At 3:12 a.m. on December 11, 1978, six men in black ski masks walked into the Lufthansa cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, tied up ten employees, pistol-whipped an armed guard, bypassed a double-door vault system they knew about in advance because an inside man had provided maps and alarm schematics, loaded $5 million in untraceable American cash and $875,000 in jewelry into a stolen black Ford Econoline van, and drove away. The entire operation took 64 minutes. Nobody was killed. No shots were fired. The $5.875 million — roughly $29 million in 2025 dollars — was the largest cash robbery in American history at the time. The crew drove to a warehouse in Canarsie, Brooklyn, owned by John Gotti — a Gambino family captain who controlled part of the JFK airport territory — where the cash was transferred to the trunks of two waiting cars. One car was driven away by the man who’d planned the heist, James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, alongside his son Frank. The other car carried four members of the stick-up crew. Within six months, most of the people in those two cars would be dead — murdered by Burke himself or on his orders — and the $5.875 million would vanish so completely that not a dollar of it has ever been recovered.
How the tip got to the mob
The money was there because of Cold War arithmetic. Once a month, American currency that had been exchanged by servicemen and tourists in West Germany was flown back to JFK on Lufthansa flights, held overnight in the airline’s cargo vault, and picked up the next morning for deposit into New York banks. The amounts fluctuated, but $2 to $5 million per shipment was routine — untraceable bills, sitting in a cargo vault at an airport that the New York mob had been running hijacking operations out of for decades. The only remarkable thing about the Lufthansa heist is that it took until 1978 for someone to rob it.
The inside man was Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo supervisor drowning in $20,000 of gambling debt — roughly $106,000 in current dollars. Werner had already proven the concept: he and a coworker named Peter Gruenwald had stolen $22,000 from the same Lufthansa vault two years earlier without getting caught. Now Werner wanted the big score. He approached his bookmaker, Martin Krugman, who ran a men’s wig shop and an illegal lottery in East New York. Krugman passed the tip to Henry Hill, a mid-level drug dealer and hustler connected to the Lucchese crime family. Hill brought it to his mentor, Jimmy Burke. Burke brought it to his boss, Lucchese capo Paul Vario, who needed cash after losing a cocaine shipment to authorities and greenlit the operation immediately. The information chain — cargo worker to bookmaker to drug dealer to hijacker to capo — was, as one journalist later described it, “knee bone to thigh bone to Burke.” Every link in that chain would eventually be murdered or imprisoned, and two of them would be both.
Burke planned the heist at Robert’s Lounge, a tavern he owned in South Ozone Park, Queens, that functioned as the crew’s operational headquarters and had for years. Burke’s crew had been hijacking cargo trucks from the JFK perimeter since the 1960s — dozens of jobs, maybe more. They knew the airport’s geography, its security rhythms, its vulnerable points. Werner supplied the rest: where to park, what time to enter, which employees would be present, how the vault’s double-door alarm system worked (one door had to close before the other could open without triggering the alarm), and how long they could stay inside before the next shift arrived. Burke selected his crew — Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, Joe Manri, Paolo LiCastri, and Robert McMahon — and assigned his son Frank as a backup driver and Parnell “Stacks” Edwards to dispose of the van afterward. Each participant was promised between $10,000 and $50,000, based on an estimated haul of $2 million. The actual haul was nearly three times that. The gap between what was promised and what was taken is where the killing started.
The cleanup
The first mistake was Stacks Edwards. His one job after the heist was to drive the black Ford van to a junkyard Gotti controlled in New Jersey and have it crushed. Instead, Edwards parked the van in front of a fire hydrant outside his girlfriend’s apartment in Queens and went inside. Police found the van two days later. Inside it: fingerprints, ski masks, a leather jacket, and a footprint from a Puma sneaker. Edwards’ prints were on file. The connection between the van and the heist was immediate.
Burke — who, according to everyone who knew him, was both methodical and psychotic in roughly equal measure — recognized that Edwards’ failure had turned the entire crew into liabilities. Every participant who could place Burke at Robert’s Lounge during the planning was now a potential witness. Every participant who knew how the money was divided was now a potential informant. Burke’s solution was the simplest one available: kill everyone.
Edwards was first. Seven days after the heist — December 18, 1978 — Tommy DeSimone and Angelo Sepe shot him in his apartment. Six rounds. The aspiring blues guitarist with the lengthy rap sheet had been working with Burke for more than a decade. His operational contribution to the heist had been driving a van to New Jersey, which he failed to do.
