The Big Heist: The Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia, and Murder

By Anthony M. DeStefano

This Pulitzer Prize-winner’s account of the heist that inspired Goodfellas reveals the rest of the story that couldn’t be told—until now (Publisher Weekly).
 
One of the biggest scores in Mafia history, the Lufthansa Airlines heist of 1978 has become the stuff of mafia legend—and a decades-long federal investigation. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony DeStefano sheds new light on this unsolved case using new evidence revealed during the 2015 trial of eighty-year-old mafioso Vincent Asaro. 
 
For the first time, Asaro speaks out on his role in the brazen heist that removed millions of dollars from John F. Kennedy International Airport. This authoritative account goes behind the headlines and Hollywood movies, taking readers inside the ranks of America’s infamous Mafia families—with never-before-told stories, late-breaking news, and bombshell revelations.
 
“A comprehensive account…impressive.”—Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9780806538310

Book preview

AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

T

HERE IS NOTHING GOOD HAPPENING AT

3:00

A.M.

when someone cries out for help in a desolate cargo area at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Rolf Rebmann, a security guard at Building 261 which happened to be the Lufthansa Airlines cargo terminal, heard the scream and despite his unease went over to ask of a man standing by a black Ford van whether he needed assistance.

Can I help you? Rebmann asked.

No, the man replied. His voice sounded like the cold of the December night.

His next reaction wasn’t to say thank you but rather to pull out a snub-nosed .38 caliber handgun, stick it in Rebmann’s face and order the startled airport worker to get in the back of the van. Do as you are told. Fast.

Shaking with fear as he was hustled into the back of the van, Rebmann noticed another man lying facedown in the vehicle, someone with a bloody face and whose cry earlier had alerted the security guard to trouble. Whatever he made as a salary wasn’t enough for the unarmed Rebmann to try any heroics. Certainly not in the darkness of a cold night. Not any night. He did what he was told and thus became a reluctant witness to a crime that he and the rest of America would never forget.

* * *

Of all the Mafia heists, rip-offs, scores, and plunders, none has been more iconic a part of American popular culture than the brazen robbery done by a group of New York gangsters on December 11, 1978, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. In the very early hours, as most of the city slept, a crew of thieves and killers, who were armed with inside knowledge of the airport security system, beat, threatened, and otherwise terrorized workers at the Lufthansa airline cargo terminal. When it was all over, the criminals disappeared before the sun came up with over $5 million in U.S. currency and nearly $1 million in jewels. The loot, which in 2016 would have had an equivalent value, taking into account inflation, of nearly $22 million, has never been recovered.

True, more valuable cargoes have been stolen over the years than what was taken from the high-value room at the Lufthansa terminal that morning. In August 1963, a gang of at least seventeen held up a British Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire and made off with 2.6 million pounds sterling, the equivalent at the time of $7.4 million. Securities, bearer bonds, and stock certificates sent through the airlines and with a value of tens of millions of dollars were purloined years before the Lufthansa theft. One thief named Robert Cudak admitted to Congressional investigators that while working at JFK as a cargo handler he and his accomplices notched up $100 million in stolen jewels, cash, and securities, usually through stealth and a little ingenuity.

But it really didn’t matter which case set the world record for an armed robbery. Happening as it did in the media and Mafia capital of the world, the 1978 Lufthansa heist became an obsessively covered news event and earned the reputation as being one of the biggest rip-offs ever, certainly in the United States. One pundit believed that the success of the armed thieves made people in New York feel good that finally somebody could do something nasty and get away with it.

If they pull it off, I say hats off, one denizen of Frankie & Johnnie’s Steakhouse told columnist Pete Hamill the day after the crime.

Cops got a pretty good early line on who ripped off Lufthansa after they discovered the black van used by the gang in the getaway from the airport. The van was supposed to be taken to a junkyard for destruction. But as the old adage says: If anything can go wrong it will. The hapless man who was supposed to take care of the vehicle never did so and would eventually pay for his screw-up with his life.

Fingerprints and shoe prints lifted from the vehicle put police and the FBI on the trail of a number of suspects, and it seemed like there would be a break in the case. Informants came up with some of the same names. But after months of work, investigators would convict only one man—lowly Lufthansa cargo employee Louis Werner—for his role in the crime. The bigger Mafia fish would elude justice, particularly after a number of mob associates who took part in the robbery—as well as some of their lady friends—wound up dead or missing.

