LUFTHANSA HEIST INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL SIMONE AND HENRY HILL

Lufthansa Heist: After Nearly 40 Years, Many Questions Remain

NEW YORK, NY – It's around 3 a.m. on December 11, 1979, at the Lufthansa warehouse at Kennedy Airport and a cargo agent sees a black Ford Econoline van backed up to one of the doors. Going over to investigate, he's hit over the head with a gun and dragged into the van where he's confronted by three robbers who threaten him and his family.

It is the beginning of what was then the largest currency robbery in the United States.

Soon after, joined by another three men, the robbers move their way through the warehouse, gathering employees whom they identify by name and hold at gunpoint. They then take the one employee who knows the combination to the warehouse's 10-by-20 foot vault.

Once inside, using invoices and manifests, they determine which parcels to remove. In all, close to 40 parcels with about $6 million in cash and nearly $1 million in jewelry are removed from the vault. With inflation, the take would be worth more than $20 million today.

The robbers, after making made it clear the employees should not to make any calls until 4:30 a.m., flee.

They drive to Canarsie where the loot is transferred to another car. The crew goes their separate ways.

Everything had gone perfectly.

And then it all went wrong.

GRABS THE IMAGINATION

"All these years later, the robbery continues to fascinate," says veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tony DeStefano whose recent book, The Big Heist, chronicles the theft and is aftermath. "It just grabs the imagination."

That's largely because of the 1986 book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi that chronicles the life of mobster turned informant Henry Hill, as well as the Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas that followed.

"It wasn't just a brazen crime," DeStefano says. "It was one that came with so many murders in its aftermath. It was a crime where the money and jewelry weren't recovered. It was a crime in which no one would be charged for decades.

"It put it in another class."

DeStefano also points out that the audacity of the crime has played a large role in why it holds people's imagination.

"This was not a group of mental heavyweights that pulled it off," he says. "And yet, they pulled it off. Luck played their way and everything fell into place."

At the heart of the scheme was a criminal named Jimmy "The Gent" Burke, an associate of Luchese Crime Family capo Paul Vario.

"Burke was pretty ruthless," DeStefano says, something borne out by the fact that in the aftermath of the heist nine people either involved in the robbery or the planning were murdered.

People were shot, tortured and garroted.

"He worked to eliminate anyone who could possibly link him to the crime," says DeStefano.

MURDERS

"Stacks" Edwards was the first to go.

A musician and low-level criminal, he pretty much had one job – to take the truck used in the robbery to a place in New Jersey and have it destroyed. Instead, he drove it to his girlfriend's apartment where he drank, did drugs and fell asleep.

The next morning, while he was sleeping, the police discovered the van and seized it. It didn't take them long to discover his fingerprints on the wheel. Once they knew who he was they raided his apartment and found a pair of sneakers whose treads matched ones found at Kennedy Airport.

Once they had Edwards as a suspect, the FBI was able to link him to Burke and other members of Burke's crew.

That, combined with the fact that the discovery of the van was well-covered in the press, warranted a death sentence for Edwards in Burke's eyes.

Exactly one week after the crime, two members of Burke's crew involved in the robbery – Tommy DeSimmone (who was played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas) and Angelo Sepe – shot and killed Edwards.

Both would later be murdered for reasons not connected to the heist.

Less than three weeks after the killing of Edwards, Martin Krugman became the second to be murdered. Krugman was a wig shop owner who first tipped off Henry Hill about Lufthansa flying in large amounts of cash to Kennedy.

He was followed by Richard Eaton who, while not directly involved in the heist, had stolen some of Burke's money. Eaton would be found rolled up in a blanket, locked in a freezer truck with a rope around his neck. He had frozen to death. It was the inspiration for the death of the character of Frank Carbone in Goodfellas, who is found hanging from a hook in a meat truck.

There would be six more murders in the next five months.

"Burke wanted to make sure that no one was left," DeStefano says.

NO ONE WAS LEFT...EXCEPT ASARO

"We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get."

That was Bonanno Family capo Vincent Asaro whose words were captured in 2011 by his cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who had become a federal informant and was wearing a wire for the FBI.

"We got f------ all around," he went on to say. "It's life. We did it to ourselves. That f------ Jimmy. He kept everything.

Asaro was complaining about never getting his share of the money from the heist.

"Everyone knew for years that the Luchese Family was involved in the heist," DeStefano says. "What we know now is that so were the Gambinos, the Bonannos and the Colombos.

"Prosecutors said Asaro was the Luchese's man."

In 2014, he became only the second man to be charged in connection to the heist. An airport employee was convicted years ago of providing security details to Burke's crew.

In 2015, in a move that left prosecutors stunned, a jury acquitted Asaro of all charges.

"Members of the jury have never talked about what went into their decision," says DeStefano. "The only window we have is one alternate who was dismissed before deliberations began.

"He said he didn't think the evidence was there. A little strange."

DeStefano says that he thinks while jurors probably believed some of what Valenti testified about his cousin, they also likely saw him as a mercenary, testifying for the government to protect his family. Valenti said as much at his cousin's trial.

"I had enough of that life," Valenti said. "I was tired. I had a lot of remorse. A lot of nightmares from situations I was in. I just wanted to take care of my family."

QUESTIONS REMAIN

"Here we are almost 40 years later and there's still a lot we don't know for sure about the heist," DeStefano says. "There's a lot of the details that we just don't know the answers to.

"There have been so many conflicting versions of who was involved in the planning, what happened afterward, that we may never know the complete story."

DeStefano says one of the things that will likely never be known is what happened to the money.

"None of it was ever recovered," he says. "The jewelry was likely fenced very quickly, but none of it has ever surfaced. Some of the money was shared but how much and with whom? How much of it was spread around the crime families?

"There are some questions that will likely remain unanswered. We don't even know exactly what we don't know."

NEVER AGAIN

"It was a job that marked a different time in the history of the mob," says DeStefano who was a cub reporter when the heist happened. "It was the kind of crime that you just won't see again."

He points out that security now is much tighter than it was back in 1979.

"There are more cameras, better systems," he says. "Response times by law enforcement are much faster."

And DeStefano says there's another thing.

"You just don't have the same quality of thinker in organized crime now compared to what it was then. Back in the '70s, you had a lot of the old school mobsters and people who had come up under them.

"It was a different kind of person with a different set of standards. Back then you had people planning heists like Lufthansa. Now you have people selling black market viagra. The talent pool is greatly diminished."

Another thing, he adds, is that given changes in law enforcement, "the smarter people are less likely to want to get too involved.

"The more public they are, the higher that they rise in the organization, the more that they become targets. And the penalties for being caught are more severe so, when caught, they are more likely to flip."

DeStefano says it's unlikely the heist will ever lose its grip on people.

"The mob is a bit of a romantic thing like the western used to be, and big robberies hold people's attention," he says. "The murders gave this one an extra sheen of fascination. Then there's the fact that a great movie has been made about it, a movie that gets played again and again.

"How they pulled it off and what happened afterward pretty much guarantees that it will always have that special place in history."

https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/lufthansa-heist-nearly-40-years-later-many-questions-remain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_heist

Additional video footage :

https://youtu.be/BlyiRDVIZrU

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