Having police officers in his pockets was an asset many crooks believed Burke had—and shared with his main mob boss Vario, who had his own arsenal of cops to rely on. When needed, Vario could keep cops away from his people.
“Wiseguys like Paulie [Vario] have been paying off the cops for so many years that they probably sent more cops’ kids to college than anybody else. They’re like wiseguy scholarships,” Hill told Pileggi.
Burke’s cop connections were believed to have tipped him off to impending raids and surveillance. In addition, Burke had police connections who could tip him off about informants and people who may have been cooperating with authorities—a security breach that had led to the death in 1969 of Paul Katz after he decided to cooperate with police.
Although New York City had been rocked by numerous revelations about police corruption during the Knapp Commission and witnessed cops getting indicted, in the cases of the Gold Bug it wasn’t easy to make a case stick. As for detective Cuomo, the court would eventually dismiss the indictment after it appeared that he didn’t know anything about what his fellow officer had done in asking for an alleged bribe. The dispostion of Caccia’s case couldn’t be found.
Still, Vario didn’t need the bad publicity and trouble Gold was causing him, particularly after he had been jailed for nine months in 1970 on contempt charges in what was a continuing war with Nassau District Attorney William Cahn. He also had to face hijacking charges, and the IRS was also beginning to focus on all the money he netted from gambling. On top of everything, Vario’s marriage was on the rocks and he was now out of his Deer Park home and living next door to Geffken’s Bar.
The day he was arrested, the fifty-eight-year-old Vario led detectives on a car chase through Brooklyn as he tried to elude them without success. While the charges against both Varios stemmed from the Gold Bug surveillance, they actually related to an alleged attempt to corrupt a Nassau County jail guard. The elder Vario was charged with witness tampering while his son Paul was indicted for perjury after he said he couldn’t recall meeting a jail guard at Geffken’s.
About two weeks after he led detectives on a merry chase through Brooklyn, Paul Vario was again indicted from evidence secured by the Gold Bug. This time the charges involved insurance fraud and grand larceny. Gold also stitched together yet another charge based on the trailer surveillance and the undercover work of detective LeVien. Vario was charged with conspiracy, bribery, and rewarding official misconduct for the several hundred dollars in payments LeVien received while posing as a crooked cop.
While Vario was getting hammered with multiple indictments, his close associates Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill found themselves facing their own serious trouble. It all stemmed from a vacation trip the two made to Tampa, paid for by a union for culinary workers at JFK. Burke and Hill visited a Tampa bar and club with a union friend Casey Rosado who promptly got into a heated argument with a man he said owed him money. The argument became physical and Burke and Hill jumped into the fray, with Burke grabbing John Ciacco, the man arguing with Rosado, and Hill beating him with a revolver. Ciacco was pretty bloodied but in the end agreed to pay his share of what he owed Rosado.
Hill said the whole affray seemed like nothing more than a family dispute. After cleaning up Ciacco, Hill and Burke resumed having a good time for the rest of the trip.
“That was it. Case closed. No big deal,” remembered Hill.
It turns out it was a matter of the case being opened. Ciacco had a sister who worked as typist for the FBI in Tampa and when she saw how injured her brother was she told the agents she worked for. The woman told the FBI about Hill and Burke, the gun, the beating, and everything. With so many people having witnessed the fighting, the agents were able to make a case and had the FBI office in New York arrest Hill and Burke for extortion, playing it up as a major organized-crime case. A trial took place in Tampa and on November 3, 1972, Burke and Hill were quickly found guilty. They would get ten-year sentences in a federal prison but were able to stay free while they appealed their convictions.
Burke and Hill, operating out of Robert’s Lounge and The Suite, continued to do business as usual. They ran credit-card schemes, sold stolen hijacked truckloads of goods and commiserated with Vario, who at this point was feeling under siege and considered by some a pariah. In fact, law enforcement was feeling good about itself because for the first time in years it seemed like the Mafia was on the ropes. After years of inattention to the Mob, the FBI was making an effort to target Mafiosi and the city district attorneys like Gold, Frank Hogan in Manhattan, and Burton Roberts in the Bronx were putting more people on organized crime cases. Quoting unidentified law-enforcement and underworld sources, the New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage penned an article in December 1972 that was headlined “Gambino Believed Seeking Single Mafia Family,” about an amazing plan by Gambino crime boss Carlo Gambino to consolidate the Five Families into one group.
