Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The 1978 Lufthansa Heist

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

On December 11, 1978, one of the most audacious heists in history took place at JFK Airport in New York City.  A small group of thieves executed an almost perfect crime and walked away with 6 million dollars in cash and jewelry.  While the actual robbery went off without a hitch, it was after the crime that things fell apart and eventually left a trail of bodies strewn across New York.  Learn more about the 1978 Lufthansa Heist, how they pulled it off, and its bloody results on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Plan your next trip to Spain at Spain.info! Sign up at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to get chicken breast, salmon or ground beef FREE in every order for a year plus $20 off your first order! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On December 11, 1978, one of the most audacious heists in history took place at JFK International Airport in New York City. A small group of thieves executed an almost perfect crime and walked away with $6 million in cash and jewelry. While the actual robbery went off without a hitch, it was after the crime that things fell apart and eventually left a trail of bodies strewn across New York. Learn more about the 1978 Lufthansa heist, how they pulled it off and, and its bloody results on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. When you watch a heist movie, It usually involves some criminal mastermind who assembles a crew for some highly planned and elaborate caper. And that makes for great entertainment, but these sorts of heists almost never happen in real life. And if they're attempted, they almost always fail. This episode is about just such a caper that was actually pulled off.

Sort of. Technically, the case remains unsolved. In actuality, we know almost everything about it, including all the players and how they did it. The story begins with an employee who worked for Luftanzah cargo at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Louis Werner. Werner is not the central character of the story, but everything does start with him. Werner had a serious gambling problem and owed $20,000 to his bookie. He thought he could get out of debt by telling his bookie about an opportunity at the airport. So he told his bookie, Marty Krugman, who also happened to own a wig shop,

about the millions of dollars in cash and jewels carried by Luftanz a cargo that came through the airport. The money was part of foreign exchange transactions from U.S. military personnel and tourists who were in West Germany. Krugman then passed this information on to a mid-level gangster and drug dealer by the name of Henry Hill. Hill then passed the information along to his mentor in crime and the person who is the center of this story, James, aka Jimmy the Gent, Burke. Burke was a career criminal and a mobster who was an associate of the Lucchese crime family, one of the five major mob families in New York. However, due to his Irish accent, he was not a made man.

Burke was known for his involvement in various criminal enterprises, including gambling, drug trafficking, and robbery. Burke realized that this was an opportunity for a huge payday. There were millions of dollars in untraceable cash and jewels, and they were lightly guarded considering the value of everything. Burke and his crew had a history of knocking off trucks that were leaving the airport. Burke got approval for the heist from the Lucchese Capo Paul Vario, who had just lost a huge sum of money in a failed cocaine deal, was happy to give his assent. Burke, Hill, Krugman, Werner, and others began planning the heist at Roberts Lounge, a bar that was owned by Burke in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens.

With Werner's inside information, they were able to craft a highly elaborate plan, and, in fact, the only reason the plan was able to be put together was because of the information provided by Werner. Werner knew exactly how the security systems worked, who could open the locks, what time shipments arrived, where to park, and how the staff was trained to react to a theft. Burke and his crew had detailed floor plans of the warehouse and knew exactly where everything would be when it arrived. As they were creating the plan, Burke also assembled a crew.

The group included Tommy D. Simone, Angela Sain. P, Louis Saffora, Joseph Sivatello, Sr., Tony Rodriguez, Joseph Costa, Joe Manorie, and Robert McMahon, all of whom were members of the Lucchese crime family. In addition to them was Palo Lacastry, a representative of the Gambino crime family, as well as Burke's son Frank, and a friend of his, Parnell Stax Edwards, who was to be the driver. Everyone involved was scheduled to receive a cut of between $10,000 and $50,000 each based on an initial two million-dollar take. Verner, the inside man, was scheduled to receive a flat 10% of the total. Once the plan was in place, it was just a matter of waiting for word on when a shipment

would be arriving at JFK. That happened on Saturday, December 9th, 1978. Verner told Burke that a large shipment of cash had arrived to the airport and would be in the warehouse all weekend, waiting to be picked up and taken to a bank via armored truck on Monday morning. At 312 a.m. on Monday, December 11th, a Ford Equal Line 150 van pulled up to the gate at the Lufanza cargo facility. Six men wearing ski masks and gloves cut the lock with a pair of bolt cutters, and they emerged from the van. The masked men went about methodically executing their plan. They entered the outside door of the building with a key that Werner had given them. All of the staff on duty at the time were forced at gunpoint into the lunchroom where they were told to lie in the ground.

The key to getting access to the warehouse, and really to the entire heist, was getting past a set of double-locked doors. One of the two doors had to be locked at all times, and the only person who could open them was the shift manager. Rudy I reckon the night shift manager on duty was tricked into coming down, where he was then forced at gunpoint to open the doors and deactivate the alarm system. Once inside, they went about finding exactly which containers had the items that they were looking for. They removed 40, 15-pound cartons of cash and jewels and put them into the van.

