“I know you are a little wild. Do you have any friends who are as wild as you?” Gruenewald asked.
A few days later, Weremeychik came back to The Owl with a friend named “J.J.” Gruenewald showed up at the bar dressed in his Lufthansa uniform and carrying an attaché case. They all left the bar and drove to a nearby park where Gruenewald showed why he wasn’t fooling around. He had a copy of a Lufthansa cargo manifest listing gold and diamonds.
At another bar on nearby Pitkin Avenue in Ozone Park, the group met another of Weremeychik’s friends and over more drinks Gruenewald said he wanted to pull off the heist on the approaching Labor Day weekend. That was too close, said one of the men. The plan was put in abeyance.
A few days later, the group again met, and Columbus Day 1978 was also discussed since Gruenewald believed there would be as much as $6 million in the cargo area. There were a number of planning discussions, and Gruenewald brought along a schematic of the outside and inside of the cargo building. The best time for the rip-off would be on a Sunday night into Monday morning when the night shift was lightly staffed and the Lufthansa people could be easily overcome and handcuffed. The shift supervisor would be forced to neutralize the alarm system, and the valuables room would be looted. Gruenewald said a friend would tell him how to set the system so the secure area could be entered without tripping the alarm. Although Weremeychik didn’t know who Gruenewald’s friend was, it turned out to be Werner who by now was very knowledgeable about the secure cargo area of Lufthansa and its operation.
It was a risky plan. It required five men and two vans to penetrate a couple of levels of airport security for up to an hour without being detected. Two vans, or one larger vehicle would be needed because there could be as many as 140 boxes of valuables to take away. While the take could be as much as $8 million, one of Weremeychik’s friends didn’t like the way Gruenewald was rushing things for the holiday. Weremeychik himself had to go to a wedding over the Columbus Day weekend, and the holiday came and went. Nothing happened, and Gruenewald was getting very impatient.
The reason Gruenewald was getting antsy was because Werner, his old friend, was getting pressure from his bookie over a $6,000 debt. The gambling debt was on top of the other obligations eating into his salary of an estimated $15,000 a year. The heist would be child’s play, he insisted. The next time Gruenwald saw Weremeychik at The Owl he waved him away. As far as Gruenewald was concerned, Weremeychik and his friends were less than children, and he walked away in disgust. It was just after Thanksgiving Day 1978. The big heist everybody was salivating over as the score of a lifetime was dead in the water.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RING
MARTIN “MARTY” KRUGMAN WAS KNOWN to the public in the late 1970s as the tacky men’s hairpiece merchant who advertised his “For Men Only” business with late-night television ads. A slight, Eastern European Jewish man with pronounced, bulging eyes—said to be the result of a thyroid-gland disorder—Krugman ran his business in Queens, and because his store was near Henry Hill’s club The Suite, he became friendly with the mob associate. Krugman was fascinated with the Mafia life and would listen to stories for hours, either in The Suite or at Burke’s Robert’s Lounge.
Krugman’s association with mobsters was more than just out of curiosity. While he had the wig and hairpiece business, Krugman was also a bookmaker who knew a host of other gamblers and bookmakers. There were plenty of them around Queens. One of them was Frank Menna, a former hairdresser who ran a luncheonette but also sometimes served as an intermediary between Krugman and his bookmaking clients. One of those clients was Louis Werner.
Menna really served as a glorified errand boy or go-between for Krugman. Menna would get a call from Werner about a bet and then would call Krugman to get a betting line and then relay the bet back to Krugman. That relationship lasted until about September 1978 when there was a discrepancy about a bet Werner had placed with Krugman. Menna decided he didn’t want to be in the middle of both men and bowed out of the relationship. Werner would make calls to Krugman on his own from that point. If necessary, Menna would act as a courier, ferrying money back and forth between both men.
Just because he no longer worked as a middleman didn’t mean that Menna stopped seeing both Werner and Krugman. He sometimes ran into Werner at Falcaro’s Bowling Alley, and one November day in 1978 stood out. It was then that Werner started talking about his job at Lufthansa and all the money that passed through his hands in the valuables room. But it didn’t sound to Menna like just idle talk.
