Six masked, armed men entered the Lufthansa cargo building at John F. Kennedy International Airport around 3 a.m. on Dec. 11, 1978, according to HISTORY. They left at 4:21 a.m. The robbery “took just 64 minutes,” per the outlet.
No shots were fired, and no one was seriously hurt or killed, HISTORY reported. The crew got away with $5 million in cash and $800,000 in jewels, for a total of $5.8 million.
Britannica calls it the biggest cash theft in the U.S. at the time. It adds that the haul was, by some accounts, “significantly more than the robbers had expected.”
The plan began with an inside man. Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo supervisor, owed a $20,000 gambling debt and approached his bookmaker, HISTORY reported. The tip reached Henry Hill, who brought in his mentor, Jimmy “the Gent” Burke.
Burke answered to Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family, who approved the job, per HISTORY. That is the Lucchese link in the crew’s story.
Employees were handcuffed in the lunchroom, and a supervisor was forced to open the vault without setting off the alarm, according to Britannica. The robbers loaded the loot into a Ford Econoline van. Police found the van two days later, parked illegally in Brooklyn.
“Authorities never recovered the cash or the jewels,” HISTORY reported. Werner was the only person ever convicted in the heist and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Burke was believed to have masterminded the robbery but was never convicted of it. He was convicted of other crimes and died in prison in 1996, per Britannica. HISTORY reports that at least a dozen people tied to the plot were later killed or disappeared.
In 2014, prosecutors charged Vincent Asaro, a Bonanno crime family member, with helping direct the robbery, CBS News reported. Court papers said a cooperating witness recorded Asaro in 2011 saying, “Jimmy Burke kept everything.” Asaro pleaded not guilty, and he was acquitted the following year, per Britannica.
The story reached the screen through Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book Wiseguy, a biography of Hill, which Martin Scorsese adapted into the 1990 film Goodfellas, Britannica noted.
Other heist stories include a 1990 art theft by two fake cops that lasted 81 minutes.
Related: Nearly 30 million watched Geraldo Rivera open Al Capone’s vault live in 1986; it held dirt and two bottles
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