Thomas Anthony DeSimone (May 24, 1950 – January 14, 1979), also known as "Two-Gun Tommy" or "Tommy D", was an Italian-American gangster and associate of the Lucchese crime family in New York. DeSimone was a grandson and nephew of Los Angeles mob bosses Rosario DeSimone and Frank DeSimone. He was married to Angelica "Cookie" Spione, but had many mistresses, including Theresa Ferrara. In the 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, the character Tommy DeVito (played by Joe Pesci) is based on DeSimone.
Contents |
Thomas' sister was Dolores and his two brothers were Gambino crime family associate Robert DeSimone (imprisoned for life) and Gambino associate Anthony DeSimone, murdered by mobster Thomas Agro in the early 1980s. He was the brother-in-law of mobster Joseph "The Barber" Spione, who was slain for refusing to help kill DeSimone in the late 1970s.[1] His sister Phyllis was Jimmy Burke's mistress since she was sixteen years old. He is the ex-father-in-law of Gambino crime family associate Salvatore DeVita.
Both DeSimone's grandfather, Rosario DeSimone, and uncle, Frank DeSimone, were bosses of the Los Angeles crime family.
DeSimone's paternal grandfather Rosario DeSimone was the boss of the Los Angeles crime family after Vito Di Giorgio was killed in Chicago in 1922. DeSimone's paternal uncle, Frank DeSimone, was a criminal attorney-turned-mobster; "Uncle Frank" (as he was known) replaced Jack Dragna in 1956 after the latter's death, becoming the second DeSimone family member to become Los Angeles crime family boss. Thomas was also related to mobsters James, Joseph, Ralph, Phil DeSimone.
Thomas was also the nephew of Leon DeSimone, who was the son of Rosario DeSimone, who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles, California. Thomas is the cousin of Salvatore DeSimone, who would later become a Los Angeles Catholic priest.
DeSimone was introduced to The Vario Crew in 1965, Henry Hill said in Wiseguy, "Jimmy [Jimmy Burke] came by the cab stand one day with a skinny kid who was wearing a wiseguy suit and a pencil mustache. It was Tommy DeSimone. He was one of those kids who looked younger than he was just because he was trying to look older. Jimmy had been a friend of Tommy's family for years, and wanted me to watch out for Tommy and to teach him the cigarette business–help make him a few bucks."
DeSimone worked under Mafia capo Paul Vario with Jimmy Burke, Henry Hill and more. DeSimone was involved in truck hijacking, dealing stolen property, extortion, fraud and murder.
DeSimone was well known for his violent temper. His sister was quoted saying "Tommy's teen-age years revolved around boxing, lifting weights, smoking cigarettes, and beating the shit out of a punching bag he kept in a spare room. He had a short fuse, and an animalistic appetite. He would drink almost a gallon of whole milk a day. His only other childhood hobby was collecting different kinds of pocket knives he kept in an old cigar box under his bed." While playing pinochle with Joseph Iannuzzi and Agro, he would throw darts at the other players when he started losing. Henry Hill's ex-wife Karen said in Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, "Tommy DeSimone always drove around in a brand-new car and wore expensive clothes, and he and Angela lived in a two-room tenement slum." And Hill described DeSimone and Burke by saying, "It didn't take anything for these guys to kill you. They liked it. They would sit around drinking booze and talk about their favorite hits. They enjoyed talking about them." An ex-police detective named Frank Santarsola said "It gave him enjoyment to break somebodies wrist, murder somebody, beating someone with a bat." Hill later described DeSimone as a "pure psychopath" and "Tommy was fucking loose horse, a fucking homicidal maniac and was always strung out on coke constantly." Hill suggested that DeSimone had something to prove because his older brother Anthony had become an informant and was allegedly murdered by the Gambino crime family.
During the 1960s, DeSimone and fellow associates Henry Hill, Joey Allegro, and Stanley Diamond would go on usual hijackings. 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 thirty-eight." Hill said.
DeSimone committed what is believed to have been his first murder on March 15, 1968. He was walking down the street with Hill when DeSimone spotted Howard Goldstein, a passing pedestrian, unknown to either gangster. Hill recalls DeSimone turning to him and saying, "Hey Henry, watch this". DeSimone yelled, "Hey cocksucker!", pulled out a .38 caliber pistol, and shot and killed Goldstein. Hill exclaimed, "That was cold-blooded, Tommy!" DeSimone replied, "Well, I'm a mean cat."
