On January 14, 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked down the basement stairs on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx wearing a double-breasted black Bill Blass suit, certain he was about to become a made man. He was twenty-eight years old, ambitious, and sure this was his coronation. Instead, John Gotti put three bullets in his head. The whole thing took five seconds.

Tommy’s head crashed forward onto a card table, blood pooling on the green felt. Gotti buttoned his cashmere overcoat and left. Tommy’s body was never discovered. The movie Goodfellas never told the full story.

Tommy was not killed just for the murder of Billy Batts, the made man whose death sits at the center of Martin Scorsese’s film. There was another unauthorized hit, a man named Ronald “Foxy” Geroth. Tommy had been dating Foxy’s sister. He beat her.

Foxy confronted him to defend her, and Tommy shot him three times in the face. That murder, more than anything, sealed Tommy’s fate. Hollywood cut it from the movie because showing Tommy brutalizing a woman and then killing her brother would have made him utterly unsympathetic. Scorsese wanted the audience to feel something when Tommy died.

The truth is, Tommy DeSimone did not deserve it. Tommy DeSimone was born on June 6, 1946, in South Ozone Park, Queens, the youngest of eight children. By the age of fifteen, he was running with Paul Vario’s crew in East New York. His brothers were already in the life; one would later be killed for being an informant, the other would get life in prison.

Tommy saw the odds and did not care. Most young men in the mob had boundaries, lines they would not cross until they had to. Tommy had none. His sister later said his teenage years were spent boxing, weightlifting, and pounding a punching bag in a spare bedroom.

He drank nearly a gallon of whole milk a day. His only other interest was pocket knives, which he kept in a cigar box under his bed. Jimmy Burke brought Tommy into the cigarette hijacking racket in 1965. Burke was already a legend, a thief and earner Vario trusted completely.

Henry Hill, part of the crew, later recalled that Burke introduced him to Tommy at a cabstand. Tommy wore a wiseguy suit and a pencil mustache, trying to look older than his fifteen years. Burke told Henry to teach the kid the cigarette racket, to show him how to make a few bucks. They made far more than that.

They hijacked cigarettes and sold them to construction sites, garment factories, and sanitation garages, pulling in three or four hundred dollars a day, sometimes more. Tommy was still a kid, bringing in more money than most working adults, and learning how to move product, keep his mouth shut, and hurt people when intimidation was not enough. Tommy committed his first murder at seventeen. In 1968, he shot a random stranger named Howard Goldstein on the street.

There was no reason, no beef, no financial motive. Henry Hill confronted him about it, calling it cold-blooded. Tommy’s answer: “Well, I’m a mean cat. ” No justification, no regret.

Most mob killers killed for business, territory, or revenge. Tommy killed because he was angry, because someone disrespected him, because he felt like it. That made him valuable to men like Burke and Vario. It also made him a ticking time bomb.

By his early twenties, Tommy carried two guns, unusual enough that people noticed. During a card game in a basement around three in the morning, a bartender named Michael “Spider” Gianco walked in. Tommy told him to dance. A week earlier, Tommy had shot Spider in the foot for refusing to dance.

Now Spider’s foot was still bandaged. Tommy ordered him to dance again. Spider told Tommy to go screw himself. The others laughed, and Jimmy Burke goaded Tommy, asking if he was going to take that from the punk.

Tommy was still playing cards when he pulled out a gun and shot Spider three times in the chest. The room went deaf. No one said a word. Henry Hill believed at that point Tommy was a complete psychopath.

He was right. The murder that counted happened in 1970. William “Billy Batts” Bentvena was a forty-nine-year-old made man in the Gambino crime family, part of Carmine Persico’s crew since 1961. He had been in federal prison for six years on a drug charge.

When he got out in June 1970, the crew threw him a welcome home party. In the movie, Batts makes a wisecrack about Tommy shining shoes as a kid, Tommy goes berserk, and he and Burke beat Batts, stuff him in a trunk, and bury him. That part is fine cinema. The real motive had nothing to do with shoeshines.

While Batts was in prison, Jimmy Burke had taken over his loan sharking racket. Batts wanted it back. Burke had no intention of giving it up. Batts went to Crazy Joe Gallo to pressure Burke into surrendering the business.

Burke refused. The wisecrack at the party was just the excuse for Tommy to pull the trigger. Two weeks later, Batts was drinking at a bar called the Suite. Tommy came in, told his girlfriend to go home, and gave Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke the eye.

Jimmy kept Batts occupied. Tommy whispered to Henry to keep him there while he went for a bag. He did not mean money. He meant a plastic mattress cover, so Batts would not bleed everywhere when they killed him.