The growing body count added to the dark allure of the Lufthansa caper, and over the years the story spawned a number of books, notably Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, which was turned into the hit film GoodFellas. The film made mob associate Henry Hill (whose character was played by actor Ray Liotta) a household name. Hill was the central figure in both the book and movie, which showed Mafia life in all its glamour, gore, and futility. Hill grew up in Brooklyn and was one of an army of poor kids, all of whom aspired to grow up to become a gangster. Lucky for Hill, he became connected to the Lucchese crime family crew of Paul Vario and his associate Jimmy Burke, whose characters in GoodFellas were played by Paul Sorvino and Robert DeNiro, respectively. A complex man who mixed homicidal terror with smoothness and courtesy as he served his Mafia bosses, it was Burke who put together the crew of men who pulled off the Lufthansa raid, although Hill himself actually wasn’t around to directly participate.

Other books followed, including one co-authored by Hill, who died in 2012. But Hill’s book, and the others that retold the story of the heist essentially ended their narratives in the early 1980s. That is when Hill was ensconced in the federal witness protection program, living a life with new identities for himself, his wife Karen, and their two children, away from New York. The books from that period fleshed out details of the heist and spun theories about where the loot may have wound up. At that point the Lufthansa saga became firmly part of Mafia legend and lore. It remained a crime that eluded justice, and with the passage of time seemed destined to stay that way.

Then in early 2014, an entire generation of Millennials who weren’t even born when the Lufthansa robbery occurred were introduced to the case when an elderly, irascible, down-on-his-luck gangster named Vincent Asaro was indicted by a Brooklyn federal grand jury. The charges against Asaro, whose son, father, grandfather, and uncle were also part of the mob, were varied and numerous. But the biggest and most sensational accusation seemed to come out of left field: Asaro played an active role in the JFK robbery and helped divvy up the loot, giving some of it to a powerful Bonanno crime family member named Joseph Massino.

For Mafia aficionados, the 2014 Asaro indictment was an astonishing blast from the past and promised to finally solve the mystery of what happened to the $6 million airport haul. The case also held out the promise that—at last—a major player would finally be held accountable, even though Burke and everyone else who took part was long dead. Federal prosecutors, some of whom also weren’t even born when the heist occurred, painted Asaro as a major, unpublicized member of Burke’s team of thieves. He was also portrayed as a brutal killer, accused in the indictment of strangling with a dog chain a Queens trucker and hijacker named Paul Katz. Prosecutors dressed up the case by indicting a few of Asaro’s alleged compatriots in the Bonanno family, notably reputed street boss Thomas DiFiore, but only for some garden variety crimes not connected to the Lufthansa case. They were secondary characters and soon would plead out to lesser charges and be gone from the case.

The FBI had as its main witness against Asaro his own cousin and confidante, Gaspare Valenti, a wannabe gangster who never made it to the mob big leagues and turned to the government for help when he was broke and disillusioned with what the Mafia had become. On paper, the case against Asaro seemed strong, particularly with the fact that for over three years he was secretly tape recorded by Valenti. The tapes showed, federal prosecutors argued, that Asaro, as well as Valenti, took part in the heist with Burke and his gang of bandits

Rehashing as it did the events depicted in GoodFellas, Asaro’s trial in the fall of 2015 was a reprise of Mafia history from a time when the Five Families of the mob wielded great power and influence. All of the gangsters seemed to have money, and they flouted their lawless lives with no shame. But by the time Asaro faced the jury, the clout of organized crime had greatly diminished in the Big Apple. Cooperating witnesses turned up all over the place, showing how greatly diminished the Mafia creed of silence—omertà—had become. Asaro’s own Bonanno crime family had been decimated by FBI investigations led by some of the very federal prosecutors who were trying to send him away to prison for what was left of his life. They were confident in the strength of their case and that the sensational crime would finally have its day in court, solving years of mystery.

