Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  "I asked which of the upcoming games they felt we could shave. Sweeney took out one of those little schedule cards, circled the games he thought we could fool around with, and gave the card to me.

  They kept saying that they liked the idea of just shaving points and not blowing the games.

  "I remember going to the first game we tested. I wanted to see them on the court for myself. It was the December 6 game against Providence. It was really a dry run, but Jimmy and I put a few bucks down to see how it would work. Boston College was favored to win by seven. Kuhn got me the tickets, and I found myself sitting right behind Sweeney's parents, in the middle of the Boston College rooting section. They were cheering like mad. When we got ahead by a few extra points, I began to relax. We were home. Providence was dead. We're racking up some points.

  "Sweeney is having "a great night. His parents are jumping up and down. Sweeney started hitting from all over the court. I'm cheering right along, but toward the end of the game I see that we're too far ahead. I see that I'm cheering for my own disaster. Everything Sweeney threw in the direction of the basket went in. Bang! He'd hit for two and run back up court looking so proud of himself. I'm holding the wrong end of a bet and this jerk is looking for a prize. Bang! Two more. Bang! Bang! Two free throws. I'm watching this shit. I want to scream, 'Miss the free throw!' but I got his folks in front of me smiling and cheering. I've got a disaster on my hands. Toward the end I thought I saw Rick Kuhn throw the ball away three or four times, trying to get us below the spread. I thought at least he was trying. On one play I saw him foul this Providence guy in such a way that the basket counted and the guy got a free throw. Typical for the night, the guy missed the free throw. But Kuhn was thinking. By jumping too late Kuhn let the ball bounce over his head, and the same Providence guy who had just missed the free throw grabbed it.

  The guy drove around Kuhn, who was standing there like a lamppost. The guy scored. Still, that idiot Sweeney is dropping shots in. I'm supposed to be puffing cigars on my way to the bank, but Sweeney has blown the bet. He wouldn't stop.

  "All they needed to win by was seven. They would have won the game and I would have won the money. Instead they won by 19 points-83 to 64. Some scheme. A waste. They took a perfectly good no-lose deal and threw it away. It was ridiculous. If we had bet big money on the game we would have been dead. I didn't want to go near the kids. I talked to Perla and Mazzei and said I was pissed and Jimmy was going to be even more upset. We were serious people. If the kids wanted to shave points, fine. It was business. But if they didn't, then let's forget the whole thing. No hard feelings, just goodbye. I told them, don't screw around-you can't play ball with broken fingers.

  "Later Kuhn said that just before the Providence game he had gone over to Sweeney to tell him the spread was seven, but Sweeney didn't say anything. During the game, when Sweeney began scoring, Kuhn said he asked Sweeney what he was doing. Sweeney said he was playing to win. Kuhn said that after the game he had told Sweeney he was crazy, that he had just blown twenty-five hundred dollars. We had a Harvard game coming up that weekend, and I told Perla it was their second chance, but I was going to need some assurances. Kuhn said he had already recruited Ernie Cobb, the team's best player, into the deal. It was a lock.

  "At the December 16 Harvard game everything was perfect. We only bet about $25,000 on it because of the Providence disaster. We bet on Harvard. Our bet was that Boston couldn't beat Harvard by more than the 12-point spread. This time the players did well. They threw away dozens of shots to keep the winning score low. Boston wound up winning by only 3 points, and we cleaned up. Then, on December 23, we got bold and bet more than $50,000 on the UCLA game, where the guys were the big underdog. That time we bet that Boston would get beaten by more than the 15-point spread. Again the guys did fine. They managed to lose by 22 points, and I began to think that the thing might really work.

  "We were riding high. The next game, against Fordham, on February 3, we had trouble laying off enough bets in New York, and we sent Mazzei to Las Vegas to bet $55,000 with the bookmakers. This tune we were betting on the underdog, Fordham. We bet that Boston could not beat them by the 13-point spread. Since Boston was the easy favorite, it was just a matter of how much our guys decided to win by.

  "It should have been beautiful. We should have cleaned up. Except that just before the end of the game we got a call from Paul Mazzei. He said that he had been driving into Vegas from the airport with the money for our bet when he got into some kind of a traffic jam, and by the time he got to town he was too late to get the bet down.

