Goodfellas’ Most Annoying Character Had A Dark Real Story – HT

 

 

 

January 6th, 1979. A Saturday afternoon in Ozone Park, Queens. The temperature outside Robert’s Lounge sat at 28°. A dirty snow crusting the curb on Lefferts Boulevard. Inside, the bar smelled like stale beer and cigarette ash, the same smell it always had. Marty Krugman walked through the door wearing a top coat over a sport shirt, his thinning hair combed back.

 A man 51 years old who still moved like he was running late for something. He was there for a meeting. Jimmy Burke had called him, said they needed to talk about the money. Marty went down the wooden stairs to the basement. He never came back up. By sundown, his body had been wrapped, loaded into a trunk, and driven somewhere only two or three men ever knew.

 47 years later, that location is still a secret. The FBI has dug. His widow has begged. Informants have whispered. Nothing. Marty Krugman was the first person to die for the Lufthansa heist. And in the basement of a dive bar in Queens, he simply ceased to exist. You probably don’t know his real name. If you’ve seen Goodfellas, you know him as Morrie Kessler, the screaming wig salesman played by Chuck Low, the guy with the bad toupee who won’t shut up about his money.

Martin Scorsese took the real man and shrunk him down into comic relief. The truth is bigger and sadder than that. The real Marty Krugman owned a wig store in Rego Park. He was a bookmaker. He had a wife named Fran who adored him. He was the man who walked into Robert’s Lounge one night in late 1978 and handed Jimmy Burke the score of the century, $6 million in cash.

 Nearly 1 million in jewelry. The biggest cash robbery in American history at that time. And for that gift, Marty Krugman got strangled in a basement and erased from the earth. This is the story of the man who started Lufthansa, the woman who spent 30 years looking for his bones, and the federal trial that finally said his name out loud.

 This is what Goodfellas didn’t tell you. Here’s the thing about Marty Krugman, he wasn’t a wiseguy. He wasn’t made. He wasn’t even Italian. He was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who grew up smart, fast with numbers, and just dumb enough about the wrong people. By the mid-70s, he was running a small bookmaking operation out of his wig shop on Queens Boulevard.

 The store was called For Men Only. It sold hairpieces to payees and the occasional under-the-counter bet. Marty was good at the bookmaking part. He had a head for odds. He had clients who trusted him. He paid out on time. What he wasn’t good at was knowing when to walk away from a man like James Burke. Jimmy Burke, 47 years old in 1978, 6 ft tall, red-faced, the kind of Irish guy who smiled when he was about to hurt you.

 He ran a crew out of Robert’s Lounge at 114-10 Lefferts Boulevard, a one-story brick building wedged between a deli and an empty lot. Burke was an associate of the Lucchese crime family, never made because of his bloodline, but feared more than most capos. The FBI suspected him in something like 50 murders. Henry Hill, who ran with him for 20 years, would later say Jimmy loved to steal more than he loved to breathe.

 And Marty Krugman owed Jimmy Burke money, gambling debt, vig on top of vig. The kind of debt that doesn’t shrink. It eats. So, Marty did what desperate bookmakers do. He brought information. Sometime in the late autumn of 1978, Marty got a tip from one of his customers. A guy named Louis Werner, a cargo agent at Lufthansa Airlines working at JFK.

Werner was a degenerate gambler. He owed Marty around $20,000 in losses. And to clear that debt, Werner whispered something into Marty’s ear that changed everything. Lufthansa, he said, ran a cash transfer through building 261 at Kennedy Airport, American currency flown in from West Germany, money used by US servicemen and tourists cycled back to New York.

 The cash sat in a vault on the second floor. The vault was guarded by one man at night. The schedule was predictable. The take could be $5 million or more. Marty Krugman heard that and saw a way out. He didn’t have the muscle to pull it himself. He didn’t have the crew, but he knew a man who did. He went to Robert’s Lounge. He sat down with Jimmy Burke.

 He laid it all out. The vault, the schedule, the inside man. Burke listened. Burke smiled. And Burke promised Marty 10% of the take. If they pulled 5 million, Marty would walk with $500,000 tax-free cash. Enough to clear his debts, close his shop, and disappear into a quiet life. Marty believed him. That was his first mistake.

