Goodfellas Left Out the Crime That Actually Brought the Whole Crew Down – HT
There is a black Ford van sitting in front of a fire hydrant on a residential street in Brooklyn. It is December 13th, 1978, two days after the biggest cash robbery in American history. The man who was supposed to drive this van to a New Jersey junkyard and watch it get crushed, went to his girlfriend’s apartment instead, used cocaine, and fell asleep.
Police found it on a routine patrol. They ran the plates. They found fingerprints inside. Within a week, the man who parked it was dead. Within 18 months, nine people connected to the heist were dead. And within 2 years, the man who organized the entire operation was behind bars. Not for the heist, for a college basketball fix.
That is what Good Fellas never got around to showing you, and it changes the shape of this story considerably. Um, the film runs nearly 3 hours covering 25 years and there are real arguments for compression, but cutting certain threads does more than shorten the movie. It removes the actual mechanism by which the crew was destroyed.
What remains is a story about glamour and violence. What the film leaves out is a story about a drug dealer who broke his boss’s only real rule and got caught. Those are very different stories. Nobody was paying attention to Henry Hill’s drug operation. In 1978, he had been moving cocaine and marijuana from Brooklyn contacts out to distributors in Pittsburgh for a while, making real money alongside everything else he had going on.
Paul Vario had told him directly not to do it. Vario was Hill’s protector and mentor of 25 years, the man who had taken an 11-year-old kid running errands on the streets of Brooklyn and turned him into one of the Lucazy family’s most productive earners. Vario was paranoid about narcotics, too much federal heat, too many desperate people who talk, too much attention from agencies that never let go.
Uh, he had made his position clear. Hill nodded and kept dealing. He would do this for two more years. And when it caught up with him, it wouldn’t just end his career, it would end everyone’s. Hill had been a Lucai Z associate since he was a teenager, working Paul Vario’s crew out of Brooklyn. He was the kind of guy who made himself indispensable without ever being eligible for full membership.
HalfIrish, never eligible to be made, but trusted with everything. By his late 20s, he was running hijacking operations out of JFK, gambling, extortion, and moving stolen merchandise. The Lucisy family had an associate named Jimmy Burke, who functioned as Hill’s other patron. James Burke, uh, known everywhere as Jimmy the Gent, was a Luca associate of Irish descent, who had built one of the most productive criminal enterprises in New York.
He ran hijacking, loan sharking, bookmaking, and enforcement. He was not sentimental. He paid well. He expected things done correctly. And the combination of those two qualities had made him one of the more feared men in the organization. In the late summer of 1978, a Lufanza cargo supervisor named Lewis Wernern brought a tip uh to his bookmaker.
Wernern had spotted something in his years at JFK. Once a month approximately, Lufansza flew large sums of cash into the cargo building. Money exchanged by American servicemen and tourists in West Germany. The cash sat in the vault overnight before bank pickup the next morning. Wernern owed money he could not pay. He figured information was worth more than nothing.
The bookmaker was Martin Krugman. Krugman brought the tip to Hill. Hill brought it to Burke. Burke understood immediately that this was different from every truck job they had ever done. He assembled the crew himself, six men he trusted with Tommy Desimone and Angelo Seep among them. At approximately 3:00 in the morning on December 11th, 1978, a black van pulled up uh to the Luansa cargo building.
The crew entered with weapons drawn. They handcuffed the overnight workers in the breakroom. They forced a supervisor to open the vault. They loaded the contents, $5 million in cash, and $875,000 in jewelry, and walked out. 64 minutes, no shots fired. The largest cash theft in American history. If the story ended there, it would be a perfect caper.
But the story had barely started. Everything Burke had built was about to work against him. Parnell Edwards had one job. Drive the getaway van to a junkyard, watch it get crushed, and walk away. The van held trace evidence. Burke’s fingerprints were inside. The stakes of clean disposal were not subtle.
Edwards drove to his girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn instead. He went inside and fell asleep. Police cruisers found the van 2 days later on a routine patrol. Parked in front of a fire hydrant on a residential street. stolen plates impounded. The forensics team found fingerprints matching several members of Burke’s circle.
