Robert’s Lounge Was Darker Than Goodfellas Ever Showed – HT

 

 

 

In Goodfellas, there’s a bar, dimly lit, wood-paneled, full of wise guys cracking jokes and counting cash. Robert De Niro holds court, Joe Pesci gets loud, the bar gives the movie its texture. It makes the mob feel local, almost charming. That was Martin Scorsese’s version. But what nobody knew at the time was that the real bar, the one it was based on, was worse than anything they put on screen.

Because underneath Robert’s Lounge, in the basement of a saloon in South Ozone Park, uh Queens, investigators would eventually pull human bones out of the ground. This story doesn’t start with the Lufthansa heist. It starts with with a building, one brick building on Lefferts Boulevard, that became the center of gravity for one of the most violent  criminal crews in New York history.

If you had walked past 114-45  Lefferts Boulevard in the late 1960s, you you would have seen what looked like any other neighborhood bar in Queens. It was a simple saloon near the intersection of Lefferts  and Rockaway Boulevard, close enough to John F. Kennedy International Airport that you could hear the cargo planes overhead.

Blue-collar workers from the airport drank there. Guys from the neighborhood stopped in after work. From the outside, it was forgettable, a place you would drive past without looking twice. And that was the point. Robert’s Lounge was owned in part by James Burke. If you know Goodfellas, you know him as Jimmy Conway.

Burke was a Lucchese crime family associate, Irish by blood, which meant he could never become a made man in the Italian mafia. Um it didn’t matter. The guy had been bounced through dozens of foster homes as a kid, beaten and abused in most of them. By the age of 13, he’d been in a car crash that killed his foster father.

 A childhood like that either breaks somebody or turns them into  something worse. Burke went the second direction. By his 20s, he was running untaxed cigarettes and liquor through Queens, mentoring younger criminals like Tommy DeSimone, Henry Hill, and Angelo Sepe. Um in 1962, Burke was about to marry his girlfriend, Mickey.

He’d been getting harassed by an ex-boyfriend. The guy was calling her, yelling at her on the street, circling her house in his  car for hours. On the day of the wedding, police found the ex-boyfriend’s body inside his own car. He had been cut into over a dozen pieces and scattered across the interior. Nobody was ever charged.

 Burke got married that same day. That’s who was running Robert’s Lounge. He didn’t need a button. He had the bar. And the bar gave him something a title never could, a permanent base of operations that looked like a neighborhood joint. Think about that for a second. A guy who couldn’t officially join the mafia built a criminal headquarters that the mafia came to him to use.

 Vincent Asaro, a Bonanno crime family figure,  who would be indicted for the Lufthansa robbery decades later, uh held a share of the place. Uh Paul Vario, the Lucchese capo, who ran the Brooklyn faction, the guy Goodfellas turned into Paulie Cicero,  used Robert’s Lounge as a regular hangout. The bar was uh mob-owned,  mob-operated, and mob-dependent from the ground up.

 And as Burke’s people took over, the regular customers quietly disappeared. Um by the late ’60s, the only people still drinking at Robert’s Lounge were people in Jimmy Burke’s world. People who were actually there described it as a dingy bar with a few card tables and saloon-style doors. One account called it a Dodge City-style saloon.

The barmaids drank Sambuca at the bar in the morning while they worked. The place got cited more than once for  selling alcohol to Burke’s underage son, Frank, who had been hanging around the lounge since he was 16. Next door sat a non-union dress factory called Moonglow Fashions, which Burke co-owned.

That factory served one purpose, laundering. The bar made dirty money through hijacking, gambling, and loan sharking. The dress factory next door washed it clean. Two businesses side by side on the same block, one generating criminal cash and the other making it look legitimate. The whole block was his little kingdom.

And from the outside, it looked like nothing. I think that’s what made it so effective, a criminal headquarters that looked like a dive bar next to a dress shop. Uh that’s exactly why it worked for over 20 years. Um the men who gathered there weren’t just drinking buddies. Uh law enforcement eventually gave them their own name, the Robert’s Lounge Group.