The Lufanza staff was told to wait 15 minutes before calling the police, which they honored down to the minute. Two of the masked men drove away in the van, and the others got into a Buick. The total time of the robbery was 64 minutes. No one was seriously harmed, and no shots were fired. The total take ended up being far larger than expected. There was $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry. Adjusted for inflation, it would be worth more than $23 million today. The crew met at an auto repair shop in Brooklyn where they changed cars and left. It was, in many ways, a perfect crime.

They quickly and efficiently pulled off one of the largest robberies in U.S. history. As soon as the police arrived, they quickly figured out that it had to have been an inside job. The robbers knew exactly what to do, where to go, and how long it would take. But there were no fingerprints and no one saw the faces of the perpetrators. While the crime was almost perfect, the aftermath most certainly was not. The first mistake took place a few days after the heist. Stax Edwards was assigned the task of getting rid of the van. Specifically, he was told to take the van to a junkyard in New Jersey, where the van would be destroyed along with any evidence.

The junkyard just happened to be owned by mobster and later mob boss, John Gotti. However, Edwards never did that. He drove the van to his girlfriend's apartment, drank, consumed drugs, and forgot all about the van. And this wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that he had parked it in a no-parking zone next to a fire hydrant. The van, which fit the description from the heist, was one of the only pieces of evidence that the police had to go on. From the van, the FBI quickly identified Burke and his associates as the prime suspects because of Edwards' association with Robert's Lounge. While Burke was the prime suspect, they didn't have the evidence to make an arrest. It was at this point, paranoia began to set in.

Burke was concerned that people would talk and the authorities would find the needed evidence. This was when the body started to pile up. The first victim was Stax Edwards. His screw up with the getaway van was the biggest loose end. So De Simone and Sepe were ordered to kill him before he could talk. On December 18th, a week after the robbery, he was found, shot five times in the head. Over the next seven months, there were nine more murders of people who were part of, or tangential to, the robbery. Martin Krugman, the bookie and wig shop owner, disappeared on January 6th.

He began loudly demanding money, and Burke was concerned that he would go to the FBI. It's believed he was murdered and his body dismembered. His remains were never found. Thomas de Simone, who was one of the main figures in the heist and who murdered Stax Edwards, was himself murdered on January 14th for reasons unrelated to the heist. The reason for his death was the murder of two members of the Gambino crime family. Louis Gaffora, who was assigned the task of laundering the money, directly countermanded Burke's orders not to buy anything flashy.

A week after the robbery, he purchased a pink Cadillac for his wife. And unlike most mobsters, he talked about mob business with his wife. Both Gifora and his wife disappeared in March 1979, and their bodies have never been found. Joe Manry, an associate of Burke, worked Air France and had inside information. Fearing he was going to turn state's witness, he was found on May 15, 1979, in a parked car, shot execution style.

Paulo Lacastry, the Gambino representative, was found with his body riddled with bullets on June 13, 1979. These were only the main players who were murdered in the months after the robbery. Other people were killed as well who were tangentially related. Only one person has been arrested and convicted in connection with the crime in the over 40 years since the heist. In 1979, Louis Verner, the inside man, was convicted to 15 years in prison. Henry Hill, who had introduced Burke to the job,

ended up entering the Witness Protection Program due to drug charges in 1980. One of the reasons why he entered the Witness Protection Program was because he was concerned that Burke was going to try to kill him just like he killed so many other people associated with the heist. Hill wrote a book that documented the robbery, which is how we know most of what we do. His book, Wise Guy, Life in a Mafia family,

became the basis for the 1990 film Goodfellas directed by Martin Scorsese. Almost everyone else who wasn't murdered directly because of the robbery ended up murdered or imprisoned for unrelated reasons in the years that followed. Angelo Sapi was murdered in 1994 along with his girlfriend. Lucchese Capo Paul Vario, who approved the plan, was sent to prison in 1984, and he died there in 1989. James Burke, the mastermind of the plan, was arrested in 1980 because of a Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal, while in prison, he was also convicted of murder.

murder. He died in prison in 1996 from cancer at the age of 64. There was one final person who was brought to trial in connection to the heist. In 2014, Vincent Tassarro of the Bonanno Crime family was accused of the crime and brought to trial at the age of 78. He was acquitted because there was no evidence connecting him. However, he did wind up in prison anyhow a few years later due to a road rage incident. The Lufanza Heist remains one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in U.S. history. To date, none of the money or jewels taken from the Lufanza Cargo Warehouse has ever been recovered, and it's widely believed that much of it was laundered or used to finance other criminal activities. The Lufanza heist remains a hallmark of criminal ingenuity and a reminder of the often

violent consequences of organized crime. Despite the FBI's extensive efforts, no one outside of Lewis Verner was ever fully prosecuted for the robbery itself, leaving the case a subject of fascination decades later. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day.

And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.