Mafia Justice: The True Story of the Lufthansa Heist from Goodfellas Documentary HT

 

The Lufansza heist, where almost $6 million in cash and jewels were stolen, has been immortalized and filmed thanks to Martin Scorsese’s Good Fellas, along with a few other smaller and lesserknown movies. But none of these works tell the full story about what happened on the early morning of December 11th, 1978.

 In some films, multiple real life people were combined into single characters and individual events were emitted. In Good Fellas, we don’t even see the actual heist happen because the film is told from the perspective of Henry Hill and he was not involved with it. Here is what really happened during the heist and its bloody aftermath where almost everyone that was part of the crew was either murdered or disappeared.

 But before we begin, please give this video a like if you enjoy it and click on the button to subscribe. One character who was completely omitted from Good Fellas is the only person that was convicted for their role in the robbery. Lewis Werner was the inside man for the heist. He worked for Lufansza at JFK airport as a cargo supervisor.

 He was employed by the airline for more than a decade when the heist occurred. Part of his job duties included meeting the planes when they arrived and taking possession of any valuables that might be on board, like cash or jewelry. The jewelry was on the plane because it was being delivered to different buyers and sellers across the globe.

 While the cash was the results of the airlines currency exchange services every day, Wernern would see these valuables arrive and he would bring them across the tarmac and into the cargo building where they were then placed inside a vault. After being placed in the cargo buildings vault, an armored car would come by in the afternoon to collect the valuables that just arrived from Europe.

 We’ll never know how many times he wondered what would happen if some of this cash disappeared as he did his job. But the thought was there and was strong enough to eventually act on. In Nicholas Pelgi’s book, Wise Guy, Henry Hill described Lewis Werner as a degenerate gambler trying to support an estanged wife and a $300 a day gambling habit on a $15,000 a year salary.

 Needless to say, Wernern had a lot of debt, and it wasn’t the kind where you could file Chapter 11 bankruptcy and walk away from it. By 1978, it was estimated that he owed $18,000 to various bookies across New York City. His life was in danger thanks to his poor choices. He needed to get rich quick if he was going to survive.

 But the actual genesis for the famous 1978 heist began 2 years earlier on October 8th, 1976 with an impulse on a routine day. A plane had just arrived from Europe, and it was full of foreign currency. Wernern went out to meet it. Back then, he was also in a lot of debt and he was desperate. He met the container which had the currency, opened it, and then disappeared.

 His official story was that he had diarrhea on that day and needed to use a toilet. After about 10 minutes, this cash that was sitting on the runway where dozens of people were working was taken back to the cargo terminal by Wernner. As his contents were inventoried, it was discovered that a small cardboard box containing $22,000 worth of European currency was missing.

 As the person in charge of taking custody of the cargo, Werner was suspected of stealing and blamed for failing to secure its contents. But he stuck to a story about having diarrhea. And after a search, none of the missing cash was found on him or in the airport. He was not arrested and received a reprimand while keeping his job.

 Of course, Wernern really did steal it. And his friend and co-orker, Peter Grunwald, was holding on to the stash. He did this because Wernern promised him a $5,000 cut after they exchanged the stolen loot for dollars. Neither man was fully aware of what they got themselves into, but they knew that they needed to get rid of any evidence minus the cash.

 They took the cardboard box that the money was transported in and cut it into pieces. Then they drove around Long Island disposing of each piece in a different dumpster so that it could never be recreated and linked back to them. Next, they needed to figure out how to exchange the money without anyone noticing.

 After doing a little research, they learned that as long as each exchange was less than $500, it did not need to be reported to the US Treasury. While this was great news for the pair, Wernern was still under suspicion and they thought it would be safest for them as Lufansza employees to have a third party do the exchanges at different banks across the city.

 Wernern then brought in his aranged wife’s boyfriend, William Fishetti, to do the leg work, and everything worked out for Louisis Wernern. Wernern paid Fishetti and Grunald their $5,000 each. He paid his wife the back support money he owed her. Then this degenerate gambler paid all of the bookies he owed money to and settled his debts.

 As a bonus, because he was never charged for the theft, he got to keep his job. Wernern managed to solve a lot of problems in his life with this one move, and he got away with the perfect crime. He had the chance to start over with a blank slate, but he didn’t. He continued to gamble, and in less than 2 years, he went from zero to $18,000 in debt again.

 To get out from it, he was going to steal from his employer again. Of course, he couldn’t use the same play, but if he could orchestrate a larger robbery of the terminal, he could make much more money, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life and then some. The two friends, Lewis Werner and Peter Grunwald, started brainstorming in the spring of 1978.

 Grunwald, saw the potential financial windfall they could achieve. $5,000 was not worth going to prison and losing his job for, but there was a larger number that could work for him, and to achieve this, they would need to steal $1 million minimum. They shook hands and decided to move forward. Grunwell’s job was to assemble the robbery team.

 While Werner’s supervisor level gave him detailed knowledge of the alarms in the terminal along with all the staff procedures. His role was to develop the plan and provide a layout of the building with the information of the alarm so that it would not go off during the heist. But Grunweld was either unable or unwilling to commit.

 Wernern was getting desperate to do this. But as the year went on, nothing had progressed. The bookies were getting more aggressive about getting their money. And when football season began, Wernern realized that he needed to do this without his friend. Many of the bookies that Wernner owed money to did not usually interact with him directly unless they were making threats.

 After receiving a menacing phone call from one of his largest mafia connected creditors, Wernern reached out to Frank Mena, who was the go-between for Wernern and the bookies. After hearing his pitch, Mena promised to take it up to his boss, Martin Krugman. This was the same man that just made the menacing phone call to Wernner.

 At this moment, the wheels were now in motion to carry out what would be the largest heist in American history at the time, though no one realize then how big this would end up becoming. Neither did most of the participants realize that their involvement would sign their death warrants.  Organized crime is like a food chain.

