It's supposed to be easy:
Get in... get out.
Get rich. Nobody gets hurt.
Each airline had their own cargo vaults.
There's a lot of money and a lot of valuables.
But when New York mobsters go after the millions
in Lufthansa's cargo area...
If anybody's seen that movie, "Goodfellas,"
this is the way it happened.
Nothing goes to plan.
If anything goes wrong, they're dead.
Like, he wanted something to go wrong.
An inside job with more than a few twists.
It's shocking and violent.
The Lufthansa heist is definitely
one of the deadliest robberies that's ever been committed.
♪ ♪
It was about staying alive.
♪ ♪
The masterminds behind every great heist
see what most people don't...
♪ ♪
Risking everything to pull off the score of a lifetime.
It takes a bold plan...
the right team...
and the skill to stay one step ahead of the law.
[jazzy music]
♪ ♪
[rock music]
♪ ♪
John F. Kennedy International Airport,
one of the busiest cargo terminals in the world,
and the largest in the US.
It's December, 1978, and more than a million tons of goods
are moving through here,
goods that include cash, jewels,
you name it.
For New York's mafia families,
the airport is a cash cow,
[mellow rock]
♪ ♪
There are five main organized crime families.
By the 1970s, they've been occupying New York
and operating for so long
that, in a lot of ways, they feel invincible.
These families operate independently,
but they also cooperate together.
They have their own spheres of influence.
The mob, they would make money
out of the airport in any way they could,
but mostly they would hijack trucks.
You would get the driver
and literally take his load from him.
JFK was the king of the hill.
Today, there's going to be $10 million
worth of goods coming in.
Next week, there's going to be 50 million.
So you might think that there was a lot of robberies
going on at the airport-- not so.
Where most thefts happened were off-airport.
But sometime in 1976,
a Lufthansa cargo agent
named Peter Gruenwald
gets an idea.
Why not stage a heist right here
inside Lufthansa's cargo area?
His only questions are: when and how?
He thought he was a schemer and a great planner,
and he knew the cargo movements.
So he thought about this a long time.
For the next 24 months,
Gruenwald obsessively looks for shipping patterns
and security flaws.
What he sees are dollar signs.
By the late fall of 1978,
he knows December is the right time to strike.
December, without a doubt, is the busiest time
for cargo traffic at Kennedy Airport.
Lufthansa Cargo would get pretty busy
during the holidays,
especially around the Christmas holidays.
European banks use Lufthansa
to ship millions of dollars a month
in currency exchange to banks in the US.
The airline also transports expensive luxury goods.
People are sending gifts, valuable gifts,
to the United States.
It could potentially be millions
and millions of dollars.
It's the perfect target.
♪ ♪
And it's in the perfect location.
Lufthansa's cargo is held in building 261,
the last warehouse inside the airport's secure perimeter.
The Lufthansa building was huge.
It was about 180,000 square feet.
It had three floors,
and the third floor was where all the offices were,
and the lunchroom was there.
The main floor was all the cargo area.
And there was the high value room.
At Lufthansa, we call the vault the val room.
Each airline had their own cargo vaults,
warehouses where they put in the high value,
like currency and jewelry and maybe some high-value art.
The most valuable shipments
are held in Lufthansa's high-value room
until they can be picked up by armored cars.
Brinks would take those things to a designated bank
that the airline would have deposited.
And jewelry, a lot of times,
would go into the jewelry center in Manhattan.
The high-value room at the Lufthansa Cargo hangar
was actually two rooms that were divided by a steel door.
When you went into the outer door,
you had to lock it behind you
before you could open the inner door.
If you didn't, you would set off an alarm
again at the Port Authority.
And the inner room is where
they had all of the high-value items--
cash, jewels.
And so you needed to get into that main room there
in order to pull off the heist.
And there are more challenges.
Even if Gruenwald hits the warehouse
during the night shift,
he needs to subdue seven workers.
Once they're under control, he can
use the supervisor's keys to
get into the high-val room.
There's just one problem, Gruenwald has a plan.
What he doesn't have is a team.
So he turns to a colleague with a known gambling problem
and ties to the mob-- Louis Werner.
I heard from guys at work, Louis liked the gamble,
and he was into some money to the mob.
Louis Werner owes about $6,000
in gambling debts, which is about $26,000
in today's money.
