The Murder Goodfellas Never Showed You –  hW

September 1963. Robert’s Lounge, South Ozone Park, Queens. It’s a quiet night. Cards on the table, drinks being poured, the usual low hum of men who don’t talk about what they actually do for a living. Four of them in the back room. Jimmy Burke, Tommy DeSimone, one other guy, and Dominic Rimo Sassani, the man who had built half of what Burke had become.

Then, Burke sets his cards down and says, “Let’s take a drive.” Not a suggestion, not a question. Sassani doesn’t even flinch. Why would he? This is the kid he pulled off the street in 1949, the teenager he mentored, protected, built from nothing. The boy who once took a savage police beating and never breathed a single word to protect him.

Remo stands up, grabs his jacket, and walks out into the night beside his oldest friend. They get into Burke’s Cadillac, drive maybe 300 ft to the parking lot of Moo Moo Vetta’s dress factory, the two of them owned together. The engine cuts off. That’s when Tommy DeSimone reaches forward from the back seat with the garrote wire.

This is the murder Goodfellas never showed you, the one that explains everything. Before there was Jimmy the Gent Burke, there was Dominic Sassani, born around 1893 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Sassani spent decades building himself into a respected figure in what would eventually be known as the Colombo crime family.

Though in his era, the lines between families were looser, more fluid. He wasn’t a flashy boss type. He was a craftsman, a man who understood that in organized crime, the real power doesn’t belong to the loudest guy in the room. It belongs to the man who controls all the loud guys. Remo specialized in counterfeit checks, not sloppy street level forgery, professional work.

By the mid-1940s, he was running a tight crew out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. They’d lift legitimate checks, alter them with a professional check protector, and flood banks across Brooklyn and Queens with amounts small enough to stay under the federal radar, but large enough to make serious money. By 1949, Remo had relocated to Ozone Park, partly for the neighborhood connections, mostly for the airport.

JFK, then called Idlewild, was a gold mine. Cargo flowing in from every corner of the world, cash, jewelry, electronics, luxury goods. Remo wanted his hands in all of it. He was married to a woman named Marie. He had a stake in several garment factories, a silent share in the bar that would become Robert’s Lounge, and a reputation in the neighborhood for being careful with money.

Henry Hill, who served him drinks as a teenager, remembered that Remo never tipped, not once. He spent what he had to and not a cent more. But Remo also understood something most guys in his world didn’t. You can’t scale a criminal operation on the backs of old men. You need young faces, faces that don’t look like criminals, faces that can walk into a bank, smile at the teller, and walk out with someone else’s money before anyone thinks twice.

In the fall of 1949, he found the perfect one. James Burke had been in and out of correctional facilities for most of his short life, foster homes that were more like prisons, a childhood defined by beatings and abandonment. By the time he was 18, he’d spent all but 86 days of the previous 6 years locked up. Remo handed him $3,000 in forged checks and pointed him at an Ozone Park bank.

“Walk in, cash the checks, walk out.” Burke got arrested. The detectives at the 75th Precinct weren’t interested in Burke. They already knew who was behind the operation. They cuffed his hands behind his back and went to work on him. Stomach punches over and over, demanding one name, “Dominic Sassani.

Give us Remo and you walk.” Burke gave them nothing. He took a five-year sentence at Auburn Correctional Facility for bank forgery and never said a word. The day he arrived at Auburn, two of Sassani’s associates met him at the gate. Remo had already made arrangements, protection, respect, introductions to the right people.

Burke didn’t just survive his sentence, he used it. He built relationships with Lucchese and Colombo family members throughout the facility. According to Henry Hill, he carried out contract murders on behalf of mob bosses who were locked up alongside him, work authorized, arranged, and paid for by Dominic Sassani. When Burke walked out in 1954, he wasn’t a street punk anymore.

He was a made associate with a reputation, a network, and a nickname that Remo himself had given him, the Irish Guinea. For 9 years after that, Sassani and Burke were nearly inseparable. Truck hijackings, counterfeit check operations, money laundered through the garment factories they both had stakes in.

Wherever Burke was putting a score together, Remo wanted in, typically 50%, sometimes a third. That was the arrangement, unspoken, consistent, understood. It went deeper than business. Remo and his wife Marie vacationed with Jimmy and his wife Mickey. When Burke got married in 1962, Sassani personally introduced him to Richard Eaton, a money launderer and drug dealer operating out of Fort Lauderdale.

He was doing what a mentor does, building his protege’s network, opening the doors that only he could open. Henry Hill, who watched both men for years, described their relationship plainly. Remo was Jimmy’s best friend, closer than almost anyone except maybe Paul Vario, but Remo was getting older, and somewhere along the way he developed drug problems, speed, heroin, and drugs in that world are a death sentence, not because they kill your body first, but because they kill your judgment.

They make you paranoid, reckless, and worst of all, desperate. In 1963, Sassani caught a serious case, a load of hijacked goods, multiple indictments stacking up, the kind of charges that could put a man in his late 60s away until he died. So Remo made a choice. He went to the NYPD and offered them something valuable, Jimmy Burke.

Burke was assembling a major score at the time, a trailer truck loaded with merchandise worth $200,000. It required real investment up front, bribes for drivers, payments to inside men, warehouse space, planning. He went to Remo and asked if he wanted a piece. Sassani put in $5,000, 5,000 on a $200,000 load.

Burke noticed immediately. That’s not how Remo operated, ever. He always bought in at 50%, minimum a third. 5,000 wasn’t a partnership, it was barely a gesture. When Burke pushed him on it, Remo gave him a vague shrug, said he didn’t need that much merchandise at the moment. Burke ran the score anyway, got the truck, set the route.

