Jimmy Conway’s Son Was Erased From Goodfellas — Then Killed Over Flour ht
1987, May 18th, 2:30 in the morning. A sidewalk in front of 1043 Liberty Avenue, Cypress Hills section of East New [music] York, Brooklyn. Liberty Avenue at that hour is empty. Streetlights, broken glass, warm spring air. The 75th Precinct logged 82 murders that year. Frank Burke would be one of them.
A 26-year-old man lies on the sidewalk. He has been shot multiple times. His name is Francis James Burke. His friends call him Frankie. His father named him after Frank James, the Wild West outlaw. His brother thought the names were funny. Their father is James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, the man [music] Robert De Niro played in Goodfellas, the man who masterminded the 1978 Lufthansa heist, $5,875,000 stolen from the cargo terminal at JFK Airport, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time.
The man serving 20 years to life in a federal prison cell while his son bleeds out on Liberty Avenue, Frank James Burke is dead. The police will find nothing on him but a house key and $40 in cash. He was a cocaine dealer. He was a Gambino crime family associate. He was a suspected participant in the Lufthansa heist, and he died because he sold a bag of cocaine that was mostly flour.
Nine years earlier, his father trusted him to drive one of the crash cars for the biggest score of his life. Nine years later, the son tried to pass off kitchen flour as product and got killed for it outside the Suncrest [music] Tavern. That is the distance between the Lufthansa heist and a bag of flour, nine years, one airport, one bar, and you have never heard of him because his sister made sure of that.
To understand the son, you have to understand the father, and to understand the father, you have to start at the beginning, which for Jimmy Burke means foster care. James Burke was born July 5th, 1931, in the Bronx. His mother was Jane Conway, reportedly a prostitute who had immigrated from Dublin. His father is unknown.
At the age of two, Jimmy was placed in foster care. He would move through multiple homes over the next decade, [music] getting hit in one house, moved to the next, getting hit again. At 13 in 1944, he was riding in a car with his latest set of foster parents when an argument broke out. The car crashed.
His foster father was killed. The surviving widow blamed the boy. She beat him regularly until he was removed and placed in yet another home. Eventually, Burke landed with a family that treated him well, the Burkes. He took their surname. It was the only stable thing he ever received from a parent figure, and he carried it the rest of his life.
The name Conway, his birth mother’s name, would surface again decades later under very different circumstances. By 16, Burke was committing crimes. By 18, he’d been arrested for forging a $3,000 check at a bank in Ozone Park, Queens. He was sentenced to five years. In prison, a Colombo family member named Dominic Remos Sassani took notice of the kid who refused to cooperate with authorities.
Sassani arranged protection. Burke learned that silence had value. Between the ages of 16 and 22, Jimmy Burke spent all but 86 days behind bars. He did not attend a single self-improvement program. He earned outstanding performance ratings in the food service department. When he got [music] out, he became the most prolific hijacker and earner in the Lucchese crime family’s Brooklyn operation, working under capo Paul Vario.
He was Irish, ineligible for full membership in the Italian-only hierarchy, but he earned so much money that the distinction barely mattered. His crew operated out of Robert’s Lounge, a bar at 114-45 Lefferts Boulevard in South Ozone Park. He was known for his generosity with tips, his charm with strangers, and his absolute willingness to kill anyone who became inconvenient.
In 1962, Burke married a woman named Mickey. On their wedding day, police found the dismembered body of Mickey’s ex-boyfriend inside a car. The body had been cut into more than a dozen pieces. No charges were filed against Burke. Frank James Burke was born around 1960 or 1961. He was the first child. Frank grew up in the Vario crew.
Since Jimmy Burke had no biological family, no parents, no siblings, no cousins, the crew became the family. Frank’s uncles included Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, and Anthony Stabile. His arms included Karen Hill and Teresa Ferrara. These were the people at his birthday parties, at the family barbecues, at the holiday dinners.
These were also the people who hijacked trucks, fixed basketball games, ran loan sharking operations, and murdered informants. Frank and his brother Jesse James Burke adopted a hyphenated surname, Burke-Conway. Burke from the adoptive family that raised their father, Conway from Jane Conway, Jimmy’s birth mother, the Dublin immigrant, the prostitute, the woman who gave Jimmy away at age two.
The children carried both names as if the family couldn’t decide which version of itself to present to the world. Years later, when Bonanno family soldier Frankie Sergio asked Jesse James Burke why their father had named them after Wild West outlaws, Jesse answered, “Because he thought it was funny.
