Thomas DeSimone

Thomas Anthony DeSimone was an American mobster of the Lucchese crime family in New York City. He is alleged to have participated in both the Air France robbery and the Lufthansa heist. DeSimone inspired the character Tommy DeVito, one of the main characters of the 1990 film Goodfellas, played by Joe Pesci in an Oscar winning performance. Early life: Tommy DeSimone had two sisters, Dolores and Phyllis, and two brothers, Robert and Anthony. Both of DeSimone's brothers were associates of the Gambino crime family; Anthony was murdered by mobster Thomas Agro in 1979. Phyllis was James Burke's mistress from the time she turned 16. DeSimone was the brother-in-law of mobster Joseph "The Barber" Spion, who was slain for refusing to help kill DeSimone in the late 1970s. DeSimone was also the ex-son-in-law of Gambino associate Salvatore DeVita. DeSimone's father owned a printing shop, which he lost due to a compulsive gambling addiction. Both his paternal grandfather, Rosario DeSimone, and uncle, Frank DeSimone, were bosses of the Los Angeles crime family. Rosario became the boss of the Los Angeles family after Vito Di Giorgio was killed in Chicago in 1922. Frank was a criminal attorney turned mobster; "Uncle Frank", as he was known, replaced the deceased Jack Dragna in 1956, and became the second DeSimone family member to assume control of the Los Angeles family. In 1965, when he was 15 years old, DeSimone was introduced to Lucchese family caporegime Paul Vario. Henry Hill, a Vario associate who was in his early 20s at the time, later recounted his first meeting with DeSimone, describing him as "a skinny kid who was wearing a wiseguy suit and a pencil mustache." DeSimone worked under Vario, Burke, and Hill, among others, becoming involved in truck hijackings, dealing and fencing of stolen property, extortion, fraud and murder. While hijacking, DeSimone would always carry his gun in a brown paper bag. "Walking down the street, he looked like he was bringing you a sandwich instead of a .38." Hill said. Air France robbery: McMahon received notice that between $400,000 and $700,000 would be delivered on Friday, April 7, 1967. He said the best time for the actual robbery would be just before midnight, when the security guard would be on his meal break. On the day of the robbery, Henry Hill and DeSimone drove to the Air France cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport with an empty suitcase, the largest Hill could find. At 11:40 p.m, they entered the Air France cargo terminal. McMahon said that they should just walk in, as people often came to the terminal to pick up lost baggage. DeSimone and Hill entered the unsecured area unchallenged. They unlocked the door with a duplicate key. Using a small flashlight, they found seven of the bags, which they loaded into the suitcase and left; $420,000 was taken. No alarm was raised, no shots fired, and no one was injured. The theft was not discovered until the following Monday, when a Wells Fargo truck arrived to pick up the cash to be delivered to the French American Banking Corporation. Murder of William "Billy Batts" Bentvena: On June 9, 1970, a "welcome home" party was thrown for William "Billy Batts" Bentvena, a made man in Carmine Fatico's Gambino crew, at a hangout owned by Burke called Robert's Lounge. At the party, Bentvena, who had just been released from prison after serving a six-year term for drug possession, saw DeSimone and asked him if he still shined shoes, which DeSimone took as an insult. A couple of minutes later, when the issue was apparently forgotten, DeSimone leaned over to Hill and Burke, and told them, "I'm gonna kill that fuck." Two days later, on June 11, Bentvena went over to "The Suite", Hill's establishment in Jamaica, Queens, to go drinking with Hill, DeSimone, and Burke. Later that night, DeSimone took his girlfriend home, and Burke started making Bentvena feel comfortable. Twenty minutes later, DeSimone returned with a .38 revolver and a plastic mattress cover, walked over to Bentvena at the corner of the bar, and attacked him. Burke restrained Bentvena while DeSimone pistol whipped the mobster with the revolver. In the book Wiseguy, Hill said that before DeSimone started to beat Bentvena, DeSimone yelled; "shine these fucking shoes!" DeSimone killed Bentvena not only because the latter had insulted him, but also because Burke had taken over Bentvena's loan shark business while Bentvena was in prison. According to Hill, Bentvena had been complaining to Joseph N. Gallo about getting back this racket. Not wanting to return the business to Bentvena, Burke knew sooner or later Bentvena would have to be killed. After the beating, the three men put Bentvena into the trunk of Hill's 1970 Buick Electra and