansa panic made the timing unavoidable. The best reading is that all of it stacked together. Bats put Tommy on the board. Spider revealed his nature. Foxy made vengeance personal.
Lufthansa made delay too dangerous. Then came the invitation. The date usually given is January 14th, 1979. Though some details vary in later retellings, Tommy gets dressed thinking this is his night. One account says Vario’s son drove him from Ozone Park toward Belmont in the Bronx. Tommy notices the weather.
He notices the quiet. Maybe he notices nothing at all until too late. In Goodfellas, that realization lasts a second. Oh, no. Then the screen cuts away. It is one of the most famous off-screen deaths in movie history because it understands something true. A man like Tommy would know before the bullet landed.
Not because he was wise, because he finally saw a room arranged by men who had no reason to honor him. According to the version Henry Hill later supported and later reporting amplified, Tommy enters a basement beneath an Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue. He sees men from the wrong side of the family line, including Gotti.
That alone would chill the blood. This is supposed to be a Lucchese ceremony. Why is a Gambino power-rising figure here? Why are there old men seated like witnesses? Why does the room feel staged instead of sacred? And then, in Hill’s later telling, Gotti himself pulls a silenced Colt and fires three times into Tommy’s skull.
Other theories exist. Some accounts name Tommy Agro as the killer. Some street stories claim Burke arranged it. Some say the body was cut up. Others say it was dumped in the ocean or destroyed with industrial scrap. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the story. It is the story. The mob was built to erase clean endings. Bodies vanished.
Versions multiplied. Fear edited memory. But the most important thing is this. By the middle of January, Tommy DeSimone was gone and nobody with real standing made a move to bring him back. That tells you the killing, whoever physically did it, had sanction. The aftermath is almost sadder than the murder.
Tommy was not mourned like a hero. He was talked around like a disease. No wake. No funeral certainty. No casket. Just absence. And absence does strange things to families. Without a body, grief cannot settle. It keeps bargaining. Street stories long held that Tommy’s mother refused to fully accept what had happened.
Because how do you accept a death with no remains, no last rites, no place to stand and say goodbye? For years, Tommy existed in that gray zone where everyone knew and no one could prove. That is one of the cruelest things the Mafia ever did to its own. It stole endings. What happened to the others is its own kind of verdict.
Paul Vario died in prison in 1988. Jimmy Burke died behind bars in 1996. John Gotti, if you believe Hill’s final version, outlived Tommy by decades, but ended in a federal prison hospital in 2002. Henry Hill flipped, survived, spiraled, and spent the rest of his life replaying pieces of this world for interviewers, writers, and radio hosts.
Even when these men beat the street, they almost never beat time. So what does Tommy DeSimone’s story actually reveal about the Mafia? First, that Hollywood likes a single cause and real life almost never gives you one. Saying Tommy got whacked because of Billy Bats is neat. It is memorable. It is also incomplete.
Bats mattered. But incomplete stories are how myths get built. Second, it reveals that the mob was less about honor than about management. Tommy was tolerated while he earned, protected while he was useful, removed when the cost of protection exceeded the profit.
Third, it shows that personal grievance and business necessity were never separate lanes. Foxy Jeruthe was not just another body. He was a bridge between Tommy’s recklessness and Gotti’s patience. And that is why the Foxy murder matters so much. It is the moment Tommy stopped being merely a dangerous Lucchese associate and became a direct insult to a future Gambino kingmaker.
Once that happened, every later mistake landed heavier. By the time Lufthansa exploded into headlines and clean-up killings, Tommy had already burned too many circles. The fake induction was not a sudden reversal. It was the final collection on an old account. Years later, Henry Hill was still talking about it, still revising some things, still defending others.
And on a recorded appearance summarized by the Howard Stern Show in 2007, Hill once again insisted that John Gotti was the one who killed Tommy DeVito, the movie version of Tommy DeSimone. That matters, not because Henry Hill was a saint or because every word out of a former wiseguy deserves blind trust. It matters because men like Hill spent their lives hiding the truth in layers, and even then certain names kept surfacing when Tommy’s ending came up.
Gotti, Foxy, Bats. Not just one, all of them. That is the part Goodfellas never had time to explain. Tommy did not die because one old insult finally got avenged. He died because he kept proving he was impossible to contain. Billy Bats opened the wound. Spider showed the sickness.
Foxy Jerothe made it personal. Lufthansa made it urgent. And when Tommy walked into that basement expecting to be welcomed into the family, what he really walked into was the moment the family decided it had seen enough. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week, and in the comments, tell me this.
If Tommy had never killed Foxy Jerothe, >> >> would Billy Bats alone still have gotten him killed? Or did Foxy turn a long-simmering grievance into a death sentence?