” Jimmy Burke thought a lot of things were funny. He also thought his children were extensions of his business. Henry Hill later told the FBI that Jimmy verbally and physically abused [music] Frank throughout his childhood. The abuse was well documented. Federal agents saw it as potential leverage, a way to turn Frank into an informant against his father. They approached him.
They tried to recruit him. Frank refused. He would not betray his father. The boy who was beaten by Jimmy Burke chose loyalty to Jimmy Burke. That is what growing up inside the Vario crew did to a person. Frank took the beatings and kept his mouth shut. That was love in the Vario crew.
December 11th, 1978, 3:00 in the morning, six masked gunmen enter the Lufthansa cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. They hold the employees at gunpoint. They force a worker to open the vault. They load $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry into a black van. They are in and out in 64 minutes.
It is the largest cash robbery ever committed on American soil. Jimmy Burke masterminded the operation. The tip came from bookmaker Martin Krugman, [music] who told Henry Hill that Lufthansa flew currency into its cargo terminal. Burke assembled the team. Tommy DeSimone was on the crew. Angelo Sepe was on the crew.
Louis Cafora, Joe Manri, Paolo Li Castri, Parnell “Stacks” Edwards, all on the crew. Robert McMahon, the inside man at the airport, provided access, and Frank James Burke, not yet 20 years old, drove one of the backup crash cars. His father put him behind the wheel of a getaway vehicle for the most audacious robbery of the 20th century.
A teenager driving for his father on the night that would define both of their lives. Henry Hill later told investigators that Burke used Frank as a stickup man during the heist. The police eventually named Frank as one of the top suspects, but that angle was dropped. No charges were ever filed. It did not matter. The damage was done.
Frank James Burke had been initiated, not through a formal ceremony with candles and saints cards, but through a car key and a street address, and the understanding that if something went wrong, he would either escape or die. His father had made that choice for him. Nine years later, Frank would die in Cypress Hills because he tried to sell flour as cocaine, but that night in December 1978, he was part of the biggest score in American criminal history. Remember that.
The flour comes later. After Lufthansa, Jimmy Burke began killing the people who helped him steal it. The paranoia was immediate. The crew members who had participated in the heist were liabilities. Every one of them knew enough to put Burke away for life. Parnell “Stacks” Edwards was first.
He had failed to dispose of the getaway van. Tommy DeSimone and Angelo Sepe shot him in his apartment on December 18th, 1978, one week after the robbery. Martin Krugman was next, the bookmaker who had originally brought the tip. He was killed in January 1979. His body was never found. Louis Cafora and his wife Joanna disappeared in March.
Joe Manri and a friend were killed. Teresa Ferrara was killed. Richard Eaton, a con artist Burke used as a front man, was murdered and left frozen in a meat truck. The famous Layla montage in Goodfellas, bodies in the meat truck, bodies in the car, bodies in the dumpster, depicts this sequence. The film shows Jimmy Conway systematically eliminating everyone connected to the heist.
What the film does not show is that Jimmy Burke’s own son was one of those connections. Frank James Burke participated in the Lufthansa robbery and survived the aftermath. His father killed crew members, associates, and their wives, but he did not kill his son. Frank was the one person Jimmy Burke spared.
The irony would take nine years to complete itself. In 1980, Henry Hill was arrested on narcotics charges. He became an FBI informant. He signed a cooperation agreement on May 27th, 1980, and entered the witness protection program with his wife Karen and their children. His testimony would eventually produce 50 convictions, including those of Paul Vario and Jimmy Burke.
Hill told the FBI everything he knew about the Vario crew, including details about Frank Burke’s role in the Lufthansa Heist and the abuse Frank had suffered at Jimmy’s hands. Hill’s testimony was the weapon that finally brought down Jimmy Burke. First, a 12-year sentence for the Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal, then a life sentence for the murder of Richard Eaton.
By the time Jimmy Burke was locked away permanently, Frank James Burke was in his early 20s living at 7802 160th Avenue in Howard Beach, Queens. Howard Beach was mob territory. John Gotti lived nearby. The Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, Gotti’s headquarters, was just down the road. With his father in prison and the Lucchese crew decimated by Hill’s testimony, Frank drifted away from his father’s world and toward the Gambino family.
This is a detail that Goodfellas never hinted at. The idea that a mob kid could switch families the way a corporate employee switches firms. The Lucchese connection was broken. The Gambino connection was available. Frank made the practical choice. He became a cocaine dealer. Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, commander of the Queens District Attorney’s Detective Squad, would later describe Frank Burke in three sentences.
