Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “There was this big spread of food, and I took out some money to pay. We’re all having a good time when Stacks Edwards sees my wad and starts to do his ‘black dude’ number. ‘How come I’m fucking broke and all you whities from the May-fia got the money?’ He starts joking about the ‘May-fia’ guys who got all those millions from the airport.

  “Stacks was crazy. That day in the papers the cops had found the truck, and it had prints all over it. The papers said they found the ski masks, a leather jacket, and a footprint from a Puma sneaker. I knew Stacks was supposed to have taken the truck to a guy we knew in Jersey and compacted it. Finished it. Instead he had gotten stoned and left the van on East Ninety-eighth Street and Linden Boulevard, in Canarsie, about a mile and a half from the airport. Then the jerk went home to sleep. The next day the cops found it, and now it’s in the papers. Stacks should have been running for his life, but instead he’s in Robert’s screwing around. The guy either had a death wish or he couldn’t believe he was in trouble. The truth is that nobody ever knows just how much trouble he’s in, and here’s Stacks, and there’s a chance his prints are all over the truck, and he’s carrying on about how the ‘May-fia’ was getting all the money.

  “Then Lenny Vario, Paulie’s brother, butts in on the joke and he starts talking about how the guys who made the airport score must all be down in Puerto Rico or Florida basking in the sun, while we’re all up here busting our humps.

  “I look at Lenny like I can’t believe he would kid around about a thing like this, and then suddenly I realize that he’s not joking. I mean, he doesn’t know a thing about it. He’s sitting in the room with the guys who did Lufthansa and he doesn’t even know it. His own brother, Paulie, has just salted away one third of the loot in Florida, and Lenny’s totally in the dark. Paulie had had his son Petey fly the money down in a garbage bag inside a hang-up travel bag the morning of the robbery. Petey went first-class and watched his bag all the way.

  “As Stacks and Lenny carried on, I looked at Paulie. He didn’t look happy. Jimmy was watching Paulie’s every move. I knew that Stacks had signed his death warrant that day. Jimmy gave the order, but it was Paulie who gave Jimmy the look. That weekend Tommy DeSimone and Angelo Sepe went to see Stacks. It was easy. The guy was still in bed. They did it fast. Six in the head.

  “When Marty Krugman heard about Stacks, he thought Stacks got whacked in some drug deal or over some plastic. And that’s the way everybody played it. Jimmy sent me over to Stacks’s family. We paid for everything. I spent Christmas Eve in the funeral parlor with Stacks’s family. I told the family Jimmy and Tommy couldn’t come because they had to be in the halfway house.

  “Marty was bound to be next. He was breaking Jimmy’s balls. He was breaking my balls. He was crying that he needed his money to pay the loan sharks. He owed about forty thousand dollars, and he kept saying that he needed it now. He wanted to know why he had to pay the interest every week.

  “I told him to take it easy. I told him he’d get the money. But Marty didn’t want to pay the interest. By this time it was already January, and he was hanging around Robert’s every day. You couldn’t get rid of the guy. He was getting worse and worse. He was where he wasn’t supposed to be.

  “And by now there was constant surveillance on everybody. There were cars parked around the clock outside the bar. The feds were down the block. The heat was getting worse and worse. And still Marty kept coming around.

  “I wanted no part of it. I kept telling him to smarten up. I’d tell him he’d get his end, but he just wouldn’t stop. He told me that Jimmy had given him fifty thousand dollars right before Christmas but that he had given forty thousand of it to Lou Werner because Werner was busting his chops for his share. I knew what was happening and I never asked for a nickel.

  “I didn’t even ask Jimmy for the money he gave me before the holidays. He said come over to the house. When I got there, Jimmy went into the kitchen and opened the breadbox. There were stacks of money inside. There had to be a hundred thousand in there. He gave me ten grand. I gave Karen three grand to go Christmas shopping. I put seven in my own kick, and that night I dropped by Harold’s Pools and bought a three-hundred-dollar permanent Christmas tree. The kids had a great time. It was the most expensive tree Harold had. It was a white plastic tree with purple balls.

  “The week after Christmas, Jimmy has me drive some bad coke down to Florida for him. Jimmy had paid a quarter of a million for it, and he wanted me to bring it down there, and he wanted to kill the guy who sold it to him. He was going to make the guy give back the money and then he was going to murder him right there in the Green Lantern Lounge in Fort Lauderdale.

