The day Werner was convicted, a couple of other members of the robbery team also got their comeuppance from a different kind of jury. On the afternoon of May 16 in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn a group of teenage boys noticed a two-door 1973 Buick parked by 2085 Schenectady Avenue, close to the intersection with Avenue M. The car wasn’t going anywhere and neither were the two men inside on the front seat. Dead with gunshot wounds to the head were Joseph Manri and Robert McMahon.
As Hill would later tell investigators, Manri and McMahon had been lured to the spot in Brooklyn by Paolo Licastri. During a meeting at a motel, Licastri admitted that he killed his two associates, felt bad about doing so but had to do it, according to Hill.
Manri was the man who had met with Werner to talk about the prospect for robbing the Lufthansa terminal. Manri dutifully reported back to Burke that Werner’s idea seemed like a good one. McMahon was the Air France cargo supervisor who had participated with DeSimone and Henry Hill in the 1967 theft from McMahon’s employer of $430,000, the dry run of sorts for the big Lufthansa heist. McMahon also liked to hang around Robert’s Lounge and made himself useful by tipping off Burke’s gang about cargo shipments.
In the Mafia, cleaning house by killing off your friends was one way of assuring that they wouldn’t fold up and cooperate with law enforcement. Manri seemed particularly vulnerable to turning into a cooperator because he faced going to trial on an unrelated robbery case, and if he decided to become an informant there was no telling what he would say and who he would give up to save his own skin. In fact, FBI agents had approached Manri’s lawyer to dangle the prospect of cooperation. Burke, seeing which way the wind was blowing in the Werner case, must have sensed that he had to take drastic action to protect himself. The result was that Manri and McMahon had outlived their usefulness. Death in the Buick was their reward.
When he was sentenced on June 29, Judge Costantino gave Werner—whom he mistakenly at one point referred to as “Gruenewald”—the opportunity to speak. Werner finally took his last chance to publicly proclaim his innocence.
“I only have to say that I am innocent, your honor,” said Werner. “I saw four men come in here who admitted planning the whole robbery and walk out of here with immunity. I don’t understand. I don’t understand that system.”
Costantino made note that Werner knew each of the men and seemed a little incredulous that he proclaimed not to know Fischetti, whom he bowled with. Costantino had heard enough and told Werner that the jury had found him guilty.
McDonald reminded Costantino that the robbery, where Whalen had been pistol whipped, could have turned out to be much worse with a bunch of armed men. Had the alarm not been deactivated properly and had the Port Authority police showed up there could have been a gunfight and a slaughter of some of the Lufthansa workers, emphasized McDonald. Costantino took up McDonald’s point and agreed that it was lucky nothing worse happened.
“When they were armed with whatever they had that evening, it is a stroke of luck that someone didn’t use bad discretion and get themselves hurt,” observed Costantino.
Werner got a maximum of fifteen years in prison with fines totaling $25,000. He also owed the Lufthansa federal credit union money for an outstanding loan although it was doubtful he would be able to pay it back. Using a strange argument, Werner appealed his conviction, in part on the grounds that it was wrong for him to be tried on both the 1976 and 1978 crimes together. He contended that if there had been separate trials that he would have testified in the Lufthansa trial. Such a claim by Werner left the appeals court justices scratching their heads: they couldn’t fathom what he meant and why they should give any credence to what he said. On February 28, 1980, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed Werner’s conviction.
With no chance of parole for five years, Werner decided to cooperate with McDonald and the FBI. It was his best shot at getting out of prison, and later, in at least two bids to get his sentence reduced, Werner raised the fact that he had helped law enforcement. In a filing with the U.S. Parole Commission, Werner said that if he did get out of prison he would be placed in the witness protection program. He then finally admitted playing a role in the robbery.
“I was not involved in the actual robbery but only gave out the information to the wrong people,” Werner said to the commission.