 Not the Burke crew, not the Lefferts Boulevard Gang. They named them after the building. When the FBI names your criminal organization after a bar, um that tells you how central that bar was to everything. The crew hijacked trucks across Brooklyn and Queens, uh intercepting cargo shipments heading to and from JFK Airport. They would pay off drivers, sometimes rough them up, then unload the stolen goods at a warehouse Paul Vario controlled.

 Cigarettes, liquor, electronics, uh designer clothing, furs, whatever was moving through the airport cargo system. And then uh some of that merchandise would show up for sale inside Robert’s Lounge itself. People from the neighborhood could walk in and buy stolen goods at a steep discount. And no, I’m not making that up.

 Burke’s crew would hijack a shipment in the morning and have pieces of it on the bar by evening. The airport cargo workers who made up a big chunk of the regulars gambled at the  lounge, bought stolen merchandise at the lounge, and some of them eventually fed information about valuable shipments right back to Burke’s people. The whole operation ate its own tail.

Steal, sell, gather intel, steal again. All of it ran through one building. It didn’t stop at cargo theft. Federal court papers tied the racketeering world around Robert’s Lounge to illegal gambling, loan sharking,  and the Boston College point-shaving scandal um of 1978 and 1979. Burke and Hill paid basketball players to control game margins um for gambling purposes.

 Uh dingy saloon in South Ozone Park was connected through layers of gamblers and middlemen to a college  basketball court in Massachusetts. If you’re wondering how a bar in Queens ends up fixing college  basketball games in Boston, the answer is that that this place was never just a bar. It was a machine. But what happened downstairs was darker than any of that.

 The bar had an attached structure with a cellar clubhouse, a mosaic floor, and a basement that extended beneath the main building. That basement doubled as a storage facility for hijacked cargo. Boxes of stolen merchandise were stacked so high and packed so  tight that there was barely enough room to play cards. But they played cards anyway.

 Burke, Tommy DeSimone,  and Henry Hill spent long nights down there gambling and talking business  surrounded by crates of stolen goods with bodies buried underneath them. According to Hill, it was in that basement where Michael Gianco, the young bartender everyone called Spider, uh crossed paths with Tommy DeSimone twice.

The first time,    during a card game, Gianco forgot DeSimone’s Crown Royal. DeSimone shot him in the foot.  A week later, uh Gianco came back to work with a full leg cast. DeSimone started mocking him. Gianco, in front of a table full of wise guys, uh told DeSimone  to go screw himself.

 Burke actually laughed. He gave Gianco some cash and told him  he had guts. But that compliment got the kid killed. DeSimone, humiliated that Burke took Gianco’s side, pulled his gun and shot him three times in the chest.  Gianco died at the card table. He was 16 years old. If you have seen Goodfellas, you know the scene.

Michael Imperioli played Spider, Joe Pesci played Tommy. Uh but in the movie, it takes place in some  generic mob basement. The real version happened underneath Robert’s Lounge. And Burke, furious at DeSimone for  killing a kid over a drink order, made him dig the hole and bury the body himself in the unfinished  section of that same basement.

 A bar with a body in the foundation, and nobody called the police. Nobody left. They just kept playing cards the next week in the same room. And Spider was not the only famous killing tied to that basement. According to Henry Hill’s account in the book Wiseguy, the welcome home party for Billy Batts, the Gambino soldier whose real name was William Bentvena, happened at Robert’s Lounge.

 Batts had just gotten out of prison in 1970. During the party, he made a crack about DeSimone’s past  shining shoes for wise guys. DeSimone took it personally because DeSimone took everything personally.  Two weeks later, on June 11th, 1970, DeSimone pistol-whipped Bats at  the Suite, a nightclub Hill owned in Queens.

 Burke and Hill helped load the body into Hill’s trunk. They drove to DeSimone’s mother’s house for a shovel and lime. The body was initially buried elsewhere, but Hill later said Bats’ remains ended up in the basement of Robert’s  Lounge before being run through a car crusher at a New Jersey junkyard. Goodfellas turned this into one of the most iconic sequences  in American cinema.