  "Guys got killed for missing the window on winning bets, but Mazzei was smart enough to call before the game was over to make sure we didn't think he was holding out on us. We should have made a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but we wound up holding nothing.

  "It was an omen. We got some money down on the next game, February 6, against St. Johns, but that turned out to be a 'push,' or a game where the point spread balances itself out and nobody wins and nobody loses. We let the money ride on the next game, February 10, which was against Holy Cross.

  "In that game Holy Cross was the favorite, and all our guys had to do was make sure they were beaten by at least 7 points. We, of course, bet Holy Cross to win by the 7-point spread. It was our big-money game. We bet with both arms. The bookies already had our money from the 'push' game the week before, and we dumped even more green on top of that.

  "I was at Jimmy's watching the game on television. It was a party. Everything was going as you'd expect. Holy Cross was winning all through the game, but toward the end our guys seemed to get all fired up. It looked as though they didn't want to lose by too much.

  "Pretty soon, before anyone even realized it, they had come within a few points of the lead. As the clock began the final countdown, our guys tried to pull back, but by then the Holy Cross players went cold. Our guys are just standing there, but Holy Cross couldn't hit from anywhere on the court. Then the other Boston College players, the ones who weren't in on our scheme, started scoring from all over. They must have smelled an upset. It was awful. Of course Holy Cross finally won, but they only won by 3 points instead of the 7-point spread, and Jimmy and I went down the tubes.

  "Jimmy went nuts. He was furious. He put his foot through his own television set. I know he lost about fifty thousand dollars all by himself. I finally got Perla on the phone and he said that he had talked to Kuhn right after the game and that Kuhn had said they just couldn't bring themselves to lose by too much against Holy Cross.

  "That was it. No more. The end of the point-shaving scheme. Jimmy was so mad at losing the cash that he said he wanted to shake those kids up. At one point during the night he said, 'Let's go up to Boston and put their heads through hoops,' but we never went anywhere. By then Jimmy had bigger problems than money."

  Sixteen

  Henry was out of prison only two months when he first heard about Lufthansa. His bookmaker pal Marty Krugman first told him about the possibility of the Lufthansa score. Marty and his wife, Fran, had come by to see Henry and Karen's new house, in Rockville Centre. It was a three-bedroom brick ranch house with a sunken living room, but Marty hardly looked at a wall. He kept motioning for Henry to talk with him on the side. Marty was so distracted during the visit that he kept grimacing at Henry to cut the house tour short whenever their wives were not looking. Finally, when Fran and Karen were in the kitchen making sandwiches, Marty told Henry about Lufthansa. He said that there were millions upon millions of dollars in untraceable fifty- and hundred-dollar bills sitting out there in a cardboard vault at Kennedy Airport just waiting to be robbed. He said it was the ultimate score. A mountain of cash. Marty said that the money, which was flown in about once a month as part of the routine return of U.S. currency that had been exchanged in West Germany by American tourists and servicemen, was sometimes stored overnight in the Lufthansa cargo vaults before it was picked up by armored trucks and deposited in banks.

  Marty's informa
tion had come from Louis Werner, a pudgy, forty-six-year-old Lufthansa cargo supervisor, who owed Marty about $20,000 in gambling debts. According to Marty, Lou Werner was one of those long-shot bettors who had spent the past eleven years trying to support an estranged wife, a girl friend, a loan shark, three children, and a $300-a-day gambling habit on a $15,000-a-year salary. Like many airport bookies, Marty Krugman had carried Werner on the rim for months in the hope of a jackpot tip on a hijacking score.

  Henry, Jimmy, and the crew at Robert's had picked up thousands of tips from 'Kennedy's indentured cargo handlers over the years, but Lou Werner's tip to Marty was unique. Werner's information held out the promise of more money than anyone in the crew had ever robbed before. And Werner was so desperate to get started that he actually had a plan. He had methodically worked out the details: how many men would be needed, the best time for the heist, how to bypass the elaborate security and alarm system. Werner had even figured out where the holdup men should park. Most important, the score was in cash-clean, easy-to-spend, unmarked money. For professional crooks that kind of cash is better than diamonds, gold, or even negotiable securities; it doesn't have to be cut, melted down, recast or resold. There are no treacherous middlemen, insurance adjusters, or wiseguy fences involved. A guy can spend it walking out the door.