Tommy came back with a . 38. Batts saw the gun. Jimmy wrapped his arm around Batts’s neck.

Tommy screamed, “Shine these fucking shoes,” and smashed the gun into the side of Batts’s head. Then again. They thought he was dead, wrapped him up, and shoved him in the trunk of Henry’s car. Driving up the Taconic Parkway, they heard banging.

Batts had woken up in the trunk. They pulled over, opened it, and finished him with a shovel and a tire iron. Three months later, they had to dig him up and move the body because the property was being developed. Even killing a made man without permission was not the worst thing Tommy did.

In December 1974, Tommy killed another Gambino associate, and that one led directly to his execution five years later. Ronald “Foxy” Geroth was part of John Gotti’s crew at the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park. Foxy was young, loyal, and being groomed by Gotti. Tommy began dating Foxy’s sister.

They broke up. Foxy heard Tommy had beaten her, not just a slap but a beating. Believing it, Foxy confronted Tommy publicly, punched him in the face, and knocked him down. In Tommy’s world, that was unforgivable.

On December 18, 1974, Tommy walked into Foxy’s sister’s apartment and shot Foxy three times in the head with a . 38 revolver. Foxy died instantly, in front of his sister, the woman Tommy had beaten. Tommy left without hesitation.

The police suspected him, but no one testified. The case went cold. The streets knew, and John Gotti knew. Foxy was his protégé, his money maker.

Tommy DeSimone, some crazy hitman from the Lucchese family, killed him over a personal grudge, without permission, without a sit-down, without respect. Gotti could not act immediately. Tommy was protected by Paul Vario and Jimmy Burke. Killing him without approval would start a war.

So Gotti waited. He filed it away and seethed. Tommy kept killing. He strangled Dominic Remsa with piano wire in the back of a car on orders from Burke, burying him behind Robert’s Lounge next to the bocce court.

Henry Hill later said he did not know how many people Tommy killed. He did not think even Jimmy knew. Then came the Lufthansa Heist. On December 11, 1978, a crew walked into the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport and walked out with five million dollars in cash and jewelry.

It was the biggest cash robbery in American history. Tommy was part of it. During the robbery, he raised his ski mask to wipe sweat from his face, and a warehouse employee caught a glimpse of him. A police sketch artist could now identify him.

Tommy was linked to the largest robbery in the nation, and the FBI had his picture. That made Burke and Vario very angry. Tommy was hot, and hot people were liabilities. But John Gotti had not forgotten Foxy.

He saw his chance and demanded a meeting with Vario. Gotti made his point: Tommy killed Billy Batts without asking, and Tommy killed Foxy without asking. Both were Gambino soldiers. Now Vario wanted to make Tommy a made man.

Gotti said it was like sticking a cactus up his ass. He wanted permission to whack the guy. Vario thought about it. Tommy had always been a problem, a useful problem, but a problem.

He killed without thinking. He bragged when he should have stayed quiet. He attracted attention. He was about to be indicted for Lufthansa.

And years before, when Henry Hill was in prison, Tommy had tried to assault Henry’s wife, Karen. Vario was still angry about that. He granted Gotti permission. On a cold winter night in late January 1979, Tommy received a call.

He was going to be made. He put on his best suit, a black double-breasted Bill Blass, with a starched blue shirt and a beige silk tie. He thought it was the most important night of his life. Bruno Facciolo and Peter Vario, Paul’s son, picked him up in Ozone Park and drove him to the Bronx.

They told him the ceremony was at a restaurant called Don Vito’s. Tommy walked into the basement expecting to see Lucchese people. Instead, John Gotti sat at a card table with a few old men. Candles lit the room.

Tommy was confused, wondering why a Gambino capo was at a Lucchese induction. Gotti smiled and told him to pull up a chair, that it was not an ordinary day in his life. Tommy sat down. Gotti pulled a silenced Colt .

38 Magnum from his coat. Three shots. All three bullets hit Tommy in the skull. His head slammed forward onto the green felt.

Gotti buttoned his coat, straightened his lapels, and walked out without a word. Tommy DeSimone’s body was never discovered. Some believe he was cut in half and dumped in the Atlantic. Some believe his body was crushed in a car at a mob-connected scrapyard and melted down in a Pennsylvania steel mill.

No one knows for sure. What is certain is that Tommy DeSimone, the most explosive and self-destructive killer in Lucchese family history, was executed by the very men he trusted, in the moment he believed he was finally being rewarded.