In the last month of 1978, on December 11, the largest cash heist in US history occurred at John F. Kennedy Airport in the watery far reaches of Queens where the runways and landing beacons run right out to the edge of some of the finest fishing in Jamaica Bay with its grassy hummocks, deep holes, and skinny water filled with fluke, bluefish and striped bass.
Five masked gunmen circumvented the elaborate security measures at Lufthansa’s cargo warehouse, Building 261, making their way through guards and security doors designed to set off alarms if you failed to close the one behind you before you opened the one ahead. The getaway driver waited outside.
They made away with $5 million in cash and at least $300,000 in gold and jewelry.
The story of the heist was another kind of gold: it was tabloid gold. The heist of the century and no one killed or injured. You could root for the thieves.
The gold would soon be covered in blood. A careless failure to discard a getaway vehicle prompted the beginning of the murders. Parnell Edwards, whose task was to drive the black Ford Econoline van to New Jersey and dispose of it, instead parked it at a fire hydrant in front of a girlfriend’s house, where police found it two days later. And his fingerprints. He was shot and killed inside his apartment within seven days of the heist. There would be more killings. Fear that the exhibition of wealth might bring the FBI to the hijackers’ doors, prompted someone believed to be Jimmy Burke, a Lucchese crime family associate and the mastermind of the heist, to continue the purge. What Burke’s own paranoia did not encourage, his desire for a larger cut of the proceeds did, providing fuel to see a purge through to its bloody end. There would be nine or more murders directly or indirectly associated with the heist attributed to Burke’s orders by the time it was over.
Feared on the streets as his homicidal nature was well known, Burke, dubbed “Jimmy the Gent,” by Breslin, was believed to use the dirt beneath the floorboards of his own bar, Robert’s Lounge on Lefferts Boulevard, as a graveyard. He used the bar of The Suite on Queens Boulevard, another place to plan and celebrate crime owned by Mob associate Henry Hill, to take out his anger on Breslin.
Henry Hill himself became truly a significant character first when he turned informant and again when he was put in the great crime writer Nick Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, which became the basis for the movie Goodfellas. Until then his was a walk-on part as a government informant, which he became after his arrest on an unrelated narcotics charge. He could not help convict Burke in connection with the Lufthansa job.
Breslin had known Burke and drank with Burke for years before the heist. In 1970, reportedly unhappy with what Breslin had written about Lucchese capo Paul Vario, an Italian American mobster associated with him (and later the murder of Edwards after the heist), Burke grabbed Breslin by the tie, forced his head down onto a bar and slammed it repeatedly while choking him with his necktie. According to Sal Polisi and Steve Dougherty in The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia:
One of the legit regulars at Henry’s joint was Breslin, the Daily News columnist who wrote a lot about the Mob. He used to stop in at The Suite all the time to have a drink. While he was at it, he’d drink in the atmosphere and pick up tips for stories.
Later on I got to know Breslin a little bit from coaching his kid’s football team. He was a good guy. He was also a celebrated character around New York—the classic hard drinking big-city newspaperman. He ran for mayor of New York with Norman Mailer in 1969, the same year his book about the Gallo Wars, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, came out.
None of that mattered to Jimmy Burke. . . . because one night in 1970 he nearly beat Breslin to death right there at the bar in the Suite.
Henry (Hill) said Jimmy was pissed about a column Breslin wrote about Paul Vario. But it might have been just because Jimmy didn’t like the way Breslin was always making wise guys look like jerks. Anyway, nobody was sure what was said exactly; all anybody remembers was Jimmy grabbed Breslin by the neck and put a Kid Twist on him: He held Breslin by one hand and twisted his necktie till Breslin turned red and his whole head looked like it was about to explode. Henry thought he was going to break the guy’s neck if he didn’t strangle him to death first. Then Jimmy yanked down on the poor fucker’s tie and started banging Breslin’s face on the top of the bar.
Breslin survived. He told people that he had a concussion, but guys who were there said he must have gotten a skull fracture at least.
He might have suffered a concussion. In at least one account, he suffered a possible fractured skull. In accounts collected decades later, the violence of the incident is downplayed. What is definite is that Breslin came home weary and worse for the wear.
