“Jimmy never trusted Marty after that, so when I finally got to run the Lufthansa thing down for him I emphasized how much money was involved, and I made sure I put in all the zeroes before I said the tip came from Marty Krugman. As I expected, Jimmy lit up over the idea. Still, he didn’t want anything to do with Marty. He said he’d think about it. All he thought about was the money. After a week he finally told me to bring Marty down to Robert’s.
“Jimmy was at the bar drinking, feeling good, and he had Marty run the score down for him. Jimmy was friendly and kept smiling and winking at Marty. When Marty had finished, Jimmy got me on the side and told me to get Lou Werner’s telephone number from Marty. Jimmy was still so suspicious of Marty that he didn’t even want to ask him for Werner’s number. That’s when I realized that during their meeting Jimmy hadn’t said more than a couple of words. He just let Marty talk. In the old days, before we both went away, Jimmy would have been up to his elbows in the heist himself. He would have had Werner sitting in Robert’s drawing pictures on the bar. Looking back, I think it was my first sign that Jimmy was a little different. A little more cautious. One step removed. But why not? Marty had never been his buddy. And, anyway, Marty was so keyed up just leaning his elbow on the bar at Robert’s with Jimmy Burke that he didn’t notice a thing.
“Jimmy started running the Lufthansa heist right out of Robert’s. He’d go to the halfway house at night and then get picked up every morning by one of the guys, who drove him to Robert’s. It was Jimmy’s office. He first called Joe Manri, who was also known as Joe Buddha because of his big belly, and told him to take a look at Lou Werner’s plan. Joe Buddha came back all excited. He said that Werner’s plan was great. He said there might be so much money involved that we’d need two panel trucks just to carry the bags away.
“By the middle of November Jimmy had most of the crew lined up. He needed five or six men to go inside and two men on the outside. First, he had Tommy DeSimone and Joe Buddha lined up to go into the place with the guns. He also had Angelo Sepe, who had just gotten out after five years for bank robbery, and Sepe’s ex-brother-in-law, Anthony Rodriquez, who had just been freed after assaulting a cop, lined up as inside gunmen. Another guy was Fat Louie Cafora, who Jimmy met in Lewisburg, and Paolo LiCastri, an illegal Sicilian shooter, who used to say he was in the air-conditioning business because he put holes in people. Stacks Edwards, the black guy who had hung around for years and worked our credit-card scams, had been assigned to get rid of the vans after the robbery.
“There were other guys in on the deal, but by now I was flying back and forth so often to Boston and Pittsburgh between the basketball and the dope deals that I lost track. I heard, for instance, that Jimmy was going to send his eighteen-year-old son, Frankie Burke, on the heist under Tommy, but I never asked and nobody ever mentioned it. Later I heard LiCastri wasn’t on the job. Frenchy McMahon, another stickup guy, who first helped us with the Air France robbery years ago, was also hanging around all the time, but I wasn’t sure where he was going to fit in. Frenchy was a good guy and he was very tight with Joe Buddha, so wherever you saw Joe Buddha you saw Frenchy. When you’ve got something like Lufthansa coming up, you don’t ask questions and you don’t talk about it. You don’t want to know. Knowing what’s not necessary is only trouble.
“By early December everything was ready and we were just waiting for the word from Werner that the money had arrived. Jimmy told Paulie about what we had coming, and Paulie assigned his son Peter to pick up his end. Jimmy also had to give up a share to Vinnie Asaro, who was then the Bonanno family’s crew chief out at the airport. The Bonannos ran half the airport in those days, and Jimmy had to show respect to them to maintain the peace. ‘To Christmas,’ Jimmy used to say after a day at Robert’s and before getting a ride back to the halfway house at night. We were all counting the days.”