But the movie starts the murder at a nightclub and sends the body somewhere  vague. The real chain of violence started and ended at Robert’s Lounge. The welcome home party that triggered the killing, Robert’s  Lounge. The basement where the body passed through, Robert’s Lounge.    One building over and over again.

Everything came back to that address.  But the Robert’s Lounge crew had reached far beyond the neighborhood. The rackets running through that bar extended into the cargo theft networks around Kennedy Airport. And the proximity of the bar to the airport was not a coincidence. Burke set up shop there for a reason.

His crew had inside information from airport workers, many of whom gambled at Robert’s Lounge and owed debts to Burke’s bookmaking operation. That pipeline is how the Lufthansa connection started. In 1978, a Lufthansa cargo employee named Louis Werner owed $20,000 to a bookmaker named Martin Krugman.

 Werner could not pay, so he offered something better. He told Krugman that Lufthansa regularly flew in massive shipments of currency, American cash exchanged by tourists and servicemen overseas,  and that the security at the cargo terminal was pathetically weak. Krugman brought the tip to Henry Hill. Hill brought it to Burke.

 Burke started planning from the back rooms and the basement of Robert’s Lounge. Floor plans of the Lufthansa terminal spread across the same tables where poker chips sat the night before. Shift schedules, security codes, vault procedures,    all of it discussed inside that building on Lefferts Boulevard. On December 11th, 1978, six masked men pulled up to the Lufthansa cargo terminal  at Kennedy Airport in a black Ford van.

In 64 minutes, they walked out with $5 million million dollars in untraceable cash and another $875,000 in jewelry. Nearly $6 million dollars  total. It was the largest cash robbery on American soil    um at the time. And if Burke had stopped there, this would be a very different story.

 Two days later, the getaway driver, Parnell Edwards, parked the van at a fire hydrant in Canarsie instead of taking it to a junkyard. Police found it. They pulled fingerprints. Within 3 days, the FBI traced the vehicle back to the world around Robert’s Lounge and identified Burke as the prime suspect. The FBI did not treat Robert’s Lounge like a casual hangout after that.

 They treated it like what it actually was. Federal agents set up helicopter surveillance on Burke’s people. They bugged the crew’s vehicles. They bugged the phones inside Robert’s Lounge. They even bugged the payphones on the street closest to the bar, the ones Burke’s guys used when they did not trust the indoor lines. On one recording, agents caught Angelo Sepe, one of the actual robbers, talking about a brown case and a bag from Lufthansa.

On another, Sepe told his girlfriend something about wanting to see where the money was and  digging a hole in the cellar. The cellar. The FBI was listening to Robert’s Lounge  because they believed that if you tapped into one bar in Queens, you could hear an entire criminal enterprise working. And they were right.

 They just could not get enough clean audio to build the case. So, what did Burke do? According to Hill, he killed everyone who could connect him to the robbery. Over the next 7 months, nearly every person involved in the Lufthansa heist ended up dead or missing. At least a dozen people. Burke was never charged for the robbery itself.

The cash and jewelry were never recovered. And through all of it, Robert’s Lounge kept standing on Lefferts Boulevard like nothing had happened. Burke renamed it the South Side Inn to dodge some of the heat, but the operation did not actually stop. It just got just got quieter. If you are the kind of person who watches videos like this all the way through, do me a favor and subscribe.

I cover stories like this regularly um and the algorithm is more likely to show you the next one if you are subscribed. By 1979, the Lufthansa heat had died down enough that the building settled back into its routine. The upper floor housed a small bachelor apartment that Burke used for years. He carried on an affair with Phyllis DeSimone, Tommy’s sister, starting in 1960.

That lasted until Tommy disappeared in 1979. After Phyllis, the apartment went to someone with a very different story. Teresa Ferrara was a young woman from Long Island who moved to Ozone Park wanting to be a model or an actress. She was blonde, tanned, and a distant relative of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello.

 In 1972, she started an affair with Tommy DeSimone. And through DeSimone, she started showing up at Robert’s Lounge. She fit right in. She dealt cocaine and Quaaludes uh to DeSimone and other Lucchese guys right there at the bar. She opened a mob-funded beauty salon on Long Island and sold drugs out of that, too.

