Batts made a “snide remark” about DeSimone shining shoes. “You couldn’t kid around with Tommy. He was wired very tight. One of Tommy’s brothers had ratted people out years ago, and he was always living that down,” according to Wise Guy, paperback, page 130. “Tommy was going nuts, but he couldn’t do or say anything. Billy was a made man. If Tommy so much as took a slap at Billy, Tommy was dead.”

Word on the street is Batt’s didn’t die on account of some insult over shiny shoes. It seems Burke muscled in on Billy Batt’s loanshark business while he was in jail. Bentvena went to “Crazy” Joe Gallo to get it back, Burke didn’t want to give it over, even Hill said that, just not to Pileggi in Wise Guy.

“A couple of weeks later Billy was drinking in the Suite,” reads Wise Guy. “I was praying he’d go home when Tommy walked in. It didn’t take long. Tommy immediately sent his girlfriend home and gave me and Jimmy a look. Right away Jimmy started getting real cozy with Billy Batts. … `Keep him here, I’m going for a bag,’” Tommy whispered to Henry Hill, who relayed the story to Pileggi. “He was going for a body bag – a plastic mattress cover – so Billy wouldn’t bleed all over the place after he killed him.”

Tommy came back later. Henry Hill told Pileggi, “Tommy took the thirty-eight of out of his pocket. Billy saw it in Tommy’s hand. The second Billy saw what has happening, Jimmy tightened his arm around Billy’s neck. ‘Shine these fuckin’ shoes,’ Tommy yells and smashes the gun right into the side of Billy’s head. Billy’s eyes opened wide. Tommy smashed him again. Jimmy kept his grip. The blood began to come out of Billy’s head. It looked black,” according to Wise Guy.

The scene was witnessed, according to the book, by Alex Corcione, who was shooed out of the bar by Henry Hill. “Tommy had done the worst possible thing he could have done, and we all knew it. Billy’s body had to disappear,” according to the book. But Billy wasn’t dead. He woke up in the trunk of Henry’s car on the Tatonic on the way to his disappearance and had to be killed again. Henry and Tommy did it with a shovel and a tire iron, not with a knife from the kitchen of Tommy’s mom, played so memorably by Scorsese’s mother in Goodfellas. Bentvena’s body had to be dug up and reburied three months later, according to Pileggi’s book.

The Lufthansa Heist