In the book Wiseguy, Henry Hill said they threw a "welcome home" party at Robert's Lounge, which was owned by Jimmy Burke, for William "Billy Batts" DeVino, a made man in John Gotti's crew and in the Gambino crime family Devino had just gotten out of prison after serving a six-year term for drug possession. Hill states in Wiseguy that Devino saw DeSimone and asked him if he still shined shoes and DeSimone took this as in insult. Hill also said that Devino provoked DeSimone because he wanted to impress some mobsters from another crime family. A couple minutes later when that issue was going to be forgotten, DeSimone leaned over to Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke and said "I'm gonna kill that fuck." and Hill saw that he was serious about it. A couple weeks later, on June 11, 1970 Devino went over to "The Suite" owned by Hill in Jamaica, Queens to go drinking with DeSimone's crew, including Henry Hill, DeSimone, and Jimmy Burke. Later that night DeSimone took his girlfriend home and Jimmy Burke started making Devino feel comfortable. Twenty minutes later DeSimone arrived with a .38 revolver and a plastic mattress cover. DeSimone walked over to him at the corner of the bar and attacked Devino. Before Devino was attacked, Jimmy Burke tightened his arms around Devino and he was pistol-whipped with the .38 revolver. He was so inebriated that he couldn't defend himself.
In the book Wiseguy Hill said that before DeSimone started to beat Devino, DeSimone yelled, "Shine these fucking shoes!". The reasons why DeSimone killed Devino was not only did he insult him, but Jimmy Burke had taken over Devino's loanshark business while Devino was in prison. According to Hill, Devino had been complaining to Joe Gallo about getting back this racket. Not wanting to return the business to Devino, Burke knew sooner or later he had to kill Devino. After the beating, the three men put Devino in the trunk of Hill's 1970 Buick Electra and later while the three men were driving on Van Wyck Expressway, they discovered that Devino was not dead. Later, 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's been an hour of DeSimone driving and he kept getting mad about the noises in the trunk and finally slammed the brakes and leaned over for the shovel and that 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 Devino 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, Devino was 49 years old and was a respected and a feared made man in John Gotti's crew and in the Gambino crime family. The price DeSimone would pay for killing a made man was his death.
DeSimone's third murder is described by Hill in Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy. A young man named Michael "Spider" Gianco was serving as a bartender at a card game, where he and DeSimone had an argument (after Gianco forgot about DeSimone's drink) that resulted in DeSimone pulling out a handgun and demanding that Gianco dance for him. DeSimone shot him in the foot when Gianco refused. A week later, when Gianco was again serving drinks, DeSimone started to goad him about his wounded foot spurring Gianco to reply, "Why don't you go fuck yourself, Tommy?" 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 took his teasing seriously and lost his temper, fatally shooting Gianco three times in the chest, angrily asking Burke if that was good enough for him. Burke and Hill were furious, Burke yelled "All right, you dumb fuck, if you're going to be a big fucking wiseguy, you dig the hole." and 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 his body was subsequently moved, because it was not found in that location. There is also recent speculation as to whether "Spider" Gianco even existed as police have never found a birth certificate or family and friends indicating that Hill possibly made the story up. But on the Howard Stern Show, Hill said that "Spider" was buried next to the Robert's Lounge, which was owned by Jimmy Burke, along with other bodies.
His fourth murder, according to Hill, occurred when DeSimone 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 cargo of a hijacked truck 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 Stanley Diamond to the man's house in the boondocks of New Jersey, with instructions to threaten and "rough up" the man to ensure he would cooperate with Burke in the future. DeSimone and Stanley Diamond, angry and so worked up about having to drive all the way to New Jersey, ended up beating the man to death.
His fifth murder, was when Jimmy Burke ordered the murder of his best friend, Dominick "Remo" Cersani, who became an informant and was going to set Burke up in a cigarette hijack for Burke to get arrested. Burke got suspicious about Cersani and later found out from one of his friends from a Queens, New York DA's office that Cersani was talking to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and that they were going to arrest Burke on a truck hijacking charge. DeSimone and Burke killed Remo that same week and told Remo at the Robert's Lounge and said "Lets take a ride." and DeSimone stuck a piano wire in Remo's head and Henry Hill said in Wiseguy "Remo put up some fight. He kicked and swung and shit all over himself before he died." Burke had Remo'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, killing him.
DeSimone was alleged to have taken part in the December 1978 Lufthansa heist from JFK International Airport, the largest robbery in U.S. history at the time. The loot is reputed to have been almost $6,000,000, of which only a fraction was recovered. He was picked out by having very well-polished shoes, too well polished for an airport employee. He was the one who suggested recruiting his ex-cell mate Angelo Sepe for the heist.