 At the very bottom were the powerless, average Joe customers who used the services provided by the criminals. People like Lewis Werner. Next, you had the gangsters at the lowest level who did the leg work for their employers. Frank Mena, the man that Wernern reached out to about the heist, was on this rung.

 Above Mena was Martin Krugman, a Jewish American businessman who sold wigs and other men’s hair care products across the tri-state area while also operating behind the scenes as a bookmaker. As far as the organized crime hierarchy goes, Krugman was close to the bottom. But just above him was Jimmy Burke. Jimmy Burke was made famous by Robert Dairo’s portrayal of him in Good Fellas.

 In that movie, the character was named Jimmy Conway after Burke’s family demanded more money than the studio was willing to pay for his name rights. Although he could be charming and was nicknamed the Gent, Jimmy Burke was nothing short of a psychopath. Henry Hill described him as someone you could have a dinner full of great conversation and laughter with, but when dessert came, he would not hesitate to shoot you in the back of the head as you glanced away.

 Jimmy Burke did business with Martin Krugman and loaned him money, but he did not like the man. Krugman was stingy and claimed that he could not pay the high interest rates Jimmy the Gent was charging. At the same time, Burke considered the low-level bookmaker to be a two-faced liar. Krugman’s brickandmortar chain would air commercials that would come on late at night.

 Jimmy Burke was an insomiac, and he would watch TV when he couldn’t sleep. Every time one of Krugman’s spots came on, he would get angry that this guy could afford to put stuff on TV while pleading poverty that he couldn’t pay back Burke’s interest rates. But for now, Krugman did earn money for Jimmy the Gent, and that was enough to allow him to be tolerated.

 Krugman saw the potential of the Lufansa heist and immediately brought it directly to Jimmy Burke for his consideration. Among Jimmy’s many illicit businesses, his specialty was hijacking. He operated his headquarters out of a bar he owned in Queens called Robert’s Lounge, where some of the regulars were also part of his loose-nit criminal crew.

 One of these men was Joe Manry. His real last name was Manriguez, but he tried to hide his Hispanic heritage and posed as an Italian in the hopes that he could one day become a maid member of the Luchesi crime family. He was overweight with a huge beer gut that earned him the nickname Buddha.

 Burke was warned that Krugman’s proposal about pulling off this heist. They agreed that in exchange for the tip, Krugman would receive a finder fee of 10%. Minus the debt he already owed Burke. Burke then directed Buddha to get in touch with Lewis Werner and work on the details of the plan to see how feasible it really was.

 Buddha was the only connection that Wernner would have between himself and the crew that was to carry out the heist. For his benefit and theirs, the less Wernern knew about who was involved, the better it would be for everyone. Wernern was very detailed about the layout of the building, the operations of the staff, and how the alarm worked so that it could be bypassed.

 One key detail was that the vault room had two security doors to access it. The first door needed to be unlocked simultaneously with two keys, which then led to an anti- room where there was a second door. The first door needed to be locked again before attempting to open the second door, or else the silent alarm would be triggered.

 Buddha liked what he heard and relayed the information back to Burke. He estimated that the score from this job would be about $2 million. Burke was also in agreement that they had a great plan, but before they could move forward, he needed approval from those higher up on the organized crime ladder.

 Jimmy Burke was on a much higher level than Martin Krugman in the underworld, and he knew a lot of powerful people who trusted him to be competent and ruthless. But he was not a made man in the mafia because he was not fully Italian. Instead, he was just an associate and could never rise any higher. But his reputation gave him direct access to a capo regime in the Luchesi family named Paul Vario.

 JFK airport was in Vario’s territory. So if this heist was going to go down, it would need his approval along with a piece of the score. Vario was open to the idea, but he needed to confer with the other crime families who also operated in the area. In the aftermath of this heist, it was inevitable that the heat of law enforcement would be turned up and so the other family’s businesses would be affected.

 Banano Captain Vincent Assero gave his approval. While newly promoted Gambino captain John Gotti consented as well, it was also negotiated that the vehicles used in the robbery would be brought to a junkyard Gotti owned in New Jersey to be crushed so that there would be no evidence for the police to find and link back to them.

 Jimmy Burke was given the green light from the estimated $2 million hall. The Gambinos were to receive $200,000 or 10% of the loot. Burke would also have to kick up money to Paul Vario, the Bananos, and Martin Krugman for his finders fee. Lewis Werner was also promised 10% of the take as well. This meant that half of the score would be divided to outside parties while Burke’s own crew was to be paid $50,000 each.

 In the end, Jimmy the Gent Burke expected to clear about $750,000 from this job. And no, he wasn’t planning to declare that income. Burke already had a crew that he worked with regularly, so the manpower was in place and standing by. Now, there was only one thing holding them up. They didn’t want to rob the terminal when the cash inside was low.

 They wanted to go in when it was flush so that the reward would outweigh the risk. Buddha reached out to Louisis Werner again and he was instructed to inform them when there would be a lot of cash on the site. November came and passed without any instructions from Wernner. The crew began to doubt that this job would ever happen.

 Then on Friday, December 8th, a large shipment of cash arrived at the airport in the afternoon. The Brinks truck drivers came to pick it up, but Lewis Werner refused to release it unless his boss signed the approval forms. But his boss already left for the weekend and wouldn’t be back. The drivers dutifully waited around for about an hour before their supervisor told him to forget about it and return on Monday.

 And so the cash remained locked up and secured at the terminal for the weekend. After runner left work that day, he reached out to Buddha from a pay phone to tell him that now was the time. As he laid in bed that night, he must have been anxious. His fantasy of robbing his employer of millions of dollars was about to really come true.

And now it was completely out of his control.  Lewis Warner woke up excited on the Saturday morning of December 9th, 1978, expecting that he just became a rich man. But there weren’t any reports on the news about the heist, and he didn’t get any calls from his employer or co-orker saying that something bad had happened.