Word finally leaked out that Werner was cooperating, which was hardly a surprise given his predicament. But Werner’s connection to the Burke crew was through Martin Krugman and Joe Manri, both of whom were now dead and outside the reach of the law. As a result, Werner didn’t have much to offer in terms of choice targets for McDonald. However, Henry Hill just might.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DEAD FELLAS . . . AND GALS
HENRY HILL DIDN’T RIDE ALONG with Jimmy Burke’s gang the night of the Lufthansa heist. While he had sat in on some of Burke’s planning sessions, there was a feeling among the crew that he shouldn’t be involved in the robbery. Hill had just been released from prison and was being careful about what he got involved in. But not too careful as it turned out. Since leaving Lewisburg prison, Hill was fully involved in moving shipments of drugs, mostly cocaine with some heroin. It was his way to make money fast after years behind bars. Henry always had to do things quickly to make a score since his life was very unpredictable.
Drugs were the fast way to make big money, and if truth be told there were many in the Mafia who were involved. The old myth was that the Commission had banned drug dealing under penalty of death. But while that was taken seriously by some in the Five Families, there were many violators of the edict. However, Paul Vario was one who appeared to toe the line. He had seen how his boss Tramunti, simply by waving his hand, had been implicated in a heroin case and sent to prison, where he would stay. Had Vario known about Hill’s drug operation it could have been curtains for the mob associate. But as long as Hill didn’t get caught, things were going well.
Then, in 1980, Henry Hill got his comeuppance. A nineteen-year-old Long Island kid, a former high school football player, was arrested by Nassau County police for making multiple sales of Quaaludes. The cops had an airtight case, and the teenager knew it, so he offered to work as an informant for them, wetting the detectives interest with information that he knew of a drug ring run by a mob associate out of Rockville Center. It was a narcotics operation tied into the Lucchese family and Vario through Henry Hill. The detectives used their new find as an informant and over a period of weeks, in cooperation with the NYPD and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office put Hill under the microscope, tapped his home telephone, and placed him under surveillance for two months.
In April 1980, Hill was busted on the drug charges out in Nassau County, and officials there alerted McDonald about the fact that they had someone in custody who was very close to organized crime. The federal prosecutor sensed that Hill could be a big break in the case, which, since Werner’s conviction, had really gone nowhere. Added to the problems was the fact that a number of people involved—Krugman, DeSimone, Manri, McMahon—had wound up dead or missing. Their absence removed potential stepping stones to the real Mafia bosses involved. Hill had been able to move between various mob factions with ease and had been very close to Burke, the man who orchestrated the heist.
Hill knew, based on the wiretap evidence and other materials that he was not going to beat the case. The informant turned out to be Bobby Germaine Junior, the son of Bobby Germaine Senior, an associate of Hill. His only hope to escape jail was to cooperate. Cooperation also seemed more and more with each passing day the only way for him to stay alive. The disappearance of Krugman and DeSimone, and the murders of Manri and McMahon weren’t the only victims in the aftermath of Lufthansa. No one who had been close to Burke or did business with him seemed safe. Barely a month after Manri and McMahon were gunned down, Paolo Licastri was found dead in a field in south Brooklyn. Then there was the case of the attractive hairdresser from Long Island.
Theresa
Ferrara was a pretty, dark-haired woman who worked in a small beauty salon in the Long Island town of Bellmore. Some said she had aspirations of being an actress and model, although her close friend and niece Maria Sanacore Stewart discounted that story. With her movie-star looks, Theresa could have done more with her life. But in the meantime, she cut hair. Having grown up in Ozone Park, Ferrara gravitated as a young adult back to the neighborhood and rented an apartment in the home of Thomas DeSimone’s mother, a situation that gave rise to rumors that she became the mob associate’s mistress. If Ferrara was involved with DeSimone, she may have learned something about the heist, and once he disappeared in January 1979 may have gone to the FBI.
Nothing was very clear about Ferrara and the life she led. But the known facts show that on February 10, 1979, about a month after DeSimone had disappeared, Ferrara received a telephone call from a man her niece Maria remembered was either “Kenny” or “Kevin” at the Apple Haircutting Associates salon. Theresa told her niece she had to go next door to a diner to meet someone and that she might be making an easy $10,000. She also said that if she didn’t return in ten minutes to come and fetch her. According to news accounts, Ferrara never got to the diner and disappeared.
