Goodfellas Never Showed Burke’s Real Kill List

Good fellows told you a lie about Billy Bats. Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece based on Nicholas Pelgi’s book Wise Guy shows Joe Peshi’s Oscar-winning Tommy Devito killing Frank Vincent’s Billy Bats and getting whacked months later. The truth is it took 9 years. William Bentina was beaten to death with a shovel and a tire iron on a back road in upstate New York on June 11th, 1970.

He was a made man in the Gambino crime family. His killers were associates of the Lucesy crime family. In the American mafia, killing a maid man without commission approval is an automatic death sentence. No appeal, no sitdown.

You die. Tommy Desimone, the man who swung the shovel, did not die until January 14th, 1979. That is 9 years. For 9 years, the most powerful crime family in New York, let the unsanctioned murder of one of their soldiers go unanswered.

In Good Fellas, this story takes up less than 20 minutes of screen time. Joe Peshi’s Tommy Devito insults Frank Vincent’s Billy Bats at a bar. Tommy snaps. He beats Bats to death.

Then, somewhere in the film’s final act, Tommy walks into a room expecting to become a made man and takes a bullet instead. The movie makes it feel like months between the murder and the payback. The audience walks away thinking the Gambinos found out and moved quickly. They did not.

They waited 9 years. And the reason they waited is a story Good Fellas never tells because it reveals something uncomfortable about how the five families actually worked. Loyalty had a price tag. And William Bentina’s price tag was not high enough.

Bentina was born in Manhattan on February 22nd, 1933 and grew up in Queens. By the late 1950s, he was a full associate of the Gambino family, running with Carmine Fatico’s crew alongside a young John Gotti. In 1961, Bentina was formally inducted as a soldier. A year later, he and Carmine Galante were convicted of heroin smuggling, and Bentina went to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut with a 15-year sentence.

He would not come home until 1970. While Bentina sat in Danbury, his lone sharking operation in Queens kept running. But it was not Bent Vina’s crew running it anymore. Jimmy Burke, a Lucasi associate operating out of Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, had taken over Bentina’s rackets.

According to multiple sources, Burke made those operations more profitable than Bent Vina ever had. The money was flowing upward through Paul Vario to the Lucase family leadership. Everyone was eating. Then Billy Bats came home and he wanted his business back.

Good Fella shows the famous Shine Box scene as a random bar insult that pushed Tommy Desimone over the edge. In the movie, it happens at the same bar where Bats later gets beaten to death. The real timeline is different. The welcome home party was in May of 1970 at Robert’s Lounge, Burk’s Bar.

Bent Vina saw Tommy Desimone, who had been a teenager, shining shoes the last time they had met, and asked if he still shines shoes. Dosimone took it as disrespect. He told Burken Hill, “I’m going to kill that fuck.” Two weeks later, on June 11th, Bent Vina was at the Suite, a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, owned by Henry Hill, not Robert’s Lounge. The movie changes the location.

Burke kept Bent Vina at the bar, buying him drinks and getting him drunk. Desimone left with his girlfriend and returned with a 38 caliber revolver and a body bag. He walked up behind Benvina and screamed, “Shine these [ __ ] shoes.” Then pistolhipped him while Burke held him down. They thought Benvina was dead.

D. Simone, Burke, and Hill loaded his body into the trunk of Hill’s car and drove toward upstate New York. They stopped at D. Simone’s mother’s house to pick up a knife, some lime, and a shovel.

On the drive north, they heard thumping from the trunk. Bent Vina was still alive. Desimone and Burke pulled over and beat him to death with the shovel and a tire iron on the shoulder of the road. They buried William Bentina in a field behind a dog kennel in upstate New York. 3 months later, the property was sold to a housing developer.

Burke ordered Hill and Dimone to dig up the body and move it. Henry Hill later said the remains were crushed in a mechanical compactor at a junkyard in New Jersey. the same Henry Hill who would later be portrayed by Ray Leotaa in Scorsese’s film. So, the Gambinos had lost a maid soldier. Under the rules, D Simone, Burke, and Hill should have been dead within weeks, but Goodfells skips what happened next.

The Gambino family did not have proof. Benvina disappeared and the Gambino suspected the Luces crew, but suspicion is not enough to start a war between two allied families. The Gambino Lucasi relationship was one of the strongest in the five families at that time. Carlo Gambino was alive and firmly in control.

