TOMMY DESIMONE - The Real Story Behind Joe Pesci's Character

0:01 Tommy DeSimone stood 6 feet 2 inches tall and carried 225 pounds of muscle that he'd built by obsessively pounding a heavy bag in his mother's spare room. On a sweltering Brooklyn afternoon in 1968, he was 17 years old, walking down a sidewalk alongside Henry Hill when he spotted a complete stranger, a pedestrian in his mid -40s named Howard Goldstein. Tommy didn't know the man, and he didn't have a reason to dislike him. He simply reached into a brown paper bag he always carried, a bag that usually hid his .38 revolver so it looked like he was just carrying a sandwich, and turned to Henry with a grin.

0:39 He said, watch this, before he leveled a gun and shot the stranger dead in cold blood. When a stunned Henry asked why he'd done it, Tommy just shrugged and said, well, I'm a mean cat. This was the raw, unpolished reality of the man who inspired the cinema legend Tommy DeVito. While the movies gave us a small, wiretight fireball played by Joe Pesci, the real Tommy DeSimone was a hulking, cocaine -fueled shadow that loomed over the Lucchese crime family, a man who didn't just break the rules of the mob, but the basic laws of human sanity.

1:14 That violence wasn't just a byproduct of his work, it was his primary hobby. There's a story Henry Hill told for years about Tommy's sheer, aimless cruelty. An incident involving a random person with a baby stroller. Tommy was high, as he often was, and he spotted a woman pushing a stroller down the street. Without a word, he pulled his gun and fired a shot directly into the stroller, just to see the terror it would cause to watch the panic unfold for his own amusement. It was this total lack of a filter, this refusal to distinguish between a rival and an innocent.

1:51 that made even his closest associates stay on edge. Jimmy Burke, a man who had personally ended dozens of lives, once warned Henry never to be alone with Tommy when he was high, because Tommy would kill you and not even remember why the next morning. He was an animal in a suit, a six foot two weight lifter who used his size and his reputation to physically dominate every room he entered. The Confrontation at the Warehouse Following a successful truck hijacking, Burke's crew drove the stolen cargo to a warehouse to unload it.

2:26 However, the warehouse foreman vehemently refused to let them use the space, protesting because Burke's guys did not have legitimate union cards. Burke tried to reason with the foreman and intimidate him, but the man stood his ground and refused to back down. The Escalation Burke backed off temporarily to avoid making a scene at the warehouse. Instead, he instructed Tommy DeSimone and another brutal associate, Stanley Diamond, to go to the foreman's house in rural New Jersey. Burke's explicit orders were only to rough him up enough to terrify him into cooperating with the crew's hijacking operations in the future.

3:08 The Murder The plan failed entirely due to Tommy's infamous explosive temper. The Annoyance Tommy and Stanley Diamond were deeply annoyed and highly aggravated about having to drive all the way out to New Jersey for a routine intimidation job. The overkill. When they arrived at the foreman's home, they got carried away during the beating. Instead of leaving the foreman with a warning and broken bones, they beat him so savagely that they killed him. This incident showcased how wildly unpredictable and violent Tommy was in real life.

3:44 It became a pattern. Just a short time later, Burke asked Tommy to help handle the Remos or Sani situation, which Tommy executed using piano wire. The weight he carried wasn't just physical. Tommy was living in the shadow of a family shame that he felt he had to wash away in blood. His brother, Anthony D. Simone, had been murdered by the Gambino family after it was discovered he was an informant. In a world of the South Ozone Park cruise, Having a rat for a brother was a stain that never came out.

4:16 Tommy spent his life overcompensating, trying to prove he was the toughest, the most loyal, and the most dangerous man on the street. He wanted that button to be a made man, more than he wanted air, and he thought everybody he dropped brought him one step closer to the ceremony. But his loyalty was a jagged thing, and it often cut the people who were supposed to be on his side. In the early 70s, Jimmy Burke grew suspicious of one of his own best friends, a man named Dominic Remo Sirsani. Burke had heard through contact to the Queen's DA's office that Remo was talking to the NYPD about a truck hijacking.

4:54 Burke didn't hesitate. He looked at Tommy and said, let's take a ride. They met Remo at Robert's Lounge, a place where friendship was supposed to mean something. Remo got into the front seat of the car, unsuspecting. while Tommy and Jimmy climbed into the back. As the car rolled into a quiet area, Tommy leaned forward and wrapped a length of piano wire around his friend's neck. Henry later recounted that Remo put up a hell of a fight, kicking and swinging as the wire bit deep, eventually losing control of his bowels before he died.

5:28 Tommy didn't flinch. He did the job for Burke because that's what a loyal soldier did. Even if the victim was a man he'd share drinks with just an hour before. They buried Remo right there, next to the bocce court behind the lounge. For years afterward, whenever Tommy and Jimmy played a game of bocce, they'd look down at the dirt and jokingly call out, Hi Remo, how you doing? It was a sick, shared secret, a bond forged in the casual disposal of a friend. The Queen's DA leak, Burke did not just guess that Remo was a rat.

6:02 He actively bought the information. Burke maintained highly paid, corrupt contacts inside the Queens District Attorney's Office. These sources explicitly confirmed to Burke that Remo was a scheduled witness who was providing details to the New York City Police Department, NYPD, in exchange for leniency on his own mounting criminal. Tommy's lack of control eventually led him to a line he couldn't cross. In 1974, While Henry Hill was away in prison for extortion, Tommy decided that Henry's wife, Karen, was fair game.

6:40 He didn't care about the brotherhood of the crew, or the protection that was supposed to be afforded to a partner's family. According to Henry's later accounts, Tommy showed up at the house, beat Karen, and attempted to rape her. It was a betrayal of the highest order in their world, but there was an even more dangerous complication. Karen was reportedly having an affair with the Lucchese capo, Paul Vario, the man the movie called Paulie. When Karen told Vario what Tommy had done, she wasn't just reporting an assault.

7:10 She was handing Vario the perfect excuse to get rid of a man who had become a massive liability. Tommy had already murdered two made men from the Gambino family, Billy Batts and Ronald Foxy -Gerroth, without permission, and the Gambinos were screaming for blood. Paul Vario made the call to the Gambinos. By January 1979, the fuse Tommy had lit years earlier finally reached the powder. He was told he was finally going to get his wish. He was told he was being made that on January 14th, Tommy dressed in his finest suit, said goodbye to his mother, and climbed into a car with Paul Vario's son, Peter, and another mobster named Bruno Facciolo.

7:54 He thought he was heading to his coronation. Instead, he was driven to a house where no ceremony awaited. Some say John Gotti himself was there, waiting to avenge his friends Billy Batts and Foxy Giroth. Some say they shot him in the face so his mother couldn't have an open casket. Others whisper that he was tortured for hours, a slow end for a man who had spent his life inflicting pain for kicks. His body was never found, likely ending up in a car compactor or buried in a nameless hole in the marshlands of Queens.

8:28 Tommy DeSimone spent his life trying to prove he belonged in the mafia. But in the end, the mafia decided he only belonged in a grave. If this deep dive into the real -life violence of the five families stayed with you, please share this episode with someone who thinks they know the whole story. And that's the way I heard it.