“I was so sure I would die that my body went completely limp causing me to urinate into my long johns,” wrote Whalen.
While Whalen may have thought that his co-workers inside the cargo building were oblivious to his plight, they were facing their own moment of horror at the hands of some other armed assailants.
Senior Lufthansa cargo agent John Murray was working the midnight to 7:00 A.M. shift and normally would take his lunch break at 3:00 A.M. But since there was little work to do Murray let his co-worker go to lunch and decided to catnap at his desk at about 3:08 A.M. He had hardly closed his eyes when he sensed something going on behind him.
“I turned around and I saw four people,” Murray remembered later. “Three of them with guns and the fourth disappeared on the other side of the office.”
Murray was about to get up out of his chair when the armed group rushed up to him and pushed him back into his seat, telling him, “Don’t move, don’t do anything stupid.”
Asked where the rest of the employees were, Murray told the gunmen they were in the lunchroom. Two of the men left while the other two robbers roughed up Murray, first putting him on the floor, then placing him back in the chair and handcuffing him. Then they grabbed Murray by his arms and took him to the lunchroom, telling him to keep his head down and not to look at anybody.
Inside the lunchroom, Murray noticed some of his fellow employees on the floor. He was then told to lay down on the floor. Sensing or knowing Murray was a key man in the cargo building, the gunmen asked him to call the other supervisor. The robbers already knew, thanks to the inside information provided by Werner, that someone like the Lufthansa supervisor knew the protocol for opening the doors to the secure valuables room without tripping the alarms. The thieves needed Murray to call the supervisor back upstairs where everyone was so he could be forced to open the alarmed room. One of the armed men told Murray to make the call and to be convincing or else they would blow his head off.
Murray’s mouth was dry from fear and he asked for a drink of water. One of the men gave him something to drink. Able to relax, Murray called the supervisor, a man named Rudy, and gave him a false story about a call coming in from Germany that he had to take.
Tricked by the call, Rudy came upstairs and was jumped by two of the robbers. One of the attackers took Rudy’s wallet and glanced through it telling him they now knew where he lived and threatened him with a shotgun before taking him away. Murray couldn’t see where Rudy went but it turned out he was taken by the robbers to the valuables room where he was forced to help the thieves open the locked doors in the right sequence so as not to trigger the alarms. Because of Werner’s information, the group knew that the two doors could never both be opened at the same time. If they were, a silent alarm would alert Port Authority police who would show up in force. The robbers told the frightened cargo workers, who had been herded into the lunchroom, to stay down if they heard any gunshots.
Twenty minutes passed. The two robbers guarding the workers asked some of them for their car keys. One of the gunmen tried to calm Murray and the others, again offering some water. It was then that Rudy was brought back and the entire group of Lufthansa employees were tied up with rope and handcuffs.
In those twenty minutes, with Rudy’s coerced assistance, the Lufthansa heist crew had taken forty boxes of U.S. currency, each about sixteen inches long and containing $125,000, for a total of $5 million. DeSimone unceremoniously opened the first box by smashing it with his foot and reaching into it to pull out cash, exclaiming, “This is it!” The boxes of cash were thrown into the dark van, which at that point had been driven into the cargo building. There was some jewelry too, worth about $850,000, that was taken. Burke knew what to do with the jewels: Paul Vario had a small stash of precious stones in his Long Island home, and there were plenty of fences for hot stuff in the diamond businesses along Canal Street in Chinatown. The robbers knew where to drive, thanks to Werner’s floor plan.
Whalen had also been brought into the room and he was definitely the worse for wear. His face was bloodied from the beating he received. With Whalen and the other Lufthansa cargo workers all shackled, the robbers left. Murray waited about ten minutes and managed to untie the rope that had bound him. Murray then made his way to a telephone and called the police.
