Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  The FBI, of course, talked to everyone who knew Werner, and just about everyone who knew Werner talked to the FBI. Fischetti, for instance, was so worried that his wife would find out about his affair with Beverly Werner that he agreed to cooperate fully as long as he wasn’t interviewed in his own home. For weeks FBI agents met Fischetti in coffee shops and taxicabs, and he told them everything he knew—which was a lot.

  Fischetti had known Werner for years and said that Werner and another Lufthansa cargo worker, Peter Gruenewald, had concocted the plan to rob the airline months before the robbery. Fischetti said the pair had hit upon the scheme after being involved in the theft of twenty-two thousand dollars in foreign currency and deciding that it was foolish to chance getting caught or fired for stealing such a paltry sum. If they were going to take any money from the vault and run the risk of getting caught, it might as well be for at least a million dollars.

  Fischetti said that Werner and Gruenewald then worked for months on their heist, and when their step-by-step blueprint was finished, Gruenewald had the job of shopping it around the airport bars looking for the right men to carry it out. Gruenewald spent months testing one prospective holdup man, a notorious barroom rowdy, but decided against using him when he realized the man wasn’t serious enough. When Gruenewald turned out to be much too slow in finding the robbers, Fischetti said, Werner took matters into his own hands and asked his bookmaker, Frank Menna, if he knew of anyone who could carry out the undertaking.

  When the FBI first approached Gruenewald he denied any knowledge of the plan, but agents soon lined up the barroom rowdy Gruenewald had approached for the robbery, as well as Fischetti, as a witness against him. On Friday, February 16, nine weeks after the robbery, agents found that Gruenewald had applied for a standby ticket from New York to Bogotá, Colombia, and then on to Taiwan and Japan. Gruenewald said he was on his way to see his estranged wife in Taiwan, where she lived with her family. Gruenewald was arrested and held as a material witness in the Lufthansa case. He decided to cooperate with McDonald in assembling the case against Werner.

  McDonald knew that with the testimony of Gruenewald, Fischetti, Beverly Werner, Janet Barbieri, and Frank Menna he had enough evidence to charge Lou Werner as a participant in the Lufthansa robbery. McDonald had also compiled enough evidence against Angelo Sepe to charge him with the robbery and, more important, to get a warrant to search Sepe’s girlfriend’s Mattituck, Long Island, house and yard for the money. The agents who had been following Sepe for weeks and had been listening to hours of rock music and snippets of conversation were convinced that the money was buried somewhere at Hope Barren’s house.

  McDonald’s objective was not just to convict Werner but to convince him to cooperate with the feds. Werner had to roll over on the men he hired to do the robbery. But the day Werner was arrested he proved to be tougher than McDonald or any of the agents had thought. He had talked incessantly before his arrest, but he stopped talking once he was in custody. On the night of his arrest, after hours of questioning, Werner continued to insist that he had had nothing whatsoever to do with the robbery. He claimed he had boasted and lied about his role in the heist only because it boosted his ego.

  McDonald decided to confront Werner with his conspirator right there in the Strike Force office. Werner was sitting in a large conference room when Gruenewald and McDonald walked in together. Werner hadn’t seen Gruenewald for over a week and he might have assumed that his friend had taken the plane to Bogotá and the Orient as planned. Now Werner saw Gruenewald walk in with the prosecutor, and he knew that Gruenewald was cooperating.

  Werner began to tremble. His chest began to heave. McDonald said later that he was afraid that Werner might have a heart attack right there in the office. Gruenewald began methodically to urge his friend to cooperate. “They know everything,” Gruenewald said. “Why should you be the only one punished?” If Werner helped with the investigation, he could be guaranteed a walk or probation, especially if he helped McDonald nail the robbers and recover the money. Gruenewald tried. He was very persistent. But Werner insisted that he didn’t know what Gruenewald was talking about. He claimed that he was getting a raw deal. He said that if McDonald thought he was guilty, he would have to prove it in court.