In May of that year, a headless and limbless torso of a woman washed up at Barnegat Bay on the New Jersey shore, some sixty miles from the south shore of Long Island and Queens. Whoever dismembered the body had tried to shield the victim’s identity by severing the head, arms, and legs. But X-rays of the torso revealed skeletal and anatomical features that proved to the medical examiner that the remains were those of Ferrara. The torso also had remnants of underwear of the type the missing woman wore.
Was Ferrara’s death tied to the Lufthansa case? No one is certain. She liked the fast night life and the men who were part of it. Mob characters attracted her and if she was the girlfriend of DeSimone as some speculated, well that was the kind of company that could get her killed.
Another woman connected to the Lufthansa crowd disappeared: Joanne Cafora, the wife of Louis Cafora, an old cellmate of James Burke. Joanne had no active tie to the heist. But police suspected that her husband had been laundering some of the Lufthansa loot through some parking-lot businesses he owned in Brooklyn. Not long after the robbery, Cafora and his wife bought a gaudy Cadillac, a fact that Henry Hill said angered Burke who feared any profligate spending would attract the attention of law enforcement. Both Caforas disappeared in March 1979, never to be found.
The Caforas, Thomas DeSimone, Parnell Edwards, Theresa Ferrara, Martin Krugman, Paolo Licastri, Joe Manri, Robert McMahon. The list of those dead or missing showed that the Lufthansa heist seemed to be cursed, much the way the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt in1922 was dogged by its own stories of misfortune surrounding some of those who participated in the expedition. But nothing more underscored the lengths Burke would go to take care of someone he was angered by than what happened to Richard Eaton.
A financial flim-flam artist, reputed arms dealer, and drug dealer, Eaton was a peripheral part of Burke’s menagerie of crooks and killers. In December 1978, less than a month after the heist, Hill and Burke purchased a thirty-three-pound load of cocaine. The quality of the drugs was poor for the New York City market, so Burke returned with Hill to Florida and sold what he had to Eaton and two other drug dealers for several hundred thousand dollars. But while Burke got some of his money from the three he was still owed some cash, said to be as much as $250,000, with little immediate chance of getting the balance. On February 17, 1979, as Hill would later remember, Burke told him that he had “wacked the scheming fuck out,” referring to Eaton.
On February 18, 1979, an NYPD officer in Brooklyn responded to a radio call telling him to go to the intersection of Drew and Blake Streets in Brooklyn where there was a vacant lot containing a trailer. After cutting the lock with a bolt cutter, the cop found Richard Eaton’s frozen body rolled up in a blanket. Eaton’s feet were tied, and there was braided rope wrapped loosely around his neck. An autopsy concluded that Eaton had frozen to death. (Eaton’s manner of death was echoed in another scene in GoodFellas, that of character Frank Carbone found hanging in a refrigerated meat truck.)
It was hard to comprehend that Eaton would roll himself up in a rug and place himself at the mercy of the elements. Years later, Valenti would tell the FBI that he had seen Eaton the night before he was murdered at the nightclub Afters in the presence of Burke, his son Frank, and others. The next morning, Valenti remembered that Jerome Asaro woke him up and said they had to dig a hole to bury Eaton, something that couldn’t be done because of the frozen ground. As a result, Valenti said the body was taken by Burke, Asaro, and others to a nearby lot his mother owned in Brooklyn and placed in the trailer.
