The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  During plea negotiations, it became apparent that DiFiore wanted any deal to include Jerome Asaro, if the younger Asaro wanted to be included. As Zissou recalled, DiFiore’s sense of camaraderie made him look for a way of getting Jerome out from under having to endure a trial and going down with his father, who was facing big troubles and on paper looked like he would be convicted. Vincent Asaro was also involved in these meetings for a global plea and complained that he wanted to be covered as well. But given the gravity of the charges against him, Vincent Asaro wasn’t going to be getting any meaningful plea. By late September, the plea bargaining intensified and Zissou wrote Ross to say everybody had made “considerable progress” and believed that the remaining issues didn’t present big obstacles to a deal.

  So, it wasn’t terribly surprising that over a two-day period between October 7 and October 8, 2014, DiFiore, Ragano, and Bonventre appeared before Ross and separately entered pleas of guilty to a single count of conspiracy to collect an unlawful debt. The victim who owed the money was a car-wash employee and debt was at a criminal usury loan rate, which in New York State meant that the interest rate was more than an annual rate of 25 percent. The victim had borrowed from a Bonanno family associate and owed $30,000, an amount that was eventually paid. Bonventre entered his plea first on October 7, while the other two followed a day later.

  The plea situation for Jerome was different than the other three. He faced more serious racketeering charges, mostly notably a case of arson involving a black nightclub and his having a role in the surreptitious moving of Paul Katz’s remains. The prosecution wanted his plea to carry more weight at sentencing. So Argentieri insisted on Jerome pleading to the Katz and arson counts.

  Jerome was one of the crime family’s younger powers, something underscored by the way he had supplanted his father, becoming a captain and then having his father report to him. The relationship between father and son had gone sour over the years, with Vincent lashing out at Jerome and his ambition. In one conversation taped by Valenti, Vincent saw his son as greedy and power hungry, regretting that he had made him a captain.

  “Fuck Jerry,” said Vincent about his son. “Fuck him in his ass. Fucking Jerry is for Jerry. Jerry’s for Jerry. I lost my son. I lost my son when I made him a skipper. I lost my son when I put him there.”

  The way Vincent saw it, Jerome was avaricious. He railed about him, calling him a “greedy cocksucker” who was ungrateful for the fact that he had secured his son what amounted to a no-show job for $600 a week.

  But there seemed to be other things at work that fractured the relationship between Jerome and his father. His parents divorced in 2005, and it appeared that Jerome took the side of his mother in the marital fight. Jerome also had a more significant work history than Vincent, from that of a laborer at a shipping company to construction and then as a dispatcher at a concrete firm. These were all things that made Jerome appear more financially stable.

  Although he was a working family man—he had raised three daughters before divorcing his first wife Susan—Jerome got involved willfully in the mob. When it suited him, Vincent had used Jerome as a willing acolyte for crime family business. When it came time, Jerome pleaded guilty before Ross to the nightclub arson, admitting he torched at his father’s direction the night club Afters, which had once been a mob watering hole, at 8601 Rockaway Boulevard, Ozone Park but became disliked by Italian gangsters after its new owners wanted to cater to African-Americans. By his plea, Jerome admitted he and another man got inside the club and helped start a fire that caused considerable damage.

  In terms of the Katz murder, Jerome didn’t admit to killing the hijacker. But he did say that “in fact knowing that a murder had been committed, I assisted persons in moving the body of that person after the fact.” Jerome also admitted that he dug up the body to prevent “the apprehension of the individual who committed that murder.”

  Some interesting things seem evident about the allocution Jerome made in court about the Katz body. First it was clear that he knew who might have committed the murder. Second, he didn’t name his father Vincent as the killer, as the government had alleged he had. Third, he did not agree to testify against his father. Fourth, Jerome didn’t admit to being a member of the Bonanno crime family but rather an associate, which is a lesser status. Yet taken together, the arson and the murder accessory charges listed in the new criminal information nailed Jerome on a racketeering conspiracy charge, the same one his father had been charged with in Lufthansa and other crimes. This had the effect of pushing the suggested prison sentence for Jerome to the range of seventy-seven to ninety-six months, in part because he already had a previous federal guilty plea to racketeering some years earlier.

  Over a period of two days in October 2014, DiFiore, Bonventre, Ragano, and Jerome Asaro pled guilty before Ross to the negotiated plea deals. Then in 2015, Ross doled out the various sentences and gave DiFiore twenty-one months, which in his case was a bargain because he got credit for time served and would be out in a year. Bonventre got twenty-one months and Ragano fifty-one months, much better than if had they gone to trial and lost on the racketeering case.