Martin Krugman — the bookmaker and wig shop proprietor who had passed Werner’s tip to Hill — was next. Krugman’s problem was volume. He complained loudly and publicly that he wasn’t getting his cut of the money fast enough. According to Hill’s account in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, Burke and Sepe killed and dismembered Krugman about a month after the robbery. His remains were never found.
Louis and Joanna Cafora followed. Louis Cafora had been one of the stick-up men and had helped plan the operation. After the heist, Burke had explicitly told the crew not to make conspicuous purchases. Cafora ignored the instruction and bought his wife Joanna a custom pink Cadillac. According to Hill, the couple was killed and compacted together with the Cadillac at an auto-wreck yard. Their bodies were never recovered.
Robert “Frenchy” McMahon and Joe “Buddha” Manri — two of the robbery crew members — disappeared shortly after the Caforas. Their bodies were never found either.
Richard Eaton and Tom Monteleone — Florida-based restaurant and club owners who had been laundering heist proceeds through their businesses — were accused of skimming. Children discovered Eaton’s body hogtied and frozen in a refrigerated meat truck. Monteleone was shot.
Theresa Ferrara — the sometime mistress of several members of Burke’s crew — was accused of being part of the skimming. Her headless torso washed ashore in New Jersey.
Tommy DeSimone — the crew’s most violent member, nicknamed “Tommy Two Guns” for his matching pearl-handled pistols, and the inspiration for Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas — was shot in the head by Gotti. Not for the heist. For murdering two Gambino family members without authorization. The mob killed him for violating protocol, not for stealing $5.875 million.
Angelo Sepe, who had killed Edwards and helped kill Krugman, lasted until July 1984 — more than five years after the robbery — when his own Lucchese family killed him for stealing cash and cocaine from a Lucchese-affiliated drug dealer.
What the movie gets right and wrong
The 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas — based on Pileggi’s Wiseguy, based on Henry Hill’s testimony — depicts the Lufthansa heist and its aftermath with most of the major structural elements intact, though names are changed (Burke becomes Jimmy Conway, Vario becomes Paulie Cicero, DeSimone becomes Tommy DeVito) and the timeline is compressed for dramatic effect. What the movie captures accurately is the central dynamic: a crew of mid-level organized crime associates who pulled off a historically large robbery and then self-destructed because the man who planned it concluded that killing the participants was safer than splitting the money with them. The movie doesn’t have time to fully develop the other dynamic — that Burke’s paranoia was validated by events. Edwards’ failure with the van did bring the FBI directly to Burke’s crew. Krugman’s public complaints about his cut were drawing attention. The pink Cadillac was exactly the kind of conspicuous consumption that gets people investigated. Burke’s calculation — that every living participant was a potential witness — was, from a purely operational standpoint, correct. The moral insanity of the cleanup was also the strategic logic of the cleanup.
What Goodfellas compresses is the legal aftermath. Hill — facing six drug charges in May 1980 and increasingly aware that he was next on Burke’s list — flipped. He entered the Witness Protection Program and testified against both Burke and Vario. His testimony generated 50 federal convictions across multiple cases. Burke was convicted for the Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme and sentenced to 12 years. While in prison, he was convicted of Richard Eaton’s murder and sentenced to 20 years to life. He died of lung cancer at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo in 1996 without ever being charged for the Lufthansa heist itself. Vario was jailed for extortion and also died of lung cancer while incarcerated. Louis Werner — the inside man whose gambling debt had started the entire chain — was the only person ever convicted in connection with the robbery. He served his 15-year sentence. He had never met Burke.
In 2014, the FBI arrested five mobsters including alleged Bonanno family captain Vincent Asaro, who was accused of helping to organize the heist. Asaro was acquitted in 2015. The stolen cash and jewelry have never been recovered. The total body count directly attributable to the heist’s aftermath — depending on which accounts you believe and which bodies you count — ranges from six to thirteen. The largest cash robbery in American history produced zero convictions for the robbery itself, more than a dozen murders, one of the greatest American crime films ever made, and a ledger that suggests the $5.875 million cost roughly one human life per half-million dollars stolen.
We cover the Lufthansa heist alongside the Antwerp Diamond Center job, the Banco Central tunnel robbery, and 20 other operations across our Greatest Heists course — where a $20,000 gambling debt, a wig shop bookie, and a tavern in Queens produced the robbery that became Goodfellas, and the aftermath that the movie didn’t have enough runtime to fully depict.