later, while the three men were driving on the Van Wyck Expressway, they discovered that Bentvena was not dead. They visited DeSimone's mother's house to get a knife, lime, and a shovel. Later in the drive, closer to their destination, Hill said it had been an hour of DeSimone's driving, and DeSimone kept getting mad about the noises in the trunk, so he finally slammed the brakes, leaned over for the shovel, and then Burke and DeSimone "didn't actually shoot him, they just stabbed him, thirty or forty fucking times, fucking horrible." Hill does not mention a knife, but claims Burke and DeSimone finished Bentvena off by beating him with a tire iron and the shovel, respectively, and the men later buried him under a dog kennel. At the time of the murder in 1970, Bentvena was 49 years old and was a made man in the Gambino crime family. Murders of Gianco, Cersani, and Jerothe: DeSimone's third murder, described by Hill, was of a young man named Michael "Spider" Gianco, who was serving as a bartender at a card game. Gianco and DeSimone had an argument (after Gianco forgot DeSimone's drink) that resulted in DeSimone pulling out a handgun and shooting him in the thigh. (In the film he was shot in the foot.) A week later, when Gianco was again serving drinks and donning a full leg cast, DeSimone started to goad him about his wounded leg, spurring Gianco to tell DeSimone to "go fuck himself". After a stunned silence, a delighted and impressed Burke, having now developed a respect for Gianco for sticking up for himself, gave him some money before jokingly teasing DeSimone, who hadn't said or done anything in retaliation, about "going soft". DeSimone lost his temper and fatally shot Gianco three times in the chest, angrily demanding of Burke if that was "good enough for him". Burke, furious with DeSimone, made him bury Gianco's body in the cellar by himself. Hill stated that after he saw this he was truly convinced that DeSimone was a total psychopath. It is believed that Gianco's body was subsequently moved, because it was not found in that location. On The Howard Stern Show, Hill said that Gianco was buried next to Robert's Lounge, which was owned by Burke, along with other bodies. There was a later interview on The Howard Stern Show with Gianco's sister, who wanted to know where the body was. DeSimone's fourth murder, according to Hill, occurred when he and another associate named Stanley Diamond got carried away after being asked to "rough up" a witness to a robbery. After a truck heist, a foreman had refused to allow Burke to unload the ill-gotten cargo in his warehouse and vehemently protested because they had no union cards. Burke attempted to reason with the man, who stood his ground and refused to be intimidated. Burke later sent DeSimone and Diamond to the man's house in rural New Jersey, with instructions to "rough up" the man to ensure he would cooperate with Burke in the future. DeSimone and Diamond, angry and worked up about having to drive all the way to New Jersey, ended up beating the man to death. DeSimone's fifth murder occurred when Burke ordered the murder of his best friend, Dominick "Remo" Cersani. Burke got suspicious about Cersani and later found out from contacts in a Queens DA's office that he was talking to the New York City Police Department, and that they were going to arrest Burke on a truck hijacking charge. DeSimone and Burke met Cersani at Robert's Lounge and said to him, "let's take a ride". DeSimone strangled Cersani with piano wire. Hill said in Wiseguy: "Remo put up some fight. He kicked and swung and shit all over himself before he died." Burke had Cersani's body buried next to the bocce court behind Robert's Lounge. It was said that whenever Burke and DeSimone played bocce with their friends, they would jokingly say: "Hi Remo, how ya doing?" DeSimone killed Gotti protégé Ronald "Foxy" Jerothe on December 18, 1974. DeSimone had dated Jerothe's sister and had beaten her up, prompting Jerothe to threaten to kill him. When DeSimone heard about the threat, he went to Jerothe's apartment and knocked on the door. Jerothe opened the door and punched DeSimone in the face. DeSimone then shot Jerothe between the eyes. Lufthansa heist and Edwards murder: The Lufthansa heist was a robbery at John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 11, 1978. An estimated $5.875 million (equivalent to $23 million in 2019) was stolen from the German airline Lufthansa, with $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time. Burke decided on Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, Joe Manri, Paolo LiCastri and Robert McMahon as the robbers. Burke's son Frank would drive one of the back up vehicles and Parnell "Stacks" Edwards' job was to dispose of the van