 The terminal did not get robbed on Friday night, and he spent the rest of his Saturday in a tense mood. When the evening came, he perhaps made himself a drink and wondered if this was going to be the night. But when he woke up Sunday morning, everything was still the same. He was getting anxious, but he knew he couldn’t reach out to Buddha and probe for information, as that might scare the crew off at best, and at worst, it might make them think that this was a setup from law enforcement, and he was an informant.

 So, he sat tight. But when Monday morning arrived, his life changed in ways that he could not imagine before. That day, at about 3:00 a.m., a black Ford Econo Line van pulled up to the cargo terminal’s gate. Meanwhile, a second car parked nearby. It was being driven by Frank Burke, Jimmy the Gent’s son.

 Like his father, people who knew him described Frank as a psychopath, but with less charm than dad. He and Tommy D. Simone, another highly violent member of the crew performing this heist, would both be combined in the Joe Peshi’s Tommy Devito character in Good Fellas, which won him an Oscar for best supporting actor. Frank Burke’s job that night was to sit tight and function as a crash car, meaning that if any cops pursued the van after the heist, he was to crash into them to end the chase.

 Inside the van were believed to have been at least five men. In addition to Tommy D. Simone, there was Angelo Sepe, a Luchesy family associate with a reputation for violence. Joe Buddha Manry, the man who planned the heist with Mner, Lewis Kaphora, who weighed about 300 lb, but was an expert stickup man, and Robert Frenchie McMahon, who was friends and roommates with Buddha, so that the two hoods could keep their expenses low as they pursued a career in crime.

 There may have been an additional man on the crew named Paulo Lee Castri. Lee Castry was a gangster from Italy who was with the Gambino family. It is alleged that as part of that family’s approval for the heist, John Gotti insisted that they have representation on the crew. Though this has never been positively proven, as none of the participants of this heist ever told their story, and law enforcement was not able to bring them to court.

 Once the van went through the gate, it parked outside of the terminal. Buddha, Frenchie, and Kapora went inside while Damon and Sepe waited in the van as lookouts. The reason why 3:00 a.m. was the chosen time for this robbery was because that was the lunch hour for the overnight terminal crew. According to Wernner, there would be 10 people working that night who needed to be subdued.

 As they entered the building, the security guard was away from his desk. No one knew they were there. The first employee they encountered was John Murray, a senior cargo agent that was trying to catch a quick nap at his desk. He was rudely awakened and marched into the cafeteria where five other employees were eating and relaxing.

 Murray was then ordered to tell the gunman who else was in the building. He answered that Carrie Whan, a transfer man, Rudy Elrich, the night shift manager, Ralph Reberman, and a security guard that just started working there were somewhere inside. Murray was then marched back to his office and a gun was pointed at his head.

 He was ordered to get Rudy Elrich out of his office by telling him there was an important phone call from Frankfurt that he needed to take. Elrich stepped out and was quickly captured. Now, they had seven of the 10 employees, but where the hell were the other three? They frantically searched the warehouse for the missing men, but could not find them.

 Meanwhile, Seepe and D Simone were waiting inside the van with no idea of what was happening inside. At least one of them removed his ski mask because it was getting hot. Suddenly, another van pulled into the lot, and it made them both very nervous. It was driven by Carrie Whan, who had just returned from a delivery.

 He saw the black van, but assumed it was just a driver from another airline working in the same position he had. The two men in the van didn’t like this, though, and they leapt out. Whan was quickly captured, but the struggle made some noise that captured the attention of another unaccounted employee named Ralph Redmond. Both men were brought into the van and threatened that they would be killed if they tried anything other than listening to their instructions.

 As the crew searched the building with Elrich as a hostage, they found the missing security guard named Samuel Veltry. He was busy going over his security instructions list as everything was going down and ironically was completely unaware of the robbery in progress. Inside the van, the two armed men were getting nervous.

 One of them went to the building to see what was going on. Through the door, he saw one of his fellow crew members searching the building. They spoke and learned about the two hostages in the van. Everyone was now accounted for. The cargo bay doors of the terminal were opened and the van drove in. Whan and Redman were pulled out of the vehicle and marched inside to join the rest of the Lufansza employees at the cafeteria.

 At some point, someone put up resistance to the crew and was pistol whipped for his trouble. But luckily, he wasn’t killed. With everyone now secured, the gunman singled out Elrich and brought him to the vault. They revealed the knowledge they had about the alarm system doors and warned Elrich that they had people at his house with his family as hostages.

 If he tried to engage the alarm, then they would be killed. Elrich had no choice but to open the vault doors ordered. The crew now had access to what they came for. 72 15-lb cartons of untraceable cash and jewelry were removed from the vault and put in the van. Once this was done, Elrich was taken to the cafeteria. Lewis Caporo was believed to be guarding the employees as he had a very unique physical description due to his weight.

 During this time, he took a quarter from one of the employees being held at gunpoint so that he could buy a soda in the cafeteria vending machine. Most employees were handcuffed behind their back, but John Murray’s hands were bound with rope while Elrich was secured with plastic tape. It’s not clear why the Lufansza heist crew did not bring enough handcuffs with them when they knew there would be 10 employees working.

 Once the staff was back together and secured, they were warned not to move for another 10 minutes. When they were planning the heist, Warner warned Buddha that it would take the port authority 90 seconds to respond to the alarm. Now the crew needed to act quick. Two gunmen got into the van as it was now packed with more loot than they anticipated, while the rest had to jump in the waiting crash car with Frank Burke.

 Both vehicles drove away from the airport without any trouble and disappeared into the night. John Murray was the first employee that managed to free himself, and he instantly called the police. The heat was now on for the crew that robbed the Lufansza cargo terminal. But what none of the men that participated in this heist knew was that they had more to worry about from the man who organized the job, Jimmy Burke.

 The van in the Buick being driven by Frank Burke arrived at an auto repair shop in the car section of Brooklyn where Jimmy Burke and Stack Edwards were waiting for them. Staxs was an African-Amean low-level hoodlm who aspired to be a blues singer while doing odd jobs for Jimmy to make ends meet. The two vehicles drove in and the garage door closed to give them privacy.

