Goodfellas Never Showed What Happened to Tommy’s Secret Wife ht

Late December 1978, a street in Queens, New York. A car pulls up. Peter Vario behind the wheel. Bruno Fatiolo in the passenger seat. Tommy Desimone steps out of his mother’s house wearing his best suit. He’s smiling. He climbs into the back seat and the car pulls away. He thinks he’s driving to the most important night of his life, the ceremony that will make him a made man in the Luchese crime family. He said goodbye to his mother.

He didn’t say goodbye to his wife. The car drove toward an unknown location where no ceremony was waiting. Only his killers. Tommy Desimone was never seen again. His body [music] has never been found. 3 weeks later, a woman walked into a New York City police [music] station alone. No lawyer, no family, no one from the crew her husband had spent his life serving.

She told the officer at the desk that her husband was missing. She said the last time she’d seen him, he’d borrowed $60 from her. Her name was Angela Desimone. Everyone called her Cookie, and she is the person Goodfells [music] erased from history. This is the story of the wife who watched a man help steal nearly $6 million and come home with nothing.

Whose brother was murdered for refusing to betray her husband. Who filed a missing person’s report [music] and then vanished from every record, every interview, and every frame of one of the greatest films ever made. The movies told Tommy’s story. No one ever told hers. Story Vanished. Joe Peshy won an Oscar for playing Tommy Devito in Good Fellas.

It’s one of the most iconic performances in film history. The short, volatile, terrifyingly funny psychopath who kills Spider over a card game and beats Billy Bats to death with a pistol grip [music] for calling him a shoe shine boy. Peshi played Tommy as a bachelor, a loner, a man whose only loyalty was to Jimmy and Henry, and whose only softness was his mother cooking dinner at 3:00 in the morning.

But Tommy Desimone, the real [music] Tommy, was married. His wife’s name was Angelica Spion. Everyone called her Cookie. And when you learn what actually happened to her, you’ll understand something about the [music] mafia that Goodfellas never even tried to explain. Because the mob doesn’t just kill people, [music] it erases them.

And Cookie Desimone was erased so completely that most people who’ve watched Goodfellow’s 50 times [music] don’t even know she existed. Erasers. This is the story Martin Scorsesi cut from 12 drafts of the [music] screenplay. The woman who married a psychopath, lived in poverty while he [music] flashed stolen cash, lost her brother to the same men who would kill her husband, and then walked into a police station alone to report him [music] missing, carrying nothing but the knowledge that the last thing Tommy ever did was borrow [music] $60 from her and never come back. You have to understand [music] who Cookie married to. Understand what she lost. Thomas Desimone grew up in a family where violence wasn’t a career choice. It was an inheritance. [music] His father and his uncle were both connected to organized crime. By his teens, Tommy was already running

with the crew that operated out of Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, Queens, Jimmy Burke’s headquarters, the place where half the schemes and Good Fellas were actually planned. He stood 6’2, weighed 225 lbs, and had the face of a matinea idol. Crime Library described him as having the looks of Errol Flynn.

Joe Peshy is 5’4. [music] That’s how different the real Tommy was from the movie version, but the looks were a mask over something broken. Tommy killed for the first time as a teenager. He was impulsive, sadistic, and pathologically incapable of letting any perceived slight go unanswered. Henry Hill later said Tommy would shoot someone for looking at him wrong, and that wasn’t an exaggeration.

By the time he was in his 20s, Tommy had a body count that made even the men around him nervous. And these were men who killed people for a living. Cookie Spion married this man in 1975. Her family wasn’t blind to what Tommy was. Her own brother Joseph the Barber Spion was a [music] Lucasi crime family associate.

At the wedding, one of the guests was Charles Carglia, a Gambino family killer who would later be convicted of four murders. That same night, Carneglia left the reception, walked into the Esquire Diner in Howard Beach, harassed a waitress, and got [music] arrested by an offduty court officer named Arthur Gelb, who found a pistol on him.