afterwards. Soon after the heist, DeSimone murdered Parnell "Stacks" Edwards, a black musician and career criminal. Edwards was supposed to have driven the vehicle to New Jersey, where it (along with any potential evidence inside) was to be destroyed in a junk yard belonging to John Gotti. Instead, Edwards parked the truck in front of a fire hydrant at his girlfriend's apartment, where police discovered it two days after the heist. Paul Vario subsequently ordered DeSimone to kill Edwards. Once he found out where Edwards was hiding, DeSimone and Angelo Sepe visited Edwards and shot him five times in the head. Disappearance: It is believed that DeSimone was murdered as a reprisal for having killed two of John Gotti's close friends, William "Billy Batts" Bentvena and Foxy Jerothe. However, the alleged murder may also have been related to $250,000 of the Lufthansa heist robbery money that had gone missing; his lover was a suspect in stealing the money. One theory is that DeSimone would have had access to the money and would have known his lover, Theresa Ferrara, was an informer for the FBI, sealing his alleged fate. On January 14, 1979, DeSimone's wife, Angela, reported him missing. She said she had last seen DeSimone a few weeks earlier when he borrowed $60 from her. When Hill became an FBI informant in 1980, he told authorities that DeSimone had been murdered by the Gambino crime family. Despite the oft-given date of death of January 14, 1979, the exact date of DeSimone's murder is uncertain. Hill claimed that in "the week after Christmas," he and Burke had gone down to Florida to straighten out a drug deal gone bad. DeSimone had remained behind in New York, because he was going to be made. When Burke called to see if the ceremony had occurred (the code phrase was to ask if DeSimone had seen his godmother yet), Burke was told that it had been called off due to a heavy snowfall. The next day, Burke found out that DeSimone had been murdered; he slammed the phone down and began crying, as depicted in the film Goodfellas. Hill also indicated in both the book Wiseguy and the DVD commentary to Goodfellas that DeSimone had already been killed when Martin Krugman disappeared on January 6, 1979. In 1994, Hill, in his book Gangsters and Goodfellas, gave an expanded story of the events leading up to DeSimone's death. Hill's wife, Karen, had been having an affair with Hill's boss, Mafia caporegime Paul Vario. When Hill was sentenced to prison, DeSimone approached Karen. When she turned him down, DeSimone attempted to attack her. In retaliation for the attempted rape, Vario approached the Gambino crew and revealed that DeSimone had murdered Jerothe and Bentvena without first seeking permission from the Gambino crime family, violating Mafia protocol. Sometime in late December 1978 or early January 1979, DeSimone was contacted and told that he was going to be "made." Peter Vario (Paul Vario's son) and Bruno Facciolo took him to an unknown location, where he was murdered. Two theories about DeSimone's alleged murder and murderer(s) exist from mob "insiders". According to mob informant Joseph "Joe Dogs" Iannuzzi, Thomas Agro said in 1985 that he had murdered Thomas DeSimone. Agro also claimed to have murdered DeSimone's brother Anthony after he turned informant. Agro also suggested murdering the eldest and last remaining brother, Robert. According to Ianuzzi, Agro would often laughingly refer to killing the third DeSimone brother, stating: "Maybe it's time to go for the DeSimone trifecta!" Another account, told by Hill in Gangsters and Goodfellas, states that John Gotti himself was the assassin, although in the presence of Thomas Agro. On May 17, 2007, on the Howard Stern Show, Hill reaffirmed that Gotti had killed DeSimone. He also added that the death "took a long time," as Bentvena had been a personal friend of Gotti's, and he wanted DeSimone to suffer before he died. Gotti's role as the assassin was repeated in the 2015 book The Lufthansa Heist, cowritten by Hill and journalist Daniel Simone, although this account claims that DeSimone's death was instantaneous from three gunshots to the head. According to Sal Polisi, DeSimone was killed by Thomas Agro (in the presence of John Gotti), and that Agro slowly tortured him to death. It has been theorized DeSimone is buried in a suspected "Mafia graveyard" on the Brooklyn-Queens border near John F. Kennedy International Airport, where the body of Al Indelicato was found in 1981, and the bodies of Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera were recovered by police in 2004. In popular culture: DeSimone was portrayed by Joe Pesci in the 1990 movie Goodfellas, renamed Tommy DeVito. Pesci won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this depiction.