Just before dawn on the 11th of December, 1978, six masked men walked into the Lufthansa cargo terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and walked out about an hour later with roughly five million dollars in untraceable cash and another eight hundred and seventy-five thousand in jewelry. It was, at the time, the largest cash robbery in American history. The crew got away cleanly, without firing a shot. By any professional measure it was a near-perfect crime.
And then almost everyone involved started turning up dead.
That is the real story of the Lufthansa heist — not the robbery, which was over in about sixty-four minutes, but the months of paranoia and murder that followed, as the man who organized it set about killing his own crew rather than share the money or risk a single one of them talking. Almost none of the cash was ever recovered. Almost no one was ever convicted. The heist became famous less for the theft than for the body count, and for the film it would eventually inspire — Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas — which means much of what the public “knows” about that night comes filtered through the self-serving memories of one informant, and needs to be held at arm’s length from what a court ever actually proved.
The candy store
To understand the heist you have to understand JFK in the 1970s, and the world of Jimmy “the Gent” Burke. JFK was one of the busiest cargo hubs on earth, a sprawling complex where untold fortunes in goods and currency moved through lightly-guarded warehouses staffed by working-class men, many of them connected, however loosely, to the organized-crime families of Queens and Brooklyn. For the crews that worked it, the airport was, as Henry Hill famously put it, their own private candy store — a place where a tip from the right insider could turn a night’s work into a fortune.
Jimmy Burke was an associate of the Lucchese crime family — not a “made” man, because his Irish blood barred him from formal membership, but a feared and respected operator who ran a crew out of a bar called Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park, Queens. Burke had a reputation for charm, generosity, and sudden, casual violence; the “Gent” nickname came from his habit of slipping a hundred-dollar bill to the truck drivers he was hijacking. Around him orbited a rotating cast of thieves, hijackers, and killers, including a young, volatile associate named Henry Hill, whose later decision to inform would make all their names famous.
The tip that started everything came from inside Lufthansa itself. A cargo supervisor named Louis Werner — by the canonical account a pudgy, ordinary man drowning in a twenty-thousand-dollar gambling debt — knew that the terminal’s vault periodically held enormous sums of cash. The money was currency that had been flown to the United States, exchanged by American servicemen and travelers in West Germany, and was being shipped back; it was, crucially, used and untraceable. Werner owed his debt to a bookmaker named Martin Krugman, and the tip traveled up the chain: from Werner, to Krugman, to Henry Hill, to Jimmy Burke — who took it to the Lucchese capo Paul Vario for the blessing required before a job that size. Werner, the inside man, was promised a flat ten percent of the take.
It is worth pausing here on a caveat that runs through the whole story. This chain — Werner to Krugman to Hill to Burke to Vario — and most of the colorful detail of the planning comes overwhelmingly from Henry Hill’s later account, told to the writer Nicholas Pileggi and dramatized in Goodfellas. It makes a wonderful story. But the only piece of it a court ever firmly established was Louis Werner’s role as the inside man. Everything else rests, to one degree or another, on the word of a man who had every reason to embroider, to flatter himself, and to settle scores.
Sixty-four minutes
In the early hours of the 11th of December, a black Ford Econoline van carrying a crew of masked, armed men pulled up to the Lufthansa cargo building during the quiet graveyard shift. The robbers — the names usually given are Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Joe Manri, Paolo LiCastri, Louis Cafora, and others, with Burke’s son driving a backup “crash car” to block any pursuit — moved through the building with the precision of men who had been told exactly where everything was. They rounded up the night employees at gunpoint, herded them together, and made it clear, in the manner of professionals, that cooperation meant everyone went home alive.
They knew the layout. They knew the vault. They knew the alarm. The inside knowledge Werner had supplied meant there was almost no improvisation: the crew got into the high-security area, forced access to the cash, and loaded the van with the currency and the jewelry. By the popular reckoning, the whole thing took about sixty-four minutes, though the precise timeline on the ground ran somewhat longer — the van is generally placed as arriving around three in the morning and pulling away a little after four, with the stunned employees not raising the alarm until the robbers were gone.
When the count came in, it stunned even the men who’d done it: roughly five million dollars in cash and around eight hundred and seventy-five thousand in jewelry. The newspapers led with it the next day — “Airport Cash Loot Was $5 Million” — and the figure dwarfed every previous robbery in the country’s history. The crew had pulled off the score of a lifetime, and for a few days it looked like they had gotten away with it entirely.