  The case against Werner was all that McDonald had. The months of surveillance and eavesdropping had only confirmed his suspicions about Burke and the crew, but they had not provided much evidence. The search of Sepe’s girlfriend’s house and the surrounding property had not turned up the money the FBI had been certain it would find. On May 23, thirty-five days after McDonald had arrested Sepe, he had to drop the charges against him because there was not enough evidence for an indictment. Jimmy and the crew could still be put away for violating parole, but then there would be no way that they might accidentally stumble and either implicate themselves or reveal the whereabouts of the money.

  But far more disturbing, as far as McDonald was concerned, were the reports of murders and disappearances connected with Lufthansa. As McDonald went about assembling the case against Werner, key witnesses began to disappear. On December 18, for instance, just one week after the robbery, Queens police found the body of a small-time black crook named Parnell Steven “Stacks” Edwards, thirty-one, lying under the covers of a bed in his Ozone Park apartment with six .38s in his chest and head. The door to his apartment had not been forced and there were no signs of struggle. The apartment had also been wiped clean of fingerprints. There was money and jewelry strewn around, so the police discounted robbery as a motive. From the casual position of the body it also looked as though the victim knew his killers and had had no reason to think he was in danger.

  On January 14 Tommy DeSimone’s wife, Cookie, reported to the police that her husband had disappeared. She said that Tommy had borrowed sixty dollars from her a few weeks earlier, and she hadn’t heard from or seen him since. At first the police suspected that Tommy had decided to get lost after he found out that two of the Lufthansa cargo workers had identified him from mug shots as the gunman who had removed his mask during the robbery. But then the word began to come back that Tommy DeSimone was gone forever.

  Three days later, on January 17, the body of a forty-two-year-old hustler and con man named Richard Eaton was discovered in a refrigeration truck that had been abandoned in Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn. The body had been found by children playing inside the abandoned trailers. The hands and legs were tied with wire and the neck was broken. There was some delay in identifying the body since it had been frozen so stiff that it took more than two days to thaw. It was only then, while going through the man’s pockets, that police found Jimmy Burke’s name and phone number. When a preliminary police investigation revealed that Eaton had occasionally worked as a courier and front man for Jimmy Burke, the city cops took their dossier and went over to see Ed McDonald.

  The police said they had learned that Eaton had just returned from a trip to Florida, where he was supposed to have laundered huge amounts of money. On one of the Sepe tapes, amid static and rock music, Sepe was heard to complain that someone was trying to cheat him while counting the money. There was also some discussion about a trip to Florida and money. McDonald had FBI men and city cops retrace Eaton’s steps and even opened the safe deposit box in which they were told Eaton had placed millions of dollars. The box was empty.

  About this time a Long Island housewife named Fran Krugman reported that her husband, Marty, had disappeared. She told the local police that she had last heard from him on January 6, when he called to say that he wouldn’t be home for a while. By the time McDonald found out that Marty Krugman had been the man to whom Frank Menna had sent Lou Werner, it was too late. McDonald would have given anything to find out about the men to whom Marty Krugman had passed on Werner’s plan. Frank Menna had told McDonald that all he had done was transmit Werner’s request to his bookmaker boss, Krugman. Menna said that Krugman took over from there. Krugman was one of the only links McDonald knew of directly co
nnected to the robbery. Krugman had been an airport bookmaker, and he had also been known to be under the mob’s protection. He had been associated with the Burke crew and had been seen frequenting Robert’s Lounge. As it worked out, Krugman disappeared just before McDonald and the FBI had started to look for him. By then he was presumed dead.

  Two weeks later, on February 10, Theresa Ferrara, a stunning, twenty-seven-year-old beautician, got an emergency call from a friend and ran out of her beauty shop in Bellmore, Long Island, to meet someone in a nearby diner. Ferrara had apparently been concerned enough about the meeting to have asked her nineteen-year-old niece, Maria Sanacore, to come looking for her at the diner if she had not returned in fifteen minutes. Ferrara left her bag, keys, and coat behind. “I have a chance to make ten thousand dollars,” she told her cousin as she raced out of the door. She was never seen again.