But while federal prosecutors win convictions in over 90 percent of their cases, you can never tell with a jury. Despite the testimony of Valenti and mob turncoats like former Bonanno underboss Salvatore Vitale and Peter Zuccaro, the six men and six women whose job it was to weigh Asaro’s fate were unconvinced. On November 12, 2015, right after the lunch break, the jury unanimously acquitted Asaro of the charges against him, and he walked out of the Brooklyn courtroom a free man, stunned, smiling, and striding with his arm around both his two women attorneys who were young enough to be his granddaughters and whose lives he had sometimes made miserable during the trial. Of course in victory Asaro treated them like his best friends.

The Big Heist is the book that will be the definitive and I think final story about the crime. Purists may say that the cash haul was only $5 million, but, let us face it, the jewelry also taken was of no use to the mob unless converted to cash—hence the $6 million total. The Asaro trial laid out details and allegations that had never emerged before in previous renditions of the story. These details are presented here thanks to the voluminous trial record. In addition, confidential sources have provided information that showed how corrupted law enforcement had become in some places, notably Queens and Brooklyn. What also makes The Big Heist different from previous books on the subject is that it takes a longer historical look at the way New York City had become an open city for the Mafia in the years before the JFK crime. The Five Families lorded over a number of industries—the garment district, the docks, construction, carting, as well as the airports. The mob exercised that control by coercion, ownership over businesses, and union corruption. Such power allowed two crime families in particular, the Bonanno and Lucchese families, to hold sway over JFK, turning the airport into a veritable cash register as mob crews ripped off cargo almost at will.

Knowing how powerful the Mafia was back in the day is an important part in understanding how the Lufthansa score was able to take place. But that is only part of the story. For decades, law enforcement was behind the eight ball when it came to mob investigations, a state of affairs that created an atmosphere where gangsters had a certain invincibility. Under the leadership of its late director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI refused to go after the Mafia in any concerted way. When in the early 1970s the FBI was finally building cases they seemed to be piecemeal and half -hearted efforts. Veteran FBI agents remembered that the agency’s New York office didn’t even have open investigations into the likes of Gambino boss Paul Castellano or even his underboss Aniello Dellacroce. The situation wasn’t much better for the law enforcement with the other Five Families. Bureau files on the Mafia were filled with outdated intelligence and gossip. They would have been better off just reading the newspapers.

The situation was often as bad with the NYPD, something Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke knew well. Cops and more seasoned detectives whose job it was to go after the Mafia were instead cozying up to gangsters. During the course of researching this book, I came across disturbing and previously tightly held law-enforcement information about allegations that some NYPD investigators working in the Queens District Attorney’s Office were feeding information to the mob. Among the allegations were that detectives even may have assisted in hiding evidence of Paul Katz’s demise.

Police corruption was systematic and gave gambling and drug operations a lot of room to maneuver. This was particularly true in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s, the very period when Henry Hill and his mentor Jimmy Burke were in their prime and running their rackets. In turn, Hill and Burke and their band of killers and thieves paid tribute, quite literally, to Mafia bosses like Paul Vario, whose character Paul Cicero in Goodfellas was played by actor Paul Sorvino. Vario and his bosses like Carmine Tramunti (the successor to Thomas Lucchese) were able to consolidate their power with the knowledge that they had co-opted law enforcement to a degree. Scores of NYPD officers were often observed frequenting Vario’s Brooklyn junkyard, and it was a fair bet that they weren’t all there to find replacements for lost hubcaps.

I was just a neophyte crime reporter in New York City when the heist happened. While I had then recently completed a groundbreaking series for Women’s Wear Daily about the Mafia in the garment business, I really wasn’t on top of all the things happening in the mob. But covering the mob on Seventh Avenue soon gave me a solid grounding in the Five Families and I was able to absorb what writers like Pileggi were doing in setting the bar for crime reporting. The challenge in writing The Big Heist was how to extend the story beyond the previous telling of the tale. With Hill’s death, we are left only with his accounts as told to Pileggi and Dan Simone, the latter who penned The Lufthansa Heist: Behind The Six-Million-Dollar Cash Haul That Shook the World with Hill. But with Hill having gone through bouts of drug and alcohol abuse, a researcher has to be careful about his recollection of events. There is also the nagging suspicion that Hill in later years may have embellished events or had been confused. Burke and his notorious crew are all dead, and any account of the heist that tries to recreate the words, actions, and motives of that gang have to be viewed with some skepticism since anyone who was a direct participant is no longer available.