The van by the fire hydrant
The unraveling began with the single job that didn’t get done. Burke had assigned a low-level associate named Parnell “Stacks” Edwards to take the getaway van and destroy it — drive it to a New Jersey scrapyard and have it crushed, erasing the most obvious piece of physical evidence. Stacks, by every account, was unreliable, and on this night he was catastrophically so. Instead of disposing of the van, he reportedly went to a girlfriend’s apartment, got high, and left the vehicle parked illegally next to a fire hydrant in Brooklyn.
Two days later, the police found it. Inside was a trove of evidence that tied the robbery directly back toward Burke’s circle. It was the loose thread that could unravel everything, and it transformed the aftermath of a clean heist into something murderous.
Because the response, according to the accepted account, was that Jimmy Burke decided to solve the problem the way he solved most problems. Rather than divide the enormous, dangerous pile of cash among a crew of nervous, talkative associates — any one of whom might spend conspicuously, get arrested, and trade the others for leniency — Burke began, methodically, to have them killed.
Stacks Edwards was first. On the 18th of December, a week after the heist, he was shot dead — punishment for the van, and the opening move in a purge. Over the following months the bodies piled up, in a wave of killings and disappearances that became as infamous as the robbery itself. Martin Krugman, the bookmaker who had passed the tip and was owed a substantial cut, vanished and was never seen again. Joe Manri and another crew member were found shot in a car. Others disappeared into the vast anonymity of the New York underworld. The exact number is impossible to pin down, but the toll is generally put at a dozen or more people connected to the heist, eliminated in the year or two after it — a body count so large it became the defining fact of the case. The money, for Burke, was worth more than the men who had stolen it for him.
Among the dead, by the canonical account, was Tommy DeSimone — though his fate sits inside its own tangle of mob legend. DeSimone, a ferociously violent killer, is generally said to have been murdered himself in early 1979, lured to his death in retaliation for earlier killings of made men, his body never found. In Goodfellas he became the basis for Joe Pesci’s character, and his disappearance is one of the more reliably attested deaths of the era — though, like so much here, the details come more from informants than from any courtroom.
Impunity
What makes the Lufthansa heist so unusual among great crimes is how thoroughly it defeated the law. The FBI threw enormous resources at it. And yet, in the end, only a single person was ever convicted of the robbery: Louis Werner, the inside man, who was undone partly because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and partly because the case against him was the one piece of the puzzle that didn’t depend on murdered witnesses. He was sentenced to fifteen years.
Jimmy Burke — the man universally understood to have organized the heist and ordered the killings — was never charged with the Lufthansa robbery at all. The witnesses who could have put him there were dead. He was eventually convicted of unrelated crimes, including a murder and a point-shaving scheme, and died of cancer in a New York prison in 1996, never having answered for the heist or the purge. The cash and the jewelry were never recovered. The fortune simply vanished into the economy of the underworld, untraceable as the day it was stolen.
The reason the world knows the story at all is Henry Hill. In 1980, facing arrest on drug charges and well aware that Burke was killing everyone who might talk, Hill made the only move that could keep him alive: he became a federal informant, entered witness protection, and told everything he knew. His testimony helped convict Burke and Paul Vario of other crimes, and then Hill told his life story to Nicholas Pileggi, whose 1985 book Wiseguy became, in 1990, Goodfellas. The film fixed the Lufthansa heist in the public imagination forever — but it fixed it as Henry Hill remembered and chose to tell it, which is the single most important caveat in the whole affair. Hill was a self-interested narrator, a man trading stories for his freedom and later for royalties, and the line between what he witnessed, what he heard, and what he improved upon is genuinely blurry. The robbery happened, the money was real, the bodies were real — but the tidy chain of who-told-whom and who-did-what is a story told largely by one man with every reason to shape it.
The legal coda came decades later, and it only deepened the sense of impunity. In 2014 — more than thirty-five years after the heist — federal prosecutors finally brought a Lufthansa-related case against an aging Bonanno crime family captain named Vincent Asaro, charging him in connection with the robbery. In 2015, a jury acquitted him. After all the resources, all the years, all the death, the second and final attempt to convict anyone of the largest cash robbery in American history ended in a not-guilty verdict, and an old man walking free.
That, in the end, is the strange shape of the Lufthansa heist. It was a brilliant robbery followed by a stupid mistake with a van, followed by a massacre, followed by almost total impunity — the perfect crime that curdled, almost immediately, into something much darker than its planners intended. The men who pulled it off mostly ended up in unmarked graves. The man who ran it died of cancer in a cell, never charged. The money was never found. And the version everyone remembers is the one a frightened informant told to stay alive, lit beautifully on a movie screen, where the candy store gleamed and the killings came fast and the truth, as always, slipped away with the cash.
Power and Pelf 