So he was desperate to pay off that debt.
You don't want to be in debt to the mob
because they'll ask you once for the money.
And if you don't have it the second time
they'll come back and break your legs.
♪ ♪
A lot of guys like this guy Werner want to get involved
with the mob and want to bring something to the mob
to get into their good graces.
Once a civilian brings something to the mob,
there's no turning back.
Werner brings Grunwald's plan to his bookie,
and it eventually makes its way to a notorious mobster,
Jimmy Burke.
He's a member of New York's Lucchese crime family,
and the guy played by Robert De Niro in "Goodfellas."
Jimmy Burke was an associate
for the Lucchese family.
Jimmy was more like a captain, the status of captain,
because he had his own crew,
even though he was an associate.
Jimmy Burke has a nickname, it's "Jimmy, the Gent,"
and he gets this nickname because
of this little habit of tipping drivers $50
whenever he hijacks their trucks.
Either you take the tip and your truck gets hijacked,
or you get killed and your truck gets hijacked.
Burke spies an opportunity
and sends a trusted lieutenant named Joe Buddha
to check out Werner.
♪ ♪
Werner, he really does feel that this is his only way out
of his gambling debts, and so he meets with Joe Buddha
as sort of a gamble.
When Lou Werner met up with Joe Buddha,
he put his life on the line.
Because if things didn't go right,
or they suspected him of being an informant,
he was getting killed.
But he's a gambler.
He's willing to take that shot,
willing to take that bet.
[suspenseful music]
Werner gives Buddha
essentially everything that he has.
♪ ♪
So that's the site plan,
that's the list of employees' names,
the security protocol for the high-value room.
♪ ♪
But Werner is too scared to really make
the conditions of this deal.
And so the mob sort of implies, yeah,
you're going to get a cut of this,
but Werner doesn't leave these meetings knowing exactly
what he's going to get.
There's always a chance if you're
coming to a crew like the Burke crew
and you are telling them how to steal $1 million
that they will kill you and take you out of the equation
to make a million dollars on their own.
A civilian who goes to the mob
never thinks about the end game,
and it's never gonna go good for them.
With a plan that's a roadmap to riches,
Jimmy the Gent starts building his team.
Some of New York's most vicious made men
will be part of it.
[dramatic music]
[suspenseful music]
It's just after Thanksgiving, 1978,
and mobster Jimmy the Gent
is holding a meeting in Queens.
He's gathered the most trusted members
of his crew to brief them on what could be
the score of a lifetime.
♪ ♪
The first person invited onto the job: Vinny Asaro,
not part of Jimmy's usual crew.
Jimmy was with the Lucchese crime family,
and Vinny was with the Bonannos.
There was no question whatsoever
that Jimmy Burke would bring Vinny Asaro
onto the Lufthansa heist.
So that each of the two crime families can,
in Burke's words, get a taste,
Vinny recruits his cousin, Gaspare "Gary" Valenti.
Gary's an experienced hijacker, and a big earner
for the Bonannos.
My cousin Vinny came to me, he says,
"We got a big score coming down."
He says Jimmy personally wants me to invite you
to be part of the crew.
I says, okay, you know? I'm honored.
In that life, it was an honor.
I says okay.
This is probably $1 million or $2 million.
I said wow.
To head the team, Burke picks his right hand man,
Tommy DeSimone, immortalized by Joe Pesci
in "Goodfellas."
Tommy's a made man, and a guy who scares even
the most hardened mobsters.
♪ ♪
The hairs just stood up on the back of my neck.
Tommy was "Two Gun" Tommy.
He always carried two pistols.
He was just a wild guy.
He was about 6'3," 6'4," good-looking guy.
If anybody's seen that movie "Goodfellas,"
he was an angel in that movie compared to what
his real life was about.
[music playing]
Tommy was a volatile individual.
He was quick to start a fight and would not hesitate
to kill you if he needed to.
Jimmy showed us, this is Lufthansa.
This is the score of scores.
♪ ♪
This should be a million at least.
♪ ♪
Closer to $2 million in cash.
Jimmy Burke was the real boss behind the robbery
at Lufthansa, knowing how many employees were there,
how many handcuffs would be needed,
how many individuals he needed to conduct a robbery.
Jimmy put everything together.
♪ ♪
No doubt about that.