DeSimone then murdered Parnell "Stacks" Edwards. DeSimone was a good friend of Stacks and was disappointed to hear that he had failed to get rid of the truck used in the Lufthansa Heist in New Jersey, where the evidence would be destroyed. When DeSimone was told by a ranking mafioso that he could become a made man because of this hit, he agreed. Once he found out where Stacks was hiding, he visited Stacks and shot him six times in the chest and head with a silenced pistol. In Wiseguy, Hill mentioned that DeSimone had killed "around" four people in prison, bringing the total to approximately 11. Hill commented that DeSimone would murder someone just because he wanted to try out a new firearm and wouldn't hesitate to use someone as human target practice.
Hill stated that he and Jimmy Burke didn't know how many people DeSimone had killed.
DeSimone was murdered as a reprisal for having killed two of John Gotti's close friends, specifically William "Billy Batts" DeVino and Foxy Jerothe.[2][3] On January 14, 1979, DeSimone's wife, Angela, reported him missing. She said she had last seen Tommy "a few weeks earlier" when he borrowed $60 from her.
Following the Lufthansa heist, Theresa Ferrara, Martin Krugman, Robert McMahon, Joe Manri, Parnell Edwards and Paolo LiCastri had all been murdered by Burke, who wanted to avoid paying them their share of the loot. For years, the New York Police Department and the FBI believed that DeSimone had either been murdered by Burke, or that he was in hiding to avoid being killed. DeSimone's brother-in-law, Lucchese family member Joseph "The Barber" Spione, also disappeared shortly afterward.
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. Henry claimed that in "the week after Christmas", he and Jimmy Burke had gone down to Florida to straighten out a drug deal gone bad. Tommy had remained behind in New York because he was going to be made. When Jimmy called to see if the ceremony had occurred (the code phrase was to ask if Tommy 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. Henry also indicated in both the book Wiseguy and the DVD commentary to Goodfellas that DeSimone was already dead when Martin Krugman disappeared on January 6, 1979.
In 1994, Henry 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 for sex. When she turned him down, DeSimone attempted to rape her. In retaliation for the attempted rape, Vario approached the Gambino crew and revealed that DeSimone had murdered Jerothe and DeVino without first seeking permission from the Gambino crime family, violating Mafia protocol. Sometime in late December 1978/early January 1979, DeSimone was contacted and told that he was going to be "made". Peter Vario and Bruno Facciolo took him to an unknown location, where he was murdered.
There are two theories as to who actually killed DeSimone. According to mob informant Joseph "Joe Dogs" Iannuzzi, Thomas Agro claimed in 1985 that he was the driving force behind the murder. 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 that "Maybe it's time to go for the DeSimone trifecta!" Another account, told by Henry Hill in Gangsters and Goodfellas, states that John Gotti himself was the assassin. 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 Gotti wanted to assure that DeSimone suffered.
DeSimone was declared legally dead by the FBI in 1990. He was thought to have been buried at a suspected "Mafia graveyard" on the Brooklyn-Queens border [4] 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.[5] His remains, however, have never been located.
DeSimone's infamy rests on his depiction by actor Joe Pesci in the 1990 movie Goodfellas (renamed "Tommy DeVito" in the film), a role for which Pesci won the 1990 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The movie took some artistic liberties: primarily, DeSimone was six years younger than Hill, not the same age (as implied when they first meet), and while depicted in the film as a small man with an attitude, DeSimone was a large, burly enforcer, standing about 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) and around 225 pounds.
Although principally based on DeSimone, Tommy DeVito also functions as a composite character. The DeVito character is substituted for various individuals not portrayed in the film; for example, in the double date scene where Hill meets his future wife, Tommy DeVito is substituted for Paul Vario's son, Paul Jr, who actually went on the date.
Hill, nevertheless, calls Pesci's portrayal "between 90 and 95 percent accurate", mentioning only that the diminutive Pesci did not physically resemble the tall, muscular DeSimone. Pesci was 46 years old during production of Goodfellas, while DeSimone was only in his teens and twenties during the real-life events depicted in the film, and is believed to have been murdered at age 28.
Also, in real life, Vario allowed the Gambinos to kill DeSimone in retaliation for the murder of Batts and Foxy Gerothe, whereas in the film, elder members of the family solely execute Tommy DeVito for killing a "made man" without permission. Hill's narration makes a reference to the true events, saying DeVito was murdered as "it was revenge for Billy Batts and a lot of other things." In the film, DeVito is literally shot through the head by Tuddy, based on (Vito Vario), the younger brother for Paul Vario of the Lucchese crime family and by Vinnie played by Charles Scorsese, based on Thomas Agro. Unlike his real-life counterpart, DeSimone, DeVito's body is found shortly afterwards and is given a funeral.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||