“He commented on the fact if he had the right people he might be able to do something with it,” Menna would recall later.
Menna knew enough to tell Krugman about the tantalizing idea Werner had raised: the theft of what could be millions of dollars’ worth of loot from Lufthansa. If there was a moment where the conspiracy behind the Lufthansa heist started, the conversations between Werner, Menna, and Krugman would later seem to investigators to be that crucial point in time. To check things out further, Krugman arranged to have someone meet Werner at an airport diner parking lot and press him for details. For security purposes, either the emissary from Krugman or Werner would drive a distinctive yellow car so that he would be easily identified.
It appeared that Menna met Werner in the parking lot at the diner. But whoever it was reported back enough information that Krugman told Menna he was impressed with what Werner had to say. For his part, Werner thought the heist could happen and told Menna he would take care of him. Smelling trouble somewhere in this plot, Menna said no thanks, he didn’t want to be involved.
* * *
As Henry Hill would later tell Pileggi, once Krugman connected with Werner he raced to tell Hill about the potential for riches that could be theirs for the taking. It was a ton of cash, maybe some jewelry too, and the money was U.S. currency coming back to the country after being spent in Europe by Americans. The cash was untraceable and didn’t require any machinations with foreign exchange. There had already been a plan put together, courtesy of Gruenewald and Werner, about how to pull off the heist. All that was needed was the right bunch of criminals to do it.
At this point Hill was freed from his prison sentence and Burke was living in a special halfway house in Manhattan. Although he had to return to the facility in the evenings, Burke was free to roam around the city as he ostensibly tried to work at a legitimate job. In fact, Burke went back and met his old crew members like Hill at Robert’s Lounge where he was told of what Krugman had learned about the potential for a big haul at Lufthansa.
As Hill recalled, Burke was intrigued with the idea and cautiously moved forward, having his people check out the Gruenewald-Werner plan, which focused around a group of at least five men serving as the actual robbers. Although Burke didn’t trust Krugman and didn’t like him, that didn’t prevent the plan from moving forward. The basic plan that Werner and Gruenewald hatched seemed workable, particularly with Werner able to show how the alarm system could be compromised. Burke now took an active role.
“Jimmy started running the Lufthansa heist right out of Robert’s,” Hill told Pileggi. “He’d go to the halfway house at night and then get picked up by one of the guys who drove him to Robert’s. It was Jimmy’s office.”
We know much of what preceded Burke’s involvement in the heist through testimony Menna and Gruenewald would later give in federal court, under oath. Information about what Burke did to finally put together the robbery team that did the heist comes primarily from Hill, either from his debriefings by the FBI or from what he told Pileggi and then later shared with writer Dan Simone in a book he co-authored. In both those books, Hill described what he believed to be the group of robbers. Talking to Pileggi for the seminal mob book Wiseguy, Hill said Burke lined up Thomas DeSimone, Joseph Manri, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, and Paolo LiCastri. But Hill also said he later learned that Licastri didn’t take part but that Robert McMahon was likely used instead. But years later and no longer a federally prote
cted witness, Hill told in his own book The Great Lufthansa Heist, co-authored with Simone, about a slightly expanded lineup of the team: DeSimone, Sepe, McMahon, Manri, and Cafora, with Licastri now also back in the mix.
Hill was not part of the actual robbery team and appears to have been kept out of the intimate planning stages by Burke. Although Hill’s version of the composition of the team was largely consistent in the two published accounts, there is a question about whether Licastri was involved as a sixth man. In debriefings with the NYPD, Hill added a seventh name to the list of alleged participants: Danny Rizzo, a Lucchese family associate at the time who was described as a close friend of Burke. In any case, the crew assembled by Burke was a wild bunch of criminals who had one common denominator: they all worked out of Robert’s Lounge.
