Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  "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 girl friend. 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 De-Simone. 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 girl friend, Hope Barren, "… 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 boast all to his girl friend, 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 girl friend'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.

  The FBI, of course, talked to everyone who knew Werner, and just about everyone who knew Werner talked to the FBI. Fischetti, for instance, was so worried that his wife would find out about his affair with Beverly Werner that he agreed to cooperate fully as long as he wasn't interviewed in his own home. For weeks FBI agents met Fischetti in coffee shops and taxicabs, and he told them everything he knew- which was a lot.

  Fischetti had known Werner for years and said that Werner and another Lufthansa cargo worker, Peter Gruenewald, had concocted the plan to rob the airline months before the robbery. Fischetti said the pair had hit upon the scheme after being involved in the theft of twenty-two thousand dollars in foreign currency and deciding that it was foolish to chance getting caught or fired for stealing such a paltry sum. If they were going to take any money from the vault and run the risk of getting caught, it might as well be for at least a million dollars.

  Fischetti said that Werner and Gruenewald then worked for months on their heist, and when their step-by-step blueprint was finished, Gruenewald had the job of shopping it around the airport bars looking for the right men to carry it out. Gruenewald spent months testing one prospective holdup man, a notorious barroom rowdy, but decided against using him when he realized the man wasn't serious enough. When Gruenewald turned out to be much too slow in finding the robbers, Fischetti said, Werner took matters into his own hands and asked his bookmaker, Frank Menna, if he knew of anyone who could carry out the undertaking.

  When the FBI first approached Gruenewald he denied any knowledge of the plan, but agents soon lined up the barroom rowdy Gruenewald had approached for the robbery, as well as Fischetti, as a witness against him. On Friday, February 16, nine weeks after the robbery, agents found that Gruenewald had applied for a standby ticket from New York to Bogota, Colombia, and then on to Taiwan and Japan. Gruenewald said he was on his way to see his estranged wife in Taiwan, where she lived with her family. Gruenewald was arrested and held as a material witness in the Lufthansa case. He decided to cooperate with McDonald in assembling the case against Werner.

  McDonald knew that with the testimony of Gruenewald, Fischetti, Beverly Werner, Janet Barbieri, and Frank Menna he had enough evidence to charge Lou Werner as a participant in the Lufthansa robbery. McDonald had also compiled enough evidence against Angelo Sepe to charge him with the robbery and, more important, to get a warrant to search Sepe's girl friend's Mattituck, Long Island, house and yard for the money. The agents who had been following Sepe for weeks and had been listening to hours of rock music and snippets of conversation were convinced that the money was buried somewhere at Hope Barren's house.

  McDonald's objective was not just to convict Werner but to convince him to cooperate with the feds. Werner had to roll over on the men he hired to do the robbery. But the day Werner was arrested he proved to be tougher than McDonald or any of the agents had thought. He had talked incessantly before his arrest, but he stopped talking once he was in custody. On the night of his arrest, after hours of questioning, Werner continued to insist that he had had nothing whatsoever to do with the robbery. He claimed he had boasted and lied about his role in the heist only because it boosted his ego.

  McDonald decided to confront Werner with his conspirator right there in the Strike Force office. Werner was sitting in a large conference room when Gruenewald and McDonald walked in together. Werner hadn't seen Gruenewald for over a week and he might have assumed that his friend had taken the plane to Bogota and the Orient as planned. Now Werner saw Gruenewald walk in with the prosecutor, and he knew that Gruenewald was cooperating.

  Werner began to tremble. His chest began to heave. McDonald said later that he was afraid that Werner might have a heart attack right there in the office. Gruenewald began methodically to urge his friend to cooperate. "They know everything," Gruenewald said. "Why should you be the only one punished?" If Werner helped with the investigation, he could be guaranteed a walk or probation, especially if he helped McDonald nail the robbers and recover the money. Gruenewald tried. He was very persistent. But Werner insisted that he didn't know what Gruenewald was talking about. He claimed that he was getting a raw deal. He said that if McDonald thought he was guilty, he would have to prove it in court.

  The case against Werner was all that McDonald had. The months of surveillance and eavesdropping had only confirmed his suspicions about Burke and the crew, but they had not provided much evidence. The search of Sepe's girl friend's house and the surrounding property had not turned up the money the FBI had been certain it would find. On May 23, thirty-five days after McDonald had arrested Sepe, he had to drop the charges against him because there was not enough evidence for an indictment. Jimmy and the crew could still be put away for violating parole, but then there would be no way that they might accidentally stumble and either implicate themselves or reveal the whereabouts of the money.

  But far more disturbing, as far as McDonald was concerned, were the reports of murders and disappearances connected with Lufthansa. As McDonald went about assembling the case against Werner, key witnesses began to disappear. On December 18, for instance, just one week after the robbery, Queens police found the body of a s
mall-time black crook named Parnell Steven "Stacks" Edwards, thirty-one, lying under the covers of a bed in his Ozone Park apartment with six.38s in his chest and head. The door to his apartment had not been forced and there were no signs of struggle. The apartment had also been wiped clean of fingerprints. There was money and jewelry strewn around, so the police discounted robbery as a motive. From the casual position of the body it also looked as though the victim knew his killers and had had no reason to think he was in danger.

  On January 14 Tommy DeSimone's wife, Cookie, reported to the police that her husband had disappeared. She said that Tommy had borrowed sixty dollars from her a few weeks earlier, and she hadn't heard from or seen him since. At first the police suspected that Tommy had decided to get lost after he found out that two of the Lufthansa cargo workers had identified him from mug shots as the gunman who had removed his mask during the robbery. But then the word began to come back that Tommy DeSimone was gone forever.

  Three days later, on January 17, the body of a forty-two-year-old hustler and con man named Richard Eaton was discovered in a refrigeration truck that had been abandoned in Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn. The body had been found by children playing inside the abandoned trailers. The hands and legs were tied with wire and the neck was broken. There was some delay in identifying the body since it had been frozen so stiff that it took more than two days to thaw. It was only then, while going through the man's pockets, that police found Jimmy Burke's name and phone number. When a preliminary police investigation revealed that Eaton had occasionally worked as a courier and front man for Jimmy Burke, the city cops took their dossier and went over to see Ed McDonald.