 His last mistake came later. You have to understand who Jimmy Burke really was to understand what happened next. Burke had been raised in foster homes. He’d been beaten and ignored as a child. He’d done years in prison. He had no instinct for gratitude. To Jimmy, every man at the table was a future expense.

 The Lufthansa heist was already shaping in his mind as a closed loop. The men who knew about it would, one by one, become problems. And problems, in Jimmy’s world, had only one solution. In late November and early December 1978, Burke assembled a crew. Tommy De Simone, the unstable killer Joe Pesci would later play.

 Angelo Seppi, a Lucchese associate with a long sheet. Joe Buddha Manri, a hijacking specialist. Paolo Li Castri, a Gambino loaner nicknamed Frenchy. Louis Cafori, who insisted on bringing his wife Joanna anywhere they hid the cash. And driving the van, a kid from East New York named Parnell Edwards. Six men inside the building.

 A few more outside as cover. Henry Hill, who’d connected Marty to Jimmy in the first place, stayed on the phones coordinating. Burke’s son, Frank Jr., helped on logistics. The plan came together over coffee and cigarettes in a back booth at Robert’s Lounge. Marty wasn’t invited to the planning sessions. He was the source. He wasn’t the crew.

December 11th, 1978, 3:00 in the morning. A black 40 Continental van rolled up to Lufthansa Cargo Building 261 at JFK Airport. Six men in ski masks stepped out. They moved with the precision of people who had walked the route in their heads a hundred times. They herded 10 employees into the cafeteria. They handcuffed them.

 They threatened their families by name because Warner had given them the names. They cracked the vault. They loaded 40 parcels of cash and jewelry into the van. $5.875 million in untraceable bills, $875,000 in jewels, nearly $7 million total. They were in and out in 64 minutes. Not a shot fired.

 Henry Hill, monitoring the police scanner, heard nothing for two full hours. By the time the alarm went out, the van was already in a Brooklyn garage. The crew had pulled off the largest cash robbery in United States history. And Marty Krugman, sitting at home in Queens with his wife, Fran, heard about it on the morning news.

 He turned to her, the way Fran would later remember it, and said quietly, “That’s mine. That’s my score.” He should have run that night. He didn’t. For 3 weeks, Marty Krugman waited for his money. He went to Robert’s Lounge. He smiled. He drank coffee. He asked, gently, when the split was coming. Burke kept telling him soon. The heat was too high.

 The FBI was crawling all over JFK. The money had to cool. Marty understood. Marty was a reasonable man. Then, the bodies started. Stacks Edwards, Parnell Edwards, the getaway van driver. He’d been told to dump the van at a junkyard where a crusher would compact it into scrap. Edwards got high instead and parked it on a Brooklyn street near a fire hydrant.

 Cops found it intact, fingerprints everywhere. December 18th, 1978, 7 days after the heist, Tommy DeSimone walked into Edwards’ apartment and shot him five times in the head. Edwards was 26 years old. He’d been planning to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. That was the warning shot. Marty Krugman didn’t read it.

 Here’s where Marty’s character becomes the trap. He was a talker. He was a worrier. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He started complaining to Henry Hill. He started complaining to anyone who would listen. He’s stiffing me, Henry. He’s not paying. He promised me 500,000. Where’s my money? Henry, you have to understand, I brought him this thing.

 I gave him Lufthansa. He’s stiffing me. Henry Hill, who would later become the most famous mob informant of the 20th century, would tell the FBI exactly this in 1980. Marty wouldn’t shut up. And in Jimmy Burke’s world, a man who wouldn’t shut up was a man already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. The FBI had moved on the heist within 72 hours.

 They knew about Werner from the inside. They were leaning on Werner. Werner was wobbling. He’d already told his girlfriend, Janet Barbieri, things he shouldn’t have. Burke understood that the chain of knowledge was Werner to Krugman to himself. Cut Werner, and Werner could still talk in court. But cut Krugman, and the chain breaks.

