Most people who’ve seen “Goodfellas” think they know why Tommy DeSimone got whacked—according to a popular crime storyteller, they’re wrong.
The real story is darker, more personal, and involves a future mob boss who never appears in the movie once.
The Man The Movie Never Mentions
In a viral three-part TikTok series with more than 470,000 views combined, content creator @storie.us.crime007 breaks down the true history behind one of cinema’s most iconic death scenes and why Martin Scorsese left the most important parts out.
The text overlay sets it up plainly: “Goodfellas never showed why the Gambinos had to kill Tommy.”
The creator starts with the rule that governs everything in this story. In the American Mafia, killing a made man without permission from the Commission—the governing body of the five New York families—is an automatic death sentence. No sit-down, no appeal. You’re dead.
Billy Batts, real name William Bentvena, was a made member of the Gambino crime family, and when Tommy DeSimone, Jimmy Burke, and Henry Hill beat him to death after a bar insult in 1970, they did it without anyone’s permission. That should have been the end of Tommy. But the Gambinos had a problem: They didn’t actually know who did it.
“The movie makes it seem like the Gambinos found out and acted quickly,” the creator explains. “In reality, that secret held for years.”
Four years passed. Then in 1974, Tommy made a mistake that had nothing to do with mafia protocol. He had been dating the sister of a street-level associate named Ronald Jerothe, known as Foxy. When the relationship ended, Tommy beat her up. Foxy found out and threatened to kill Tommy over it. So Tommy went to Foxy’s apartment and shot him dead the moment he answered the door.
The problem: Foxy Jerothe was a protégé of John Gotti.
Gotti wasn’t the boss of anything yet, just a rising Gambino figure running the Bergen crew in Queens as acting capo. But he was reportedly ambitious, ruthless, and fiercely loyal to the people under his wing. Foxy was one of those people. And Gotti was not the kind of man who let something like that slide.
“The movie ‘Goodfellas‘ never mentions John Gotti,” the creator points out. “Not once. In the real story of why Tommy DeSimone was killed, Gotti is arguably the most important figure in the room.”
The Betrayal That Actually Got Tommy Killed
Gotti carried that grudge for years. And as his power grew through the late ’70s, so did his ability to do something about it. But what finally sealed Tommy’s fate wasn’t another murder; it was a betrayal from inside his own crew.
While Henry Hill was in prison, Tommy allegedly made a move on Karen Hill. According to Henry Hill’s 1994 book “Gangsters and Goodfellas,” Tommy beat up and attempted to assault her. But here’s the part that makes everything click: Paul Vario, the Lucchese captain the movie calls “Paulie,” was allegedly having an affair with Karen at the time. When Vario found out what Tommy had done, he didn’t just get angry. He picked up the phone and called the Gambino family.
Vario told them what they’d been waiting nearly a decade to hear: Tommy DeSimone was the man who killed Billy Batts. The Billy Batts murder wasn’t the real reason Tommy died; it was the gift-wrapped excuse Vario handed over to settle a personal score. Combined with Gotti’s long-standing vendetta over Foxy Jerothe, Tommy was a dead man walking. He just didn’t know it.
What Really Happened On Jan. 14, 1979
On Jan. 14, 1979, Tommy DeSimone disappeared. No body was ever found—no closed casket. There was no casket at all.
The movie shows his death as almost elegant. He walks into a room expecting to be made, gets a bullet in the back of the head, and slumps to the floor. The reality, the creator says, was messier and more disputed.
Henry Hill gave investigators several different versions over the years. One had Tommy’s body going through a car compactor. Another placed his remains near what some called an informal mob burial ground on the Brooklyn-Queens border near Kennedy Airport, an area where other bodies were later recovered by police in the ’80s and 2000s.
Hill’s 2015 book “The Lufthansa Heist” claimed Gotti himself fired three shots into Tommy’s head. Mob informant Joe Dogs told a different story, that Gambino soldier Thomas Agro carried out the hit, with some accounts claiming Agro slowly tortured Tommy while Gotti watched. The more extreme versions, the creator notes, are unverified. There are street rumors circulating for decades that claim Tommy was cut in half with a chainsaw and dumped in the Atlantic.
“Whether that detail is true or exaggerated through decades of retelling, the core message is clear,” the creator says. “The Gambinos didn’t just want Tommy dead. They wanted him erased.”
The series closes with a reframe of Joe Pesci’s performance. The movie portrays Tommy as a volatile hothead, impulsive, chaotic, and someone who kills because he can’t control himself. But people who actually knew Tommy DeSimone described something colder. He reportedly carried a .38 revolver inside a brown paper bag, walking up to targets on the street looking like he was carrying lunch from the deli. By the time anyone realized what was happening, he’d already pulled the trigger.
“That is not a hothead,” the creator says. “That is a clinical psychopath who had figured out how to weaponize the ordinary.”
There’s one final detail that made Tommy’s position even more precarious: Two of his brothers were Gambino associates. One of them, Anthony, had turned informant and was feeding information to law enforcement. The Gambinos knew. Anthony was murdered by Thomas Agro in 1979, the same year Tommy vanished. In the mafia, your family name is everything. And the DeSimone name had become a liability long before anyone confirmed what Tommy did to Billy Batts.
The Real People Behind The Movie
“Goodfellas” is based on real events, and the real versions of these people were, in several cases, more extreme than what made it to the screen.
Henry Hill
Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) was a Brooklyn-born Lucchese family associate who started running errands for Paul Vario’s crew at age 11. His Irish-Italian heritage meant he could never be a made man (full Italian lineage was required), but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the family’s most active earners. He co-orchestrated the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time, netting nearly $6 million. In 1980, facing narcotics charges and suspecting he was next on the hit list, Hill became an FBI informant. His testimony led to 50 convictions. He died in 2012 of heart disease, not a mob hit, which he’d spent years expecting.
Jimmy Burke
Jimmy Burke (renamed Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro) was the architect of the Lufthansa heist and, according to Henry Hill’s estimate, responsible for at least 60 to 70 murders. Like Hill, his Irish descent kept him from ever getting his button. According to A&E, he spent just 86 days as a free man between the ages of 16 and 22. His name was changed in the film because his daughter demanded $100,000 to use it. Burke died of cancer in 1996 while serving a life sentence—eight years before he would have been eligible for parole.
William Bentvena
William Bentvena (renamed Billy Batts) was a Gambino soldier who had been doing time for drug trafficking since 1962. He was made in 1961 and had been working alongside a young John Gotti before his arrest. When he got out in 1970, he walked into a welcome home party and made a joke about Tommy DeSimone shining shoes. Two weeks later, DeSimone and Burke beat him nearly to death, drove him to a burial site, realized he was still alive in the trunk, and finished the job with a shovel and a tire iron. His body was buried on a dog kennel property in upstate New York, later exhumed when the land was sold for development, and moved to a second location, believed to be crushed in a New Jersey junkyard compactor.
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BroBible reached out to @storie.us.crime007 for comment via TikTok direct message and comment.