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.