Thomas DeSimone: A man with a homicidal streak who had a sadistic impulse, DeSimone was unpredictable and his characterization by Joe Pesce in Goodfellas was pretty close to the mark. Hill recalled that he even killed his own brother over some jewelry the sibling stole and wouldn’t return. He was said in later published accounts to have been a relative of Rosario and Frank DeSimone, famous Los Angeles members of the Mafia in the late 1950s and 1960s.
DeSimone was a hijacker whom Burke relied on heavily. He would shoot and kill people with abandon, having murdered Spider Gianco in Robert’s Lounge, killed Gambino soldier William “Billy Bats” Bentvena over a slight and then killed his friend and fellow hijacker Ronald “Foxy” Jerothe, who was a friend of John Gotti, then a Gambino associate. DeSimone had been dating Jerothe’s sister and assaulted her after a breakup. Fearing retaliation, DeSimone shot and killed Jerothe as the two argued one day in December 1974.
In another example of DeSimone’s warped sense of loyalty to Burke, mob associate Peter Zuccaro told investigators how DeSimone once shot at a car in which Burke’s daughter Catherine was being driven by her then-boyfriend along Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach. It seems that DeSimone didn’t want any man near Burke’s daughter and took some shots at the boyfriend, but didn’t hit him—nor Catherine—remembered Zuccaro.
DeSimone also had a streak of black humor. According to one mob informant, while DeSimone barbecued food in the backyard of his home in South Ozone Park he would toss a piece of hot dog over into a vacant lot where some of his victims were rumored to have been buried. He explained the food toss by quipping that the buried corpses had to eat too. Funny guy.
Angelo Sepe: A mob associate originally from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Sepe had been a fringe player for years. He once had a social club in Brooklyn that he eventually sold to an associate of the Gambino crime family. He did a nine-year federal prison sentence for bank robbery and in January 1978 was arrested on drug charges, but the case was thrown out. Sepe lived in South Ozone Park, a neighborhood not far from JFK. Sepe didn’t mix well with Hill, and convinced Burke to keep him away from the actual execution of the heist.
Robert “Frenchy” McMahon: McMahon got his nickname because of the fact that he worked in the cargo operation of Air France at JFK. It was because of McMahon’s job with the airline that Hill said he had the necessary entrée to steal over $420,000 in cash in 1967 from the airline’s valuable cargo area, a haul that made for nice tribute payments to some mobsters and solidified McMahon’s stature with Burke. McMahon not only frequented Robert’s Lounge but also The Owl and other watering holes near JFK.
Joseph “Buddha” Manri: Like McMahon, Manri had a job in the cargo operation of Air France at JFK. According to Hill, Manri had checked out the plan for the robbery presented by Werner and thought it was a good one. His nickname was a reference to his big stomach. Manri was also known to police as “Joseph Manri Manriguez.”
Louis Cafora: Another associate of Burke who owned some parking lots in Brooklyn. Cafora’s usefulness to Burke was as an avenue for laundering money.
Paolo Licastri: A Sicilian immigrant, Licastri was reputed to have been linked to the infamous Pizza Connection drug operation but was never charged. He had ties to the Bonanno and Gambino crime families.
If Henry Hill was right, those were the men involved along with Burke in the big heist. There are, of course, two names missing from the public versions of the group of robbers Burke had assembled: Vincent Asaro and his cousin Gaspare Valenti. Their names would publicly surface as being linked to the heist some thirty-five years later.
But while Hill’s public statements on the heist excluded Asaro and his cousin, he had actually claimed to law enforcement as far back as 1983 that Asaro was involved. According to NYPD records, an informant, who was clearly identified by the description cops used as being Hill, stated that Asaro was involved in the planning stage of the heist with Burke, along with Paul Vario who stayed in contact with the crew. Hill also alleged that it was Asaro, along with Burke and a member of Vario’s family who “waited outside,” the documents stated, although there was no specific description of what was meant by the term “outside.” So the previously secret Hill materials came up with the added names of Asaro, Burke, and a kin of Vario. Interestingly, Hill never made mention of Valenti being involved in the heist or anything else.