  The Nassau police began a routine missing-persons investigation. They discovered that Ferrara had recently moved to a thousand-dollar-a-month apartment; when the rental agent gave them her previous address, it turned out that she and Tommy DeSimone had lived in the same two-family house in Ozone Park. On May 18 a female torso was found in the waters off Barnegat Inlet, near Toms River, New Jersey. An autopsy was performed at the Toms River Community Hospital, where comparison X-rays were used to positively identify the body as that of Theresa Ferrara.

  By the time Lou Werner went to trial in April, five possible witnesses had either been murdered or had disappeared, and McDonald had assigned round-the-clock protection to all of the survivors he planned to use in court. Gruenewald testified that he and Werner had concocted the plan together and that Werner had recruited the robbers behind his back. The barroom rowdy whom Gruenewald had first approached to do the robbery testified that Gruenewald had gone over the plans and told him that he would have to get the information about bypassing the alarms from Lou Werner. Even Janet Barbieri, Werner’s girlfriend, wound up reluctantly testifying that Werner had boasted to her that he had been responsible for the robbery.

  On May 16, after a ten-day trial, Lou Werner was found guilty of helping to plan and carry out the Lufthansa robbery. He was the only person charged with the robbery and was facing twenty-five years’ imprisonment. If there was any possibility of finally getting Lou Werner to talk, it was now. Werner had refused to talk in order to take his chances at trial. If he had been acquitted he would have gone free and would have been able to keep whatever money he had earned from the robbery. But Werner was convicted, and unless he wanted to spend the next twenty-five years in prison, he was going to have to cooperate.

  Although McDonald did not know it at the time, Werner had met with only one member of Jimmy Burke’s gang—Joe Buddha Manri. Manri had been sent by Jimmy to check out Werner’s plan and had huddled over it in the parking lot of the Kennedy Airport Diner. Manri had left eighty-five thousand dollars in two packages at the airport motel for Werner. Had Werner chosen to cooperate, he could have implicated Manri, and only Manri.

  The afternoon he was convicted, Lou Werner was taken back to the federal prison to await sentencing. He was held on the third floor, the detention area reserved for prisoners whose lives were in danger or who had decided to talk. Jimmy Burke, who had finally been picked up on April 13 for parole violation, was being held in the same prison. He was visited after the trial by one of his lawyers, who said that Werner had been convicted, was facing heavy time, and was in protective custody.

  Later that night a radio car from the 63rd Precinct in Brooklyn found the bodies of Joseph “Joe Buddha” Manri, forty-seven, of Ozone Park, and Robert “Frenchy” McMahon, forty-two, of Wantagh, Long Island, slumped in the front seat of a two-door 1973 blue Buick parked at the corner of Schenectady Avenue and Avenue M, in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn. Each man had been killed with a single shot from a .44-caliber gun in the back of the head. Now Manri was dead and Lou Werner’s only possible ticket out of jail was gone.

  Nineteen

  On the day I finally got arrested my friends and family were driving me crazy. I was working such long hours that I was snorting about a gram of coke a day just to keep all the insanity together. My partner, Bobby Germaine, and I were getting our stuff from Charlie the Jap, who’s been a junk guy all his life, and we were going crazy trying to keep it a secret from Paulie Vario. Paulie had been yelling about me getting involved with junk ever since I got out of the can, but meanwhile he’s not coming up with too much for me to live on.

  “Jimmy Burke was laying low ever since Lufthansa, and I couldn’t earn like before with him. Anyway, I’m getting too old for sticking up trucks. Bill Arico had been caught on a jewelry heist, and I had been supporting his wife, Joan, and his two kids until he was able to escape from Riker’s with a jeweler’s saw I got for Joan to give him. Two of the Boston College basketball players I was paying screwed up on another game and there was hell to pay.