 The 72 boxes from the van were removed and placed into the trunks of the Buick in another car driven by Jimmy. Jimmy and his son drove in one car while D Simone, Seepe, French, and Buddha left in the other. Staxs took the van and was ordered to bring it to John Gotti’s junkyard in New Jersey to be destroyed while Lewis Kaphora walked a few blocks and was picked up by his wife.

 Paulo Lee Castry, if he was involved, most likely took the subway home. One thing for sure is that everyone walked away that night in a good mood. Every piece of paper currency printed by the US Treasury has a serial number. Usually, when large amounts of cash are being physically transferred, all of the bills come from the same printing batch and thus have consecutive serial numbers.

 These numbers get recorded and when stolen cash re-enters the banking system, it gets flagged and the government can locate geographically where it came from to isolate where the thieves who are spending it are. But the money at the Lufansza cargo terminal came from foreign currency exchanging. A soldier arriving in Germany has a $100 bill that he exchanges at Lufansza’s counter for local currency before he steps out of the airport.

 Behind him is a businessman from New York with $50. Every single piece of cash that was stolen came from different people from all walks of life. The serial numbers were not recorded and were completely random, making the cash that was stolen in the Lufansza heist practically untraceable. After the port authorities secured the terminal, the FBI, detectives from the Queen’s District Attorney, and detectives from the NYPD all arrived on the scene.

 By the time the sun rose that morning, four agencies were actively on the hunt for the gunman, and they had two major leads. Ralph Redmond, the employee who was taken outside of the building and held in the van, told authorities that it was a black Ford Econo Line. And Rudy Ellich told investigators that the thieves knew how the alarm for the vault operated, which meant that someone working there gave them that information.

 The van lead should have been a dead end because it was supposed to have been disposed of at John Gotti’s junkyard, but for whatever reason, Stax Edwards did not do his job. He parked the van illegally on the street and seemed to have forgotten about it while he went to get high. It was recovered by the police 2 days after the heist, and it didn’t take long for investigators to connect it to the robbery.

 What was even worse was that when they dusted it for fingerprints, they found some. When Stax Edwards did not do his part, he signed his own death warrant. No matter how likable he was, he could get everyone involved in this heist known to law enforcement. Most importantly, Jimmy Burke. The damage he caused needed to be contained.

 He retreated to an apartment in Ozone Park, Queens to lay low from investigators who were bound to get a match on his prince. On December 18th, one week after the robbery, his friend Tommy D. Simone arrived with Angelo Sepy to check up on him. They put six bullets in his head to guarantee his silence. Meanwhile, Lewis Werner was largely uninvolved with the heist, except for his connections to Joe Buddha Mandry and Martin Krugman.

 But as investigators pursued their theory that this was an inside job, he landed directly in their sights. Thanks to the $22,000 worth of foreign currency that disappeared 2 years earlier. Wernern was tough and kept his mouth shut. He knew that the people who did this were dangerous, and if he cracked, then he would be dead. Besides, he had a nice cash payoff he could look forward to once all the heat blew over.

 Although Wernern was the prime suspect, every employee was looked into and Per Grunro also came under suspicion. Wernern was given a small cut of the robbery to hold him over for now and he gave a portion of that money to his friend in order to buy his silence. In the initial weeks of the investigation, both men remained silent, but that did not clear them of suspicion.

 It probably didn’t help that Warner bought a new car and Grunwald paid off his debts during this time either. From the point of view of investigators, out of all the employees that could be the inside man, these two were the shest bets. It didn’t take long before Stax’s fingerprints were identified in the van. And when police found his dead body with six holes in the head as an execution, they knew they discovered another link to the robbery.

A detective did not need to be Sherlock Holmes to learn that Stax was a regular at Robert’s Lounge, which was owned by Jimmy Burke, a well-known career criminal and hijacker who spent more days in prison than he did outside of it in his youth. With a reputation like that, the dots were easy to connect. Jimmy the Gent was now suspect number one for masterminding the Lufansa heist, but he was determined to get away with it, even if that meant destroying his own crew.

 While it’s highly likely that Jimmy Burke did not know who Peter Grunworld was, Lewis Werner was a loose end for him. But it needed to be assumed that he was being closely watched by law enforcement and should be off limits for now. Besides, by all appearances, he was keeping his mouth shut and playing dumb about the heist while patiently waiting for his cut once the heat cooled down.

The same cannot be said for Martin Krugman. While he was not a suspect and was thus off the radar, he wanted his 10% finders fee now, which ballooned from an estimated $200,000 to more than half a million. It’s well documented that Burke did not like Krugman at all. According to Henry Hill, the thought of giving that much money to a scumbag like Krugman did not sit right with Jimmy the Gent.

 It made him sick to even consider giving that much cash to a person who just passed contact information along without taking any active planning in the heist or being part of the risk of carrying it out. Being an immoral gangster, Jimmy Burke rationalized to himself that Martin Krugman should be murdered on principal. Tuesday night, technically the day after the robbery, he ordered Henry Hill to bring Krugman to the Riviera Motel under the guise that they were meeting some prostitutes.

Once there, Tommy D. Simone and Angelo Sepe were to kill him. Henry Hill and his wife Karen were friends with Krugman and his wife. Henry didn’t feel comfortable setting up his friend. He tried to delay and talk Jimmy out of committing the murder, and somehow his pleas appeared to have worked. Hill had already made plans with Krugman to go out that night.

 So, they went to a bar and drank. Over cocktails, Krugman revealed what his cut from the heist was supposed to be, and everything clicked for Henry Hill about Burke’s motivations. When Stax Edward’s corpse turned up a few days later, Krugman believed that he was the victim of a drug deal gone bad. Unaware of the danger he was really in, he continued to hound Jimmy Burke for his money.

