In "Goodfellas," Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito is a complete psychopath. As it turns out, Tommy DeSimone was even crazier in real life.
Wikimedia CommonsThomas DeSimone went missing in 1979 — and more likely than not, he was murdered.
Goodfellas is often considered one of the best Mafia movies ever made. And part of what makes it great is Joe Pesci’s scene-stealing character, Tommy DeVito. DeVito can be charming and often gets a laugh, but he’s also always ready to snap into a murderous rage at a moment’s notice. He’s a psychopath with a hair-trigger temper.
Of course, Goodfellas is based on real stories of mobsters in the orbit of Henry Hill. And while many movies based on true stories take liberties with the characters, Pesci’s character is a pretty faithful representation of a very real and terrifying mobster: Tommy “Two Guns” DeSimone.
Tommy DeSimone spent nearly half his life in the mob and played a major role in a number of big heists, including the Air France robbery and the infamous Lufthansa heist. More than anything else, though, DeSimone was known for his temper — and people who provoked him, like William Bentvena, would usually come to wish they hadn’t.
Thomas DeSimone Entered The Mob At A Young Age
Although he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1950, Thomas DeSimone grew up on the streets of New York, surrounded by mobsters.
His uncle and grandfather were both major figures in organized crime, and his brothers ended up becoming associates of the Gambino family. Even one of his sisters, Phyllis, would end up involved with the mob, becoming James Burke’s mistress when she was just 16.
DeSimone followed his brothers’ example and began his own life of crime early on, joining the crew of Lucchese family mobster, Paul Vario, when he was 15 years old.
Through Vario, DeSimone met Henry Hill and together, they worked on a number of criminal schemes. Hijacking trucks and fencing the goods was a favorite, and DeSimone had an unusual habit of carrying his gun for these hijackings in a paper bag. According to Hill, “Walking down the street, he looked like he was bringing you a sandwich instead of a .38.”
However, DeSimone wasn’t shy about using his gun. He supposedly committed his first murder at just 17. While walking down the street with Hill, he spotted a total stranger strolling in front of him. He then turned to Hill and said, “Henry, watch this,” before gunning the man down in cold blood.
This was just one of many instances of DeSimone’s uninhibited violence.
Henry Hill Called Tommy DeSimone ‘A Total Psychopath’
That kind of impulsive violence would follow DeSimone — and get him into trouble, in an incident that was depicted in Goodfellas.
According to Hill, it all went down in May 1970, when the crew was holding a party at Robert’s Lounge, Jimmy Burke’s nightclub, for William “Billy Batts” Bentvena, a made man in the Gambino family who had just been released from prison.
At the party, Bentvena ran into DeSimone and asked him if he “still shined shoes.” It was meant as a joke, but DeSimone wasn’t the type of person you wanted to joke with.
DeSimone had a life-long inferiority complex. His brother had also been an informant for the FBI, which meant that DeSimone always felt the need to prove himself.
He wanted respect more than anything, especially from other gangsters.
Rather than taking Benvtena’s jest as intended, he let the rage boil in him. At that moment, he leaned over to Burke and Hill and told them, “I’m gonna kill that f***.”
A few weeks later, on June 11, DeSimone followed through on that threat. He confronted Bentvena at Hill’s nightclub in Queens, The Suite, cracking him upside the head with his pistol and shouting at him, “Shine these f***ing shoes!”
NYPDTommy DeSimone’s mug shot.
DeSimone continued to beat Bentvena until he was dead and bloodied.
Just as in the movie, DeSimone’s crew helped him bury the body, stopping at DeSimone’s mother house to grab a knife, a lime, and a shovel, with the body still in the trunk.
And as it turned out, Bentvena wasn’t dead yet. DeSimone and Burke heard Bentvena making noise in the trunk, and so they opened it up and beat him to death with a tire iron and the shovel. They then proceeded to bury Bentvena at a friend’s kennel in upstate New York.
In another incident that made it into the movie, DeSimone’s impulse for violence had deadly consequences for Michael “Spider” Gianco. Gianco was a young mob associate who was serving as a bartender when he forgot DeSimone’s drink. DeSimone quickly pulled out a gun and shot Gianco in the foot after demanding that he dance for him.
A few weeks later, Gianco ran into DeSimone again, this time wearing a leg cast. After DeSimone started making fun of his cast, Gianco told him to, “go f*** [himself].”
Initially, DeSimone was going to let it slide — after all, it took some guts for a guy like Gianco to stand up for himself so brazenly. Even Burke was impressed; he laughed and handed Gianco some money for showing some courage. Then, he messed up. Burke made a joke at DeSimone’s expense, telling him he must be “going soft.”
DeSimone, not one to take a joke, responded by shooting Gianco three times in the chest.
“Nobody says a word,” Hill wrote, “but now I’m convinced Tommy is a total psychopath.”
Burke, enraged, left DeSimone to bury Gianco’s body by himself — “and all the while Tommy was grousing and pissed off that he had to dig the hole. He was like a kid who had been bad and had to clean the erasers after school.”
By then, it was clear that DeSimone was becoming a problem. Meanwhile, tensions were rising among the mobsters, and things would soon come to a head when Burke wanted to put together the biggest heist in U.S. history — the Lufthansa heist.
How The Lufthansa Heist Made — And Broke — The Gambino Family
Thomas Monaster/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesJames Burke (Jimmy the Gent), arrested and taken to Federal Court.
In spite (or maybe because) of his casual brutality, DeSimone remained an important part of Vario’s crew. And when Jimmy Burke needed someone to help him carry out the biggest heist in U.S. history, he included DeSimone in his plan.
Together, Burke, Hill, and DeSimone carried out the infamous Lufthansa heist, stealing almost $6 million from JFK International Airport in New York.
Over the next few weeks, DeSimone served as a hitman, silencing anyone who could tie Burke — who had become increasingly paranoid — to the robbery. But what DeSimone didn’t know was that his own murderous past was about to catch up with him.
A few weeks after the heist, DeSimone got the news he had been waiting almost his entire life for. He was going to be “made.” He would finally be someone that other mobsters had to respect.
Of course, the truth was that DeSimone was walking into a trap. Someone, most likely Paul Vario, revealed to the Gambino family that DeSimone had murdered Bentvena.
And according to the code of the mafia, murdering a made man without permission meant death.
Tommy DeSimone’s Disappearance And Death
In January 1979, DeSimone disappeared. He has never been seen since, and was declared legally dead in 1990. Officially, no one knows what happened to him.
But according to several sources within the mafia, he was murdered in revenge for the killing of Bentvena. Henry Hill maintains that Jon Gotti, future don of the Gambino family, killed DeSimone himself. According to another mobster who claimed he was at the scene, his death was slow and painful.
Warner Bros. PicturesThe death of Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito (Tommy DeSimone) in Goodfellas.
If these accounts are true, then the body of Tommy DeSimone is probably buried in one of the “mafia graveyards” on the outskirts of New York, lying forever among some of his own victims.
In the end, DeSimone was a victim, too — one of the lifestyle he had always wanted to live and his own murderous temper.
Enjoy learning about Tommy DeSimone? Next, learn the story of Henry Hill’s wife, Karen Friedman Hill. Then, read about the executions, informants, and flamboyance of the American Mafia in the 1980s.
