The crime gripped the public’s imagination, for both its magnitude and its moxie: In the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1978, a group of masked gunmen seized about $6 million in cash and jewels from a cargo building at Kennedy International Airport.
The
Lufthansa heist, as it was known, was billed as the biggest cash robbery in United States history, and it played a starring role in
the 1990 movie “Goodfellas.” It remained unsolved for four decades, perhaps because many of those who might have known something turned up dead.
But on Thursday, more than 35 years later, federal authorities charged an aging mobster, Vincent Asaro, 78, with playing a role in the heist, saying they had four cooperating witnesses from organized crime families who linked Mr. Asaro, a reputed capo in the Bonanno crime family, to the robbery.
It is a stunning turn in a famously unsolved case that had long been attributed to mobsters affiliated with the Lucchese family. The man thought to be the mastermind, a Lucchese associate named James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke,
died in 1996 in prison, where he was serving a life sentence in a different case. Henry Hill, the mobster-turned-informant of “Goodfellas” fame, who helped plan the heist,
died in 2012.
The only person ever convicted in the robbery was a Lufthansa cargo agent, described as the “inside man” in the plot.
The indictment unsealed Thursday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn represents the first time that an organized crime figure has been charged in the heist. But Mr. Asaro does not appear to have grown rich from the proceeds of the crime: As late as 2011, he was recorded complaining about his take.
“We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get,” Mr. Asaro said to another mobster, who is cooperating with the government.
“Jimmy kept everything,” he added, apparently a reference to Mr. Burke, according to legal filings by prosecutors.
The indictment charges Mr. Asaro; his son, Jerome, 55; and three other men with a racketeering conspiracy that reads like a Mafia highlights reel: armored truck heists, murder, attempted murder, extortion and bookmaking.
Some of the crimes alleged in the indictment predated even the airport heist, including a homicide committed in 1969. The federal investigation first became public in June, when agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation descended on a home owned by Mr. Burke’s daughter in the South Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens and began digging in the basement, soon finding human remains.
The remains, the indictment makes clear, belonged to Paul Katz, who was identified in court papers as an associate of Mr. Burke’s who had a warehouse used by Mr. Asaro and Mr. Burke to store stolen goods. After the warehouse was raided, Mr. Asaro began to suspect that Mr. Katz was an informant. He later told a government informant that he and Mr. Burke had killed Mr. Katz with a dog chain and buried him under cement in a vacant house, according to a legal filing submitted by prosecutors.
Decades later, according to a filing, after a police detective reopened the Katz murder case, Mr. Asaro directed his son and another man to dig up the remains, which were buried a second time
under the home of Mr. Burke’s daughter.
The defendants, who investigators said were all linked to the Bonanno family, were expected to be arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors say that Mr. Asaro currently holds the rank of captain in the Bonanno crime family, but that his standing has varied over the years, and that at one point he was demoted for taking too much money from his underlings.
The legal filings by prosecutors do not say precisely what Mr. Asaro’s role in the Lufthansa heist might have been, although he is charged with the robbery itself as well as with planning it.
“Asaro himself was in on one of the most notorious heists — the Lufthansa robbery in 1978,” the F.B.I. agent in charge of the New York field office, George Venizelos, said. “It may be decades later, but the F.B.I.'s determination to investigate and bring wiseguys to justice will never waiver.”
Prosecutors believe that Mr. Asaro gave some of the jewelry stolen in the heist to a superior in the Bonanno crime family. That superior later became an informer and is helping prosecutors with the current case, according to a legal filing.
The F.B.I. agent who supervised the investigation, Steve Carbone, said in an interview that he had always suspected that Mr. Asaro was “in the mix as a player” who had connections at the airport. But Mr. Carbone, Mr. Carbone, who retired in 1998, said it would be a surprise to him “if Asaro was physically involved in the heist” as one of the gunmen.
Investigators believe that there were about a half-dozen gunmen involved in the robbery. Among the suspects, Mr. Carbone said, were Frank Burke, James Burke’s son; Thomas DeSimone; Angelo Sepe; and Anthony Rodriguez. They all are dead.
The F.B.I.'s investigation into the Lufthansa heist seemed to be gaining steam by mid-1980: Mr. Hill admitted his involvement in the robbery and was quickly swept up into the witness protection program when he agreed to cooperate.
But suspects kept turning up dead. By the time Mr. Hill began cooperating, the corpses of at least six people connected to the robbery or to its participants had been discovered. It was thought that Mr. Rodriguez might have died from a snakebite in his home, according to his lawyer at the time, Marvyn Kornberg.
Mr. Carbone said that over the years, “I got to believe 15 people were killed solely because of this case.”
Investigators came to suspect that the heist was masterminded by Mr. Burke, who was a close associate of top members of the Lucchese crime family. Mr. Burke was sent to prison on information provided by Mr. Hill, but the crime was not related to the Lufthansa heist: It involved fixing Boston College basketball games. While in prison, Mr. Burke was tried and convicted in the killing of a drug dealer, Richard Eaton.
The only person convicted of the Lufthansa robbery was the cargo agent, Louis Werner, who had gambling debts to pay off. Mr. Werner took the idea for the crime to his bookmaker, who introduced him to another bookmaker, a beautician from Long Island, who is believed to have passed along the tip to the robbers, according to testimony at his trial.
Only a tiny fraction of the money stolen at Kennedy Airport was ever recovered.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/n...gation-including-78-lufthansa-heist.html?_r=0
never knew about the original story