  “Tommy would have gone down there with Jimmy that weekend, except Tommy was going to be made. He was finally getting his button. For Tommy it was a dream come true. If you wanted to be a wiseguy, you had to be made. It was like being baptized.

  “We had heard that Bruno Facciolo and Petey Vario were going to vouch for him. They were supposed to pick him up and drive him to where they were having the little ceremony, but when Jimmy called and asked if he had seen his godmother yet, Tommy’s mother said it was snowing so much it had been called off. The next day Jimmy called again. I saw him in the booth. He listened, and then I saw him raise his hand and jam the phone down on the hook with all his strength. The whole phone booth shook. I never saw him like that. I never saw such anger. I was scared.

  “He came out of the booth and I saw he had tears in his eyes. I don’t know what’s going on, and he says that they just whacked Tommy. Jimmy’s crying. He said they whacked Tommy. The Gotti crew. They whacked Tommy. It was over Tommy having killed Billy Batts and a guy named Foxy. They were made guys with the Gambinos, and Tommy had killed them without an okay. Nobody knew Tommy had done it but the Gambino people had somehow gotten the proof. They had a sit-down with Paulie and they got Paulie’s okay to kill Tommy.

  “The way they did it was to have Tommy think he was going to get made. He thought he was going to his christening. He got all slicked up. He wanted to look good. Two of his own crew came to pick him up. He was smiling. He was going to be made. Nobody ever saw him again.

  “We came right back to New York. The guy who sold Jimmy the bad coke got a reprieve. There was nothing to do. Even Jimmy couldn’t revenge Tommy. It was between the Italians, and on that level Jimmy didn’t belong, any more than I did, because my father was Irish.

  “Right after New Year’s the Lufthansa heat got to be too much at Robert’s, so everyone moved to a new place Vinnie Asaro opened on Rockaway Boulevard. Vinnie was spending a fortune fixing up the place, which was right next door to his fence company. I remember when I got back from Florida, Marty was all over me. He was hanging around Vinnie’s new joint now, and he wanted to know about Tommy. He wanted to know about Stacks. What was going on? He knew Tommy had had trouble with the Gotti crew and that Stacks was probably hit over a business deal that went bad, but he was nervous. I think he sensed something was wrong. He used to hang around Vinnie’s bar waiting for war news.

  “And that’s where they whacked him out. At the bar. On January 6. Fran called at seven o’clock the next morning and said Marty hadn’t come home that night. I knew right away. I couldn’t get back to sleep. She called back at nine. I told her that I’d go out and look for him later that morning.

  “I drove over to Vinnie’s fence company, and I saw Jimmy’s car parked outside. I walked in and said that Fran had just called me. Jimmy was sitting there. Vinnie was sitting next to him. Jimmy said, ‘He’s gone.’ Just like that. I looked at him. I shook my head. He said, ‘Go pick up your wife and go over there. Tell her that he’s probably with a girlfriend. Give her a story.’

  “When Karen and I got to Fran’s she was hysterical. She knew like I knew that he was dead. She said that he had called her at nine-thirty the night before and said he was going to be late. He told her that everything was fine. She said that he was supposed to get some money.

 
“I’m sitting there holding her hand and I’m thinking about Jimmy. Murders never bothered Jimmy. He started doing them as a kid in jail for old Mafiosi. In prison you don’t have nice little fights. You have to kill the guy you fight. That’s where Jimmy learned. Over the years he had killed strangers and he had killed his closest friends. It didn’t matter. Business was business, and if he got it into his head that you were dangerous to him, or that you were going to cost him money, or that you were getting cute, he’d kill you. It was that simple. We might have been close. Our families were close. We exchanged Christmas presents. We went on vacations together. Still, I knew he could blow me away right there and get Mickey, his wife, to call Karen and ask where I was. ‘We’re real worried,’ Mickey would say. ‘We’ve been waiting for him. Did he leave yet? What could be holding him up? Do you think he’s okay?’ Meanwhile Jimmy’s planting me with a boxful of lime in the Jamaica Marshes, across the street from where he lives.