In one afternoon of negligence, um the nearly perfect crime had a thread hanging. Burke did not pull threads carefully. He cut them. Edwards was shot in his apartment on December 18th, 7 days after the heist by D. Simone and Sappe. That was the first killing. Martin Krugman, the bookmaker who had delivered Wernern’s tip, was murdered and dismembered by Burke approximately one month after the heist.
The man who made the whole thing possible, was dead inside of 60 days. The bodies kept turning up across New York. Robert McMahon, who had helped coordinate access inside the cargo building, was found dead. Lewis and Joanna Kapora, who had laundered heist money and then, according to multiple accounts, purchased a pink Cadillac and told people about it, disappeared entirely and were never found.
By the summer of 1979, nine people connected to the Lufanza job were dead. And I think the part that doesn’t get said enough is that Burke was generating more heat with the killings than the heist itself ever had. Nine bodies in 18 months, all circling the same crime. Every murder was another file on an FBI agent’s desk, and nobody was going to prison for it.
Uh Warner, the cargo supervisor who had sold the information, was convicted in a federal courtroom in 1979 and sentenced to 15 years. He was the only person ever convicted of the actual robbery. Every other participant was either dead or unchargeable. Burke gave interviews. He said he had nothing to do with Lefanza.
He would say that until he died. You’d think after nine murders in 18 months, Burke would have had enough. You’d think wrong. While Burke was working his way through the witness list in 1979, Henry Hill had a second operation running that nobody at the time was connecting to the heist. Hill had met a man named Paul Maz during an earlier stay in federal prison.
Maz was a Pittsburgh associate who moved in gambling and drug circles. Through Maz, Hill had connected with two brothers named Rocco and Anthony Peara, small-time gamblers from Pittsburgh who had noticed something about the upcoming college basketball season. Boston College had a player named Rick [ __ ] He was entering his senior year.
He was also a high school friend of Roco Pearllles and he had already agreed to cooperate with a point shaving arrangement. The plan was straightforward. The Pearllles would identify games where Boston College was favored by a significant spread. Cune would ensure Boston College underperformed against that spread.
The gamblers would bet accordingly. The money would flow. Uh Cune would get a cut. The operation needed financing and professional scale. Ma went to Hill. Hill went to Burke. Burke, the man currently managing the aftermath of the largest cash heist in the country, agreed to fund a college basketball fix. It would turn out to be the only crime in this entire sequence that prosecutors could actually pin on him. Not the 5.
8 million, not the nine bodies. College basketball. Hill flew to Boston in November of 1978. The same month, the left Hanza job was moving into final planning. Uh he met with Cune and another Boston College player, Jim Sweeney. He sat down with a schedule and circled nine games. The operation ran for the entire 1978 to 1979 season.
Hill made close to $100,000 from it. His associates made more. Jimmy Burke got a return on his investment. This is the part that still does not quite compute. I have gone back and forth on how to frame it. Burke was in the middle of eliminating everyone connected to the Lufansza heist while simultaneously bankrolling a federal wire fraud conspiracy involving college athletics, two separate sets of investigators, two separate paper trails, all of it happening at once.
Good Fellas was released in 1990. By that point, both the Boston College scheme and the narcotics operation had been removed from the narrative. The film runs nearly 3 hours, covering 25 years, and there are real arguments for compression, but cutting those two threads does more than shorten the movie.
It removes the actual mechanism by which the crew was destroyed. What remains is a story about glamour and violence. What the film leaves out is a story about a drug dealer who broke his boss’s only real rule and got caught. Those are very different stories. If you’ve been finding this useful, hit subscribe. We do this every week.
By April of 1980, the three threads were colliding. On April 27th, narcotics officers arrested Henry Hill on drug trafficking charges outside his home on Long Island. He had been moving cocaine from Brooklyn contacts out to Pittsburgh distributors. Exactly what Vario had told him not to do for years. Karen Hill, after bailing him out, flushed $60,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet before agents could return with a search warrant for a second pass.
The family was financially hollowed out in a single afternoon. No cash, no product, and nobody in the organization willing to take their calls. The FBI arrived alongside the narcotics officers, and they brought a recording. The tape captured Jimmy Burke telling Paul Vario that Hill needed to be taken care of.