Jimmy's version of the plan seemed simple on paper.
The crew would arrive at Lufthansa at exactly 3:00 a.m.
during the night shifts' meal break.
The van will drop off six men at the front entrance
then continue to the back of the building
and wait for a signal that the robbers inside
have secured the third floor lunchroom.
That's where all but one of the employees
should be gathered.
[jazzy music]
That one employee?
He's the warehouse supervisor, and he's key to the heist
because he literally holds the keys to the high-val room.
To pull off that plan, the team has to lure him of his office
and prevent him from tripping the silent alarm.
[clicks tongue]
Hmph.
Our warehouse supervisor was Rudy Eirich.
He needed two keys in order to open the doors.
He needed both keys to turn simultaneously
to unlock the door, because if it didn't,
an alarm would go off at the Port Authority.
[edgy music]
♪ ♪
The plan is set.
Insider Louis Werner will tip off the heist team
when the val room is full.
He leaves original mastermind Peter Gruenwald in the dark.
Werner never tells the mob about Gruenwald,
and he never tells his co-worker,
who invested two years in planning,
what's about to go down.
Werner thinks that if he cuts Gruenwald out of the heist,
that he's going to make more money,
and this is important to him because of his gambling debts.
Gruenwald doesn't really realize what's happening.
He thinks that he's still in on this,
and he thinks that Werner's just biding his time
to come up with a plan.
December 8, 1978,
Werner learns that a Lufthansa flight
just landed with millions in cash
on board from overseas banks.
Whenever we had valuable cargo coming in
on an inbound flight, Brinks was notified
to pick up the valuable cargo.
Brinks would basically pick up money,
and they would take it to the bank.
And back in 1978, the banks closed at 3:00.
So if it got too late, Brinks was not taking the money.
They left it there at our val room.
♪ ♪
If Werner can prevent the Brinks armored truck
from making the pickup, millions in cash
will spend the weekend in the high-value room.
When the val shipment came in,
Louis delayed the paperwork.
Brinks said, no, banks are closed
and we're not taking the money.
See, this is the key.
Brinks couldn't make that pickup.
That meant all that cash had to sit
in the vault over the weekend, and it was a lot of money.
[energetic music]
♪ ♪
It's almost too good to be true.
[phone rings] So Werner lets the team know
there's a ripe opportunity if they can move fast.
We already had the supplies, the ski masks,
the cuffs, the gloves.
Everybody had guns.
We didn't have to worry about that.
Jimmy's crew has everything they need,
except for the perfect vehicle.
They need to steal one ASAP.
Jimmy tells the guys get a van big enough
to hold eight or ten guys.
Because they're planning the heist to be at nighttime,
they would want a black van to blend in better.
It's difficult to come up with the right vehicle.
They spent the whole weekend
looking for a black van to steal.
Joe Buddha finally finds the right van for the job,
just as another huge cargo shipment arrives at Lufthansa.
It should be good news, but there's a catch.
More cash also means additional personnel on site,
something the heist team doesn't know about.
Because we had an extra freighter,
they called in people on overtime.
That night, December 11th, we had three more guys scheduled.
But if you weren't working that day,
you didn't know about the extra section,
you would not know there was extra people
called in on overtime.
Unaware of the extra workers, the heist team
meets to review plans.
It's finally go time.
That night of the heist, we meet up at Jimmy's.
Everybody shows up.
[energetic music]
Everybody checked their guns, checked their gloves,
checked the cuffs, ski mask, everything.
Jimmy said, "Listen, guys, you're the best there are.
"There's nobody better than you guys.
"That's why I picked you.
"You guys are very capable of pulling this off.
There's no doubt in my mind."
The crew heads out in the van, followed by a crash car,
a vehicle ready and waiting
to crash into Port Authority police vehicles if necessary.
They were parked there at a gas station
about two miles away from the airport.
They had their guns outside the car behind the wheels
in case the cops came, you know,
"What are you doing here?" whatever.
So they would stash the guns on the inside of the wheel.
At 3:00 a.m., the van pulls up
to the unrestricted front entrance
of Lufthansa Building 261.
All but two of the crew exit the van.
The heist begins now.
♪ ♪
To get into the building, you needed nothing.
We had no alarms and no security guard.
[jazzy rock music]
At that time at Lufthansa Cargo,
we never expected a robbery like this.