“Gambino was said to maintain that growing law enforcement pressure and persistent internal conflicts would destroy the five families here unless they were restructured into a tighter and stronger network,” wrote Gage.
Part of the problem for Gambino, according to Gage, was that some of the Mafia families had lost their leaders through death: Thomas Lucchese, Joseph Profaci, and Vito Genovese. The result was that some of the families had become weak and undisciplined, and their members had grown careless. In particular, the Lucchese outfit had not only lost the political connections of its namesake but had become marred by the Gold Bug, which The Times said was a low point, especially for Vario, the man considered to be one of the family’s important members.
Gambino also believed the crime families had grown too large with too many impulsive younger members. He wanted to expel hundreds of Mafia members who had shown weaknesses that made them a risk to the security or stability of the crime families, wrote Gage. Gambino feared, said Gage, that some mobsters had become soft and vulnerable to law-enforcement pressure which would make them become informants.
The problems Gambino perceived were real, and his predictions were prescient. He had no further to look than the activities of the Lucchese family where Vario, despite his cautious approach to doing business, had been played for a fool by Gold and his staff with the installation of the bugging device. Vario’s reliance on men like Burke and Hill was also proving to be misplaced as they in turn associated with impulsive men like Thomas DeSimone and others targeted by the FBI. Burke was also a man with a homicidal streak, and his propensity for violence drew the attention of police and had already landed him and Hill in trouble.
The audacious plan ascribed to Gambino in late 1972 never came to be fulfilled as the five Mafia families went on to endure, with different levels of success. By early 1973, Vario himself had his hands full with problems. His many gambling arrests had finally led the IRS to charge him in mid-1972 with evading taxes on an indeterminate amount of gambling income in 1965 and 1966 while running a numbers operation in Inwood and Atlantic Beach on Long Island. Vario and his associate Steven DePasquale were charged with being “bankers,” the men who were responsible for overseeing the computation of all bets and financing the operation.
Federal agents built the case against Vario and DePasquale by sending in undercover agents who ingratiated themselves as numbers runners or other operatives with the numbers operation doing business in the St. Albans area of Queens. The agents testified, as did a number of people who worked for the business. Then, Vario himself took the witness stand and under questioning by his attorney denied what other witnesses had said, particularly about his having taken a paper bag full of gambling cash and putting it in a desk at a social club on Long Island. Vario had to admit on the witness stand that he had pleaded guilty to an earlier charge of gambling conspiracy but said he only did that to go along with a plea bargain worked out by his lawyer. Otherwise, said Vario, he wasn’t guilty.
The Brooklyn federal court jury thought otherwise about Vario and convicted him of
evading taxes for a two-year period. In April 1973, Vario was sentenced to a total of six years in prison and fined $20,000. For prison, Vario was sent to Lewisburg Penitentiary, considered a high-security prison in Pennsylvania and about two hundred miles from New York City. As it turned out, Lewisburg was a Mafia social club. Doing time in the prison along with Vario were John “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi, a Lucchese family labor racketeer, and Vinny Aloi, a key leader of the Colombo crime family after family boss Joe Colombo had been put in a coma after being shot in 1971. Added to the mix was Henry Hill, who began serving his sentence for the Tampa extortion in 1974. Jimmy Burke had to serve his time in a different prison.
Life in prison for Vario and the other Mafiosi, as well as favored associates like Hill, was different from what the regular inmates experienced. The gangsters had food and liquor smuggled in with the help of pliant guards and cooked in their own rooms in special areas. A memorable scene in Goodfellas showed the mobsters cooking Italian dinners, with Dio using a razor blade to thinly slice garlic for the sauce.