Hill knew when he heard of the discovery of the body that Burke had killed Eaton, and the murder was just another homicide done as Burke’s way of doing business and getting rid of someone he didn’t like. So, by April 1980, Hill sensed on a visceral level after his drug arrest in Nassau County that cooperating with the government was the best way to stay alive. Hill made bail on the drug case and met Burke in a Long Island diner to talk about who the informant in the drug case might be. But when Hill was asked by Burke to travel to Florida to kill Junior Germaine, he believed he was being set up to be killed. Hill knew at that point he was going to cooperate, and prosecutor McDonald made it easy for him by having him arrested as a material witness to the Lufthansa heist. However, McDonald remembered later that he didn’t have an easy time getting the material witness warrant for Hill. He first approached a Brooklyn federal magistrate who, to his surprise, disapproved the request. Finally, McDonald went to see Judge Mark Costantino, who had handled the earlier Werner trial and he readily approved it with hardly a second glance at the paper work. Hill was then firmly in the government’s hands.
McDonald laid it on the line with Hill. He could be prosecuted for the drug case or he could cooperate and help the government break the Lufthansa heist. With a wife and two kids to worry about, and knowing full well what Burke and the mob bosses were capable of doing, Hill made the decision to go over to the government’s side. On May 27, 1980, Hill signed an agreement with federal prosecutors to cooperate in the investigation of the Lufthansa case, particularly to help them investigate the roles Burke and Sepe played in the robbery. The government also would be able to use Hill as a witness in connection with any other crimes he knew about—something that would eventually come back to haunt Vario and his friends in the mob. In exchange, Hill wouldn’t be prosecuted for the crimes he revealed, including narcotics trafficking, and he and his family would be placed in the federal witness protection program. If he screwed up and lied, Hill could be prosecuted for perjury.
The cooperation agreement Henry Hill signed gave him a new life. His old days as a wise guy, mob associate—whatever you wanted to call it—were over. The old life was finished, but by cooperating Hill was taking his best shot at staying alive.
But if McDonald and the FBI thought Henry Hill would give them the mother lode of information to prosecute Burke, Sepe, and any of the other survivors of the heist they would face untold frustrations. Burke was arrested in 1979 for parole violations, but that failed to shake him. Hill knew a great deal about the planning Burke had done for Lufthansa, but to prove the case McDonald needed corroboration, and many of those who could give it were dead or as in the case of Werner had only dealt with people who had been murdered. The result was that Burke was insulated from a conspiracy charge. Sepe was still alive but the earlier attempt to charge him had failed miserably.
McDonald soon realized that even with Hill in his pocket the Lufthansa case was stalled. Some, notably Nassau County District Attorney Dennis Dillon, thought Hill had been exaggerating his knowledge of the Lufthansa robbery. McDonald had a lot more on his plate than Lufthansa. He was commandeering a number of Mafia investigations and getting ready to try one of the Abscam cases against U.S. Senator Harrison Williams. By 198
0, while the FBI was pushing to keep the heist investigation alive, McDonald viewed it as a case that was a bottomless pit with little hope of more indictments, especially against Burke.
But then, unexpectedly, Hill provided the prosecutor a gift he had not expected. Hill had been arrested in the Nassau County drug case, and one of his co-defendants was a strange woman named Judith Wicks, described by investigators as a sometimes girlfriend and drug courier of Hill’s. Like Hill, Wicks became a cooperating witness, and one day in McDonald’s office happened to mention a trip Hill had made with her to Boston. In fact, Hill made a number of trips to Beantown in December 1978 and said that he was there right after the Lufthansa heist. Curious, McDonald asked Wicks what the Boston trip was all about and she demurred, saying he should talk to Hill to find out what the Boston angle was all about. (Wicks was portrayed in Goodfellas as the superstitious drug courier character Lois Byrd played by actress Welker White.)
McDonald had Hill brought to his office and during a debriefing session Hill nonchalantly mentioned to the prosecutor that three years earlier he and Burke had fixed some basketball games during the 1978-79 season at Boston College, which as everyone knew happened to be McDonald’s alma mater and where he had played on the freshman team. The prosecutor was flabbergasted. Carbone said he almost fell out of his chair when he heard the story.
“The motherfucker almost leaped over the fucking table and tried to grab me, he went berserk” was how a laughing Hill later described McDonald’s reaction in a documentary-film interview.
McDonald had a recollection of being more restrained, later recalling that he told Hill that he was “nuts” and had a serious problem.
The Big Heist Page 13