Port Authority cops reached the Lufthansa cargo terminal at about 4:30 A.M., which would have been about twenty-five minutes to a half hour after Murray made his call for help. The van with the thieves had that much of a head start, and none of the airport guards saw or stopped the van. It is possible that Port Authority officials may have even passed the van and the robbers somewhere along the roads leading to the airport. After getting notified, the Port Authority contacted both the FBI and the 1134th Precinct of the NYPD, which encompassed JFK. Port Authority cops got two markedly different reactions to those calls. The FBI responded immediately. But, according to a later report in Newsday, the precinct replied that the local cops were interested just in “bombs, bodies and sex cases” and that the Port Authority could have everything else, or something to that effect.
The fragmented response of law enforcement to the initial report of the biggest armed robbery in American history was something that would haunt the investigation for years to come. While the Port Authority and the FBI responded quickly, the NYPD seemed to have been on the sidelines. Even the precinct commander is said to have learned of the heist while Christmas shopping later on the morning of December 11. Eventually, law enforcement worked out cooperation, with the FBI leading the main investigation. But one local official, newly elected Queens District Attorney John Santucci, was briefly shunted to the side. (Santucci had been appointed district attorney in December 1976 after his predecessor left for a judgeship, and he won the follow-up election for the job in November 1977.)
Some federal officials were concerned that Santucci, a very popular and political prosecutor, had a tendency to showboat, to seek out publicity whenever he could. Less than nine months before the heist, Santucci had castigated the FBI during a news conference for its handling of cargo theft at JFK, saying federal authorities and others in law enforcement had been deceptive in trying to portray the airport as a “Garden of Eden” free of crime.
“We’ve had difficulty with the FBI,” Santucci told reporters during the unveiling of stock- and cargo-hijacking cases involving airport shipments. “What concerns me greatly is that at every meeting we’re told that Kennedy Airport is a ‘Garden of Eden.’ Nobody cooperates in these investigations. If I want to fandango I go to a dance, not to meetings with these law enforcement officials.”
Based on recent history and what thieves like Robert Cudak had said a few years earlier to Congress, Santucci wasn’t entirely off base with his criticism. True, the FBI had agents working the airport and making some cases. But hijackers and internal thieves like those connected to the mob and Jimmy Burke plagued the airport. Santucci also touched on another problem: labor unions, shipping agents, and airlines that failed to report thefts.
While he was only sworn in as district attorney in January of 1978, Santucci inherited a problem that had been whispered about for years concerning his office. Some in law enforcement believed that in the 1970s Burke had his hooks into Queens cops and others working for the Queens District Attorney’s Office. In Wiseguys, Hill recounted to Pileggi the claim that Burke had sources of information which could tip him off to investigations. (This particular issue is fleshed out at different points in this book concerning the disappearance of Paul Katz.) Whether those allegations were true or not didn’t matter since it cast a pall over Santucci’s office and may have been the unspoken justification for the FBI attempting to keep the local prosecutor at bay.
But since the airport was within Santucci’s jurisdiction, as well as that of the NYPD, it was difficult to keep him or the police out of the case. It would take weeks of meetings and bureaucratic arm wrestling between the FBI, Port Authority, and New York City officials before it
was decided that the federal authorities should try to make the case. Regardless of the turf battles that would develop in the Lufthansa case, investigators had a good idea within hours of the discovery of the robbery who pulled off the job. All signs pointed to Burke and his motley band at Robert’s Lounge. But it was one thing to have gut feelings, even when supported by information from a confidential informant, about who took part in the heist. It would be something entirely different to prove it with sufficient evidence, the kind that would justify an arrest and then take the case before a jury. As investigators soon found out, it would be a tough road to make a case.
The day after the robbery, the newspapers in New York had a field day with the story. The Daily News front page focused on the suspicion that the crime was an inside job, blaring with a headline “Red Baron Ripped Off: Inside Job Seen in $5M JFK Heist.” One of the suspects was described as having a “Zapata-style” mustache, an apparent reference to DeSimone. A composite police sketch of two suspects, including the mustache man, was also included. The article said lie-detector tests were going to be given to all of the Lufthansa employees because investigators were convinced the crime was an inside job “possibly ordered by organized crime.”