That was the phrasing, taken care of. This was the man who had killed at least nine people connected to the Lufansza heist in the preceding 18 months. Hill understood the language. Hill also understood the math. He was facing a serious federal sentence for narcotics trafficking. His mentor of 25 years had just given him $3,200 and ended their relationship.
The man who had treated him like a son was on tape planning his death. The witness protection program was the only door left open. On May 27th, 1980, one month after the arrest, Hill sat down with federal prosecutors in a Brooklyn courthouse, and signed his cooperation agreement. He entered the United States Witness Protection Program with his wife and two children.
The domino that knocked everything else over was the drug arrest. Not the heist, not the murders, not the Boston College scheme, a narcotics charge on Long Island for a drug operation his boss had spent years begging him to abandon. Hill’s testimony produced 50 criminal convictions. The number is worth sitting with.
Paul Vario was convicted of fraud in 1984, sentenced to four years. He was convicted again for extortion in 1985 and sentenced to 10 more. He died in federal prison on May 3rd, 1988 of respiratory failure. He was 73 years old. He had spent decades being careful. He protected Hill for a quarter century and he died behind the walls of a federal prison in in Texas because of it.
Jimmy Burke was convicted in 1982 uh not for the Lefanza heist, not for the nine killings in the aftermath, for the Boston College point shaving scheme. And that’s the part that sits with me. The heist itself never produced a conviction beyond Warner. Burke had been thorough enough with the killings that the $5.8 million remained legally speaking unsolved.
No cooperating witnesses left, but the basketball scheme left a paper trail, wire transfers, phone calls, uh college kids who talked, the thing Burke probably thought of as a side bet. uh a minor play uh compared to everything else he had going was the one that gave prosecutors enough to put him in a room. Um he would never leave.
Think about that. The largest cash robbery in American history, nine murders to cover it up and the conviction comes from a point shaving scheme at Boston College. He received a 12-year sentence. While serving that term, he was convicted of a separate murder and received a life sentence on top of it. He died of cancer in April of 1996 in a hospital in upstate New York.
Transferred from the prison where he had spent the last 14 years. He was still saying he had nothing to do with Lufansza. Rick Cune um the Boston College player was convicted and sentenced to 10 years. The harshest sentence ever given to a player in a sports bribery case in American history. He served 28 months.
Lewis Werner, who sold the information that made the heist possible, served 15 years and remains the only person ever convicted of actually committing the robbery. Hill was removed from witness protection in the early 1990s for repeated criminal violations. He was arrested again in Seattle in 2001. He died of heart disease in Los Angeles on June 12th, 2012. He was 69.
The story Good Fellas tells is about a man seduced by power and glamour pulled into an orbit he could never escape. It is genuinely compelling. But strip away the style and what you have is a drug dealer who ignored an explicit prohibition, got caught in a narcotics sting, heard a recording of his mentor planning his murder, and flipped to avoid a long sentence.
The 50 convictions that followed are not a story about loyalty collapsing under pressure. They are the arithmetic of a man doing the calculation correctly. The machine ran on violence and calculation for two decades. At the end, it came apart the same way most things come apart. Not in a single dramatic moment, but through accumulated carelessness.
One bad decision stacked on another until the weight of it collapsed under its own evidence. That van parked at a fire hydrant on a Brooklyn street in December of 1978 is still the right image for everything that followed. One person failed to do a single task correctly. One person parked a van rather than destroying it, fell asleep, and gave police a thread to pull.
That thread eventually led to Burke’s fingerprints, which led to a killing spree that created more exposure. That exposure ran alongside a drug operation that led to an arrest. That arrest led to a recording. That recording led to 50 convictions. And those convictions led to two men dying in federal prison. Men who had spent their entire adult lives avoiding exactly that outcome.
Good Fellas shows you the glamour of how it was built. What the film could not show you or chose not to is the grinding way it actually ended. If you want the real mechanics behind the mob movies, the drug operations, and the point shaving schemes that got cut from the final edit, while the actual convictions sit in court records, the next video is on screen now.
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