“I’m all right,” he said as he walked in the door. Then he went up to bed.
The incident did not end his relationship with the saloons of Queens. His range was that of a news shark: Pep McGuire’s on Queens Boulevard, Robert’s Lounge on Lefferts Boulevard, the Suite, and when he felt flush or puffed up with his own brilliance, the Copacabana in “the city” as people from Southeast Queens referred to Manhattan. In his 2005 book, The Good Rat, he explains the cost of their demise in a changing world of journalism:
Among the saloons of the city today, there are no notorious places known as mob joints. And there are no more meetings between reporters and gangsters in places known for tough guys and neon and loud fun. News reporters get their information from Jerry Capeci’s Gang Land on the Internet. When their work is done, you find reporters at health clubs or going home to some suburb where they drink wine and the contest is who causes more boredom, the wife or the husband. I stand on Queens Boulevard in front of what was once Pep McGuire’s, and I recall nights and crimes, and I am certain that I hold memories possessed by virtually no one else alive. The owners were Norton Peppis—known as Pep, he gambled anything he had or didn’t have—and Johnny McGuire, who appeared to have started life legitimately by going on the police force. He was in the Seventeenth Precinct and was posted at the door to UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. There had been threats. Officer McGuire, all tuckered out from a day at Monmouth Park Racetrack, took a chair in front of the suite’s door and passed out. A flash from a Daily News camera woke him up. He tore down the hall after the photographer and begged him to take another picture to preserve his job. The guy gave Johnny a break and let him pose at the door. Beautiful, Johnny said. In the morning the police commissioner happened to differ. On his desk was the Daily News with a front page featuring Officer Johnny McGuire, uniform collar tugged open, hat and gun on the chair next to him. The partners opened a barren joint and filled the bar with stewardesses from the nearby airports and lugged in jockeys from Aqueduct, and soon the place was bedlam. Somewhere at the bar was Fat Thomas, drinking and yelling. There was a band, a dance floor, and people tumbling around. You had Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, saxophonist from the Basie band, drinking scotch and milk at the bar.
Nor did the incident or his columns on the aftermath of the Lufthansa heist end his relationship with Burke, whose affections could turn on a coin toss from murderous to munificent—but who, Breslin knew, was always bound to be a source of information.
“Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But I knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion.”
He wrote this also in The Good Rat, a book in which hanging from the golden transcript of the testimony of mobster-turned-informant Burt Kaplan in the trial of two dishonorable men, the “Mafia Cops,” Mob hitmen who wore badges, are displayed the pearls of Breslin’s knowledge, and the glittering charms that are remembered and then reworked from versions that appeared in columns and books he wrote over the course of decades. Autobiography may be a big word for “lies,” and memory may be a thief, but in the hands of a storyteller with some roots in an oral tradition, they are the spine of life, repeated, polished, distilled for an audience that is waiting for them, an audience that includes Breslin, because, like some itinerant singer of tales, the words are the only way he can see.
The Daily News reported that the Lufthansa theft occurred at 3:15 A.M. when the thieves captured and locked the guards in a second floor cafeteria of the cargo facility on the northern edge of JFK’s 4,960-acre property and then entered a 14-by-14-foot cinderblock room and exited it with thirty bags of cash and jewels. The detailed account by police reporter Bill Federici and rewrite man Owen Mortiz noted that the cargo area was bursting with cash as a Lufthansa flight had $2 million to $3 million aboard when it landed earlier, money earmarked for the Chase Bank.
The rest of the cash, jewels, and some canceled checks, which were worthless, was already on hand.
The Lufthansa shipment was not a regular occurrence. Someone had good information. It would turn out to be Louis Werner, an airport worker, who brought the information to Martin Krugman, his bookmaker, to whom he was in debt for a reported $20,000. Krugman to Hill to Burke. Because no one fails to keep a secret better than mobsters in bars, because one robber lifted his mask, because of the careless failure to properly dispose of a getaway car, the FBI was onto the Burke gang within days. For their efforts they watched bodies pile up, and no money was ever recovered.