The police were waiting at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. Not a lucky patrol stop, not a coincidence. They knew the route, the timing, the details. This was a setup built from the inside. Burke had corrupt contacts inside the Queens County DA’s office, people who could find things out quietly for the right price.

He started asking questions. The answer came back to one name, Dominic Sassani. In exchange for leniency on his own charges, Remo had handed the NYPD his protege, the teenager he’d mentored, the kid who’d taken a beating a decade and a half ago to protect him. Henry Hill would later write that this was the moment something fundamental broke inside Jimmy Burke.

The betrayal didn’t just cost him money or a score, it destroyed his ability to trust anyone, ever again. [clears throat] Within days of learning the truth, Burke made his decision. There would be no conversation, no confrontation, no warning. That same week before any of this, Remo had given Jimmy and Mickey Burke anniversary gifts, round trip tickets to Florida, a warm, generous gesture from an old friend.

Sassani had no idea what was coming. Henry Hill captured the logic of this world perfectly in Wiseguy, “When you’re about to get killed, no one tells you. It doesn’t happen like in the movies. There’s no big dramatic argument. Your killers come to you wearing the faces of the people who’ve known you your whole life.

They come when you’re relaxed, when you’re comfortable, when you trust them completely.” Back room, Robert’s Lounge, cards and drinks. Burke says, “Let’s take a drive.” They walk to the Cadillac together. Remo slides into the front passenger seat. Burke and DeSimone get in back. They drive a few hundred feet to the parking lot next door.

Tommy DeSimone pulls the garrote wire over Sassani’s head. Remo fights back, kicking, reaching, thrashing, the windshield, the dash, the steering wheel. His body violent with the instinct to survive. DeSimone pulls tighter. Henry Hill was standing outside the bar when it happened. When they climbed out of the car after, he could smell what the struggle had left behind.

He turned away and vomited. Burke showed nothing, no grief, no hesitation. This was the man who had shaped him, protected him, given him everything, and Burke had given the order without losing a moment of sleep. They carried Sassani’s body to the enclosed backyard behind Robert’s Lounge, right alongside the bocce ball courts.

Dug a hole, laid him in it, poured cement over the top. Then they drove the Cadillac to a scrapyard in Starrett City, Brooklyn, and had it crushed into a metal cube. Dominic Remo Sassani vanished from the face of the earth. His wife Marie filed a missing person’s report. Nobody followed up. In the mob, people disappear. That’s just how it goes.

But here’s the part that tells you everything you need to know about Jimmy Burke. After the murder, whenever Burke and Tommy DeSimone played bocce ball in that backyard, they’d look down at the cemented ground beneath their feet, directly over where Remo was buried, and they’d say it every single time. “Hey Remo, how you doing?” Then they’d laugh, step on the concrete, keep playing.

The man who built Jimmy Burke was literally the floor he stood on. And Burke treated it like a running joke. Tommy DeSimone himself wouldn’t survive much longer. In January 1979, he was told he was finally going to be formally inducted into the Lucchese family. He dressed up, said goodbye to his mother, and walked out the door. He was never seen again.

The Gambino family had settled their debt. DeSimone had murdered made man William Billy Batts Bentvena and Gambino associate Ronald Foxy Gerota without permission. And the tab had been open for nine years. But there’s another layer to it. DeSimone knew where too many bodies were buried, literally. And in Burke’s world, that alone was reason enough.

Richard Eaton, the Fort Lauderdale money launderer that Remo had personally introduced Burke to back in 1962, continued working with Burke for another 16 years after Sassani’s murder. In 1979, Burke had him killed, too. Found bound and gagged in a Brooklyn trailer with a bullet in his head. Same reason, same paranoia.

Once Burke’s trust was gone, it never came back for anyone. Henry Hill turned informant in 1980, facing life on drug charges. He gave up the entire operation, Paul Vario, Burke, everything. When the FBI pressed him on murders, Hill told them about Sassani, about the garrote wire, about the bocce court jokes.

They investigated, found nothing. The body was gone. The statute of limitations had run out on conspiracy. There was no case to make. Jimmy Burke died at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo on April 13th, 1996. Lung cancer. 64 years old. He was serving 20 years to life for killing Richard Eaton, not for any of the dozens of other murders, not for the men buried across Queens and Brooklyn, not for Dominic Sassani, just for one con artist in a trailer.

He never acknowledged Remo, not in letters, not in court, not once. The only time Henry Hill ever saw Burke cry was when he got the news that Tommy DeSimone had been killed. Not for Remo, never for Remo. Here’s the thing about organized crime that every movie gets wrong. It’s not really about the money. The money is easy to understand.

What’s harder to understand is what it does to human connection, to loyalty, to the concept of family itself. Dominic Remo Sassani spent most of his adult life climbing the ranks of New York organized crime. He reached capo level. He built networks, laundered millions, ran operations. He took a frightened, angry 18-year-old off the street and turned him into one of the most feared criminals Queens had ever produced.

And when he got scared and made one desperate decision, the same kind of desperate, self-preserving decision the mob has always both demanded and punished, Burke erased him. No trial, no warning, no last conversation, just cement and a parking lot and two guys telling jokes above his grave. That’s the real lesson here. Not the heists, not the Cadillacs, not the restaurant scenes.

The lesson is that in that world, the closer someone is to you, the more dangerous they are. Because the only people who can truly destroy you are the ones you let in. Remo let Jimmy Burke in, and Jimmy Burke put him in the ground. If you’re new here, we drop a documentary every week covering the real stories behind organized crime, the ones that didn’t make it into the movies.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.