Today in HistoryâDecember 11: The GoodFellas Behind the Lufthansa Heist
âTo be a wise guy was to own the world.â That is, according to Henry Hill, noted Mafia associate, FBI informantâand 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 hadnât illegally parked the getaway vehicle in front of a fire hydrant.
The intricacy of the heist lay in the buildingâs 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.
At age 78, Vincent Asaro, who had ties to the Bonanno crime family, was arrested in 2014 in connection with the robbery but was ultimately acquitted.
The aftermath, however, was messy, and often violent. Heading the heist was James âJimmy the Gentâ 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 Scorseseâs film GoodFellas (1990). Parnell âStacksâ 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 vaultâs layout. Werner might have been one of the lucky onesâmany of the original perpetrators would be found dead in the following years.
- 64 minutes: Time taken to complete the heist
- 0: Airport employee deaths
- Approximately 6: Deaths connected to the heist
- 1816: Indiana becomes the 19th U.S. state
- 1936: King Edward VIII announces his abdication of the British throne
- 1941: Germany declares war on the U.S.