There was initially some confusion on the amount of money stolen. The first reports told of $3 million. But by December 14, The New York Times reported that officials at Chase Manhattan Bank, the intended recipient of the money shipped by West German Commerzbank, said the shipment might have been as much as $7 million, a figure that was later knocked down after an audit to $5 million. Inclusion of the jewelry, as well as some West German marks, would boost the total to $5.8 million and then even higher to about $6.25 million. Oddly, the shipment’s declared value for customs purposes was about $49,000 in West German marks, a number derived from the weight of the cash shipment of 220 pounds, the Times reported. In West Germany, the reaction among bankers was said to be one of anger and distress: “My God, you lost millions,” was one exclamation. The loss was substantial, but as one German banker noted to the newspaper the shipment was insured.
The New York Post coverage featured the logo of “Great Plane Robbery,” a takeoff on the Great Train Robbery moniker given the 1963 heist of the Royal Mail train in Britain. An FBI source was quoted as saying the Lufthansa employees present the night of the crime were all “horribly in fear of their lives.” No more so, it seems, than Kerry Whalen whose name was bandied about in many news accounts as having got a good look at two of the suspects. The leak of Whalen’s name and the way he was treated by some in law enforcement, notably the FBI and federal prosecutors, would become a long-standing source of resentment for him, which would resurface years later.
As crafty as the robbers were, they made a couple of mistakes, which gave police some early leads. Some of them had removed their ski masks and exposed their faces to the Lufthansa employees, a move that would help police sketch artists. One of the employees also remembered the license plate on the black van, which as it turned out happened to have been stolen about eight hours before the heist. The witness recalled the plate reading “508 HWM.”
The 1977 Ford Econoline vehicle, which had been illegally parked in front of 528 E.95th Street in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn had been ticketed two or three times by cops or parking-enforcement agents. But on December 13, 1978, a civilian had noticed the license plate and telephoned police and it was NYPD officer Joseph Rossi, on night duty, who remembered having issued one of those tickets
“I remembered that number,” Rossi said later. “I called the station house and my command. They got people over there quickly and it turned out to be the wanted van.”
Rossi was one of the first cops on the scene, and detectives arrived and started dusting the vehicle for fingerprints, finding some on the bumper, the door, and mudguard. The prints from the mudguard were considered important because Kerry Whalen had recalled that the man who pistol whipped him had grabbed the car at the point of the mudguard with an ungloved hand during the attack. Inside the van, police also found a leather glove and some pieces of paper. More fingerprints were also taken from the wallet one of the suspects removed from Whalen’s pocket. As Whalen remembered, the assailant looked at his name and address, remarking that if there were any problems they knew where to find him.
The recovery of the van and fingerprints were the first big breaks in a case that was fast consuming the investigative efforts of numerous law-enforcement agencies. While the money and jewels were nowhere to be found, it seemed as though Burke’s crew had made a number of blunders, not the least of which was the careless leaving of the black van on the Brooklyn street. They also left a number of fingerprints and although this was the era before digital fingerprint analysis was in vogue, the prints could eventually help winnow down the suspects. Catching them would be the challenge.
CHAPTER TEN
THE FRIENDS WHO HURT YOU
PAUL VARIO’S FAVORITE FAST FOOD was a White Castle hamburger. He could eat bags of the tiny, square patties, known in the business as “sliders,” the burgers with the little holes. There weren’t a lot of White Castle restaurants in New York City, but Vario could find a few in Queens or in the Bronx.
On one particular day in late 1978, a few weeks before the Lufthansa heist, it wasn’t a White Castle that Vario visited but rather a McDonald’s on Rockaway Boulevard, not far from JFK. The trip was not for food. An FBI agent named Robert Levinson had contacted the aging mobster through his attorney Joel Winograd and requested a private meeting. The three men sat around a table and Levinson, an agent working organized crime, had something that he said Vario needed to hear.