We had no idea that the biggest
robbery in airline history was about to happen that night.
Just after 3:00 a.m. on December 11, 1978,
Tommy DeSimone and crew
storm into the Lufthansa Cargo Building 261.
They've timed their entry to coincide
with an employee meal break.
When the inside team came in to the lunchroom,
most of the people, from what we understand,
after speaking to them, they were, my words,
"pissing in their pants."
They were very, very scared because these guys
are flashing guns out there.
It was upstairs, the lunchroom.
These guys come in. Tommy was a bad dude.
He was homicidal.
He would kill you without blinking an eye.
No reason. Just kill you.
If anything goes wrong, they're dead.
All of the men that are working that evening--
none of them expected that this was going to happen.
This was sudden, and it's terrifying.
I look at life, when your number's up, it's up,
and there's nothing you can do about it.
For some of the guys, in fact, it might have
been the most terrifying night of their life.
Meanwhile, the van drives to the side of the building,
but Gary Valenti deals with the padlocked gate
blocking access to Lufthansa's loading dock.
♪ ♪
I was out of a van with bolt-cutters.
I didn't cut the lock.
I was too smart for that, because security would come
around and check the lock.
So I cut the link on a chain and un-linked it.
And then when Frankie pulled in with the van...
♪ ♪
I just hooked the link back up.
Valenti is right to be cautious.
Kennedy is a 24-hour by 7 airport.
Planes come in late, late at night.
They don't stop like at midnight and shut down.
[edgy music]
So that's why we had a large group of police officers
always patrolling.
We had about 60 on the midnight shift.
At that time of night, there should have been no one back
behind the building unless they were Port Authority people
or Lufthansa employees.
There should not have been anybody there.
[dramatic music]
Back in the break room, Tommy DeSimone
checks to ensure he secured all the employees
listed by Louis Werner.
They rounded up all the employees into the lunchroom.
They handcuffed them, and they were
told to put their heads down.
We were told over and over again,
do as we're told, and nobody was going to get hurt.
♪ ♪
They asked for everybody's wallet and car keys,
and they said this way we know where you are.
If you say anything, we know where you live.
If you threaten a person, that person
may or may not try to be a hero.
But when you start threatening their family,
they think twice.
And these guys weren't the brainiest guys,
but they knew how to threaten people's families.
They go to the wife, they go to the children,
and mothers and fathers.
They put that threat to them, and nobody,
nobody wanted to do anything.
They just wanted them to get the hell out of there.
♪ ♪
Even the heist team wants to get the hell out of there,
but there are two men missing from the list of employees.
Back outside, the guys in the van are growing concerned.
By now, they expected crew to have locked down the employees
and open the cargo door.
But we're sitting in a van.
We took off the mask because they see two guys
in a van with ski masks on--
something's wrong, you know?
[edgy music]
♪ ♪
Sitting in the van, I saw a truck
headed towards the cargo area.
[uneasy music]
One of the guys working overtime was Kerry Whalen.
♪ ♪
He was doing transfers, taking cargo from Lufthansa
to the other airlines.
♪ ♪
He must have seen the van out at the back door.
Kerry approaches the cargo bay door
with his eyes on the van.
When he spots the unfamiliar faces inside,
he panics and starts to run.
And if he makes it from here to there,
it's not just the heist that's in danger.
Tommy "Two Guns" up in the break room
is volatile and violent, and he got his nickname for a reason.
[tense music]
When I seen the guy walking towards me, he sees me,
and I know he made me.
I said he can't get away.
'Cause he gets away,
my guys in there are going to get caught.
They're trapped.
I said this guy has got to be taken, one way or the other.
Less than half an hour into the heist,
Gary Valenti and van driver Frankie Burke
are caught off guard by the arrival of an extra employee.
I jumped out and ran up to him, and I says, "Don't move.
Nobody's looking to hurt you."
And he starts to run and holler.
[dramatic music]
So I hit him in the head with the pistol,
split his head open, and he fell to the ground.
Frankie stuck his pistol in his eye and says,
"Don't move or I'll blow your eye out.
Now just get up."
We cuffed him, and put him in the van.
My crew went to lunch and I was there working because
I was trying to get everything caught up,
and I heard a holler at the back,
and that's when I left my desk to walk over
to see what the noise was.
[click]
So I open the outer walkthrough door.