On Monday, December 11, 1978, at 3:12 in the morning, a Lufthansa security guard patrolling the cargo terminal’s parking area spotted a black Ford Econoline van pulling into a garage bay near the vault loading platform. The guard, Kerry Whalen, walked toward the van to see what was up. As he approached he was suddenly hit across the forehead with the barrel of a .45 automatic. A short, wiry man wearing a knitted black cap paused a moment and then hit him again. Blood began to pour from the guard’s wound just as the man pulled his cap down over his face like a ski mask. Whalen felt another man grab his holster and disarm him. The two gunmen then ordered Whalen to deactivate a silent alarm near the gate. Stunned as he was, Whalen nonetheless wondered how they knew about the alarm. Whalen’s hands were then pulled behind his back and he was handcuffed. He saw several men with ski masks, all carrying pistols or rifles. His wallet was removed by another gunman, who said they knew where his family lived, and if Whalen did not cooperate they had men ready to visit his house. Whalen nodded to indicate that he would cooperate. It was difficult for him to see because he could not wipe away the blood pouring down his face.
A few minutes later Rolf Rebmann, another Lufthansa employee, thought he heard some noise on the ramp. When he opened the door to investigate, a half dozen armed men wearing ski masks pushed into the building, forced him back against a wall, and handcuffed him. The gunmen then took a set of one-of-a-kind magnetic keys from Whalen and walked directly through a maze of corridors into a high-security area, in which they seemed to know exactly where two other Lufthansa employees would be working.
When those two had been rounded up, two of the gunmen remained downstairs to make sure there were no unexpected visitors to disturb the robbery. The rest of the gang marched the handcuffed employees up three flights to a third-floor lunchroom, where six other employees were on their 3:00 A.M. meal break. The gunmen burst into the lunchroom brandishing their guns and propelling the bloodied Whalen before them as an indication of their seriousness. The gunmen knew each of the employees by name and ordered them to lie on the floor. They asked John Murray, who they knew was the terminal’s senior cargo agent, to call the Lufthansa night supervisor, Rudi Eirich, on the intercom. The gunmen knew that Eirich, who was working somewhere else in the vast building, was the only employee on duty that night who had the right keys and combinations to open the double-door vault.
On the pretext of reporting trouble with a cargo shipment from Frankfurt, Murray asked Eirich to meet him in the cafeteria. As Ei-rich, who had been employed by Lufthansa for twenty-one years, bounded toward the cafeteria, he was greeted with two shotguns at the top of the stairs. He looked into the cafeteria, not twenty feet away, and saw his employees on the floor with thick plastic tape across their mouths. He was quickly convinced that the gunmen were dangerous, and he decided to cooperate. While one of the gunmen stood guard over the ten bound employees in the cafeteria, the other three hoods took Eirich down two flights of stairs to the vaults. They seemed to know everything. They knew about the double-locked two-door security arrangements in the four-foot-thick cinder-block vault rooms. They knew about the silent wall alarm system inside the safe, and they even cautioned Eirich about accidentally touching it.
The gunmen had Eirich open the first vault door to a 10-by-20-foot room. They then ordered him to lock it behind them. They knew if he opened the door to the second vault, where the money and jewels were stored, without closing the outer door, a silent alarm would be sounded at the Port Authority’s police office about half a mile away. Once the inner vault was opened, Eirich was ordered to lie on the floor while the men went through what appeared to be copies of invoices or freight manifests. They were apparently trying to identify the correct parcels in a room filled with hundreds of similarly wrapped packages. Finally the gunmen began to toss some of the parcels out the door. One of the first was thrown just inches from Eirich’s head. He looked at it for a second, and then the heel of a work boot smashed the package open and he could see what looked like neatly bound stacks of bills under the thick paper wrapping.
The gunmen carried at least forty parcels out of the inner vault int
o the outer vault. They then ordered Eirich to reverse the procedure and lock the inner vault door before he opened the outer vault door. Two of the gunmen were designated to load the parcels into the van while the other gunmen took Eirich back upstairs to the cafeteria. There they gagged him with plastic tape, just as they had done with the rest of his employees. Suddenly one of the gunmen who had been loading the parcels onto the van came puffing into the cafeteria. He was sweating and excited. He had taken off his ski mask and was wiping his brow. One of the other gunmen yelled at him to put on his mask but not before several employees had managed to sneak a glimpse of his face.
