Many people consider Joe Pesci’s Oscar‑winning performance in *Goodfellas* to be one of the greatest in cinematic history. His character, Tommy DeVito, is based on real-life mobster Thomas DeSimone. It’s been claimed that the filmmakers changed the name because Martin Scorsese wanted to tone down the psychopathic nature of the real man. He supposedly worried that if they stuck to reality, audiences would find DeSimone’s actual behavior too random and brutal to believe. Here is who mob associate Thomas DeSimone really was.

Tommy DeSimone, nicknamed “Two Guns,” was born on June 6, 1946. He was the youngest of eight children and grew up in the South Ozone Park area of Queens, New York City. Two of his three older brothers went on to become associates of the Gambino crime family. Tommy’s path diverged slightly after an introduction to Lucchese family caporegime Paul Vario at age fifteen linked him to the Vario crew.

In 1964, DeSimone dropped out of high school after completing the 10th grade. Physically, he was very different from the actor who would later portray his fictionalized version. He was tall—six foot two—and skinny, weighing about 175 pounds. Two of his closest associates were Jimmy “The Gent” Burke and Henry Hill.

In his autobiography *Wiseguy*, Henry Hill recalls the young Tommy as a skinny kid in a wiseguy suit with a pencil mustache. He also notes that DeSimone had a strange way of carrying his handgun. Instead of tucking it into his waistband, he kept it in a paper bag and carried it like a lunch sack. The trio committed many violent crimes together, specializing in hijacking.

One complaint form from DeSimone’s now‑declassified FBI files gives us a detailed example of how these hijackings worked. Around 7:15 p.m. on October 9, 1966, an R.E.A. truck loaded with 187 fur coats was hijacked in Manhattan at the corner of 7th Avenue and 14th Street. The driver was stopped at a red light when an armed man suddenly appeared and pointed a gun at him.

The driver was forced out of the truck and placed into another car, where he was driven around the city for over an hour before being released unharmed in Yonkers. The entire time, he was ordered to keep his gaze straight ahead and not look at the other men in the car. The truck had been en route to Newark Airport, where the furs were to be shipped to customers across the country.

The insured value of the merchandise was almost $200,000 at the time, which is more than $2 million in 2025. The truck was recovered the next day in Jersey City, abandoned at a gas station with the cargo missing. Attempts to lift fingerprints from the vehicle came back negative. The driver reported that the hijackers were three men.

One man, who had the gun and later drove the car, matched DeSimone’s description. Another sat in the back seat and might have been Jimmy Burke or Henry Hill. A third, unseen man drove the truck away. About a month later, the FBI received a tip about a business in Queens selling $500 furs at a steep discount of $100 each.

When agents went to investigate, there was nothing to see. The business owner and his employees denied that any such liquidation sale had taken place. In November 1969, however, New York City detectives recovered some of the stolen merchandise and returned it to R.E.A. After that, the investigation stalled for a few years.

In a later follow‑up interview, a witness—whose name is redacted—identified DeSimone and Burke from photographs. Thomas DeSimone was arrested and brought in for questioning but refused to say anything. He was first tried in 1975; the result was a hung jury. A second trial ended the same way, and a third concluded in a mistrial.

After three failed attempts, the government dropped the charges. Even if DeSimone had been under law enforcement’s radar during the 1969 hijacking, the police were well acquainted with him by the mid‑1970s. His FBI profile noted that he had numerous arrests, including one for a 1975 hijacking.

On April 7, 1967, when DeSimone and Henry Hill were in their early twenties, they committed what later became known as the Air France robbery. This caper can be seen as a precursor to the more famous Lufthansa heist a decade later. Robert “Frenchy” McMahon was a daytime security guard at Air France’s cargo terminal.

At that facility, U.S. dollars exchanged in Asia arrived by plane and were transported to the cargo building. There, they were stored in a safe until an armored truck could pick them up for delivery to the bank. According to Hill’s later account, McMahon tipped off Jimmy Burke about a large cash shipment arriving that weekend and gave him a copy of the safe key.

Burke told Hill and DeSimone to get the largest suitcase they could find and bring it to the cargo building just before midnight, when the night guard would be on his lunch break. Two men walking into the building with a suitcase wasn’t suspicious; passengers who lost luggage were always coming in at odd hours. DeSimone and Hill entered undetected.

Using a map that Frenchy drew, they easily found the safe room. They opened it with the key McMahon provided and walked out with the suitcase now stuffed with $420,000 in cash. No one bothered them, and no one was hurt. The theft wasn’t discovered until Monday, when a Wells Fargo truck arrived to pick up the money and found it gone.

In *Wiseguy*, Henry Hill describes multiple murders committed by Tommy DeSimone. The two most famous to the public are those of Billy Batts and Spider, both dramatized in *Goodfellas*. According to Hill, these killings are accurately portrayed from book to screen. Billy Batts, real name William Bentvena, was a made man in the Gambino family, which meant DeSimone should never have touched him.

Spider, real name Michael Gianco, came from a mafia‑connected family. They had no idea what happened to him until Hill later turned informant and told his story. To this day, Spider’s body has never been found. Hill claimed that DeSimone’s first murder occurred when Tommy was just seventeen.

The victim was a random man walking past them on the street. DeSimone didn’t know the man; he merely told Henry, “Watch this,” and then shot him. The fourth killing Hill describes involved a warehouse foreman who refused to let Jimmy Burke unload a truck full of stolen merchandise at his facility.

The foreman lived in rural New Jersey. Burke ordered DeSimone and another associate, Stanley Diamond, to visit the man’s home and rough him up so he wouldn’t cause trouble again. DeSimone was furious about the long trip, lost his temper, and beat the man to death instead of merely threatening him.