This other guy Ralph comes out...
because he heard the screams.
There's a van back there, and somebody's
standing outside the van.
I guess he heard the door open, and he saw me,
and I asked him if I could help him.
And he said, yes, and stuck a gun in my face.
I put the gun to him.
I said, "Look, I'm not looking for trouble.
Just follow me to the van. Get in the van and be quiet."
And he accommodated, no problem.
And so, we had two of them.
♪ ♪
I got in the van, and then I was kind of worried
because I saw the guy that stuck the gun
in my face with no mask on.
[dramatic music]
The only thing that came to my mind
is that if they're going to shoot me,
I hope it's fast, and worried about my wife and kids.
♪ ♪
Then, Joe Buddha come out.
He says, "We can't find two guys."
I said, "Look in my van."
Somebody hollered out.
We're looking for this guy Ralph.
We got everybody.
We're looking for this guy Ralph.
And then the guy that was outside the van
that I saw said, is one of you Ralph?
And I said, yes, me.
♪ ♪
They got me out of the van to come in and open the door.
♪ ♪
Once the cargo bay door opens,
the van pulls into the warehouse.
They led me through the warehouse with Kerry
with a gun at my back up the stairs.
♪ ♪
Things are not going as planned.
There are too many employees, and they're not all
where Werner said they would be.
Potentially outnumbered now, the crew needs to reassert
control of the situation.
♪ ♪
In the lunchroom, I could see all the rest of the crew
laying face down on the floor.
I grabbed Kerry, and they said what happened to him?
I said, well, I says, he wanted to be a tough guy.
One of the guys that hit Kerry outside was straddled
over him and hit him again, and said,
"This guy tried to get away when I told him not to."
I said, hey guys, take a look at your buddy here.
It could happen to you.
Nobody wants to hurt you. You're going to hurt yourself.
And I heard somebody say we don't have enough handcuffs.
So somebody else said use rope and tie them up.
And they tied me and Kerry together with rope.
The cargo workers may be accounted for,
but phase two is trickier.
They need to coax the supervisor out of his office
and keep him from pressing the Port Authority panic button.
Doing that hinges on the questionable people skills
of Tommy "Two Gun" DeSimone,
a man not known for his patience.
Tricking the supervisor to leave his enclosed office
was a critical part to making the heist successful.
He was a person that knew about the alarm systems,
and you needed to get him in your custody.
[upbeat jazz]
Rudy didn't leave his office, no matter what.
So they made the office senior agent call Rudy on the phone
and told him he had to come up to the office
and talk to them.
[phone rings]
He says anything goes wrong, he says--
Like, he wanted something to go wrong.
If anything goes wrong, they're dead.
With a gun to his head, the senior agent
is finding it difficult to lure Rudy Eirich
to the third floor break room.
Tommy DeSimone tells him, get Rudy and his vault
keys upstairs, or else.
And he called down to Rudy on the office phone
that he had a call from Germany,
and they wanted to talk to the supervisor.
♪ ♪
Please, just come up.
And it worked.
♪ ♪
When Rudy came upstairs, they also stuck a gun on him.
So now he knew there was a robbery going on.
The crew heads for the high-val room
with Rudy in tow, ready to put their inside info
to the ultimate test.
If the locks on the doors aren't handled
in exactly the right sequence, tempers and alarms
will go off.
When the supervisor is leading these men
into the vault, he definitely at this point
does not realize that there's an inside man for this job,
and I think that he believes that he can still trigger
the alarm and get out of this.
Unlock it now. Go ahead.
You needed both keys and turned simultaneously
to unlock the door, because if you didn't,
an alarm would go off at the Port Authority.
[dramatic music]
The supervisor, he was nervous.
His hands were shaking.
Tommy told him put your hands down and just relax,
because if your hands shake again, he says,
I'll blow your brains out.
Go ahead. Come on.
It's nearly one hour into the Lufthansa heist,
and Jimmy Burke's crew still doesn't
have their hands on the loot.
Success hinges on persuading
the high-value room supervisor to play ball.
Werner told Joe Buddha you had to open the first door,
close it, and then open the second door
to get into the vault.
The supervisor probably could have done something,
but it was a risk I don't think that he was willing to take.
I don't think he wanted to jeopardize
all the employees' lives.