A war over one missing soldier without concrete evidence would have cost both families far more than Bentina was worth. And there was the money problem. Burke, later portrayed by Robert Dairo as Jimmy Conway, was now running Bentina’s old rackets and making them more profitable than Bent Vina ever had. That profit flowed through Paul Vario to the Luces leadership.

If the Gambinos demanded Burke’s death, the Luces family would lose a major earner. If the Luces family protected Burke, the Gambinos would have to escalate. Neither side wanted that, so they let it simmer. 9 years of simmering. Dimone walked around Queens for almost a decade after killing a maid Gambino soldier, and nobody touched him.

Not because the Gambinos forgot, because the math did not work. The cost of revenge exceeded the value of the offense. Three things changed that math. First, in 1974, Tommy D.

Simone killed Ronald Foxy Gerroi. Gerroi was a Gambino associate and a close friend of John Gotti. D. Simone had been dating Jerro’s sister.

When the relationship ended, he beat her. Gerroi confronted Desimone about it. Desimone went to Grothy’s apartment and shot him dead. the moment he opened the door. Now Desimone had killed two men connected to the Gambino family without permission.

One killing could be tolerated. A pattern could not. Second, word reached John Gotti in late 1978 that Dimone was about to be formally inducted into the Lu’s crime family. If that ceremony happened, Dimone would become a maid man, and killing him would require commission approval, a process the Gambinos could not control.

Gotti reportedly told Paul Vario that allowing D Simone to be made after he murdered Billy Bats was, in Gotti’s words, unacceptable. The window to act without political consequences was closing. Third, Paul Vario had his own reasons to hand Dimone over. While Henry Hill was serving time in prison, Dimone allegedly attempted to rape Hill’s wife, Karen Hill.

What Good Fellas never mentions is that Karen Hill was having an affair with Vario himself. D. Simone had not just attacked a crew member’s wife, he had attacked the boss’s mistress. Vario gave the Gambino family permission to act.

On or around January 14th, 1979, Peter Vario, Paul Vario’s son, and another Lucesi member named Bruno Fatiolo drove Dimone from his home in Ozone Park to a location in the Bronx. Desimone was wearing a double- breasted black bill suit, a starched blue shirt, and a beige silk tie. He believed he was going to his making ceremony. Henry Hill later said the hitter was John Gotti himself, though this has never been confirmed.

What is confirmed is that Tommy Desimone never came home. His wife reported him missing. His body has never been found. Jimmy Burke was in Florida when he heard the news.

He called Desimone’s mother and asked if Tommy had seen his godmother yet. his coded way of asking about the ceremony. She said it had been postponed because of snow. The next day, Burke called again and got different information. Hill described Burke coming out of a phone booth with tears in his eyes.

Burke said they just whacked Tommy the Goddy crew. The FBI tried to charge Burke with William Bentina’s murder after Hill entered the Federal Witness Protection Program in 1980. The case collapsed because Hill was both the sole surviving witness and an accomplice. You cannot build a prosecution on one man who participated in the crime he is testifying about.

No corroboration existed. Everyone else who was there that night was dead. Good Fellas tells you Billy Bats died because Tommy Desimone could not take a joke. The documented record says something different.

Bent Vina died because Jimmy Burke did not want to give back a lone sharking operation that was making him rich. The Gambinos did not avenge their soldier because the Lucasi family’s profits from Burke’s operation made peace more valuable than justice. And when the Gambinos finally moved 9 years later, it was not honor that triggered it. It was a pattern of killings, a political deadline, and a boss’s personal grudge against the man who had touched his mistress.

Interestingly, Frank Vincent, who played Billy Bats, would later portray Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos, bringing the same intensity to HBO’s mob drama that he brought to Scorsese’s Masterpiece. William Bentino was 37 years old when he died on a back road in upstate New York. He had been home from prison for less than a month. His body was buried, exumed, and crushed in a junkyard compactor in New Jersey.

No one was ever convicted of his murder. The man who ordered it, Jimmy Burke, died of lung cancer in prison on April 13th, 1996. Convicted of an unrelated killing. The man who swung the shovel, Tommy D.

Simone, was executed 9 years later by the same family system that was supposed to protect men like Billy Bats. His body has never been found either. This is what good fellas never told you about the Gambino Luces Alliance.