  “Meanwhile the FBI had been to the house looking for some guns. They had a warrant and they were gentlemen. They waited until the kids went to school. They went through everything, but I had managed to get most of the pieces out just the week before. There was one nine-millimeter pistol in the bedroom bureau, and Karen knew enough to ask if she could get dressed. They said okay, and she went upstairs and shoved the gun into her panties. Later she complained because the thing was so goddamn cold.

  “On top of all this there’s my girlfriend, Robin. The truth is I should have gotten rid of Robin, but she was working with me on the dope. I used her place to store and cut the stuff. She sold a little too, but mostly she was her own best customer. And every time I went over there she wanted to have a talk about the relationship.

  “I was under so much pressure that the day I got pinched almost came as a relief. I must have left the house about seven in the morning. I was going to pick up my brother Michael at New York Hospital. He was being treated for his spina bifida. On the way to the hospital I planned to drop by Jimmy’s house. Jimmy had ordered some guns from a guy I had been doing business with in a Connecticut armory. The guy had dropped off Jimmy’s guns at my house the night before. Jimmy had some thirty-two-caliber silencers, and he wanted guns to go along with his silencers. Here’s Jimmy, heat all over him from Lufthansa, on parole, just like me, and he’s looking to buy guns for himself. Bobby Germaine wanted some guns too. He said he’d take whatever Jimmy didn’t take. Germaine, you must understand, was on the lam in six different jurisdictions, was pretending to be a freelance writer—he even had a typewriter all set up with paper—and already had an arsenal of guns and shotguns stashed all over his place. He didn’t need those guns any more than Jimmy did, but those are the kinds of gun nuts I’m dealing with at the time.

  “I figured I’d stop off at Jimmy’s house, drop off the guns, then drive into the city and pick up my brother at the hospital and drive him back to my house. I threw the guns in the trunk of the car, and I heard this helicopter. I looked up and saw it. It was hovering right over my head and it was red. You notice a red helicopter over your house at seven o’clock Sunday morning. I got in the car and drove toward Jimmy’s house in Howard Beach. For a while I noticed that the copter seemed to be following me, but by the time I got near his house on Cross Bay Boulevard it was gone.

  “Jimmy was already awake. He was waiting in the doorway like a kid at Christmas. He came out, and he started to look at the guns before we got into his foyer. I reminded him about the heat. I told him about the helicopter. He looked at me like I was nuts. There he was taking guns out on the sidewalk and looking at me like I’m nuts. But I saw that he was impatient. He wanted to see the guns. When we got into the foyer he ripped open the paper bag, took one look at the guns and screamed, ‘Fuck! These are no good! My silencers won’t fit these things. I don’t want these things.’ All of a sudden I knew he didn’t want to pay me for the guns. All of a sudden I knew I was stuck a few hundred. I’d bought the damn things for him. He had wanted them, not me. And now I was stuck. I didn’t say a
nything.

  “I’d known Jimmy for over twenty years, but I had never seen him crazier than he had been since Lufthansa. Ever since the stickup he had been getting progressively worse, and I knew better than to argue with him in the morning. I knew that at least eight of the guys who’d done the Lufthansa job were dead, and I knew the only reason they were gone was because they’d started bothering Jimmy about the money. Jimmy had gone crazy with the money. And sometimes I think even he knew it. I remember we were driving around one day on this or that, and he’s sort of half talking, and he blurts out that sometimes he thinks that the money is cursed. That’s the word he used—‘cursed.’

  “The way Jimmy saw it, Marty, or Stacks, or Frenchy McMahon, or Joe Buddha, or whoever wanted his share of the Lufthansa money was taking the dough out of Jimmy’s pocket. That was Jimmy’s money. Anyone trying to take some of that money made Jimmy feel like they were trying to rob him. For Jimmy, if it was a matter of giving a guy a quarter of a million bucks or two behind the ear, it was no contest. It was a time when you didn’t argue with Jimmy. You never knew what he’d do. So I just repacked the guns in the ripped bag and turned around and left. He was so disappointed and pissed he didn’t even say good-bye.