The gunmen ordered the employees to remain where they were and not to call the police until 4:30 A.M. It was then 4:16, according to the cafeteria wall clock. Exactly fourteen minutes later the Port Authority police received their first call. Five million dollars in cash and $875,000 in jewels were gone. The single most successful cash robbery in the nation’s history had taken exactly sixty-four minutes.
Seventeen
Lufthansa should have been the crew’s crowning achievement. A dream come true. The ultimate score for anyone who had ever hijacked a truck or moved swag out of the airport. It was the heist of a lifetime. The one robbery where there should have been enough for everyone. Six million dollars in cash and jewels. And yet, within days of the robbery the dream score turned into a nightmare. What should have been the crew’s happiest moment turned out to be the beginning of the end.
Henry had been running around so frantically that weekend trying to keep his point-shaving scheme afloat that he didn’t even know that there had been a robbery until ten o’clock Monday morning when he woke up, turned on the radio, and got into the shower:
“. . . and nobody knows for sure just how much was taken in that daring predawn raid at Kennedy Airport. The FBI says two million dollars, the Port Authority police say four million dollars, the city cops say five million. How much maximum? That they won’t say. So far Lufthansa has not said anything, but they’ve promised to break their silence soon with a press conference, and WINS will be there to cover it live from the scene of the heist at JFK when they do. It looks like a big one, maybe the biggest this town has ever seen. Stay tuned . . .”
“I didn’t even know they were going to take the place that night. I was drunk out of my mind. I was with Marty Krugman all night. We were drinking at the Spice of Life, in Cedarhurst, not two miles from the airport, and we didn’t know a thing. When I got home that night I had an argument with Karen. I got so pissed I packed my clothes and took the Long Island train to the place of a girl I knew, on East Eighty-ninth Street.
“About ten o’clock in the morning Jimmy calls me up. He says he wants me to meet him at the Stage Delicatessen that night just before he checks into the halfway house.
“I go over to the Stage. Tommy was there, smiling. Fat Louie Cafora was there. He weighed three hundred pounds, owned a parking lot in Brooklyn, and was going on trial for extortion and arson, but he was happy. He was marrying his childhood sweetheart, Joanna. He had just bought her a white Cadillac for a surprise wedding present.
“Lufthansa was all over the television and radio that day. Everybody knew about it, but I didn’t say two words. Jimmy and Tommy were on their way back to the halfway house to check in. Jimmy was half drunk and feeling good.
“He was concerned about whether I was going home to Karen that night. Karen had come to his house looking for me that morning. In fact, he had had to call around just to get the girl’s number where I was staying. Karen didn’t know where I was.
“He asked if I was going home. I said in a couple of days. He said okay. I now see that he didn’t want anything out of line. He wanted everything to appear normal. He didn’t want angry wives running around from house to house looking for their lost husbands.
“He asked me if I needed money. I said no. I asked him if he needed money. He laughed. He took out an envelope stuffed with fifty- and hundred-dollar bills—there must have been ten thousand dollars there—and he counted out about five hundred to Tommy and five hundred to Fat Louie.
“With that he says that he’ll meet me in the morning at Moo Moo Vedda’s dress factory, next to Robert’s.
“The next morning I meet Jimmy at Moo Moo’s, and we started driving to Bobby’s Restaurant, in the garment center. We have a meeting with Milty Wekar about betting the Harvard game we’d rigged for the next Saturday. Later that afternoon we had the same kind of meeting set up with Marty Krugman back in Queens. Milty and Marty were two of the bookmakers we used to get our bets down in the point-shaving games.
“We were on the expressway, getting close to the tunnel, when Jimmy let go of the steering wheel, turned toward me, and gave me a big, one-armed hug around the shoulders. ‘We got it!’ he said. ‘We got it!’ Then he started driving again like he hadn’t said a word. I was so surprised by his sudden move that he almost broke my neck, but I knew it was his way of telling me that we had taken Lufthansa.
“But the next thing he said made me feel sick. He was looking ahead, driving, and he asked, almost casually, if I thought Marty had told his wife, Fran, about Lufthansa.
“At that point I knew that Jimmy was going to whack Marty. I knew Jimmy better and longer than most people. Sometimes I knew what he was going to think about something before he did. I could tell whether Jimmy was going to like something or hate it. And now I knew Jimmy was thinking about murdering Marty Krugman.
