Today in History—December 11: The GoodFellas Behind the Lufthansa Heist

“To be a wise guy was to own the world.” That is, according to Henry Hill, noted Mafia associate, FBI informant—and Lufthansa heist accomplice.

On December 11, 1978, six gangsters quietly stole a sum of $5.875 million (roughly $28 million today) from the Lufthansa cargo hold at JFK airport. It was the largest amount of money to ever be stolen in the U.S. at the time, and it might have been the perfect crime. That is, if one of the mobsters hadn’t illegally parked the getaway vehicle in front of a fire hydrant.

The intricacy of the heist lay in the building’s vault system. Only one man had the code for both doors. In order to avoid setting off an alarm, an initial door had to be unlocked and relocked before the second was opened. Starting at 3 am, the gangsters were swiftly in and out of the vault and had finished loading the truck by about 4:15 am.

The aftermath, however, was messy, and often violent. Heading the heist was James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, who had worked with crime families but was more of a free agent (read: loose cannon). He was determined to make sure nobody would ever talk about the crime. Spoiler alert: Hill would, in fact, talk about the crime, and his role was later memorialized in Martin Scorsese’s film GoodFellas (1990). Parnell “Stacks” Edwards parked the getaway vehicle in front of a fire hydrant, providing police with valuable fingerprints, and was dead (thanks to Burke) a week later. In fact, the only person to serve time in association with the crime was airport employee Louis Werner, who provided the mobsters with valuable information about the vault’s layout. Werner might have been one of the lucky ones—many of the original perpetrators would be found dead in the following years.