Basically, he was a career criminal. He tried to emulate his father. He was trying to make his bones. Make his bones. The phrase means to prove yourself in a Mafia family, to earn your place through action. Frank was trying to become what his father had been. But Jimmy Burke had been a hijacker, a heist planner, a master of large-scale theft.
Frank Burke was a street-level cocaine dealer in the crack era, working out of bars in East New York and Howard Beach. The scale was different. The ambition was the same. The outcome was worse. The cocaine Frank Burke was not pure. He cut it. Frank Burke cut his cocaine with flour. Every dealer cuts product.
That is how the margin works. The problem was Frank cut it until there was almost nothing left. Frank Burke used flour. Henry Hill and Daniel Simone wrote in the Lufthansa Heist, pages 342-343, that Frank sold cocaine cut so heavily with flour it was practically worthless. The buyer was a drug dealer who expected product and received something closer to baking supplies.
This was not a minor miscalculation. In the drug trade, selling garbage disguised as product is not a business dispute. It is a death sentence. On the night of May 17th, 1987, Frank Burke was at the Suncrest Tavern on Liberty Avenue in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn. At some point after midnight, he got into an argument with two men outside the bar.
The argument was about the flour. The cocaine he had sold was worthless and the buyer wanted satisfaction. At approximately 2:30 a.m. on May 18th, Frank was shot multiple times. His body was found on the sidewalk in front of 1043 Liberty Avenue. The New York Times reported the killing on May 19th, 1987.
The UPI wire service ran the story the same day. Both identified the victim as Francis James Burke, 26, son of James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, the suspected mastermind of the Lufthansa Heist. Frank was the last of the Lufthansa suspects walking free. Every other participant was either dead, imprisoned, or hidden inside the Witness Protection Program.
His father was in prison. Henry Hill was in Witness Protection. Louis Werner and Peter Gruenwald, the Lufthansa insiders, were in Witness Protection. Everyone else was dead. Frank James Burke, the teenager who had driven the crash car for the biggest cash robbery in American history, died outside the Suncrest Tavern because he put flour in a bag and called it cocaine.
Two days after the murder, on May 20th, 1987, police arrested Tito Ortiz, a 46-year-old convicted drug dealer, at his home at 105 2975th Street in Ozone Park, Queens. Ortiz was charged with second-degree murder in [music] the death of Francis James Burke. Note the address. 105 2975th Street, Ozone Park, the same neighborhood where Robert’s Lounge had operated, the same streets Frank’s father had controlled, the same territory where the Vario crew had run its operations for decades.
Frank Burke and his killer were neighbors in the geography of organized crime. Ortiz was convicted. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. On September 10th, 1987, less than 4 months after Frank Burke’s murder, a 36-year-old Queens barber named Vito Scaglione was working in his shop. The shop was called Father and Son.
Scaglione’s brother, known as Frank the Barber, was a minor figure in the mob world. He occasionally cut John Gotti’s hair at the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club. Three masked gunmen walked into the Father and Son Barber Shop. They were carrying .380 caliber handguns. They shot Vito Scaglione dead.
The New York Times reported the killing on September 11th, 1987. Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, the same detective who had described Frank Burke as a career criminal trying to make his bones, was quoted in the story. The official investigation linked the barber shop killing to organized crime, but the full picture did not emerge until years later when a classified FBI informant file was made public.
The informant was Greg Scarpa, Colombo family member, known as the Grim Reaper. One of the most prolific killers in New York Mafia history and simultaneously one of the FBI’s most valuable sources, Scarpa had been feeding information to his handler, FBI Agent Lind Vecchio, for decades. On September 14th, 1987, 4 days after Scaglione’s murder, Scarpa told his handler the following, as recorded in his FBI informant file.
The hit on Vito Scaglione on September 10th, 1987, was a retaliation hit for the murder of Frank James Burke. The source advised that Scaglione actually committed the murder, although someone else was charged. Read that again. According to the FBI’s own informant, Vito Scaglione, the Queens barber, was the actual killer of Frank James Burke.
Tito Ortiz, the man arrested, charged, and [music] convicted of the murder, may have been the wrong man, and the barber was killed in retaliation. Three masked gunmen 4 months later in his own shop. The implication is clear. Jimmy Burke, sitting in a federal prison cell, learned that his son had been murdered.
He identified the real killer. He sent word, and three men with .380 caliber handguns walked into a barber shop in Queens and settled the account. Jimmy Burke could not attend his son’s funeral. He could not grieve in public. He could not hold his wife, but he could reach through the walls of a federal prison and kill the man who killed his boy.
