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Podcast Transcript

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.

When you watch a heist movie it usually involves some criminal mastermind who assembles a crew for some highly planned and elaborate caper. 

This makes for great entertainment, but these sorts of heists almost never happen in real life, and if they are 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 of the players and how they did it. 

The story begins with an employee who worked for Lufthansa Cargo at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Louis Werner. 

Werner is not the central character in this 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 his debt by telling his booking 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 Lufthansa Cargo that came through the airport. 

The money was part of foreign exchange transactions from US military personnel and tourists who were in West Germany.

Krugman then passed this information on to a middle-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 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 descent, 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 the goods. 

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. Vario, who had just lost a large 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 Robert’s Lounge, a bar owned by Burke in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens. 

With Werner’s inside information, they were able to craft a highly elaborate plan. What made the plan was the inside information from Werner. 

Werner knew exactly how the security system 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 floorplans of the warehouse and knew exactly where everything would be when it arrived. 

As they were creating the plan, Burke assembled a crew. The group included Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, Joe Civitello Sr., Tony Rodriguez, Joseph Costa, Joe Manri, and Robert McMahon, who were all members of the Lucchese crime family. In addition to them was Paolo LiCastri, a representative of the Gambino family, as well as Burke’s son, Frank, and a friend of his, Parnell “Stacks” 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 estimated $2 million take. Werner, 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 arrive at JFK. 

That happened on Saturday, December 9, 1978. Werner told Burke that a large shipment of cash had arrived at 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 3:12 a.m. on Monday, December 11th, a Ford Econoline 150 van pulled up to the gate of the Lufthansa 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 on 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. 

Rudi Eirich, 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 they were looking for. They removed forty 15-pound cartons of cash and jewels and put them into the van.

The Lufthansa staff was told to wait 15 minutes before calling the police, which they honored 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 was far larger than expected. There was $5 million in cash and over $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 US 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.

There were no fingerprints, and no one saw the faces of the perpetrators. 

While the crime was almost perfect, the aftermath was not. 

The first mistake took place a few days after the heist.  “Stacks” 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 was 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. This wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that he had parked 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 Bruke was the prime suspect, they didn’t have the evidence to make an arrest.

It was at this point that paranoia began to set in. Burke was concerned that people would talk and the authorities would find the needed evidence. 

This was when the bodies started to pile up.

The first victim was Stacks Edwards. His screw-up with the getaway van was the biggest loose end, so DeSimone and Sepe were ordered to kill him before he could talk. On December 18, a week after the robbery, he was 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 6. He began loudly demanding his money, and Burke was concerned that he would go to the FBI. It is believed he was murdered and his body dismembered. His remains were never found. 

Thomas DeSimone, who was one of the main figures in the heist and who murdered Stacks Edwards, was himself murdered on January 14 for reasons unrelated to the heist. The reason for his death was the murder of two members of the Gambino crime family.

Louis Cafora, 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. Moreover, unlike most mobsters, he talked about mob business with his wife. 

Both Cafora and his wife disappeared in March 1979, and their bodies have never been found. 

Joe Manri, an associate of Burke, worked for Air France and had inside information. Fearing he was going to turn state witness, he was found on May 15, 1979, in a parked car, shot execution style.

Paolo LiCastri, 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. Others were killed 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 Werner, 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 program was because he was concerned that Burke would try to kill him, just like he like killed so many other people associated with the crime.   

Hill wrote a book that documented the robbery, which is how we know most of what we do. His book, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, became the basis for the 1990 film Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorcese. 

Almost everyone else who wasn’t murdered directly because of the robbery ended up murdered or in prison for unrelated reasons in the years the followed.

Angelo Sepe was murdered in 1984 along with his girlfriend.

Lucchese capo Paul Vario, who approved the plan, was sent to prison in 1984 and 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 convicted of 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 Asaro 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 wound up in prison anyhow a few years later due to a road rage incident.

The Lufthansa heist remains one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in U.S. history. To date, none of the money or jewels taken from the Lufthansa Cargo warehouse have ever been recovered, and it is widely believed that much of it was laundered or used to finance other criminal activities.

The Lufthansa 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 Louis Werner was ever fully prosecuted for the robbery itself, leaving the case a subject of fascination decades later.