“We believe your life is in danger,” said Levinson.
The FBI often would pick up indications through wiretaps or other means that someone in the mob life might be in danger of being killed. Hits were the way the Mafia policed and protected itself. Sometimes the transgressions were severe enough—like striking or killing a made member—that death was almost a certainty. Other times the reasons were trivial, perhaps nothing more than a perceived slight or sign of disrespect. Each of the Five Families had also gone through periods of warfare, such as the Gallo-Profaci war, which littered the streets of Brooklyn with bodies in the 1960s. The mob life had its risks and everybody in it knew that. Very often the victim was a close friend who had set him up for the kill. There was a saying that only your friend could hurt you and Mafiosi had sometimes gone to their deaths in the company of those who were the people they trusted.
* * *
In Vario’s case, there were undoubtedly those in the Mafia who believed he had betrayed them by being so indiscrete with the Gold Bug case. Vario didn’t open the door for the police and invite them in, but he had been outwitted by the detectives from Gold’s office who were able to penetrate the security at the junkyard so ingeniously. As a result, hundreds of Mafiosi and associates had been subpoenaed or otherwise harassed by prosecutors. Some were even arrested and charged based on what the bugging device picked up from conversations in Vario’s office.
Levinson’s motive in telling Vario that he was in danger was a calculated move. The FBI appeared to be trying to get Vario to switch sides out of fear. It was a classic law-enforcement ploy and sometimes it worked. But not with Vario. He looked at Winograd and then spoke the only words he would say in the brief meeting.
“Thank you very much,” said Vario, as he placed his hands on the table and stood up. Both he and Winograd left the restaurant and drove away. Levinson came away empty-handed.
How serious was the threat against Vario? Decades later it was hard to say for certain. Levinson disappeared in 2007 while on a visit to Iran’s Kish Island where he was working as a private investigator for some companies. He is believed to still be alive. But for some of those involved in the Vario crew and the Lufthansa heist death came quickly, before they even got hands on their share of the loot.
* * *
Parnell Edwards loved hanging around Robert’s L
ounge. He was a credit-card thief, just like Hill was at times, and found he could move hot cards through Burke’s operation at Lefferts Boulevard. Edwards liked being linked to the Mafia, which he called “May-fia” but could never become a made member because he was African-American. For the Lufthansa heist Edwards had a relatively simple task: get rid of the black van.
The job was easy enough, but Edwards didn’t see the urgency and thought it better to spend a night with his girlfriend without paying attention to parking regulations. After the Lufthansa robbers left the van in Brooklyn, Edwards parked it on the street where NYPD officer Rossi ticketed it and later identified it as the vehicle being sought after. The cops were able to lift prints from it and naturally had important bits of evidence—all thanks to Edwards’s screwup. FBI agents also showed up and collected some heavy wrapping paper that had been on the interior floor of the van and contained footprints of Nike athletic shoes.
On December 18, 1978, police discovered Edwards’s body in the bed of his Ozone Park apartment at 109-16 120th Street. He had been shot at least six times in the head and body. Immediate suspicion about who the killer was turned to DeSimone, who had no qualms about slaying anybody, particularly if Burke needed the work done.
The conventional wisdom has been that Edwards was killed because he messed up on the van disposal, something that didn’t put him in good stead. But Hill would later tell investigators that Edwards made another terrible gaffe right after the robbery during a Christmas party held at a dress factory Burke had next door to Robert’s Lounge. The gathering included Paul Vario, Burke, Hill, DeSimone, Sepe, and others. Edwards shot his mouth off at the party, saying words to the effect that all the “whitey motherfuckers” had made so much money from the airport that they should give him some. Vario was appalled to hear Edwards mouth off in such a way about the heist and turned red with anger, said Hill. Something had to be done.
The Big Heist Page 10