“It was wild. There was wine and booze,” Hill recalled. “Looking back, I don’t think Paulie [Vario] went to the general mess five times in the two and a half years he was there. We had a stove and pots and pans and silverware stacked in the bathroom. We had glasses and an ice-water cooler where we kept the fresh meats and cheeses.”
Although he was besieged by numerous investigations, Vario wasn’t afraid to put up a legal fight. After he was convicted in the Gold Bug case for giving money to a cop, Vario’s attorney Joel Winograd appealed and argued that there was never any proof that undercover cop Doug LeVien had actually been given any cash by Vario. In fact, during the trial LeVien admitted that prosecutors had never tested the cash allegedly given by Vario to his associate Clyde Brooks [serving as an intermediary in the bribe] to see if Vario’s fingerprints were on the money. It was an embarrassing lapse in police procedure, and the appellate court used it to reverse Vario’s conviction as well as that of Brooks.
The day he learned of the decision overturning the conviction, Winograd showed up at Geffken’s and found Vario, who had been freed from his federal tax prison sentence, hanging out wearing an undershirt and trousers. Vario was one of the older, working-class Mafiosi who didn’t find it necessary to impress people by being well dressed. Winograd played coy and told Vario he wanted to have a drink with him so the mobster ordered two whiskeys from the bar.
“What this all about?” asked Vario quizzically of his lawyer.
“I wanted to toast you and celebrate because,” and here Winograd paused for dramatic effect, “your conviction was just overturned.”
With that, Vario lumbered up out of his chair and embraced Winograd. That night at Geffken’s there were drinks all around. The decision effectively meant Vario wouldn’t have to face the prospect of another prison term—at least for the foreseeable future.
By mid-1978, Vario, Hill, and Burke where either out of prison, or in Burke’s case, completing the rest of the sentence at a half-way facility in Manhattan. Yet the Mafia they were coming back to in 1978 was different than it was when they all went to prison. The Lucchese family had gone through upheaval with the death of its namesake, Thomas Lucchese, in 1967, and his successor Tramunti was taken off the street in 1973 after being convicted in a federal heroin case. Tramunti died in prison in October 1978, and the leadership of the family remained in flux, although Vario was still considered consiglieri. Carlo Gambino, the most respected and powerful of the Five Family bosses had also died in 1976 of natural causes and was succeeded by his cousin Paul Castellano.
In the Bonanno family, which had criminal interests in the airport, upstart Carmine Galante had tried to bully his way to the leadership position with the help of Sicilian gangsters. However, the official boss Philip Rastelli still had considerable backing, particularly from a group led by Massino, a newly made Mafia member who had a hijacking racket that rivaled Burke’s operation. For the Genovese family, the acting boss was Frank Tieri, the latest in a line of successors who took over as leader after the murder or incarceration of other candidates like Thomas Eboli and Gerardo Catena. For the Colombo family, considered the weakest of the Five Families, Vincent Aloi had become the boss. Aloi’s family had seen its power diminish since namesake Joseph Colombo was paralyzed in a 1971 shooting and died in May 1978.
To ease the transition from prison, Burke would have a legitimate job during the day and at night would have to report back to the facility. The idea was for inmates like Burke to get acclimatized back into civilian life and hopefully lead law-abiding lives. But there was no way a man like Burke, who had grown up scheming, stealing, and killing, would change into anything other than a criminal. Hill also couldn’t leave the criminal life, and said that after Lewisburg he got into drug dealing to catch up on the money he couldn’t make while he had been in prison. Vario, now sixty-four years old, had to be careful about what he did but knew that there was still money to be made on the street. All three were hungry and eager for a big score—if the opportunity came along.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I GOT A COUPLE OF MILLION”
THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA for the Lufthansa heist came not from Paul Vario or Jimmy Burke but rather from the desperation and greed of Louis Werner, a man who couldn’t be trusted. He had been working for over a decade at the Lufthansa Airlines cargo operation at JFK, and his personal life story read like a low-rent version of Peyton Place. His marriage to Beverly—who was sleeping with his good friend William Fischetti—was on the rocks, and he was spending money like water on a new girlfriend. Plus, Werner gambled and was into his bookie for thousands of dollars. That was a debt that had to be paid. He was also behind in child-support payments.
