The Real Story Of Tommy DeSimone — The Psychotic Gangster Behind Joe Pesci’s ‘Goodfellas’ Character
- May 2, 2018
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 31
Joe Pesci won an Oscar playing Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, a small, hilarious, terrifying man who could turn a compliment into a murder in about ninety seconds. The character was based on a real Lucchese crime family associate named Thomas DeSimone, and by most accounts, Pesci actually undersold him. But a lot of what's commonly repeated about DeSimone's life turns out to be shakier than it looks once you start checking it against anything beyond Henry Hill's own telling, and Hill was, by his own family's admission, not always a reliable narrator of his own story.
A Disputed Start
Even DeSimone's basic biographical details aren't fully settled. One detailed genealogical account has him born Thomas James DeSimone on 6 June 1946 in the South Ozone Park section of Queens, the youngest of eight children born to Robert Anthony DeSimone and Camilla Passerelli. A separate, more widely repeated version has him born Thomas Anthony DeSimone on 24 May 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That second version has been copied across dozens of pop-history sites over the years, but the two accounts can't both be right, and it's worth flagging rather than picking one and pretending it's settled. What both versions agree on is the family background, and it's a bigger deal than most retellings give it credit for.
Two of his older brothers, Anthony and Robert, became Gambino crime family associates, and Anthony was murdered by mobster Thomas Agro in 1979, the same year Tommy himself disappeared. But the real mob pedigree ran through his father's side: DeSimone's grandfather, Rosario DeSimone, had been a Los Angeles crime family boss in the 1920s, and his uncle Frank DeSimone held the same position decades later, in the 1950s. Tommy wasn't some kid who wandered into organized crime. He was mob royalty by birth on the West Coast, even if his own career played out entirely in New York.
What's not in dispute is how young DeSimone was when he got in. In 1965, at either 15 or 19 depending on which birth year you believe, he joined the East New York crew of Lucchese caporegime Paul Vario, the crew that also included Henry Hill and James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke. Hill remembered meeting him as a skinny kid in a wiseguy suit with a pencil moustache, absurdly young to be trying that hard to look like a gangster. Within a few years he was involved in truck hijackings, fencing, extortion, and, according to Hill, his first murder before he was out of his teens: a random stranger shot in the street, apparently just to prove he could. He picked up the nickname Two-Gun Tommy for his habit of carrying a pair of pistols, and even away from actual crime, his temper showed up in small, telling ways: acquaintances remembered him throwing darts at other players if he started losing a game of pinochle.
The Air France Robbery
DeSimone's early reputation as a capable earner, rather than just muscle, came from the April 1967 Air France robbery at JFK Airport, and the setup behind it was more elaborate than most retellings let on. The inside man was Robert "Frenchy" McMahon, a veteran Air France cargo supervisor who'd worked the airline's JFK facility for over a decade and knew exactly where large cash shipments sat before being collected. Air France was, oddly enough, functioning as an informal courier for currency American tourists and servicemen had exchanged overseas, storing hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time in a strong room before shipping it back to a Manhattan bank.
Getting the key copied took real groundwork. Hill and McMahon found a vulnerability in the security guard responsible for the room and set up an actual honeytrap, introducing him to a paid escort at a nearby motel and using the resulting distraction to lift the guard's key long enough to duplicate it.
Once McMahon got word that a shipment worth $400,000 to $700,000 had arrived, the crew moved fast. On the night of 7 April 1967, DeSimone and Hill walked into the terminal carrying the largest empty suitcase Hill could find, banking on the fact that people wandering into a cargo terminal looking for lost baggage never drew much scrutiny. They let themselves into the strong room with the duplicate key, found seven bags of cash by flashlight, including one containing $60,000 in notes from the Indo-China Bank of Laos, and walked back out without a single shot fired or alarm tripped.
Nobody noticed anything was wrong until 11 April, four days later, when a Wells Fargo truck arrived to collect the money and Air France staff discovered the strong room was empty. Despite an immediate joint investigation by airport security, the NYPD and the FBI, no one was ever charged. Hill later said it was this job, more than anything else, that earned him real standing with the Vario crew, and the film Goodfellas leans on it as a kind of dress rehearsal for the much larger, much bloodier Lufthansa heist that would define the end of DeSimone's life eleven years later.
The Killing of Billy Batts
The murder that defines DeSimone's reputation, and the one Goodfellas builds its most famous scene around, is the killing of William "Billy Batts" Bentvena in 1970. Bentvena, a made Gambino family member fresh out of prison, was celebrating at Robert's Lounge, Burke's bar, when he made an offhand joke about DeSimone's old job shining shoes. DeSimone took it badly. Weeks later, he, Hill, and Burke lured Bentvena to a nightclub, beat him near to death, and put him in the trunk of a car, only to hear him still groaning partway through the drive. They finished the job with a tire iron, buried him near a dog kennel, and later exhumed and reburied the remains elsewhere when the property changed hands.
The movie frames Bentvena's murder as an unforgivable insult answered with instant, understandable rage. The real motive was probably duller and more dangerous: according to later reporting, Burke had his own reasons to want Bentvena dead tied to protecting his loansharking territory, and Bentvena's insult may have simply been the convenient trigger rather than the actual cause. Killing a made man without approval from his own family was, regardless of motive, the kind of mistake that tends to catch up with people eventually, and it's one of the leading theories for what eventually caught up with DeSimone himself, alongside a very different killing that gets far less attention than it deserves.