There is no court document that confirms Burke ordered the Scaglione hit. There is no confession, no wiretap, no cooperating witness who has testified to it under oath. There is only the Scarpa file, a single entry from a man who was simultaneously a mass murderer and a federal informant, a man whose reliability is debated by every criminal justice scholar who has ever studied his case. But the timeline speaks.
Frank Burke killed May 18th, 1987. Vito Scaglione killed September 10th, 1987. 3 months and 23 days. In 1990, Martin Scorsese released Goodfellas. The film is based on Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book Wiseguy, which chronicles Henry Hill’s life inside the Lucchese crime family. Robert De Niro plays Jimmy Conway, the film’s version of Jimmy Burke.
The surname was changed from Burke to Conway. The reason for the change is a story in itself. During pre-production, De Niro communicated extensively with Henry Hill to prepare for the role. He also reached out to Catherine Burke, Jimmy’s daughter, Frank’s sister. De Niro wanted to understand the family.
Catherine cooperated, initially. Then, as Glenn Kenny wrote in Made Men, the story of Goodfellas, she abruptly severed all contact with De Niro without explanation. Catherine wanted money. Kenny writes, “Apparently, Catherine tried to strong-arm the production into giving her $100,000 to use the Burke name.
Rather than do that, almost all of the names of the real-life characters in the picture were changed. The surname Burke became Conway. Paul Vario became Paul Cicero. Tommy De Simone became Tommy De Vito. Henry Hill stayed Henry Hill because Hill had signed away his rights. But the name change was not the only thing Catherine achieved.
Frank James Burke, the son, the crash car driver, the cocaine dealer, the murder victim, was completely erased from the film. In real life, Jimmy Burke brought his own teenage son along on the biggest cash heist in American history. In the film, Jimmy Conway does not have a son. Catherine Burke is believed to be responsible for this erasure.
Whether it was her explicit demand or whether Scorsese made the creative decision independently, the result was the same. Frank James Burke vanished from the cultural record. The most famous mob film ever made, based on the true story of the crew his father ran, does not acknowledge that he existed.
Goodfellas made 46 million at the box office, six Oscar nominations, 30 years of rewatches. You have watched the Layla montage. You have never once wondered why Jimmy Conway doesn’t have a son. In 1987, a gram of cocaine in Brooklyn ran about $100. Frank Burke was selling bags of a worth less than the flour inside them.
Now you know, Jimmy Burke died of cancer on April 13th, 1996 at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He was 64 years old. He was still serving his sentence at Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York. His earliest possible parole date would have been November 3rd, 2008. He did not make it. He was buried at Saint Charles Cemetery in East Farmingdale, New [music] York.
His son, Frank, had been dead for 9 years. His daughter, Catherine, would marry Anthony Bruno in DeLecato, a Bonanno family soldier convicted of murdering boss Carmine Galante in a prison ceremony in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1992. She met in DeLecato while visiting another inmate, John Carneglia of the Gambino family.
As of 2006, Catherine was still living in Howard Beach, Queens. His son, Jesse James Burke, reportedly chose a different path. Multiple sources within the mafia history community indicate that Jesse lived a normal, legitimate life. He did not enter organized crime. He did not deal drugs. He did not drive crash cars.
He carried the name of a Wild West Outlaw and lived like a civilian. Two sons, one named Frank James, one named Jesse James. Their father thought the names were funny. One son followed his father into crime and died on a sidewalk at 26. The other walked away and survived. In June 2013, FBI and NYPD organized crime investigators showed up at a house on 102nd Road in Ozone Park, Queens.
The house had belonged to the Burke family. Catherine Burke in DeLecato had lived there. The investigators brought equipment. They dug. They were looking for human remains. The Lufthansa investigation had never been fully closed. Bodies connected to the post-heist murders had never been recovered. Martin Krugman’s body was never found.
The investigators believe that some of the missing might be buried under the house where Jimmy Burke’s family had lived. The results of the excavation were not made publicly conclusive. The digging stopped. The investigators left. The house remained. Somewhere under that Ozone Park property, the past might still be waiting. Jimmy Burke’s victims.
Jimmy Burke’s secrets. The bodies that the Layla montage never showed you. And above ground, in a cemetery in East Farmingdale, Jimmy Burke lies buried. Nine years after his son died on a Brooklyn sidewalk over a bag of flour, 39 years after he put that same son behind the wheel of a crash car at JFK Airport and told him to drive.
Frank James Burke does not exist in Goodfellas. His sister made sure of that. Tito Ortiz went to prison for his murder. How long is not public record. But he did. He drove the car. He sold the cocaine. He put flour in the bag. And the flour killed him.