Lufthansa heist

Lufthansa heist, theft on December 11, 1978, of some $5.8 million in cash and jewels from the air cargo building of the German airline Lufthansa at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City—at the time the biggest cash theft to have taken place in the United States. Of the many suspected participants, almost all of whom were involved in organized crime, only one was ever convicted and served time in connection with the robbery, and almost none of the stolen money was ever recovered.

The convicted person, Louis Werner, was a cargo agent at Lufthansa who also was a gambler. He was aware that about once a month the airline flew in large amounts of cash that had been exchanged in Germany by American servicemen and tourists; that cash often stayed in the vault at the cargo building until the following day, when it was picked up to be deposited into banks. Werner reportedly suggested to his bookmaker, Martin Krugman, that it would be possible to steal millions of dollars in cash from that vault. The idea was then brought to James Burke, a known gangster who was associated with the Lucchese crime family. Burke was believed to have masterminded the heist, with the help of information from Werner. The intelligence supplied included maps, information about employees likely to be present, and the timing of the event. Authorities concluded that Burke planned the robbery with various associates from Robert’s Lounge, a bar in Queens that he owned.

At about 3:00 am on December 11, a van carrying a half dozen or so armed men pulled up to the cargo building. Several of the men, wearing ski masks, entered the building while the van was being driven to the rear of the building. Most employees were handcuffed in the employee lunchroom, and a supervisor was required to open the vault doors without triggering an alarm. In the meantime, according to reports, another employee, Kerry Whalen, returned to the building after making a delivery. When he walked past the thieves’ van, those within were said to have forced him to enter the vehicle. Another employee, curious about the noise, reportedly stepped outside and was also taken hostage. This employee was later able to identify the van as being a Ford Econoline 150. Once all the workers (including those taken into the vehicle) had been secured in the lunchroom, the cash and jewels—by some accounts, significantly more than the robbers had expected—were loaded into the van, which was driven away without incident. The men drove to an auto shop in Brooklyn, where the loot was loaded into one or more cars.

Parnell Edwards, the driver of the van, was to take it to a junkyard to be compacted. He failed to do that; rather, he parked it illegally on the street in Brooklyn, where it was found two days later. It contained fingerprints that proved to be one of the few real breaks in the case. Edwards was killed shortly thereafter. The bookmaker Krugman was also killed, and several other people believed to have been involved in the heist were murdered or disappeared. Werner was arrested in 1979. Evidence connecting Burke to the heist or any subsequent murders was lacking, but he was later convicted for other crimes, and he died in prison in 1996. In 2014 Vincent Asaro, a member of the Bonanno crime family, was indicted in connection with the heist. On the basis of testimony by another associate of the crime family, he was accused of having helped direct the heist, but he was acquitted the following year.

The Lufthansa heist and the events surrounding it were described in several books, including Inside the Lufthansa HEI$T (2013) by Kerry Whalen, The Lufthansa Heist (2015) by Henry Hill and David Simone (Hill had been an associate of Burke’s and admitted to having helped plan the crime), The Mystery of the Lufthansa Airlines Heist (2015) by Robert Sberna and Dominick Cicale, and The Big Heist (2017) by Anthony M. DeStefano. In addition, the crime was a central part of Wiseguy (1985), a biography of Henry Hill by Nicholas Pileggi, and that book was the basis of Martin Scorsese’s critically acclaimed 1990 film Goodfellas.