 His excuse for being so pushy was that the inside man was demanding his cut and he was just a messenger. Burke gave him 50 grand to shut him up for now. Krugman in turn passed 40 grand to Lewis Werner according to Henry Hill, but we can assume that he deducted the money he was owed from the gambling first.

 Christmas and New Year passed. As 1979 began, Krugman continued to be pushy about his share and apparently started to believe that maybe Sax Edwards’s death was connected to the heist and not a drug deal. Unfortunately for him, he appeared to lack the ability to keep these thoughts to himself, and they trickled back to Jimmy.

 Krugman went from being annoying to becoming a liability. On the morning of January 6th, Krugman’s wife called Henry Hill’s house to tell him that Martin did not return home from the night before and asked that he look for her missing husband. According to the book Wise Guy, which is a memoir about his life, Hill said, “I drove over the Vinnie Asos fence company and I saw Jimmy’s car parked outside.

” I walked in and said that Fran had just called me. Jimmy was sitting there. Vinnie was sitting next to him. Jimmy said, “He’s gone.” Just like that, I looked at him. I shook my head. He said, “Go pick up your wife and go over there. Tell her that he’s probably with a girlfriend. Give her a story.” Krugman’s body was never found.

 His estimated date of death is January 4th, 1979. He was legally declared dead in 1986. The Lefanza heist has become more notorious in popular culture because of its aftermath rather than the actual heist itself. This is because most of the people involved suffered from untimely deaths. While the majority were committed by Jimmy Burke to sever any connections of the crime between himself and law enforcement, there were some members of the crew who were murdered for unrelated reasons. Tommy D.

 Simone was the next participant to die, who was an example of the latter, immortalized by Joe Peshi’s performance in Good Fellas. The real life person was slightly different than his on-screen counterpart in that D. Simone was married and acted like a family man when he was not being a gangster. Both men were violent psychopaths who actually enjoyed killing people.

 The scene in Good Fellas when he murders the teenager named Spider because he stood up for himself apparently really did happen like in the movie. The murder of Gambino family soldier Billy Bats was also similar to the movie. But there was one main difference from real life. In the movie, Tommy returns to the bar the same night to kill Bats for insulting him.

 In real life, he patiently waited 2 weeks for the man to let his guard down and then struck like a cold-blooded predator. Jimmy Burke seemed to like him because both men lacked a moral compass when it came to murder. In fact, according to Henry Hill, they would sometimes drink together and have remember when conversations about all the people they killed.

 Like Burke’s former partner who spoke to the police and ended up strangled with a piano wire by D Simone for his troubles. While Tommy D Simone might have been a genuine friend to Jimmy and a member of his crew, there was one person who did not like him. Luchesi Kappo Paul Vario. There are two types of men in a mafia family.

 Those who were smart and knew how to generate money and those that could enforce brutal violence to keep those operations in line. Tommy D. Simone was the second type, but he was too wild for various tastes. To become the member of a family, you needed to have the ability to kill someone. But guys like Tommy were volatile loose cannons, which made them bigger liabilities than assets to the businessoriented leadership on the high rungs of organized crimes ladder.

 But despite Vario’s low opinion of the man, word got out just after 1978’s Christmas that Tommy D. Simone was to become a maid member of the Luchesy family. He must have been ecstatic about how his life was shaping up. He just made a ton of money from the heist and now he was about to become an official member of the mafia.

 His future was looking bright. Just after Burke had Martin Krugman killed, he brought Henry Hill with him to Florida so they could chase down a professional scam artist who had cheated Burke out of a4 million dollars from a bogus coke deal. While they were traveling, Burke made a phone call to someone unknown to Hill to see how Tommy’s induction ceremony went.

 When Jimmy returned, there were tears in his eyes. He told Hill that the ceremony was a setup and Tommy was executed. The deed was done by John Gotti and his crew. Payback for killing Billy Bats and another guy named Fox, both who were made men in the Gambino family. Tommy killed them without permission. And in Kosanostra, he broke the rules, which in turn demanded a death sentence.

 On January 14th, 1979, Cookie D. Simone reported her husband missing the police. The first month of the new year was not even halfway over and two more men connected to the largest heist in American history just a month earlier were murdered. And as the year progressed, the body count would continue to rise.  As people began to die and disappear, law enforcement continued to aggressively push on with their investigation.

In their minds, there was no doubt that this was done by Jimmy the Gent Burke and his crew. The only thing they didn’t have was proof. There was plenty of hearsay as known informants in the underworld relayed the rumors that the Roberts Lounge crew was behind the heist. This caused investigators to zero in on four suspects. Tommy D.

 Simone, Angelo Sepe, Frank Burke, and a man named Anthony Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a known criminal whose name in this story only comes up in the FBI’s possible suspects list. There isn’t any evidence or stories that place him as part of Burke’s crew for the Lufansza heist. So, it looks like they got this one wrong, but the Simone and Sepe were very strong leads.

 It is believed that they are the two gunmen who stayed behind with the van during the first phase of the robbery when they captured Carrie Whan. During that time, Sepe became hot and removed the ski mask, allowing Wayan a chance to get a glimpse of his face. He would later pick out Sephy’s mug shot when being interviewed by law enforcement. D.

 Simone had also removed his mask at some point during the crime and allowed his face to be seen. Like Seepe, another witness picked him out from his mugsh shot, but he would never be brought in for questioning. Authorities assumed that he went on the lamb following the heist and the heat it was bringing, not knowing that he was already dead because of unrelated reasons.

 Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District, Edward A. Macdonald, became the lead man for law enforcement, and he stepped up surveillance of Burke and his men. It turned into a cat-and- mouse game between the cops and robbers with the crew becoming experts at slipping their government tails and disappearing for days, sometimes even leaving the state.

Jimmy Burke was out of prison and on parole at the time, and McDonald could have thrown him back behind bars for a number of violations. But that wasn’t going to help recover the money, so he chose to let him roam the streets and see where it might lead. On February 7th, 1979, Macdonald decided to turn up the heat when he subpoenaed 10 people to appear in front of a grand jury, some of which were known Luchesy members.

