Thomas "Tommy" DeSimone

DeSimone was twenty-eight years old when he took part in the Lufthansa robbery and twenty-nine when he vanished. He is on this page because of what he did in the last decade of his life, and he is known to almost everyone because of a performance that gets his age wrong by twenty years.

He was an associate in Paul Vario's Brooklyn crew, alongside Henry Hill and James Burke, and by every account that reached the record he was the most dangerous man in it and the least controllable.

Billy Batts

In June 1970 DeSimone and Burke beat and shot William Bentvena, known as Billy Batts, in a bar in Brooklyn. Bentvena had recently come home from a long sentence and had, in front of others, spoken to DeSimone as the boy he had been when the sentence began.

Bentvena was a made member of the Gambino family. DeSimone was an associate who could never be made. Under the rules that governed both men, killing him without sanction was not a dispute to be settled later; it was a debt that could only be paid one way.

14 January 1979

DeSimone left his home on 14 January 1979 and was not seen again. He had been told, according to Hill's later testimony, that he was going to be inducted into the family that day.

His body has never been found and nobody has been charged. The accepted account

• from Hill, and consistent with the sequence of deaths that followed the

Lufthansa job — is that the Gambinos were finally permitted to settle the Bentvena killing, and that the Lucchese side raised no objection at a moment when several of the robbery's participants were being removed anyway.

On the screen

In the film he is Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, who was forty-six at the time of filming. The real DeSimone was a large man in his twenties.

The change is worth naming because it alters the story's centre of gravity. A volatile veteran is a character. A violent twenty-year-old whom nobody senior could restrain, and whom the organisation eventually disposed of when he became inconvenient, is what the record describes.