  “Fran was blabbering away about the money. She was worried she’d have to pay the loan sharks. I told her not to worry about them. She said she didn’t have any money. Karen told her not to worry about it. Marty would turn up. Then Fran broke down about the robbery. She said that Marty was going to give me $150,000 and that he was going to give Frank Menna $50,000. I was trying to console her and at the same time deny that I knew anything about any robbery. But she kept saying that she knew that I knew. She wouldn’t stop. I wanted to get away from there as fast as I could. It was just beginning.”

  Eighteen

  For the media, caught in the usual preholiday news doldrums, the Lufthansa robbery was the greatest Christmas present of all. Newspapers and television stations presented it as a six-million-dollar entertainment crime, a show-biz caper in which there hadn’t been a shot fired and the only discernible victim was a German airline, for which much of the city’s population had very little historic sympathy.

  The ballyhoo in the press was taken by various enforcement agencies as a personal affront. The FBI, with jurisdiction over all interstate crimes and unlimited overtime policies, assigned over a hundred agents to the case in the first forty-eight hours. Custom agents, the Port Authority police, the New York City Police Department, insurance company investigators, Brink’s armored truck company, and Lufthansa’s own security men swarmed over the scene of the crime, devouring clues and questioning witnesses.

  Edward A. McDonald, the assistant U.S. attorney who was put in charge of the case, was a thirty-two-year-old, six-foot-five-inch former college basketball player who lived with his wife and his three sons in the same tough Brooklyn neighborhood in which he had grown up. McDonald’s father and grandfather had both worked on the docks, and he was no stranger to wiseguys. He saw his first gangland killing from the social studies classroom window at Xavierian High School, in Bay Ridge; five days later, when he went over to Bliss Park to practice his jump shot, he found that the mob had dumped a corpse on the basketball court.

  According to McDonald, there was never any mystery about who robbed Lufthansa. Within the first couple of hours at least a half dozen police and FBI informants—many of them part-time hijackers and petty cargo thieves—called to report that Lufthansa had been the work of Jimmy Burke and the crew from Robert’s Lounge. At about the same time the Lufthansa cargo workers who had caught a glimpse of the gunman who took his ski mask off during the robbery picked a photograph out of the police lineup book which they said resembled the robber. It turned out to be a mug shot of Tommy DeSimone. A top mobster, who was a member of the Joe Colombo crime family and also happened to be a confidential FBI informant, called his contact agent and identified Jimmy Burke as the man behind Lufthansa and said that Angelo Sepe, Sepe’s ex-brother-in-law Anthony Rodriquez, Tommy DeSimone, and Jimmy Burke’s twenty-year-old son Frankie were four of the gunmen involved in the robbery. When photographs of these four suspects were shown to cargo workers who had been working the night of the robbery, Kerry Whalen, the night guard who had been hit across the forehead when he first encountered the gunmen, picked out one that he said resembled the man who hit him. It was a mug shot of Angelo Sepe.

  Eyewitness identification of suspects who “resemble” gunmen and the word of mob informants who cannot come forward and testify in court are not enough to charge anyone with a crime. But they are more than enough to put suspects under surveillance. By the end of the first week dozens of FBI men and city cops, using cars, trucks, vans spotter planes, and helicopters, began a round-the-clock surveillance of Jimmy Burke, Angelo Sepe, Tommy DeSimone, and Anthony Rodriquez. Undercover cops dressed as cargo workers and truckers started hanging around Robert’s Lounge and the Owl Tavern. McDonald got the court’s approval to install electronic bugs and homing devices in Jimmy’s Olds, Tommy’s Lincoln, and the new, white Thunderbird sedan that Sepe had bought shortly after the robbery for nine thousand dollars cash in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. McDonald even leaked stories to the press about the robbery, hoping that they would help stimulate conversations in the bugged cars.

  For the next eight weeks the investigation became a game of nerves. Jimmy and the crew knew they were the prime suspects for the Lufthansa robbery—they could even read about themselves in the newspapers—but they continued to live their normal wiseguy lives, hanging around their same haunts and effortlessly slipping their tails whenever they wished by making unexpected U-turns on busy streets, jumping red lights, or backing up the entry ramps of the city’s highways. They managed to lose the FBI spotter planes and helicopters by driving into the FAA’s restricted flight zone at JFK, where all nonscheduled plane traffic, including FBI surveillance planes, is prohibited. Even the state-of-the-art car bugs turned out to be less effective than McDonald had hoped: whenever Jimmy, Angelo, and Tommy stepped into their cars, they turned up the volume of their car radios full blast.