“He was a stone killer,” Steve Cerbone, the lead FBI agent on the case, said of Burke in an interview. “He was directly or indirectly involved in eleven or twelve murders in relation to the case.”
But Cerbone and the FBI team that ultimately was given the case were not brought in for several days. Until then it was managed by the small airport squad and the local Port Authority Police. “By then they were able to get their stories straight. To be honest, it was just too late.” The stories all synced up, Cerbone said. And the witnesses refused to talk. That plus Burke’s brutal efforts at damage control stymied the investigation.
“A month after the heist,” Cerbone said, “We got news that somebody was trying to kill him. He and his family were so hard core that his wife wouldn’t let us into the house.”
The FBI did manage to gather enough evidence to prosecute and convict Werner in 1979. By then, the Burke associates and airport workers who might have been able to provide information leading back to Burke were dead.
What Breslin did, over the course of columns beginning a few days after the heist and continuing through the Werner trial, was to bring everything to life in a way that could only be possible if you had drunk with, talked with, been beaten up by, walked the streets with and sounded, with your Queens accent, just like the men you were writing about who lived those fabled “second class” lives in the outer boroughs of the Imperial City.
Here he is in Howard Beach, which has not yet been made notorious by the mobster John Gotti nor had its deep-seated racism made public in “The Howard Beach Incident,” in which a white mob chased a Black man to his death, when he ran onto a highway and was struck by a car. It also has not yet suffered the devastating noise of the supersonic Concorde airliner as it landed and took off from nearby JFK Airport. Howard Beach, therefore, was relatively unknown.
It was dusk and the lights caused the ice on the edges of the canal to sparkle. . . . We were looking out at this from the bar of the clam shack . . . the two of us were having shrimp, mussels and calamari . . . The guy behind the counter asked me if I wanted a full apron instead of a napkin. I had dropped so much sauce on the front of my shirt . . . I was concentrating completely on the person I was with . . . My friend is a truck driver to the cargo area of Kennedy Airport, and he also is a thief.
Police from four agencies feel he is involved in the $7 million holdup of the Lufthansa cargo terminal . . . So do I, which is why I intend to see him as much as possible from now on . . . I intend to become very famous writing about it.
This is Breslin, putting you inside the home turf of the robbers, and setting it up for the unnamed friend to speak. He is an interlocutor with a great sense of humor.
The FBI calls up and they want to make an appointment . . . The major case squad needs something off me. They got a major case alright. I had my wife call them back. She told them that I went to the dentist and the dentist slipped and stuck the drill through my tongue. She told them I wouldn’t be able to speak for a couple of months at least.
“What happened after that,” I asked him.
“I went to the lawyer about it.”
“What does the lawyer say about this.”
“He says he hopes I done the robbery.”
And now you know: Everyone in New York is cheering for the robbers.
In another column, published the day after Jimmy Burke declined to talk to the FBI and the paper reported that Burke was with Angelo Sepe, an associate of the Lucchese crime family and member of the Lufthansa heist gang, when the feds arrested him and charged him in connection with the heist, Breslin writes:
Yesterday, a man on Jamaica Ave. who had witnessed the arrest on Saturday said that as the agents touched Sepe, Burke immediately started for them. That is in keeping with Burke’s reputation: He never goes without a fight. He is big and active and has great resentment for authority that whiskey makes even stronger.
But this time one of the agents told Burke that he was to go away, that this arrest did not concern him.
And now Breslin has shown us Burke in a way none of the other reporters can know him. He tells us about his youth hanging around the edges of the Aqueduct Racetrack. He tells us about the opening of Robert’s Lounge near both the racetrack and the airport and how Louis Werner, also charged, lived around the corner and how Marty Krugman, his bookmaker, already deceased in between the heist and the column two-and-a-half months later, also drank there. And now we are in the barroom where the heist was planned.
By the next week he has put the heist in a context that his readers, rooting for the underdog, the robbers, understand.
The announced figure is $5.8 million, but some people believe the Germans are underestimating their losses once more and that the true robbery figure is so high that it constituted the world’s record take for criminals: legitimate people, of course, steal so much more that it is unfair to place your thief in a category with them.
And there we have it. The thieves and the outer borough second class citizens of New York City have common cause.