The Murder Nobody Can Actually Verify
One of the most widely repeated DeSimone stories involves a young bartender named Michael "Spider" Gianco, allegedly shot in the leg for forgetting a drink and then shot dead weeks later for telling DeSimone to go do something anatomically impossible to himself. It's a vivid story, and it's the one most retellings present as settled fact. It probably shouldn't be. Researchers who've tried to verify Gianco's existence beyond Hill's own account have come up empty: no birth certificate, no record of him in the neighborhood he supposedly worked in, nobody who remembers him. Henry Hill was the sole source for the story and the only person who could have confirmed it, and he died in 2012 without ever producing anything beyond his own telling. That doesn't mean it definitely didn't happen. It means it's a story with exactly one uncorroborated source, and it deserves to be labeled that way rather than repeated as fact.
A murder with much better documentation, and one that gets left out of most retellings entirely, is the killing of Ronald "Foxy" Jerothe in December 1974. DeSimone had been dating Jerothe's sister; when the relationship ended badly and DeSimone allegedly beat her, Jerothe threatened to kill him over it. DeSimone didn't wait to find out if he meant it. He went to Jerothe's apartment and shot him in the face the moment he opened the door. The detail that matters here is who Jerothe was: a young associate and personal friend of Gambino captain John Gotti. If there's a real reason the Gambino family eventually wanted DeSimone dead, multiple accounts now point to this killing rather than Bentvena's.
The Lufthansa Heist
DeSimone's last major job was the December 1978 Lufthansa heist at the same JFK cargo complex where he'd made his name a decade earlier, and it dwarfed everything the crew had done before. The inside man was Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo agent buried under roughly $20,000 in gambling debt. Werner had actually gotten the idea from a colleague, Peter Gruenewald, then cut Gruenewald out entirely and taken the plan straight to his bookmaker, Martin Krugman, who passed it along to Henry Hill and up to Burke. Burke handpicked the crew, and Werner handed them everything they needed: maps of the facility, employee lists, and the identity of the supervisor who held keys to the vault.
At around 3am on 11 December 1978, six masked men in a black Ford Econoline van cut the padlock on the cargo gate with bolt cutters and let themselves into the building using a key Werner had supplied. Staff on shift, including senior cargo agent John Murray, were forced at gunpoint into a lunchroom and held there while the crew cleared out the vault. They walked away with $5.875 million in cash and jewelry, several times more than the roughly $2 million they'd expected going in, making it the largest cash robbery in American history at the time. DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, Joe "Buddha" Manri, Paolo LiCastri and Robert McMahon, the same McMahon who'd tipped off the Air France job over a decade earlier, all took part alongside Burke and Werner, each promised a cut somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 depending on their role.
What followed the heist was uglier than the heist itself. Werner turned out to be the only person ever convicted, sentenced to 15 years, and his arrest sent Burke into a spiral of paranoia about who else might talk. He began systematically killing off nearly everyone connected to the job. Louis Cafora sealed his own fate by buying his wife Joanna a custom pink Cadillac, driving it right past the JFK cargo lot under FBI surveillance, and bragging about the heist. Both Caforas disappeared, and neither body was ever found. Robert McMahon and Joe Manri were killed after refusing to cooperate with federal investigators. DeSimone's own assignment was Parnell "Stacks" Edwards, who'd been told to destroy the getaway van at a New Jersey scrapyard and instead just abandoned it, fingerprints and all, where police found it within days. DeSimone and Sepe tracked Edwards down and shot him dead. Almost none of the stolen $5.875 million was ever recovered.
Disappearance
On 14 January 1979, DeSimone vanished. His wife, Angela, reported him missing after he borrowed $60 from her and never came back. He was 32 or 33, depending on the disputed birth year, and he was never seen again. His own brother-in-law, Angela's brother Joseph "The Barber" Spione, was murdered not long after, reportedly for refusing to take part in whatever happened to Tommy.
The version told in Goodfellas, and repeated in most retellings since, has DeSimone lured to a fake induction ceremony and executed by Gambino soldiers acting on John Gotti's orders, in revenge for Bentvena. It's a clean, dramatically satisfying ending, and it may simply be wrong. A later investigation by Den of Geek, drawing on an alleged former Gambino associate's account, argues the Gotti crew had nothing to do with DeSimone's death at all, and that Burke himself killed DeSimone as part of the same Lufthansa cleanup that claimed Edwards and several others, rather than risk him talking to police under pressure. Other researchers still favor a Gambino hit, just tied to Jerothe's murder rather than Bentvena's. Nobody has ever recovered a body, and the specific closed-casket detail from the movie is itself an invention. There was no casket, open or closed, because there was nothing to bury.
What actually happened to Tommy DeSimone is, in the most literal sense, still an open case. It's a fitting, if unsatisfying, end for a man whose entire adult life sits at the blurry edge between what Henry Hill said happened and what can actually be verified, not unlike the uncertainty that still surrounds plenty of unsolved mob violence from the same era, including cases like the still-disputed killing of mob boss Carmine Galante, where the official story and the version whispered inside the mob itself have never fully lined up either.