  After meeting with Marty, Henry became obsessed with Lufthansa. The timing was perfect. Jimmy Burke was about to be released from Allenwood and temporarily assigned to the Bureau of Prisons' Community Treatment Center, a seedy hotel that had been converted to a halfway house on West Fifty-fourth Street, near Times Square. Jimmy would sleep at the center, but he would be free to roam around the city during the days and evenings. Tommy DeSimone was also due to be released to the halfway house at about the same time. Henry realized that he, Jimmy, and Tommy could beat by ten times their glorious $480,000 Air France score of 1967. It was the best welcome-home present any of them could ever receive.

  There was only one problem: Jimmy Burke hated Marty Krugman. Jimmy had not trusted Marty since the early 1970s, when Marty was just starting out as a bookmaker and owned For Men Only, a men's hair-styling shop and wig salon next door to The Suite, Henry's Queens Boulevard nightclub. Marty did well enough in the wig business to star in his own late-night television commercial, in which he would be seen swimming vigorously across a pool wearing his wig while an announcer proclaimed that Krugman's wigs always stayed put. Henry always found Marty Krugman amusing, but Jimmy saw him as a mark. He felt that Krugman was booking out of his store and paying nothing in tribute or protection. Jimmy kept insisting that Henry shake down Marty for at least two hundred dollars a week, but Henry kept trying to placate Jimmy with stories about how Marty wasn't doing well enough yet to be shaken down. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jimmy was a part-time insomniac, and when he couldn't sleep he turned on the television. Whenever he saw Marty's wig commercial at four in the morning he felt duped. "That fuck has the money to go on television," he would complain to Henry, "but no money for anybody else?" Eventually Jimmy had Tommy DeSimone and Danny Rizzo work over one of Marty's employees as a warning, but instead of giving in, Marty threatened to go to the DA.

  "Jimmy never trusted Marty after that, so when I finally got to run the Lufthansa thing down for him I emphasized how much money was involved, and I made sure I put in all the zeroes before I said the tip came from Marty Krugman. As I expected, Jimmy lit up over the idea. Still, he didn't want anything to do with Marty. He said he'd think about it. All he thought about was the money. After a week he finally told me to bring Marty down to Robert's.

  "Jimmy was at the bar drinking, feeling good, and he had Marty run the score down for him. Jimmy was friendly and kept smiling and winking at Marty. When Marty had finished, Jimmy got me on the side and told me to get Lou Werner's telephone number from Marty. Jimmy was still so suspicious of Marty that he didn't even want to ask him for Werner's number. That's when I realized that during their meeting Jimmy hadn't said more than a couple of words. He just let Marty talk. In the old days, before we both went away, Jimmy would have been up to his elbows in the heist himself. He would have had Werner sitting in Robert's drawing pictures on the bar. Looking back, I think it was my first sign that Jimmy was a little different. A little more cautious. One step removed. But why not? Marty had never been his buddy. And, anyway, Marty was so keyed up just leaning his elbow on the bar at Robert's with Jimmy Burke that he didn't notice a thing.

  "Jimmy started running the Lufthansa heist right out of Robert's. He'd go to the halfway house at night and then get picked up every morning by one of the guys, who drove him to Robert's. It was Jimmy's office. He first called Joe Manri, who was also known as Joe Buddha because of his big belly, and told him to take a look at Lou Werner's plan. Joe Buddha came back all excited. He said that Werner's plan was great. He said there might be so much money involved that we'd need two panel trucks just to carry the bags away.

  "By the middle of November Jimmy had most of the crew lined up. He needed five or six men to go inside and two men on the outside. First, he had Tommy DeSimone and Joe Buddha lined up to go into the place with the guns. He also had Angelo Sepe, who had just gotten out after five years for bank robbery, and Sepe's ex-brother-in-law, Anthony Rodriquez, who had just been freed after assaulting a cop, lined up as inside gunmen. Another guy was Fat Louie Cafora, who Jimmy met in Lewisburg, and Paolo LiCastri, an illegal Sicilian shooter, who used to say he was in the air-conditioning business because he put holes in people. Stacks Edwards, the black guy who had hung around for years and worked our credit-card scams, had been assigned to get rid of the vans after the robbery.