  There were a few bits of tantalizing chatter that the FBI managed to record in spite of the obliterating wall of rock and disco music, such as Sepe telling an unidentified man about “. . . a brown case and a bag from Lufthansa . . .” or his telling his girlfriend, Hope Barron, “. . . I want to see . . . look where the money’s at . . . dig a hole in the cellar [inaudible] rear lawn . . .” But this was still not enough to connect Sepe and his pals to the theft.

  After a while the crew became so adept at slipping tails that sometimes one or more members of the gang would disappear for days at a time. McDonald received reports that his suspects had been spotted as far away as Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach. Of course, he could have revoked their paroles and sent Jimmy, DeSimone, and Sepe right back to jail for consorting with each other, but that was not going to solve the Lufthansa robbery, nor was it going to get any of the money back.

  McDonald knew from the start that Lufthansa had been an inside job. How else would the six gunmen have known which of the twenty-two giant cargo warehouses in the 348-acre Kennedy freight-terminal area just happened to have six million dollars in cash and jewels sitting around over the weekend? Such large sums are usually picked up by armored truck shortly after they arrive and are immediately deposited in banks. The gunmen also knew the names and the locations of all the employees working that night; they knew about the perimeter alarms that required a special magnetic key, and they knew where to find the key and how to disconnect the automatic security cameras without sounding the silent alarm. McDonald was convinced that if the surveillance and electronic techniques failed to catch the pros, the amateur inside man would eventually lead to Burke and the men who actually carried out the robbery.

  Lufthansa’s own security men gave McDonald Lou Werner’s name within hours of the robbery. Werner had already been the suspect in an earlier theft of twenty-two thousand dollars in foreign currency, but there had not been enough evidence at the time to arrest him or have him fired. This occasion was different. It turned out that Lou Werner had prevented the Brink’s armored-truck guards from making their routine pickup of the six million in cash and jewels on the Friday before
the robbery. Werner had claimed that he had to get the approval of a cargo executive to sign the release. One of the Brink’s guards had complained that this was not the procedure, but nevertheless, Werner had disappeared for the next hour and a half and had not reappeared in the cargo area until after the guards had been ordered to continue their rounds without the Lufthansa money. So Lou Werner was not only responsible for the money and jewels being left at the airport over the weekend but he was one of the few Lufthansa employees who knew it was still there.

  Such pros as Jimmy Burke never seemed to talk about anything indictable, even in what they had to assume was the privacy and safety of their own cars, but an amateur such as Lou Werner couldn’t shut up. He seemed compelled to drop hints about the robbery to everyone he knew. He boasted about coming into some money. He told his barroom pals that he had paid off his bookies and loan sharks. He announced that he was heading for Miami to spend Christmas week.

  To the agents involved, following up on Werner’s domestic intricacies was more like plodding through a comic soap opera than investigating a robbery. They found, for instance, that just before the robbery Werner had told his estranged wife, Beverly, that he would be coming into a great score and that she would most assuredly regret having left him after twenty-three years. He told his best friend, William Fischetti, about the robbery at least a month before it took place and agreed to invest thirty-thousand dollars of the loot in Fischetti’s taxicab business. Then, two weeks later, Werner found out that Fischetti, who was married, was having an affair with his estranged wife, Beverly; he got so angry he called his old pal and withdrew from the business proposition. On the morning of the robbery, with the radio and newspapers announcing the spectacular heist, Werner was apparently still so incensed at his ex-pal that he called Fischetti at home and shouted, “See, big mouth!” and hung up. A couple of days after the robbery, when the newspapers were filled with headlines about the multimillion-dollar score, Werner proudly boasted all to his girlfriend, Janet Barbieri, a thirty-six-year-old divorced mother of three. Barbieri promptly burst into tears and screamed hysterically that he would wind up in jail. Werner was so depressed by his girlfriend’s reaction that he went to his local bar and proceeded to tell the whole story to his favorite bartender—but only after swearing him to secrecy.