Thankfully, the passage of time created new opportunities and new sources of information to bring to life the story of the heist and deadly events that surrounded it. Since the early 1980s, when many of the earlier accounts of the heist were written, the federal government went on a concerted rampage against the Mafia, building cases and creating a body of evidence through wiretaps, photographs, and informants that has exposed the inner workings of the mob in a way that we never had before. The investigation of the Bonanno family, capped with Massino’s conviction and his decision in 2004 to become the first official boss of a New York crime family to cooperate with prosecutors, gave investigators new sources of information about the likes of Asaro and helped build the case against him.

But it was Valenti’s decision to turn on Asaro that gave federal investigators ammunition to finally put together the 2014 Lufthansa indictment. Whether or not you agree with Valenti’s mercenary reasons for turning on his cousin, the secret tapes he made showed there was some circumstantial evidence to support the idea that Asaro had a role in Lufthansa. Testifying for the government, Valenti fleshed out through his trial testimony the allegations that Asaro was involved in the heist. Much of what Valenti recalled on the witness stand rang true, at least so far as it was consistent with Hill’s own accounts and previous testimony in the Werner case.

Asaro had never before been publicly linked to Lufthansa: he certainly didn’t show up in Hill’s published accounts, although he did surface in a few references in Wiseguy. As spelled out in Pileggi’s seminal account, Asaro hung out in Burke’s mob club, ran a junkyard, and allegedly, as the Bonanno family liaison at JFK, was due a cut of the proceeds (but who, in the book, was said never to have received anything). Until the 2014 indictment, Asaro was not in any way part of the popular and public story line that had developed over the years since the 1978 robbery. In his testimony, Valenti puts himself right on the scene when the heist occurred and contended that Asaro was near the airport in a vehicle with Burke and helped hide the loot. These were all new allegations, at least for the public. Yet in the end, while Valenti sounded convincing, he didn’t carry the day for the government. It remains a fair question for the hardened skeptic as to how truly involved Asaro was and even if he was, did he play an important part in the conspiracy?

The Big Heist will explore what went wrong with the case against Asaro and how he was able to win an acquittal. Federal prosecutors, once confident they had a strong case against Asaro, were stunned in defeat. Critics, including some very experienced attorneys and investigators, believed the case was over-tried, with too much evidence that proved too confusing for the jury. Others think the jurors viewed an aging Asaro as a scapegoat who was being prosecuted for a crime many had all but forgotten.

The Big Heist is divided into three sections, covering decades of New York mob history. The first section, chapters 1 through 6, portrays the Mafia world Asaro was a part of in the years leading up to the heist. It was a world in which the Five Families were at or near the pinnacle of their power in New York City, policing themselves with untold murders as they squeezed various industries through extortion, thefts, and scams. Chapters 7 through 12 reveal how the heist was spawned from the financial desperation of Werner, a hapless man who found a willing accomplice in Burke and his band of thieves. As a career criminal, Burke was the expert mechanic of crime who could figure out how to carry out the heist. But his failing was in his reliance on bone-headed accomplices who pushed him into an orgy of killing to prevent federal investigators from implicating him in the crime. Chapters 13 through 22 deal with Valenti’s betrayal of Asaro at the Lufthansa trial, a prosecution that resulted in the stunning acquittal.

Asaro’s trial took place over a ten-day period in the fall of 2015. The extensive trial record developed in the case plays an important part in the preparation of this book. I also had the benefit of the trial records of the Werner case thanks to the National Archives. There were also numerous interviews with investigators and access to previously undisclosed law-enforcement files. Asaro’s case provides the framework for the retelling of the Lufthansa story in a way that helps the reader to understand what it was like in the world of La Cosa Nostra in the days before and after December 1978. It is also a coda to the evolving story of the Mafia in New York City, still an important part of our social history even in the face of its diminished power.

* * *

July 2016

New York, N.Y.

CHAPTER ONE

T

HE

M

ESSAGE FROM THE

B

ONES

B

RADLEY

A

DAMS WAS SOMEONE

who was not squeamish when confronted with the dead. As a forensic anthropologist, he was around human remains all of the time. The pieces could be as large as a thigh bone or as small as a fingernail. Adams’s subjects usually never died peacefully.