CHAPTER NINE
“MY GOD, YOU LOST MILLIONS!”
JOHN CURTIN HAD BEEN A BRINK’S armored-car guard for about twenty-three years. His job was to sign for shipments that went onto his truck, and he worked about three days a week making pickups in the cargo area at JFK. One of those days was usually a Friday, which is the day of the week December 8, 1978, happened to be when Curtin made his rounds. After an earlier stop at a different airline, Curtin and his guard Frank Crowley made a scheduled pickup call at the Lufthansa Airlines cargo area in building 261. It was around noon.
Stopping by the cargo area, Curtin picked up some paperwork from a Lufthansa clerk. The documents were given to Crowley who waited in the cargo area to take custody of the shipment while Curtin and another guard on the truck drove back to Seaboard Airlines to pick up a couple of items. Curtin quickly got back to Lufthansa and noticed that Crowley was still sitting around without any cargo. The odd thing was that Crowley was continually being told he would be taken care of but never was.
The shipment Curtin was to pick up was said on the paperwork to be $4 million in U.S. currency. But when Louis Werner, the Lufthansa supervisor, finally showed up he told Curtin the amount was actually $5 million. Werner seemed a bit officious, Curtin would later remember, and started talking about problems with another security outfit where there was some money missing from a shipment. Because of that problem, Werner said Lufthansa wouldn’t let shipments of cash leave until a big boss verified that nothing had been improperly taken. This would take a little bit of time until a security man could come, said Werner.
Hit with an unexpected delay, Curtin called his office and told his dispatcher what had happened. Curtin told Werner he really couldn’t wait around and that he had to leave to take care of another shipment. Brinks would have another truck come by Monday to pick up the Lufthansa shipment, explained Curtin. That was fine with Werner, who took the paperwork back. The $5 million cash shipment, along with a few other valuables, would have to stay in the secured room through the weekend—just like Louis Werner knew they would.
* * *
Kerry Whalen was a twenty-three-year-old college man from Queens who seemed to have some good luck when he got a job working in the cargo area of Lufthansa at JFK. Whalen’s job often led to overtime hours and good pay, which helped him pay the bills and his college tuition expenses. The night of December 10, an inbound Lufthansa flight was delayed for about twelve hours, and there was plenty of overtime available for cargo people who wanted to stay around and meet the delayed aircraft. Whalen took the overtime, which had been approved until midnight. Another supervisor asked him to keep working until 7:00 A.M. Monday.
“That would be a fifteen-hour day, some of it at double time,” Whalen later remembered in his own book, Inside the Lufthansa HEI$T: The FBI Lied. “I agreed to stay on as lo
ng as possible because the overtime would pay off the Spring tuition bill.”
After taking care of a $500,000 shipment of caviar for another airline, Whalen recalled driving back to the Lufthansa cargo building at around 3:30 A.M. and noticing as he approached the building a dark van near the ramp into the structure. Among the things that seemed odd to Whalen, he remembered, was the fact that the van had no lettering on the outside and that it lacked any Port Authority placards. Well, he thought, it might be some cleaning worker or fellows who serviced the soda machines. He made a U-turn and parked in front of the van, exited his car and then began walking toward Building 261, warily looking at the two men seated in the strange vehicle. Both men were visible to Whalen, the passenger more so, and he saw that they were both Caucasian. One seemed close to thirty years old and was about five feet ten inches tall. The driver, seemed about twenty-two years old, with dark hair and complexion, perhaps five feet six inches in height.
Whalen remembered the man in the passenger seat mumbling the words “get in the truck” at which point he knew he was in trouble and started running to the entrance to the cargo building, screaming “Help!” Whalen got the first door open and had run a few steps toward the second inner door when the passenger who had been seated in the van started to pistol whip him, forcing him to the concrete floor. What Whalen recalled next was looking at the barrel of a pistol in front of his eye and seeing in his moment of terror two bullets which were inside the revolver.
The Big Heist Page 9