 He announced to the press that Stax Edwards was believed to have been murdered by the missing Tommy D. Simone, and both men were connected to the heist. Next, the police made their move against Angelo Sepe. A witness reported seeing him armed at the time of the robbery, which was a violation of his parole. On February 17th, they arrested him and searched his house, hoping to find some evidence connecting to the heist, with the biggest hope being part of the loot itself.

 Instead, all they found was Jimmy Burke relaxing inside. Sepe was also charged with participating in the robbery, but he claimed to have had an alibi, and the only connection law enforcement had linking him there was Wayan picking out his mugsh shot. Sepe and Burke refused to talk, and in late March, the charges against Seepe were dropped, minus his parole violation.

 In April, Burke was arrested for violating his parole for associating with a known felon. This referred to when he was found at Sepe’s house. These would be the most charges that either man would face in relation to the case. The leads to the Robert’s Lounge crew were turning into dead ends thanks to disappearing suspects and a wall of silence.

McDonald’s only hope for this case was the two Lufansza employees that he believed were involved. Law enforcement knew that Lewis Werner and Peter Grunwald came into some large amounts of cash following the robbery, but both men claimed that those were the rewards of gambling. Neither man changed their story, and this appeared to be a dead end as well. But they soon had a break.

Grunweld was summoned to appear in front of a grand jury, but before that was scheduled to happen, he had already planned a vacation outside of the country in Asia. As he tried to board his plane, he was unaware that due to his summons, he could not leave the country. He was picked up at the terminal and arrested.

 Macdonald met personally with Groomwell to try and get him the flip. But he wasn’t going to be persuaded. They transferred him to the Nassau County Jail and placed him in the general population so he could ponder what his future had in store. After a week, he decided that prison was not for him, and it certainly wasn’t worth his tiny cut from the heist.

 So, he decided to start talking. In addition to what he knew about the 1978 heist, he also told him about the time in 1976 when his friend Lewis Werner stole a cardboard box full of money. After Grunwald told investigators everything he knew, they then went after Frank Mana, the bookie gopher who brought the heist to Marty Krugman.

 When he opened his front door and saw FBI agent standing there, the first words out of his mouth were, “I want immunity.” Authorities also went after William Fchetti. Lewis Werner is a strange wife’s boyfriend who laundered the money Wernner originally stole. He instantly folded under questioning and was more concerned about his own wife finding out about his affair with Werner’s wife, Beverly.

 The FBI next questioned Beverly Werner and Wernern’s current girlfriend, Janet Barbiri. Both women broke down under interrogation and admitted that Wernern had boasted about his role in the heist. Macdonald couldn’t use his wife’s testimony against Werner, but in his mind, Janet Barberi was fair play. While Frank Mena’s connection was between Wernern and Marty Krugman, Krugman was dead already, so that link to Jimmy Burke was broken.

 But with three witnesses willing to testify against Lewis Werner, Macdonald decided he had enough evidence to go after the Lufansza heist inside man. On February 20th, Lewis Werner was arrested outside of a bowling alley. Just as he was trying to get into his brand new van that was purchased with the stolen cash, Jimmy Burke felt the news of law enforcement tightening around him, and he was determined not to go to prison for this, while also trying to keep the millions he stole.

 And anyone blocking the path to his goal was going to pay with their life.  On February 18th, 1979, a group of children playing in a part of Brooklyn called the Pit opened an abandoned tractor trailer and discovered a dead body inside that was frozen solid. The police were called and detectives Robert Kohler and James Sha were assigned to the case.

 A small address book was found hidden inside the man’s clothes, sewed between layers and apparently unknown to his murderers. There was one contact inside this book that piqu their interest, James Burke. By now, all of law enforcement believed that Burke was the number one suspect of the Lufansza heist. So, they assumed that he killed this unknown man because he was connected to the robbery.

 They were 50% right with their guess. Dental records would identify the man as Richard Eaton. He could be described as a professional scam artist if that was a real job. Earlier that year in January, Jimmy Burke was in Florida with Henry Hill when he learned about Tommy D. Simone’s death. The reason why they were there was because they were chased and eaten.

He stole Jimmy’s money during a fake drug deal and Burke wanted revenge. While they couldn’t find him then, he made the mistake of visiting New York and that’s when they appeared to get him. But these details wouldn’t become clear until decades later. and the discovery of Eaton’s frozen solid body has been linked to the heist in popular culture thanks to the famous scene in Good Fellas.

 Another death initially believed to be linked to the heist that is most likely unconnected was Terresa Ferrer, a beauty shop owner by day and drug dealer by night. She was said to have become a police informant and on February 10th she received a call at work. She told her staff that she was leaving for a meeting and would return in 15 minutes.

 No one ever saw her again. And a few months later, her dismembered torso washed up in New Jersey. It was only identified because there was a serial number on her breast implants. She was a regular at Robert’s Lounge. And Henry Hill claimed that she was killed because she was supposed to launder money for Paul Vario and instead tried to steal it.

 Law enforcement now dismisses this as unlikely with the real reason for her murder being that she was a cooperating witness who helped orchestrate a large drug bust in November of 1978. But because she was a known associate of Jimmy Burke and vanished at a time when people connected to the heist were disappearing, there is a small possibility that she was involved in the Lufansza robbery in some way.

 Jimmy Burke looked at the crew from that night to try and figure out who the weakest link might be. Angelo Sepe was a stand-up guy that did prison stints and committed murder when ordered. The character of Frankie Carbone was partially based on him, but the real life version was much different than the on-screen one, especially in how he died. He was safe for now.

 Robert Frenchie McMahon and Joe Buddha Manry also seemed to be dependable guys with a hardcore dedication to the life. Buddha might be a potential problem later as he was the only contact between Wernner and the crew. But Burke was willing to let that play out for now as the man seemed loyal.

