Tommy Was Killed. Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill Survived. Here's Why

Tommy Was Killed. Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill Survived. Here's Why On the night of June 11, 1970, at The Suite bar in Jamaica, Queens, three men from capo Paul Vario’s crew in the Lucchese crime family beat, stabbed, and killed William “Billy Batts” Bentvena, a fully inducted soldier of the Gambino family. Tommy DeSimone struck first. Jimmy Burke stomped the victim’s face. Henry Hill drove the body in the trunk. All three heard Batts still groaning inside the trunk, so all three turned back and stabbed him another thirty to forty times until he was finally dead, then buried the body at a dog kennel in Howard Beach. Three months later, when the property was sold to a real-estate developer, all three dug the body up again and moved it elsewhere. And in the American Mafia system there is only one rule that applies to the murder of a made man without the permission of the Commission, the supreme governing body of New York’s Five Families: you die. No trial, no appeal, no exceptions. Yet on January 14, 1979, only Tommy DeSimone was lured into a room with the promise that he was about to be formally inducted, dressed in his finest suit, said goodbye to his mother, and then vanished forever, his body never found. Jimmy Burke went on to plan and execute the $5.8 million Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport just eleven months earlier, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time. Henry Hill continued dealing drugs, running restaurants, and lived another thirty-three years before dying of heart disease in a hospital bed in Los Angeles in 2012. For decades the usual answer was simple: Tommy killed a made man so Tommy had to die—that was the law. But when the evidence is actually examined, that answer collapses completely, because Jimmy and Henry were also present, also took part, also buried the body, and also violated exactly the same rule.