Entrusted with the oversight of high-value cargo such as cash and jewels, Werner didn’t care about such lofty things as his fiduciary duty. If Werner saw an opportunity for thievery, he took it. He was the kind of risky, dishonest airport employee with money pressures who Robert Cudak had told congressional investigators years early could easily be compromised and help make JFK easy pickings for the Mafia.
It was October 8, 1976, when Lufthansa flight 493 from Quito, Ecuador, arrived at JFK with a special sealed bag containing currency. Banks and foreign-exchange operations often sent cash by airline back to New York City and had the money placed in high-value bags that got special handling and were secured by a chain around the bag. This particular shipment from Quito contained the equivalent of $22,000 in currency: Italian lira, Belgian and French francs, Canadian and American dollars, Swedish kronor. The bag was placed in a special high-value room and Lufthansa employees noticed the security chain was still intact. Things seemed to be in order.
The next day, October 9, when the bag was checked, it was discovered that the currency was all gone. Suspicion immediately fell on Werner since it was his job to meet incoming flights, and he knew the contents of the bag from the airline manifest and other documents. He also had lied to his boss when he said there was no valuable cargo on the flight. But without video surveillance evidence or anything more concrete linking him to the theft, Werner wasn’t arrested.
Of course, Werner had taken the money and within a few days took it all to Gruenewald who offered to exchange it but keep it buried in his backyard until the heat of the investigation cooled off. But after becoming increasingly paranoid, Werner took the cash back from Gruenewald, paid him $5,000 for his troubles and then asked another friend, Bill Fischetti, to help make the currency exchange. Fischetti was an old gambling and bowling buddy of Werner, both frequented Falcaro’s Bowling Alley in the town of Lawrence in Nassau, a popular sports venue run by champion bowler Joe Falcaro who notched over sixty-five perfect games in his career. Fischetti made several trips to Manhattan where he exchanged the foreign currency into dollars.
Werner was never fired from Lufthansa after the disappearance of the Quito shipment of currency. Instead he was assigned to work in the cargo area of the airlin
es in a large warehouse bearing the number 261. It was one of those events, combining with so many other things, some quite by chance, that would later come together in the big heist. The facility had a valuable-property room, which had been made more physically secure with the building of a cinderblock wall and the installation of alarm systems. Werner had the run of the place. He knew the alarm system, and every day knew what was going in and out of the secure room.
Gruenewald and Werner still kept their friendship alive. In fact, Werner needed friends because after getting away with the Quito currency caper he felt emboldened about targeting bigger money shipments, maybe even diamonds, something that could make him big money and take care of all of his problems. In 1978, he told Fischetti they could do something big. The best time was in the cold weather, when his heavy winter coat would make it easy for Werner to hide a package of jewels and walk out of the cargo area without being detected.
The Owl Tavern on New York Boulevard [now known as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard] was one of many bars and dives around JFK, the kinds of places airport workers, cargo brokers, and mobsters would frequent. These were joints where connections could be made, big scores dreamed up, and conspiracies of all kinds hatched. Even if you were down on your luck, The Owl was a place any aspiring thief could try and get someone to buy them a drink.
It was early August 1978 that Brian Weremeychik, a Lufthansa worker who was a little short of cash stopped by The Owl. He spotted Gruenewald, who looked like a guy who could spot him a quick loan. Maybe $5 or $10? Gruenewald leaned over and said don’t worry about a few bucks—“I got a couple of million more.” Weremeychik laughed because he didn’t believe him. Gruenewald wasn’t kidding, and said he could take it out of Lufthansa, “his place,” as he called it, where gold and diamonds were plentiful. Now, Weremeychik knew he wasn’t messing around.
The Big Heist Page 8