 Eventually, uh she moved into the upstairs apartment at Robert’s Lounge itself. She was living above the bar, sleeping in a building where bodies were buried one floor below her. In 1977, the DEA busted her selling to an undercover agent. Facing jail time, she flipped. From 1977 to 1979, Teresa Ferrara was the federal government’s eyes and ears on Paul Vario.

 Her information led to a massive bust in November 1978 when the Coast Guard and the DEA seized 30 tons of narcotics on the Flushing waterfront. That operation cost Vario and Burke a quarter of a million dollars. She was also suspected of helping skim Lufthansa money with Richard Eaton. This is the part that still gets me. A woman living upstairs at Robert’s Lounge,  dealing drugs to the men who drank downstairs, secretly informing on the capo who ran the whole operation, and skimming from the biggest robbery any of them had ever pulled off.

All at the same time. On February 10, 1979, Ferrara got a phone call at her salon. She told her 19-year-old niece she was meeting someone at a diner and to come looking for her if she was not back in 15 minutes. She never came back. Three months later, her dismembered torso washed up in Barnegat Inlet, New Jersey.

  She was identified by her breast implants. No one was ever convicted. I think her story is the one that makes Robert’s Lounge hardest to look at. She lived in the building, worked the building, betrayed the building, and the building killed her for it. That building had three floors, and  every one of them was a different kind of crime scene.

Downstairs was the bar  where the crew drank uh and planned. Below that was the basement where bodies were buried. Uh above it was an apartment where Burke’s girlfriends lived until they were killed. According to Hill, multiple victims uh ended up beneath the building over the years.

 Um but Burke found out about the FBI search warrant before agents arrived. Uh he had remains moved. When investigators came to dig on June 6th, 1980, um some of what had been buried there was already gone. They still pulled what authorities said was a human leg bone and part of a shoulder bone out of the basement  floor. But the full scope of what was down there, nobody knows.

 And here is the part  that shows you who Burke really was. After the dig made the newspapers, Burke and his  attorney, Michael Quero, hired a bulldozer and had it brought to the site. They made an open offer to law enforcement and reporters. Dig wherever you want. Point to any spot and we will let you excavate it.

 The police took him up on it. They dug  and found nothing. Burke had already cleaned house. That is a level of arrogance that goes beyond criminal confidence.    That was a man who understood that the evidence was gone and wanted to humiliate the people  looking for it.

 In 2013, decades later, FBI and NYPD organized crime investigators  went back to dig again. This time at Burke’s former home. More than 30 years after the  fact, they were still looking for what he buried. Burke had been dead since 1996.  Cancer took him in a Buffalo hospital while he was serving 20 years to life, but the ground in Queens was still giving up secrets.

And that’s  the part of this story that sticks. You’ve seen the movie version, Robert De Niro smiling,  buying drinks, being charming and dangerous in a way that feels almost aspirational.  The bar in Goodfellas, uh which was actually filmed at Neirs’ Tavern in nearby Woodhaven, Queens, looks like the kind of place where exciting things happen.

 The kind of place you’d want to visit if you could go back in time. The real Robert’s Lounge was a building where the FBI set up surveillance because they believed listening to one bar in Queens would crack the biggest robbery case in the country where a 16-year-old poured drinks and got shot for talking back, where Burke’s girlfriends lived upstairs.

And his victims were buried downstairs. Scorsese turned all of that  into something watchable, something with a soundtrack, and I think that’s the most unsettling part. The real place was darker than anything Scorsese put on screen, and Scorsese wasn’t exactly pulling punches. The building stood on Lefferts Boulevard until the early ’90s when it was torn down.

Today, that same address in South Ozone Park houses a karaoke bar called GT Kingston. People walk in on Friday nights, pick songs, and sing in a space where Jimmy Burke ran a criminal empire for two decades. The patrons don’t know. Why would they? If you want to see what else the movie’s got wrong about the mob, that video is on screen now.