Krugman was the first link to himself. Krugman was the connector. Krugman had to go. Fran Krugman was 46 years old that winter. She and Marty had been married since 1960. She knew her husband’s habits the way wives of bookmakers learned to know habits. He came home for dinner. He kissed her on the forehead.

 He called when he was running late. He never disappeared. On the morning of January 6th, 1979, Marty told Fran he was going to a meeting. He kissed her. He said he’d be home for dinner. He drove to Ozone Park. What happened in the basement of Robert’s Lounge that afternoon was reconstructed years later from informant testimony. Burke was there.

 Tommy De Simone was there. Angelo Sepe was there. The basement was concrete floor, low ceiling, exposed pipes. Marty came down the stairs. He probably thought he was getting paid. He was led toward the back. A wire went around his neck from behind. He didn’t have time to scream. Strangulation takes between 4 and 6 minutes when done correctly.

 It was done correctly. Tommy De Simone, according to one informant, watched and laughed. They wrapped the body in plastic. They carried it up the stairs after dark. They put it in the trunk of a car. And then, it vanished. The most accepted theory among investigators is that Marty Krugman’s body was buried at 159-10-84th Street in Howard Beach, Queens.

That was Jimmy Burke’s home. A simple two-story brick house with a finished basement and a backyard the size of a postage stamp. For decades, agents wondered whether Burke had buried his enemies on his own property. In June 1980, Burke’s daughter Catherine got married. The reception was at the house. FBI surveillance photos from that day showed Jimmy laughing on his lawn, possibly standing on top of the men he’d killed.

 That image would haunt Fran Krugman for the rest of her life. When Marty didn’t come home that night, Fran called Robert’s Lounge. They told her he’d left hours ago. She called the police. She called Marty’s brother. She drove the streets of Ozone Park looking for his car. The car turned up days later parked on a side street, locked, undisturbed.

 There was no body, no blood, no witness who would speak. The NYPD opened a missing person file. The case went nowhere. Within weeks, the bodies kept piling up around Lufthansa. Joe Buddha Manri, shot in the head in his Buick on May 16th, 1979. Robert McMahon, shot the same day in the same car.

 Louis Cafora and his wife Joanna, vanished forever. Tommy DeSimone, killed by the Gambinos for an unrelated grudge, also vanished. Paolo LiCastri, found burned and shot in a vacant lot. Teresa Ferrara, a girlfriend of one of the crew, found dismembered in a Toms River, New Jersey surf in May. By the end of 1979, at least eight people connected to the Lufthansa heist were dead.

 Of the nearly $7 million stolen, less than 50,000 was ever recovered. Fran Krugman did not stop looking for her husband. Not in 1979, not in 1985, when Henry Hill flipped and told the FBI everything he knew. Not in 1990, when Goodfellas opened in theaters and turned her dead husband into a screaming Jewish stereotype. Fran sat in a movie theater in Queens and watched Chuck Low as Morrie Kessler screaming about wigs and money getting an icepick through the back of the skull in a parked car.

 Fran watched the audience laugh. She walked out before the credits. The real Marty Krugman had not died loud. He had died quiet. In a basement, begging for the money he was promised. The film made him a fool. The truth made him a victim. For 34 years, Fran kept calling the FBI. She kept asking, “Any leads? Any rumors? Any tip on where Marty might be buried?” She kept his clothes.

 She kept his wedding ring out on the dresser. She lit a candle for him every January 6th, every year. In June 2013, the call she had been waiting for finally came. The FBI told her they had a fresh informant, a made guy who had been close to Burke’s crew was cooperating. He told the bureau that bodies had been buried under the basement of 84th Street, Jimmy Burke’s old house.

Burke himself had died in 2004 in a federal prison medical center of cancer, never having said one word about Krugman or Lufthansa. The current owners of the Howard Beach house gave the FBI consent to dig. On June 17th, 2013, agents in white coveralls arrived with ground penetrating radar and shovels. They tore up the concrete in the basement.

 They dug into the small backyard. The neighborhood crowded behind yellow tape. Reporters camped on the sidewalk. Fran Krugman sat in her apartment listening to the news, holding her breath. For 5 days they dug. They found bone fragments. They found scraps of fabric. Forensic teams ran every piece through the lab.