  "There were other guys in on the deal, but by now I was flying back and forth so often to Boston and Pittsburgh between the basketball and the dope deals that I lost track. I heard, for instance, that Jimmy was going to send his eighteen-year-old son, Frankie Burke, on the heist under Tommy, but I never asked and nobody ever mentioned it. Later I heard LiCastri wasn't on the job. Frenchy McMahon, another stickup guy, who first helped us with the Air France robbery years ago, was also hanging around all the time, but I wasn't sure where he was going to fit in. Frenchy was a good guy and he was very tight with Joe Buddha, so wherever you saw Joe Buddha you saw Frenchy. When you've got something like Lufthansa coming up, you don't ask questions and you don't talk about it. You don't want to know. Knowing what's not necessary is only trouble.

  "By early December everything was ready and we were just waiting for the word from Werner that the money had arrived. Jimmy told Paulie about what we had coming, and Paulie assigned his son Peter to pick up his end. Jimmy also had to give up a share to Vinnie Asaro, who was then the Bonanno family's crew chief out at the airport. The Bonannos ran half the airport in those days, and Jimmy had to show respect to them to maintain the peace. 'To Christmas,' Jimmy used to say after a day at Robert's and before getting a ride back to the halfway house at night. We were all counting the days."

  On Monday, December 11, 1978, at 3:12 in the morning, a Lufthansa security guard patrolling the cargo terminal's parking area spotted a black Ford Econoline van pulling into a garage bay near the vault loading platform. The guard, Kerry Whalen, walked toward the van to see what was up. As he approached he was suddenly hit across the forehead with the barrel of a.45 automatic. A short, wiry man wearing a knitted black cap paused a moment and then hit him again. Blood began to pour from the guard's wound just as the man pulled his cap down over his face as a ski mask. Whalen felt another man grab his holster and disarm him. The two gunmen then ordered Whalen to deactivate a silent alarm near the gate. Stunned as he was, Whalen nonetheless wondered how they knew about the alarm. Whalen's hands were then pulled behind his back and he was handcuffed. He saw several men with ski masks, all carrying pistols or rifles. His wallet was removed by another gunman, who said they knew where his family lived, and if Whalen did not cooperate they had men ready to visit his house. Whalen nodded to indicate that he would cooperate.
It was difficult for him to see because he could not wipe away the blood pouring down his face.

  A few minutes later Rolf Rebmann, another Lufthansa employee, thought he heard some noise on the ramp. When he opened the door to investigate, a half dozen armed men wearing ski masks pushed into the building, forced him back against a wall, and handcuffed him. The gunmen then took a set of one-of-a-kind magnetic keys from Whalen and walked directly through a maze of corridors into a high-security area, in which they seemed to know exactly where two other Lufthansa employees would be working.

  When those two had been rounded up, two of the gunmen remained downstairs to make sure there were no unexpected visitors to disturb the robbery. The rest of the gang marched the handcuffed employees up three flights to a third-floor lunchroom, where six other employees were on their 3:00 a.m. meal break. The gunmen burst into the lunchroom brandishing their guns and propelling the bloodied Whalen before them as an indication of their seriousness. The gunmen knew each of the employees by name and ordered them to lie on the floor. They asked John Murray, who they knew was the terminal's senior cargo agent, to call the Lufthansa night supervisor, Rudi Eirich, on the intercom. The gunmen knew that Eirich, who was working somewhere else in the vast building, was the only employee on duty that night who had the right keys and combinations to open the double-door vault.

  On the pretext of reporting trouble with a cargo shipment from Frankfurt, Murray asked Eirich to meet him in the cafeteria. As Eirich, who had been employed by Lufthansa for twenty-one years, bounded toward the cafeteria, he was greeted with two shotguns at the top of the stairs. He looked into the cafeteria, not twenty feet away, and saw his employees on the floor with thick plastic tape across their mouths. He was quickly convinced that the gunmen were dangerous, and he decided to cooperate. While one of the gunmen stood guard over the ten bound employees in the cafeteria, the other three hoods took Eirich down two flights of stairs to the vaults. They seemed to know everything. They knew about the double-locked two-door security arrangements in the four-foot-thick cinder-block vault rooms. They knew about the silent wall alarm system inside the safe, and they even cautioned Eirich about accidentally touching it.