 He decided that the weakest link was Louisis Kapora and the reason wasn’t that a witness could easily identify his extremely overweight body frame. The problem was his wife Joanna. This was his second marriage and he was head over heels for her. She always went with him to Robert’s lounge after they married in 1978 and always seemed to be close to her husband, sometimes within distance to overhear his conversations.

 This made his fellow gangsters uncomfortable because wives, while they had an idea of what their husbands did, were not supposed to be involved. What made Jimmy Burke even more upset with Kaphora was that on the night of the heist, his wife drove out to pick him up. She knew more than she was supposed to, and that made her a liability along with her careless husband.

 The FBI also zeroed in on the couple and they were brought into the 113th precinct for questioning, but both stayed firm in their denials and were released. However, police later claimed that Kapora had a change of heart and agreed to meet with them to tell them everything. He never showed up to that meeting.

 Both he and Joanna disappeared sometime in March and are presumed dead. But Burke was not able to relax. The government was fast-tracking the trial against Lewis Werner to start in May so that it could bring down pressure on Jimmy and his crew. Jimmy was under the microscope, so all he could do at the moment was wait.

 But he would still have a few moves left to play as everything continued to unfold.  After people connected to the heist began to disappear or were murdered, Assistant Attorney General Edward Macdonald knew that he had only one play left to connect the heist to Jimmy Burke, and that was Lewis Werner. He was charged for his involvement with the robbery as the inside man, and bail was set at $1 million, of which half needed to be cash.

 He didn’t have that much money, and even if he did receive his 10% cut and use it here, he would need to explain where it all came from. So, he was forced to languish in jail and wait for the wheels of justice to turn. A few days later, a grand jury formally indicted him based on the available evidence. His lawyers could deny his guilt all they wanted.

 But for anyone looking at this case, it seemed to be beyond a reasonable doubt thanks to Peter Grunwald and Frank Mena turning against him. His girlfriend Janet Barbiri also appeared to have turned her back on him as well. But he still refused to cooperate and accept his guilt. Macdonald next charged Wernner for the money he stole in 1976, which Peter Grunwald could testify about in addition to William Pricetti, who laundered the money.

 But still, Wernner stayed silent, either out of hope that if he stuck through this, he would be paid half a million dollars, or he was afraid of the men who actually carried out the heist. His trial went about as well as anyone could guess, with multiple witnesses testifying against him about his gambling problem, his prior stealing of the money in 1976, and his planning of robbing the cargo terminal again with an armed crew.

 The only surprising moment of this trial occurred when Janet Barbi was supposed to testify against her boyfriend. She backed out at the last minute, claiming that she loved the man and couldn’t go through with it. But the feds would not let her back out of her earlier statements, so she pretended to be ill for 2 days and said she had a heart condition and if she took the stand, she could die from distress.

 The judge wasn’t buying it and had her arrested for contempt of court. On May 11th, US Marshalss marched Barbia in and she changed her story on the stand, claiming that Wernner never spoke about the heist to her. She cried and trembled the whole time she testified. To add to the courtroom drama, she collapsed three times and her testimony was moved to a private area.

 It was cut short when a doctor monitoring her said that her blood pressure and pulse were rising high. The judge then dismissed and released her. On May 14th, the prosecution rested its case. The defense did not call any witnesses of its own, opening the path for closing arguments to proceed the next day. On the following afternoon, the jury began the deliberations.

 Less than 24 hours later on May 16th, the jury announced that Lewis Werner was guilty of three of the six charges laid against him. He now faced a potential sentence of up to 25 years in a federal prison. Jimmy Burke was also following the trial as it was the biggest threat against him. Wernern kept his mouth shut during it, but if he was sentenced to the maximum, then there was a good chance he might flip.

 And while Joe Buddha Manry and Robert Frenchie McMahon may have been good guys, they could also flip when staring down that kind of time. Plus, Manory was the only link between Burke and Wernern, which made him a double threat. Later that evening, hours after the guilty verdict was delivered, McMahon and Manry were found dead in a parked car in Brooklyn.

 Both had been shot in the back of the head. It was clear to the authorities that they knew who their killer was and considered him a friend. At the time, Manry was suspected as being part of the heist because of his connection to Burke. While McMahon was not on law enforcement’s radar yet, Wernern remained in custody. He awaited a sentencing as May turned into June.

 On June 26th, the government brought the convicted but not yet sentenced inside man in front of a grand jury to give him one more chance to cooperate before appearing at the mercy of his judge. He refused. 3 days later on the 29th, Lewis Werner was sentenced to 15 years in prison plus a $25,000 fine.

 He was 46 years old at the time and continued to profess his innocence as he was taken to prison. Also in June, Paulo Lee Castri, the man who may or may not have been part of the robbery crew to represent the Gambino family, was found dead on Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn caused by four bullet holes.

 He was shirtless and shoeless in an area that newspapers described as a place for dumping unwanted things. So, as July 1979 approached, it was now more than 6 months from when the Lufansza heist was carried out. Regardless of if it was a five or sixperson crew that carried out the robbery, Angelo Sepe was still alive.

 Jimmy’s son Frank, who drove the crash car that night, was also above ground, and so was Jimmy. Everyone else connected to the job beyond Lewis Werner and his associates were gone. Likewise, Lewis Werner had zero contact with any of the remaining men, so there was no way he could definitely lead authorities to them.

 Burke’s name wasn’t even brought up at Wernner’s trial. Instead, Martin Krugman’s was, and he was missing. Jimmy Burke might have finally felt that he could relax because he got away with this, but law enforcement was not going to let the matter go so easily.  US Attorney Edward Macdonald and his multi- agency network of investigators must have felt pretty confident after winning their trial against Lewis Wernner.

 One fact that gave them a lot of comfort was the large amount of money stolen. That money would need to be laundered for the people in the heist to actually enjoy what they took. And to do that, you need to bring in a lot of extra people to process it. While less than 10 people were involved in doing the dirty work of actually stealing the money, there could be another 30 involved in moving the cash.