 The results came back inconclusive. Animal bone, construction debris. Nothing definitively human. Nothing definitively Marty. The FBI packed up. The reporters left. The yellow tape came down. And Fran Krugman, now in her 80s, sat in her kitchen and cried for the husband she had buried 34 years earlier in her mind, but had never been allowed to bury for real.

Here’s where this story gets interesting again. 2015, the federal government finally decided to charge an old made guy named Vincent Asaro with the Lufthansa heist. Asaro, now 80 years old, a Bonanno capo, had been on the periphery of the original score. He’d taken a cut. He’d helped move the money. He’d been overheard on wiretaps for years that he never got his fair share.

 The trial opened in Brooklyn Federal Court in October 2015. Henry Hill was already dead by then, having passed in 2012. But the prosecutors had other witnesses. They had a Asaro’s own cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who had worn a wire for years. And on day three of the trial, Fran Cruikman walked into that courtroom.

 She was small, white-haired. She wore a black cardigan and held a tissue in her hand. She took the stand. She raised her right hand. She told the jury, in a voice that did not break, about the morning her husband left for a meeting and never came home. She told them about the basement at Robert’s Lounge. She told them that a wig store owner from Rego Park, a man who had owed too much money and known too much information, had been killed for the crime of asking to be paid what was promised.

 She did not cry on the stand. She had cried for 36 years. She was done crying. She wanted, she said, just one thing. She wanted to know where his body was, so she could bury him, so she could stop dreaming about him in basements. Vincent Asaro was acquitted on November 12th, 2015. The jury didn’t believe the cooperators.

Asaro walked out of the courthouse laughing. He died in 2022, also having said nothing about Marty Krugman. The men who knew where the body was are all dead now. Burke, DeSimone, Sepe, shot to death in his own apartment in 1984. Henry Hill, dead of natural causes. Asaro, gone. The location of Marty Krugman’s remains is information that died with them.

What does this story tell us? It tells us what Goodfellas couldn’t, because a film has to entertain. And the truth is too quiet to entertain. The biggest cash heist in American history wasn’t planned by professional thieves. It was planned in a wig store in Queens by a Jewish bookmaker who was over his head in debt.

He brought it to a man who saw him as a tool, used the tool, and then threw the tool away. Marty Krugman didn’t die because he was greedy. He died because he was naive. He believed Jimmy Burke was a man whose word meant something. He believed $500,000 was coming. He believed if he just kept asking politely, the money would arrive.

 He didn’t understand that the moment he handed over the information, his usefulness ended, and his liability began. Fran Krugman lived into her 90s. She kept the wedding ring on the dresser. She never remarried. She died still not knowing where her husband was buried. The house on 84th Street was eventually sold again.

 The new owners poured a fresh basement floor. Robert’s Lounge closed decades ago. The building was demolished. The lot at 114-10 Lefferts Boulevard is somebody else’s now. Whatever happened in that basement on January 6th, 1979, lives only in the memory of dead men and the imagination of one widow who never gave up.

 The Lufthansa Heist made Jimmy Burke a legend. It made Henry Hill a movie. It made Tommy DeSimone an icon, played by Joe Pesci, winning an Oscar. It made Marty Krugman a punchline. A toupee in the movie, a scream in the parking lot, an ice pick in the skull. The truth is, he was the man who started it all.

 Without Marty Krugman, there is no Lufthansa Heist. Without Lufthansa, there is no Goodfellas. Without Goodfellas, the entire modern image of the American mob is different, and yet his name is barely whispered. His grave is nowhere. His widow died still searching. That’s the real story of organized crime. Not the glamour, not the suits and the steak houses.

 A wig salesman from Queens, strangled in a basement for asking to be paid what he was owed. And a wife who lit a candle for him every January 6th for the rest of her life, hoping every year that this would be the one when he finally came home. If you found this story haunting, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week.

 The ones the film skipped, the names Hollywood erased. Drop a comment below. Who do you think really knew where Marty Krugman ended up? And who should we cover next?