As a child visiting his grandparents’ funeral home in Kansas, Adams had to go through the embalming area to get to the garage when he stayed with them on school vacations. Sometimes he would see the deceased on the preparation table, although he was spared seeing the corpses having embalming fluid pumped into their body cavities. Their internal organs would have been sliced open with a trocar, a blade designed to cut a person’s internal organs so that the fluid could be more readily absorbed by the lifeless tissue. He didn’t have to witness that procedure either.

No, dead people didn’t seem to bother Bradley Adams. As a college man he took to specializing in archeology and worked on prehistoric sites in the United States and Central America. He then became more interested in the forensic aspect of science, spending time in graduate school at a body farm in Tennessee. It was a place where, in the interests of science, corpses were placed all over the grounds in various states of burial—or no burial at all. The bodies were consigned to this natural state so that scientists could study the decomposition of human bodies in assorted situations. Students like Brad Adams would sometimes have to stick their hands—gloved of course—into the decaying flesh to understand what was happening to our mortal remains. At first he thought the putrefaction might make him vomit or pass out. But, no, Brad Adams discovered he wasn’t bothered by it. It was something you got used to.

There aren’t many jobs for forensic anthropologists. It is a rather rarified field with most of the positions in big cities or at major universities. However, Adams was good enough at what he did that he got a job with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City as the resident forensic anthropologist and was something of a legend, the go-to guy whenever cops needed help when a body or human remains were found. He knew his stuff and was often loaned out to study cases all over the world.

Prior to joining the OCME, as the office is known, Adams worked with the U.S. military in Hawaii, the headquarters of the command that was responsible for finding and identifying the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in various conflicts. He spent time in Vietnam to sort through the graves of U.S. servicemen killed in the war. Adams even did the same in North Korea, where he was kept in a guarded compound after the Communist government there allowed American experts in to examine what were believed to be the graves of Americans killed in the Korean War. The North Koreans did relax things enough that Adams and his colleagues were able to go on guided tours during weekends.

In New York City, the cases Brad Adams was called to deal with weren’t as politically charged as the wartime stuff. If the NYPD or other law enforcement agencies telephoned it was a safe bet that Adams would be going to what could be a crime scene to examine the remains of some unfortunate. It could be a railroad siding, a ditch, a sewer, a sandy beach, the inside of an apartment, even a drainage pipe in a cemetery: Brad Adams had been to just about any place imaginable where a dead body or bones might wind up.

On June 18, 2013, the request for assistance to Brad Adams came from the Manhattan office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agents were preparing to dig in the basement of an attached home in Ozone Park, a section of the Borough of Queens. They had a tip—a pretty good one from a trustworthy source—that the remains of a murder victim might be under the concrete floor. If they found something, Adams would be needed to do a quick examination to determine if the finds were human and then take them back to his lab for further analysis. To keep Adam’s mind open and to avoid saying anything suggestive that might later taint the investigation, the agents didn’t tell him very much about the victim.

It wasn’t uncommon for cops to come across bones, only to discover they were not human. In fact, in Brooklyn once under the basement floor of an old mob social club police uncovered some bones after an informant swore that many bodies had been buried there. They found bones all right, but they turned out to be those of a horse. Fragments of chickens sometimes littered city parks in the aftermath of Santeria or other religious rituals. After years of study Adams could quickly tell if the bones he was looking at were those of a person. He had co-authored a forensic textbook on the subject, complete with photographs comparing human bones with those of animals ranging from birds to water buffalo. Alligators it turned out had shoulder blades very similar to those of a man, Adams noted.

Adams had actually been alerted by the FBI about the dig a day earlier, June 17. It was then that the agency’s evidence response team showed up with jackhammers, pick axes, shovels and other tools to begin digging in the basement floor of 81-48 102nd Road. To cover all their bases, the agents also did some digging in the backyard. The bureau’s informant had said the body was toward the rear of the cellar, under some relatively fresh cement by a door. That was enough for the agents to get a search warrant from a federal judge. The residents really had no say in the matter. Agents unlocked the garage door, which was at the end of an inclined driveway and started to work inside. News media crews eventually showed up and took photographs of the agents, who had set up a blue tent at the house to shield their work from prying eyes as they started to go about their business

The cellar area didn’t look at all sinister. The main room was well lit and cluttered with boxes of