‘Goodfellas’ explained: Why is Tommy whacked?
Goodfellas was Martin Scorsese’s sensational return to the mafia film subgenre after 17 years away, following his first hit movie Mean Streets in 1973.
There are gangster films, though, and then there’s Goodfellas – a cocaine-fuelled opera of violence, vanity, and veal cutlets that makes most other mob flicks look like amateur hour, with Marty’s previous efforts included. With the swagger of a jukebox loaded only with bangers, Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece is just brutally honest, hilarious, and deeply unwell. Like Henry Hill said: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” And with Goodfellas, you understand why.
Along with Henry Hill, the now-legendary film features a motley crew of gangsters working for Paulie Cicero’s local branch of one of New York’s five families. While each of their characters has their quirks, none is quite as memorable as Tommy DeVito, played by the quite outstanding maniac Joe Pesci.
DeVito is said to be based on the real-life mafia member Thomas DeSimone. Pesci brings him to life in his own inimitable style, however. Most memorably, in the movie’s most famous scene, Tommy questions his fellow mobster Henry Hill about why he’s laughing at him. “Funny how?” he demands, reducing Hill to, in his words, “a stuttering prick”, before it’s revealed he’s just messing with him.
As we know now, all doesn’t end well for the Goodfellas, as their cocaine business is shut down following a police raid on Hill’s home. Hill is forced to turn on his fellow gang members in return for witness protection. Cicero, Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Conway and the rest of their cohort are all put behind bars for the rest of their lives.
Tommy doesn’t even make it that far. He’s shot dead three-quarters of the way through the film, much to Conway’s horror. The only time we see Jimmy ‘The Gent’ show any emotion other than brute anger is when he finds out that Tommy’s been killed. He breaks down in tears, leaving Hill embarrassed and unsure how to comfort him.
“Billy Batts, and a lot of other things”
As Hill explains, moments before we see Tommy get whacked on screen, being a full member of a mafia family, or a “made man”, means “you could fuck around with anybody just as long as they aren’t also a member.” Tommy was given the impression that he was about to become a made man in his family.
In fact, it was a trap laid by his family in collaboration with a rival crime family. They’d come to an agreement that Tommy needed to be killed. As both Jimmy’s henchman and Henry explain, “we couldn’t do nothing about it”. It was Tommy’s time to die, as recompense for certain actions he’d taken that violated a certain code of honour that the crime families upheld.
More specifically, this recompense concerned Tommy’s murder of a made man within the rival crime family almost a decade earlier. Tommy had got into a heated argument with the made man Billy Batts at Henry’s nightclub. Tempers flare to the point that Tommy and Jimmy end up killing Batts. This scene is closely based on the real-life murder of Billy Batts by Thomas DeSimone, Jimmy ‘The Gent’ and Henry Hill.
Despite burying Batts’ body soon afterwards to hide the murder from the police, Tommy’s actions are impossible to hide from the criminal underworld of New York’s mafia. As Hill says, “Batts was a made man and Tommy wasn’t.” This meant that Tommy had gone completely against the laws of the jungle. There was only one way it was going to end for him from that point on.
It wasn’t the only time Tommy DeVito had overstepped the mark, either. Even the movie’s “Funny How” scene gives us a further glimpse of his short fuse, despite it being a put-on.
Clearly, his own crime family decided they could do without the trouble he was causing. Still, there’s no denying he was a funny guy.