Carglia later had Gelb murdered. That’s the kind of man who came to Cookie’s wedding. And here’s what her married life looked like. Henry Hill told Nicholas Pelgi for Wise Guy that Tommy always drove brand new cars and wore expensive clothes. and he and Cookie lived in a two- room tenement slum. Two rooms in Queens. While Tommy was out spending money at clubs, buying drinks, impressing women, flashing the kind of cash that comes from hijacking trucks, and [music] robbing card games, his wife was sitting in a tenement apartment waiting for him to come home. No children are documented from the marriage. No record of Cookie working, just a woman alone in two rooms while her husband lived an entirely separate life. Tommy didn’t just neglect Cookie. He was, according to every source, relentlessly unfaithful. He was always on the prowl for [music] women.

His most significant affair was with Teresa Ferrara, a strikingly beautiful woman who ran a mobf funed beauty salon in Belmore, Long Island. The salon was a front for cocaine distribution. Ferrara sold drugs to Desimone and other Lucasy associates, and through Tommy, she became embedded in the social world around Robert’s Lounge in the suite, Henry Hills nightclub in Queens.

Their affair reportedly started around 1972, 3 years before Tommy even married Cookie. But Ferrara had a secret that was more dangerous than any affair. After getting arrested in the summer of 1977 for selling cocaine to an undercover DEA agent, she [music] flipped. She became an FBI informant, the government’s eyes and ears on Luces Caporime Paul Vario.

[music] Her intelligence led to a massive bust on November 11th, 1978 when Coast Guard and DEA agents seized a cocaine shipment on the Flushing Waterfront that cost Vario and Burke roughly $250,000. The FBI told the NYPD to leave Ferrara’s robbery crew alone because of the intelligence she was providing.

She was playing a game with no margin for error and by early 1979 it caught up to her. Now here’s where the story turns dark and I mean darker than good fellas ever went. One of the competing accounts of why Tommy killed Ronald Foxy Jerathy, a Gambino associate, shot three times in the face on December 18th, 1974, is that Foxy kept hitting on Cookie.

That’s the version Anthony Rugiano Jr. gave in a 2019 interview. The standard version from Hill and Pelgi says Tommy was dating Jerrothy’s sister and killed him after Gerroi threatened retaliation for Tommy assaulting her. [music] Maybe both versions are true. Maybe Tommy killed a man for flirting with a wife he himself was neglecting.

That’s the kind of logic that operated inside Tommy Desimone’s head. But killing Foxy Jareth wasn’t just a murder. It was a death sentence on a timer. Jarthy was a Gambino associate and a John Gotti protetéé. And the other murder Tommy was carrying, the one from June 11th, 1970, was William Billy Bats, Bent [music] Vina, a Gambino soldier and personal friend of Gotti.

Bats had humiliated Tommy publicly at the suite, referencing his past as a shoe shine boy. Tommy [music] waited and then he ambushed Bats, pistol whipping him, beating him while Jimmy Burke held him down, loading the body into a trunk, [music] stopping at his mother’s house for a knife. shovel and lime.

When they heard Bats still alive in the trunk, they finished him with a shovel and a tire iron, stabbing him 30 to 40 times. Both of these murders violated the most fundamental rule in the mafia. You do not kill a made man or associate of another family without commission approval. Paul Vario had kept these secrets buried because Tommy was useful.

But Tommy made one final mistake that cost him Vario’s [music] protection. According to Hill’s gangsters and good fellas, Tommy attempted to [music] rape Karen Hill while Henry was in prison. Vario, who was himself having an affair with Karen, was enraged. He went to Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss, and handed Tommy over.

He told the Gambinos what Tommy had done to their men. [music] The Gambinos had waited years for this. and Cookie’s brother was the first to pay. Joseph the barber spion was supposed to help John Gotti lure Tommy Desimone to his death. The plan was straightforward, [music] using Cookie’s brother, someone Tommy trusted, to bring him to the location where the Gambinos would be waiting.

