The Real Story Of Billy Batts That ‘Goodfellas’ Didn’t Tell

Published March 1, 2024
Updated March 28, 2024

Although "Goodfellas" famously depicted the murder of Gambino mobster William "Billy Batts" Bentvena, the real story was far too bloody for the movie to portray.

Billy Batts

Wikimedia CommonsA photo widely said to depict William Bentvena, better known as Billy Batts, though its authenticity is disputed.

Not too much is known about the early life of Billy Batts. He was born in 1921 with the name “William Bentvena” (although even this is up for debate, as he was also known as William Devino) and worked his way up within New York’s Gambino crime family alongside his close friend, John Gotti.

Batts had just gotten out of prison after doing time for a drug-related charge the night his fate was decided in 1970.

According to Henry Hill, who told his life story to author Nicholas Pileggi in his book Wiseguys (which would later inspire Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas), the families would throw a sort of “welcome back” party any time one of the boys got released from jail.

As Hill tells it, at Billy Batts’ welcome back party in 1970, Batts made a snide comment to fellow wiseguy Tommy DeSimone asking him to shine his shoes. DeSimone was notoriously hypersensitive — in addition to being a loose cannon.

DeSimone fumed about the comment all night, but since Batts was a “made man” in the Gambino family, he was untouchable and as Hill said, “if Tommy so much as took a slap at Billy, Tommy was dead.”

DeSimone had to swallow his anger and bide his time, but a few weeks later, he got his opportunity for vengeance at the Suite, a club owned by his friend, Lucchese family associate Jimmy Burke.

William “Billy Batts” Bentvena’s Early Life

While much of Bentvena’s early life is something of a mystery, there are a few concrete details about his younger years that can be gleaned.

William Bentvena was born on January 19, 1921, in New York City, growing up in roughly the same area as DeSimone and Hill. For some time, Bentvena disappears from the record. Details about his education, family life, and upbringing, among other things, are effectively nonexistent, but what is clear is that by the late 1950s, he had gotten involved with New York City’s mobsters.

In 1958, for example, when Bentvena was 37 years old, he became a member of a heroin smuggling ring known as the Ormento Group. The group was put together by Lucchese crime family member John Ormento, with the help of Carmine Galante and Anthony Mirra, according to U.S. court documents.

1959 was a big year for Bentvena. He became an associate of the Gambino crime family and also took on a job for “Joe the Crow” DelVecchio and Oreste “Ernie Boy” Abbamonte to conduct a drug deal in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Unfortunately for Bentvena, this deal would lead to his arrest by undercover police, landing him charges of possession and exchange of narcotics.

Bentvena managed to avoid extensive jail time, however, and in 1961 he became a full member of the Gambino crime family. The cops would come for him again a year later, though, when he and Galante were busted in 1962, leading Bentvena to receive a 15-year jail sentence.

He was released in 1970, but his newfound freedom was, of course, relatively short-lived.

Billy Batts’ Brutal Death

What should have been a celebratory night for Billy Batts ultimately proved to be the night that doomed him. He had been locked away for quite a while, and the last time he saw Tommy DeSimone, the latter was a young man, shining shoes and working his way up from the bottom.

But DeSimone wasn’t a rookie anymore. He had made a name for himself — and he was prone to violence.

It’s likely that Batts didn’t mean to insult DeSimone when he asked him “if he still shined shoes,” as Henry Hill put it, but his intention didn’t matter. DeSimone was livid, and he told Hill and Burke, “I’m gonna kill that f***.”

Two weeks later, on June 11, he followed through on that promise.

At the Suite, Hill wrote that Burke held Billy Batts down while DeSimone shouted “Shine these f***ing shoes!” before proceeding to beat Batts in the head with his gun.

The other wiseguys present at the scene panicked, knowing that the retribution for Batts’ murder would be ferocious, and helped stuff the body into Hill’s car before rushing off to bury it.

Unfortunately for them, Batts was not actually dead, and when they opened the trunk he “had to be killed again,” this time with a shovel and tire iron (instead of a kitchen knife, as portrayed in the notorious scene from Goodfellas).

Former JFK airport employee Kerry Whalen, who was working the night of the Lufthansa heist, wrote his own account in the 2015 book Inside the Lufthansa HEI$T: The FBI Lied that shed some new light on Bentvena’s death.

Whalen used the Freedom of Information Act in 2001 to obtain FBI documents relating to the heist. He received about 1300 pages, although much of the vital information (including names of agents) were redacted.

The famed Goodfellas scene where Billy Batts loses his life.

One of the FBI documents, dated August 8, 1980, recounts the murder of “William Bentvena AKA Billy Batts” and confirms what Hill had described: Batts and DeSimone were out at Robert’s Lounge, a bar owned by Burke, when Batts sneeringly asked DeSimone to “shine his shoes,” a comment that caused DeSimone to go berserk.

Two weeks later, DeSimone and Burke encountered Batts at the Suite Bar and Grill in Queens. The insult clearly had not been forgotten, as they then proceeded with the “vicious beating of Bentvena.”

The Fate Of Billy Batts’ Murderers

DeSimone did not escape reprisal for William Bentvena’s murder, although the true details of his own gruesome end did not emerge until nearly thirty years later.

According to the 2015 book Hill published with journalist Daniel Simon entitled The Lufthansa Heist: Behind the Six-Million-Dollar Cash Haul That Shook the World, Tommy DeSimone was done in by three bullets from the gun of Batts’ old friend, John Gotti.

Hill claimed he withheld the details of the murder (which he had learned from a fellow mobster-turned-informant) from Pileggi during the writing of Wiseguys for fear of reprisal from those implicated.

As Hill tells it, the Gambino family had been stewing over DeSimone’s murders of Billy Batts and another one of their men, Ronald “Foxy” Jerothe. Things finally came to a head when Gotti heard DeSimone was about to become a “made man” himself — and therefore untouchable — and asked to meet with the Lucchese family capo, Paul Vario.

Vario, as it turned out, had his own reasons for wanting DeSimone out of the way.

Not only had the volatile gangster put the Lufthansa heist, which Vario’s gang orchestrated, in jeopardy when he lifted his ski mask, but he had also attempted to rape Hill’s wife (whom Vario happened to be having an affair with) while her husband was in jail.

John Gotti reportedly told Vario that for him, DeSimone being made after having murdered his friend was “as bad as putting a cactus up my ass. I wanna whack the bastard, and I want you to give me the green light.”

Vario gave his assent, Gotti pulled the trigger, and DeSimone never emerged from the Italian restaurant he stepped into one January night in 1979.


After learning about William Bentvena, AKA Billy Batts, and his gruesome murder, check out Richard Kuklinski, the most prolific mafia hitman of all time. Then, read about Nucky Johnson, the real-life mobster behind Boardwalk Empire.

author
Gina Dimuro
author
A graduate of New York University, Gina Dimuro is a New York-based writer and translator.
editor
Austin Harvey
editor
A staff writer for All That's Interesting, Austin Harvey has also had work published with Discover Magazine, Giddy, and Lucid covering topics on mental health, sexual health, history, and sociology. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Point Park University.