“I shrugged. I didn’t want to look as though I even considered Krugman important enough to think about. We kept driving. I didn’t say anything. After a minute or two Jimmy said that when we got to Bobby’s he wanted me to call Marty and make an appointment with him for later that night. Now I said that I was certain Marty had told Fran everything. I wanted to sound like Marty probably talked with lots of people. That it was no big deal. Nobody could prove anything. I was scrambling to try and keep Marty alive. Jimmy didn’t listen. He just said that after our meeting with Marty I should figure out a way to get Marty to go somewhere with me later that night.
“Now, I know where to find Marty every hour of the day. I had been with him all night Sunday, but since the robbery early Monday morning I had been purposely ducking him. Marty must have called my house a million times. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to know when he was going to get his money. And now I began to suspect that he had been busting Jimmy’s balls about money too.
“I called Marty from Bobby’s and said that Jimmy and I would meet him at the Forty Yards at four-thirty. I didn’t say anything about later. When I got back to the table I saw that Tommy DeSimone was sitting there with his sister Dolores, and so was Milty Wekar. Jimmy started talking to Milty about the basketball bets, and then he turned to me and said that I should work out with Tommy where we were going to take Marty later that night.
“That’s how it happens. That’s how fast it takes for a guy to get whacked. It was getting crazy, but I still had from two in the afternoon until eight or nine o’clock that night to talk Jimmy out of killing Marty. Meanwhile I’m going along with the program.
“Tommy said that he and Angelo Sepe would meet me at the Riviera Motel. There was a big parking lot in the rear of that place. Tommy said, ‘Just bring Marty to the back of the parking lot. Tell him you got to meet some broads downstairs. Just get out of the car and leave him there. Me and Angelo will take it from there.’ Tommy loved it. To Jimmy whacking people was just business, but Tommy got enjoyment out of it. I told Tommy that I’d be there between eight and eight-thirty.
“In a little while Jimmy and I were on our way to the Forty Yards to see Marty about the baskets. I could see for the first time that Jimmy was a nervous wreck. His mind was going in eight different directions. All the way to the Forty Yards I talked about what a pain in the ass Fran Krugman would turn out to be if we whacked Marty. That she’d pester everybody until she found out what happened. I also reminded him that we needed Marty to lay off some of our bets. I didn’t
use the words, but I was trying to say that killing Marty was like taking bread off our table.
“When we got to the Forty Yards, Marty was waiting. On the way in the door Jimmy said, ‘Forget about tonight.’ It was like a load off my mind. And in a few minutes Jimmy’s drinking and joking with Marty like they were the best of friends. We drank for the rest of the afternoon, and there was no mention of Lufthansa and no mention of the money. I thought maybe Marty was wising up. Maybe he had a chance.
“Jimmy left, and while Marty waited for Fran to pick him up he started his song. ‘When do I get my money?’ he asked. ‘What are you asking me for? Ask Jimmy,’ I said. I was almost joking. He said, ‘I did, and Jimmy says my end is $500,000.’ Now I know why Jimmy wants to whack Marty. It’s a matter of a half a million bucks. No way Jimmy was going to deny himself half a million dollars because of Marty Krugman. If Jimmy killed Marty, Jimmy would get Marty’s half a mill.
“Meanwhile Marty was asking me how much my end would be. I told him not to worry about my end. But he wouldn’t stop. He said that he’d talk to Jimmy. That he’d give me $150,000 and then get Jimmy to give me $150,000. He was screaming that he’d make sure I wasn’t cheated. The poor bastard, he didn’t have any idea how close he had just come to being killed, and I couldn’t even tell him. He wouldn’t have believed me.
“Thursday afternoon, about three days after the robbery, we were all in Robert’s having our Christmas party. Paulie had come up from Florida, and we’d kicked everybody out of the place who wasn’t with us. Paulie looked good. Jimmy was running around making sure Paulie was happy. Paulie’s brothers Lenny and Tommy were there. Fat Louie was there. Everybody was there except Tommy DeSimone, because Paulie didn’t like Tommy being around.
Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 19