Spion refused. He would not help kill his sister’s husband. That refusal cost him his life. Social Security death index records place Spion’s death in July of 1978, 5 to 6 months before Tommy himself disappeared. One unverified account claims [music] Spion was bludgeoned to death and dismembered in the back room of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, Gotti’s headquarters in Ozone Park.

His remains are believed to be buried in a place called The Hole, a notorious mob graveyard on the Brooklyn Queens border [music] near JFK airport at Ruby Street between Blake and Dumont Avenues. The FBI excavated the site in 2004. They found the bodies of two Banano [music] Capos from the 1981. Three Capos hit.

They [music] never positively identified Spion. Think about that from Cookie’s [music] perspective. Her brother, murdered because he refused to betray her husband may never have been known why he died. The New York Times later confirmed the connection, reporting that [music] investigators were looking for both Tommy Desimone and Joseph Spion, who was slain because he would not help kill Mr.

[music] Desimone. Now, the Lufthanza heist enters the picture. December 11th, 1978. [music] Tommy was one of six armed men who [music] walked into the Lufansza cargo terminal at JFK airport and walked out with approximately $5 million in cash and $875,000 [music] in jewelry. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $28 million.

It was the largest [music] cash robbery in American history at the time. Tommy was already [music] marked for death before the heist even happened. His brother-in-law had been killed months [music] earlier for refusing to participate in the plot against him. But Tommy [music] didn’t know that. He thought he was about to receive the ultimate reward, his button.

Formal induction as a made man in the Luces [music] family. In late December 1978, Peter Vario, Paul’s son, and Bruno Fatiolo, a Luces soldier, picked Tommy up. He had [music] dressed in his finest clothes. He said goodbye to his mother. He believed he was driving to the ceremony that would make him untouchable.

There was no ceremony. There were only his killers. How Tommy died depends on who you ask. Henry Hill told Howard Stern in 2007 that John Gotti himself pulled the trigger and that the death took a long time because Billy Bats had been Gotti’s close friend. Mob informant Sal.

Police [music] said Thomas Agro slowly tortured Desimone to death with Gotti present. Joseph Joe Dogs Ianuti claimed Agro told him in 1985 that he had killed both Tommy and [music] later his brother Anthony and joked about going for the decimon trifecta. An alternate account via Greg [music] Buckaroni claims Burke himself killed Tommy at his own home and had the body disposed [music] of in a Philadelphia scrap metal yard where it was melted at a US steel facility.

The most widely accepted version is the Gambino execution with Luke cooperation. Hill’s account of learning the news was [music] adapted faithfully in Good Fellas. Burke slammed the phone down and began crying. The code phrase to confirm the hit was to ask if Tommy had seen his godmother yet. Tommy Desimone’s body [music] has never been found.

He was declared legally dead by the FBI in 1990. And then there was Cookie alone. On January 14th, 1979, Angela Cookie Desimone walked into a police station and reported her husband missing. She told officers the last time she had seen him, he had borrowed $60 from her. That detail appears in virtually every source.

Wikipedia, [music] Crime Library, Den of Geek, all tracing back to the original police report. One of the men who helped steal nearly $6 million, had [music] borrowed $60 from his wife and never came back. Jimmy Burke kept everything. FBI surveillance tapes played [music] at Vincent Assaro’s 2015 trial captured Assaro complaining that Burke had cheated everyone.

According to Daniel Simone’s book on the heist, Burke distributed [music] only 200,000 to Gotti and 450,000 Dvario, keeping the [music] rest. Cookiey’s share of Tommy’s cut, somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 [music] went into Jimmy Burke’s pocket. As Hill told the History Channel, rather than give everyone their share, it was easier to put a quarter bullet in their head.

And then Burke started [music] killing Parnell Stacks Edwards shot five times in the head on December 18th. Martin Krugman, the tipster who brought the heist opportunity, [music] killed on January 6th for demanding his share. Body never [music] found. Richard Eaton, found frozen, hog tied, hanging on a meat hook in a refrigerated truck.