 So eventually somewhere the odds were good that someone would make a mistake. But the second half of 1979 was full of dead ends. They investigated many murders they suspected of being connected to the heist, but then ruled them out. They spoke to many witnesses who claimed to have information that turned out to be bogus.

 And the remaining men they believed to have been the perpetrators kept their mouths shut and stayed away from the money. When the one-year anniversary of the case arrived in December, no progress was made since Wner’s conviction in June. The case appeared to be cold, but 1980 would become a very bad year for Jimmy the Gent Burke.

 That April, Henry Hill, a close associate of Burks, who was not involved in the heist, was arrested for dealing drugs. He was also an addict at the time, which made his underworld associates afraid that he might cooperate with the FBI. He was initially against that idea until federal agents shared some surveillance evidence that they found.

 The first was a wire tap with Angelo Sepe trying to convince Burke that Hill needed to be killed in order to guarantee his silence. The next tape they played was Burke visiting Paul Vario to secure his permission. Henry Hill stayed quiet at first and was released on bail. He felt things out and quickly realized that the FBI was right.

Burke was going to murder him. As he pondered his next move, Macdonald arrested him as a material witness in the Lufansza heist. Hill had three choices. Let himself get murdered, go to prison for decades, or cooperate against the people that wanted to kill him. He chose the third option. But investigators soon realized that Henry Hill was an extremely unreliable drug addicted compulsive criminal.

 It was difficult for them to get concrete information from him. And it wasn’t because he was stonewalling or trying to protect someone. His mind was just all over the place. Steve Carbone, the FBI agent who debriefed him, claimed that Hill had the mentality of an 8-year-old. He also did not have any real knowledge about the Lufansza heist because he was not part of it.

 All his knowledge was secondhand and useless in a courtroom. Hill’s lack of involvement in the heist was of particular interest to investigators because he appeared to be close with Burke. Hill explained that Burke wanted him involved but couldn’t because he had bad blood with Angelo Sepe after the two served time together in prison.

 Back then, another inmate roughed up Hill and he didn’t defend himself. This caused Seepe to call Hill a queer and no longer want anything to do with him. Investigators thought they had caught a big fish when Henry Hill turned states evidence, but they soon became disappointed. However, since the taxpayers were now footing the bill for his existence in witness protection, they needed to use him any way they could.

 Often, that meant appearing as a witness in low-level trials. But one day, he finally proved his worth by accident. Prosecutors asked him to help convince a woman that was part of his drugdeing operation to cooperate. During the interview, she could not remember where she was on a particular date, which prompted Hill to remind her that they were together in Boston fixing basketball games.

 Hill was pressed further about the games and law enforcement learned that Burke was part of a game fixing scheme with four other people. He was arrested in 1980 and held without bail. In 1981, his trial came and he was found guilty. In January of 1982, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. But if Macdonald hoped that the possibility of the 52-year-old spending the rest of his life behind bars would get him to trade something about the Lufansza heist, he couldn’t be more wrong.

On February 6th, 1984, Burke was indicted for the murder of Richard Eaton, the scam artist whose corpse was found frozen in a trailer by a bunch of kids. Thanks to Henry Hill’s testimony, Burke was found guilty and sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars. While the government might have gotten him off the streets, the Lufansza money was still out there, and the case was still considered unsolved, except for Lewis Werner’s conviction.

And any remaining participants that were still in the streets were not going to live happily ever after.  As Jimmy Burke was facing the reality that he was going to die in prison, the only remaining people from the heist crew still alive were his son Frank and Angelo Sepe. Sepe would not live to see 1985.

On July 18th, 1984, he was found murdered along with his 19-year-old girlfriend Joanne Lombardo. It was said that a week before his death, he robbed a drug dealer with mob connections. Those connections then went to work when they entered Seep’s basement apartment in Benenhurst. Lombardo was killed as she slept with a bullet to a head.

 Sepe then received three more shots to his own. Frank Burke became an associate to the Gambino family. He was shot to death on May 18th, 1987 by a convicted drug dealer on Liberty Avenue in the Cypress Hill section of Brooklyn. Because of Paul Varo’s importance on the organized crime hierarchy, he is probably only one of the few people to get his cut from Jimmy along with the Banano and Gambino families.

In 1984, Henry Hill testified against Vario for providing him with a no-show job in the 1970s so that he could get out of prison on parole. Vario was sentenced to 4 years and was later convicted again for extorting protection payments from the airfight companies operating out of JFK airport. He died in May of 1988 at the age of 73.

 Vincent Assero, a cappo in the Banano family, was charged as being part of the robbery in 2014 based solely on the testimony of a cooperating witness that also happened to be his embittered cousin. A jury found him not guilty and he walked away free. On April 13th, 1996, Jimmy Burke died of cancer. Lewis Werner, the inside man who came up with the idea of robbing his employer, probably had the happiest ending of anyone that was involved with the heist.

After spending his first year in prison, Wernern decided that he didn’t like it there and couldn’t do another 14 years. His lawyer reached out to ADA McDonald to say that he would now like to cooperate. But Wernern had a huge problem at this point. With Joe Buddha Manor and Martin Krugman both dead, he had no direct connection to Jimmy Burke, which meant that he had nothing valuable for investigators in 1980.

 but he really wanted to get out of prison. So his lawyer sent out a press release saying that his client was now cooperating. The publicity forced the government’s hand to reduce Warner sentence from 15 to 5 years. Once he was released, he was reunited with his girlfriend Janet Barberi and they were placed in witness protection.

 It’s believed that he passed away in 2007 while living in Oklahoma. Peter Grunwald also entered witness protection after testifying against his former friend, but his fate is unknown. The bodies of Tommy D. Simone, Martin Krugman, Lewis Kapora, and his wife Joanna are still missing. So are the money and jewels that were stolen on December 11th, 1978.

 But just because they haven’t been recovered doesn’t mean that someone didn’t spend them somewhere. After all, what made the idea of this heist so irresistible to everyone involved was the fact that the cash was untraceable.  Now the law enforcement