If I had a gun to my head, I think
it would be very hard to say no to what
someone is asking you to do.
It's self-preservation.
When Eirich realizes the thieves know
the secret protocols to avoid tripping the alarm, he folds.
The supervisor went along with everything.
He didn't want to become a dead hero.
The val room is now theirs.
Once the robbers had the vault open,
they moved quickly.
[energetic music]
I was the first one in with Tommy,
and there were boxes on the side.
♪ ♪
There were exactly 50 boxes.
So Tommy took one.
He threw it on the floor, and he stepped on it.
And he saw 125,000 in hundreds.
When I seen the money, I started doing math in my head.
This is the score of scores.
They're shocked at the amount of money
that they have.
This is more than double what they were expecting.
Thanks to the surprise cargo shipment,
the crew now faces the best kind of work,
carrying off even more cash.
As the boxes are being taken away,
Gary Valenti spies something else.
There was an aluminum case
that was about maybe 3-foot by 3.
I opened up the drawer, and I seen diamonds.
I opened another drawer, and I seen rubies,
and another drawer was emeralds.
The contents of the jewelry case add nearly 900,000
to the whole.
Now, all they need is a clean getaway.
[exciting music]
After they got the money out of the val room,
they brought Rudy back upstairs and told him
to lie down on the floor also.
And then we were told that they were
going to leave a guy behind, and we were not to get up.
They got everything out
right into the back of the van.
They were like precise.
[tires screeching]
As we leave the airport, we're driving,
and Jimmy and Vinny were in a crash car.
And we pull up to them, and say, where to?
Where should we go with it?
Just two minutes after leaving with the loot,
the crew hits a speed bump.
They have a getaway van, but no real getaway plan.
As some say, the brains, right?
You pull off a $6 million heist,
you don't know where to go.
So Vinny yells out, "Go to my cousin's house."
That's what we did, we went to my house,
backed the van in, and unloaded it in my basement.
As the team heads to Gary's, the employees managed to call
the police and share the news.
Lufthansa Cargo has been hit--hard.
The Port Authority's Operations Captain,
Henry DeGeneste, is one of the first to arrive.
We had our own detective unit that investigated the mob
for the Port Authority police.
And when they came, they all said,
this has got to be a mob hit.
Nobody else would be brazen enough
to do the robbery at John F. Kennedy Airport than the mob.
♪ ♪
Back in Gary Valenti's basement,
the heist team's spirits are high,
and so are the stacks of cash.
And Joe Buddha counted the money.
He says, $2 million, $2.5 million, $3 million,
$4 million.
Oh my God. The money was stacked this high,
all $100 bills.
He says, could you believe this here?
And we're still not done counting.
You talk about euphoria. It was amazing.
You know, the idea that they essentially
stumble upon 5 million, almost $6 million,
it's incredible, especially in that day and age as money.
I mean, this is more than $20 million in today's money.
The idea that that is just one night's take,
it's unbelievable.
♪ ♪
The next step should be easy--get rid of the van.
Jimmy Burke assigns this job to crew member
Parnell "Stacks" Edwards.
♪ ♪
When a mob uses a car in a robbery,
it's mandatory to get rid of that car.
Being there are so many mob-related junkyards,
you would send it to a junkyard to get crushed.
That's the plan here.
Burke orders Stacks to make the van disappear immediately.
Stacks went over his girlfriend's house,
got drunk, and did some drugs,
and he left the van on the streets for two days
parked illegally.
Meanwhile, news of the heist is everywhere.
There was a holdup of historic proportions
at New York City's Kennedy Airport this morning--
Several million dollars in cash and jewelry
taken from a cargo hanger by a band of armed men
wearing masks.
The news went viral.
It was the biggest robbery in airline history.
And whispers about an inside job are growing louder.
Within days, our informants told us
that Jimmy Burke and his crew
were involved in the robbery.
There's nothing bigger and better.
We walk around with our chests like this.
And the FBI said, well, we know it was you guys.
Well, if you knew it was us, why don't you pinch us?
The FBI got its first break
when the New York City Police Department
called in the plates of a van that was illegally parked.
When they ran the plates, determined that the van had
been stolen, I specifically was the individual
who recovered that evidence.
There were airway bills from the Lufthansa,
and also envelopes were marked Lufthansa.
What did they find? They didn't find anything.
They said they found this, this, and that.