Terresa Ferrara, Tommy’s [music] mistress, the FBI informant, disappeared on February 10th, 1979. She left her beauty salon to meet someone at a diner with a [music] chance to make $10,000. She told her 19-year-old niece to come [music] looking if she wasn’t back in 15 minutes. She never came back.

3 months later, a headless, dismembered torso washed up in Barnagate Inlet, New Jersey. [music] They identified Ferrara through serial numbers on her breast implants. No one was ever convicted. Lewis and Joanna Kapora [music] believed compacted inside their own car. Tom Montleó [music] found murdered in Connecticut.

Joe Buddha Manri and Robert Frenchie McMahon shot execution [music] style in a Buick in Brooklyn. Paulo Lcastri, the Gambino representative on the heist, shot four times and dumped on Flatlands Avenue. At least 10 people connected to the Lufansza heist were murdered in the months that followed. Cookie wasn’t one of them.

She wasn’t killed because she didn’t know anything worth killing her over. She wasn’t [music] pay because Burke didn’t pay anyone he could avoid paying. She wasn’t interviewed on camera [music] because no journalist sought her out. And she wasn’t in Good Fella because Martin Scorsesi and Nicholas Pelgi made a deliberate choice across 12 drafts of the screenplay [music] to turn Tommy Dimone into a bachelor.

That choice was calculated. Screen Rant offered the most direct explanation. Having a wife would have added a soft side to Tommy Devito and that would have changed how the audience reacted to everything [music] terrible he did. Tommy in the film is pure menace, pure volatility. A character defined entirely by violence.

A wife sitting in a tenement apartment while he murdered [music] people and burned through stolen money would have introduced moral complexity. It would have made [music] the audience feel something other than fear. And Scorsesi didn’t want that. So, Katherine Scorsesi sits at the dinner table after the Billy Bats murder, playing Tommy’s mother in a scene that was almost entirely improvised.

She tells her son to get a girl and settle down. Tommy laughs and says he settles down almost every night, but in the morning, he’s free. The audience laughs, too. It’s one of the film’s most beloved scene. But the real [music] Tommy had already settled down. Cookie was at home. And the painting Tommy’s mother shows off at that dinner, the one she says she did herself, was actually painted by Nicholas Paley’s mother, based on a photograph from National Geographic.

Even the art on the wall was borrowed [music] from someone else’s life. Here’s what the mafia does that Hollywood can’t quite capture. It doesn’t just kill people, [music] it unmakes them. It takes a woman who was legally married, whose brother was murdered for loyalty, whose husband helped steal millions, and it reduces her to a single line in a police report.

$60. [music] That’s what Cookie was left with. Not her husband, [music] not his share of the heist, not even an explanation, just the memory of a man walking out the door with her [music] $60, dressed in his best clothes, heading to a ceremony that didn’t exist. No media interview with Cookie has ever surfaced.

No subsequent public records trace her movements after January 1979. No one knows if she remarried, moved away, or died [music] quietly somewhere without anyone connecting her to the most famous mob movie ever made. The crime library observed that one has to wonder how Tommy’s real life widow [music] must have felt seeing her husband portrayed as a heartless hitman and womanizer in Good Fella, then as a clownish mob wannabe in The Big Heist.

But no one ever asked her. Cookie Spion is the ghost in the Good Fella’s machine. She existed [music] at the center of one of America’s most famous crime stories and was written out of every version of it by her husband who left her [music] in a tenement, by Jimmy Burke, who kept her money, by the Gambinos [music] who killed her brother, by Scorsese and Pelgi who cut her from 12 [music] drafts, and by history, which simply forgot.

The movies told one version. The truth had [music] a woman in it. And the truth, as always, is colder than anything Hollywood put on screen. If this story revealed something you didn’t know, hit [music] subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Here’s [music] the question. Do you think Scorsesei was right to cut Cookie from the film, or would her story have made Good Fellas an even better movie? Drop your answer in the comments.

Until next time.