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[B]Murder of William "Billy Batts" Bentvena[/B]
In the book Wiseguy, Henry Hill said they threw a "welcome home" party at Robert's Lounge, which was owned by Jimmy Burke, for William "Billy Batts" Bentvena (confused as William Devino), a made man in Carmine Fatico's crew (the same crew John Gotti was a part of) in the Gambino crime family.
Bentvena had just gotten out of prison after serving a six-year term for drug possession. Hill states in Wiseguy that Bentvena saw DeSimone and asked him if he still shone shoes and DeSimone took this as an insult. Hill also said that Bentvena provoked DeSimone because he wanted to impress some mobsters from another crime family. A couple of minutes later when that issue was going to be forgotten, DeSimone leaned over to Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke and said "I'm gonna kill that fuck." Hill saw that he was serious about it. A couple of weeks later, on June 11, 1970, Bentvena went over to "The Suite" owned by Hill in Jamaica, Queens to go drinking with DeSimone's crew, including Hill, DeSimone, and Jimmy. Later that night DeSimone took his girlfriend home and Burke started making Bentvena feel comfortable. Twenty minutes later, DeSimone arrived with a .38 revolver and a plastic mattress cover. DeSimone walked over to him at the corner of the bar and attacked Bentvena. Before Bentvena was attacked, Jimmy Burke tightened his arms around Bentvena and he was pistol-whipped with the .38 revolver. He was so inebriated that he couldn't defend himself.
In the book Wiseguy, Hill said that before DeSimone started to beat Bentvena, DeSimone yelled, "Shine these fucking shoes!" DeSimone killed Bentvena not only because he had insulted him, but also because Burke had taken over Bentvena's loanshark business while Bentvena was in prison. According to Hill, Bentvena had been complaining to Joe Gallo about getting back this racket. Not wanting to return the business to Bentvena, Burke knew sooner or later Bentvena would have to be killed. After the beating, the three men put Bentvena in the trunk of Hill's 1970 Buick Electra and later while the three men were driving on The Van Wyck Expressway, they discovered that Bentvena was not dead.
Later, they visited DeSimone's mother's house to get a knife, lime and a shovel. Later in the drive, closer to their destination, Hill said it had been an hour of DeSimone driving and he kept getting mad about the noises in the trunk and finally slammed the brakes and leaned over for the shovel and that Burke and DeSimone "didn't actually shoot him, they just stabbed him, thirty or forty fucking times, fucking horrible." In the film version of Bentvena's death, Tommy stabs Bentvena eight times and Jimmy shoots Bentvena four times.
Hill does not mention a knife, but claims Burke and DeSimone finished Bentvena off by beating him with a tire iron and the shovel, respectively and the men later buried him under a dog kennel. At the time of the murder in 1970, Bentvena was 49 years old and was a respected and a feared made man in the Gambino crime family. The price DeSimone would pay for killing a made man was his own life.
[IMG]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c354/sbando/lethalcouples2.jpg[/IMG]
Jimmy The Gent and Tommy D.