They found nothing.
A few days later, New York City PD connected
the van to Stack Edwards.
I'm sure when Jimmy Burke heard
about Stacks and his failure to get rid of the van,
that he was livid.
Stacks has to get rid of the van, and he had one job to do,
and he didn't do it.
In Jimmy Burke's mind, Stacks has to go.
♪ ♪
The Lufthansa heist went off without a hitch.
When Jimmy Burke hears that someone didn't do their job,
he sends Tommy "Two Gun" DeSimone
to take care of the problem.
When NYPD tracked Stacks to his apartment,
they found him dead.
In that life if you're told to do something,
there's a reason you're told to do it,
and you don't do it, your life is at risk.
With $6 million on the line and pressure
building from the FBI, Burke is determined
to tie up loose ends.
Stacks Edwards is only the first.
The first person Louie Werner contacted to get to the mob
disappeared in January 1979.
Around that same period, Tommy DeSimone also vanished.
Jimmy starts killing people because people
start spending a couple of dollars that he gave them.
He got paranoid.
They bought cars, mink coats and fur coats for their wives,
jewelry, watches.
If members of your crew are spending a lot of money,
it brings attention to you.
Throughout the course of the investigation,
it seemed like we were just a step
or two behind Jimmy Burke.
Every time I went out
to talk to one of Jimmy Burke's associates
that was involved in the robbery,
it seemed that they would end up dead.
[dramatic musical sting]
Investigators are also determined.
They need to find the inside man before he disappears too.
♪ ♪
Poor Peter Gruenwald finds out about the heist
at the same time that the rest of the world does.
He gets so panicked that he decides to flee the country,
and he's arrested while trying to flee.
Gruenwald admits that the plan was his,
but he tells investigators he didn't act on it,
and that Louie Werner brought it to the mob.
Werner winds up being the only person
convicted for the Lufthansa hijacking.
The very next day after Werner is convicted
and starts talking about Joe Buddha,
Joe Buddha is murdered.
Law enforcement found Joe Buddha dead on May 17.
They shot him in the head in a car in Brooklyn
and left him there.
Eventually, police link 12 murders
to the Lufthansa heist.
Even more, a classified was potentially linked.
In organized crime circles,
knowing too much about this heist
is a death sentence.
People are getting killed around Jimmy left and right.
I would say approximately between 20
and 30 people got killed, massacred.
Not killed, I would say "massacred," more or less.
The Lufthansa heist is definitely
one of the deadliest robberies that's ever been committed.
As the body count escalates,
the FBI recovers $60,000 from Louis Werner,
but more than $5 million simply vanishes.
Jimmy got the lion's share of the money.
Because of the people who were getting killed,
he was keeping their share.
That's how it goes in the mob.
The guy at the top is getting most of the money,
and the cuts underneath that just get smaller and smaller.
Vinny and I received $750,000 apiece.
A lot of guys never received a full amount.
And the rest of the loot, $60,000 from Louis Verna,
well, that's all the police ever recover.
In the end, Jimmy Burke is convicted,
not for the greatest airline heist in history
or all the murders that followed,
but for his involvement
in a conspiracy to fix college basketball games.
Burke died in prison in 1996.
In the late 1970s, a detailed analysis
of the security measures at JFK is undertaken
by Port Authority officials,
although some call it too little too late.
Security in the cargo buildings
changed dramatically.
We put cameras in all the cargo buildings
that went right into our police desks
so we also could see what was going on.
Gary Valenti and his cousin Vincent Asaro
are the last living survivors of the team
associated with the heist.
In 2015, Gary testified against Asaro,
regarding his cousin's involvement
in the Lufthansa job.
Once I couldn't be an earner anymore,
you know, in that life, that's how you survive.
Either you earn, you're dead,
or you're on a shelf.
So I said, you know what?
I'm gonna become an informant.
I decided. I made up my mind.
I cleared my soul, and I wanna testify.
To the surprise of everyone, including the defendant,
Vincent Asaro is acquitted on all charges
relating to the heist that started right here
in Lufthansa's Building 261.
What began as one worker's fantasy
became the most infamous heist in mob history,
its bloody aftermath, immortalized in "Goodfellas,"
with dozens killed and a take
worth more than $20 million in today's dollars.
The Lufthansa job belongs with history's greatest heists.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