The fifth murder Hill knew of was that of Dominick Cersani, Burke’s best friend and business partner. Burke suspected that Cersani had become a police informant and ordered Tommy to kill him. Unaware he was in danger, Cersani climbed into a car with Burke in the front and DeSimone in the back.

Tommy looped a cord around Cersani’s neck and strangled him to death while Burke watched. The body was later buried in the basement of Robert’s Lounge, a bar Burke owned that doubled as his headquarters. DeSimone’s sixth known victim is believed to be Ronald “Foxy” Jerothe, killed on December 18, 1974.

The two were rumored to be friends who committed hijackings together. DeSimone had been dating Foxy’s sister and one night beat her up. In response, Foxy told others he was going to kill DeSimone. When word got back to Tommy, he decided to strike first. He went to Foxy’s apartment, knocked on the door, and shot him three times in the face when he answered.

Two months later, in February 1975, Tommy DeSimone married Angela, nicknamed “Cookie.” When the FBI interviewed her that year, she was five months pregnant, and the couple was living in his parents’ home. His FBI file also notes that he had been married in 1966 and had one child with that woman, from whom he separated in 1969.

DeSimone admitted to a six‑month common‑law relationship with her but denied that they were ever formally married or that he had a child. In organized crime, a capacity for violence is considered an asset. Even in that world, however, DeSimone was at the extreme end of the spectrum. Many who knew him described him as a psychopath.

Perhaps he had a chip on his shoulder after his older brother Anthony, a Gambino associate, was murdered on suspicion of being an informant. Or perhaps he was simply unhinged. Yet for all his brutality, DeSimone could be oddly sentimental. During one arrest after his father’s death, officers noted a tattoo on his right arm: a cross with the words “In memory of Pop.”

His mother told investigators that her youngest son was considerate but had a bad temper when provoked. In one police interview, FBI agents observed that he appeared to have average intelligence but was extremely nervous and easily antagonized under stress. His file also notes that he never served in the armed forces.

On June 17, 1970, he was classified 1‑Y for the draft, meaning he was not fit for military service due to ongoing legal issues. Although he beat the fur‑truck hijacking charges, DeSimone was sentenced on April 11, 1975, to ten years in prison for another hijacking. He began serving time at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

On October 18, 1978, due to “good behavior,” he was transferred to the Manhattan Community Treatment Center. This was essentially a halfway house where he was allowed to roam the city freely as long as he returned by curfew. When he missed curfew, a bribe to the right person was enough to keep his paperwork clean.

Less than two months later, on December 11, 1978, DeSimone was part of the crew that carried out the notorious Lufthansa heist—then the largest cash robbery in American history. He later became a liability for mastermind Jimmy “The Gent” Burke when it emerged that Tommy had taken off his mask during the robbery because he was too hot, allowing a witness to see his face.

That lead never had time to develop. Before investigators could capitalize on it, the people involved in the heist began to die under suspicious circumstances. Right after the robbery, as law enforcement pressure mounted, DeSimone was ordered by Burke to kill Stacks Edwards. Stacks had been tasked with picking up the van used in the heist and driving it to New Jersey for disposal.

Instead, he parked it on the street, leaving it full of his fingerprints. It was only a matter of time before police traced it back to him. DeSimone and Angelo Sepe tracked Stacks down, and Tommy shot him five times in the head. It is very likely that Stacks Edwards was the last person Tommy killed.

On January 14, 1979, his wife Angela reported him missing to the police, saying she had not seen her husband in weeks. He has not resurfaced in almost fifty years and is presumed dead. Over time, numerous theories emerged about who killed him, why, and how.

The most widely cited account of his murder comes from Henry Hill. According to Hill, Tommy was told by Paul Vario that he was going to be “made” into a full member of the Lucchese family shortly after the Lufthansa heist. During the week after Christmas, Burke and Hill were in Florida working on a drug deal when Tommy was picked up by Paul’s son Peter Vario and Bruno Facciolo.

DeSimone believed he was being taken to his induction ceremony. Instead, he walked into an ambush. Hill said the motive was vengeance for the murders of Billy Batts and Foxy Jerothe, particularly Batts, who was a made Gambino member killed without authorization. Hill later added that Tommy’s alleged assault on Hill’s wife, Karen, also influenced Vario’s decision to have him killed. In this version, DeSimone’s death was quick.

Another theory suggests that Jimmy Burke himself either killed Tommy or ordered his murder because of the Lufthansa heist. In Burke’s paranoia, he suspected that DeSimone had become a police informant and had him eliminated before he could talk. A third account comes from mob informant Joe Iannuzzi.

According to Iannuzzi, Gambino capo Thomas Agro bragged about killing DeSimone in 1985. In this telling, Tommy once again believed he was going to a mafia induction ceremony. Instead, he was led to a house where Agro, John Gotti, and others were waiting. Iannuzzi claimed that Agro supervised while Gotti slowly tortured DeSimone to death as revenge for killing his friend Billy Batts.

In another version of the same story, Gotti still does the killing but shoots DeSimone quickly three times in the head. Agro also claimed responsibility for murdering Anthony DeSimone and joked about killing the remaining brother, Robert, so he could complete the “DeSimone trifecta.”

While the mafia knew Tommy was dead, the government did not. In the summer of 1979, he became a wanted man for violating his parole. The search went nowhere. DeSimone’s body was never recovered. Some suspect he was buried in a mafia graveyard known as “the Hole,” a barren area on the Brooklyn–Queens border where the body of Bonanno capo Sonny Red Indelicato was later found.

After Bonanno boss Joe Massino became an informant in 2005, the site was excavated and more bodies were uncovered. DeSimone was not among them. Either that was not his final resting place, or his remains had already decomposed beyond recognition.