  In Jerome Asaro’s case, defense attorney Lawrence Fisher submitted papers that described his client’s work ethic and his regret about his life of crime. Fisher also attached letters from family members, including his current and former wives, his children and other relatives asking for a lenient sentence. Particularly poignant was a note written by his mother Theresa who was suffering from blindness and had to dictate her words to a daughter. Theresa Asaro said that in her failing health she relied upon Jerome and hoped that Ross would take her needs into consideration.

  But when Jerome Asaro was sentenced on March 26, 2015, there was another family in court whose members Ross had to consider: those of murder victim Paul Katz. Before he disappeared on December 6, 1969, Katz had fathered five children with his wife Delores. His life had been one in which he was mixed up with Burke and his crew in all kinds of hijackings and other thefts, and when Katz left the house for the final time, both he and his wife knew he might never return.

  When she was given a chance to speak in court, Katz’s daughter Ilsa remembered how she and her brothers and sister had been watching an episode of Frosty the Snowman on television when her father walked out the door. Her mother, Ilsa said, had begged Katz not to leave.

  “He never came back,” Ilsa said to Ross.

  Actually the remains excavated by the FBI team from the basement of the house in Ozone Park did make it back to Katz’s family after the bones, hair, and other bits of tissue were analyzed for DNA comparison. The remains were turned over to Katz’s son Lawrence by the FBI.

  “He came home with me carrying him in an evidence bag,” Lawrence told Ross.

  Adding a macabre element to the entire sentencing proceedings was the fact that as Ilsa tearfully addressed Ross she said she was carrying some of her father’s cremated remains in a cloth bag inside her handbag. She did not actually take the remains out as she spoke. The torment of not knowing for years about what had been her father’s fate had led Ilsa to have to come up with a fiction about his demise.

  “When we were asked, ‘Where’s your father?’ we’d say he died in a plane crash,” Ilsa said.

  Asaro offered no apology to the Katz family members, but did so to his own family. When it came time for Argentieri to speak, she reminded Ross that Jerome had lived a life that had been steeped in Mafia involvement.

  In sentencing Jerome, Ross didn’t give him a break. She hit him with ninety months or seven-and-a-half years, not much under the sentencing guideline maximum recommendation of ninety-three months. Judges don’t have to stick to the guidelines, but in this case Ross saw no reason to go to the low end of the range. Seeing that Jerome didn’t have the ability to pay a fine, Ross didn’t impose one but did hit him with the mandatory special assessment of $50, half of the usual $100 levy.

  With four of the five defendants convicted, the
government could now turn its attention to Vincent Asaro, the last man standing and the main attraction who prosecutors said was intertwined with the Lufthansa heist. Asaro wasn’t going to take a plea deal, certainly not one that gave him a twenty-year prison sentence and that meant he would die behind bars. At the age of eighty, Asaro was going to trial.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DEAD MEN TOLD NO TALES

  NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY HOMICIDES Jimmy Burke had committed in his decades-long criminal life. Some in the FBI thought it could be as many as thirty. The bloody trail after Lufthansa accounted for the deaths of at least five direct participants in the heist, not counting the death of Anthony Rodriguez who died after one of his poisonous pet snakes bit him. As Henry Hill would tell investigators, Burke saw informants all around him and sometimes—as in the case of Paul Katz—he was right and had no qualms about killing.

  Anyone who watched the film GoodFellas saw slayings by Burke’s crew at Robert’s Lounge done by garroting, stabbing, or gunshots. Bodies went missing, were tossed into hastily dug graves or else left in the street. Murder gave the edge to Scorsese’s cinematic version and the public and news media were waiting to see what Vincent Asaro’s trial would bring out about all the blood and gore. Katz’s murder would certainly be part of the case because it was listed in the indictment. But what about all of the other killings? Could they be linked somehow to Asaro?

  Prosecutors did not disappoint. In March 2015, with a trial still some seven months away, Argentieri and her staff crafted a seventy-two-page special court document known as a motion in limine, a term that comes from the Latin and means at the “threshold” and refers to a request before trial to either bring in or keep out certain evidence. They would follow it up with additional filings. In Asaro’s case, the prosecution wanted to bring in certain evidence to show how he had been continually involved over forty-five years with the Bonanno family and bring in evidence of other acts—all bad—not charged in the indictment but which showed his criminal intent and motives. Among those were Asaro’s history of heavy drug use, gambling, stealing, assaults, threats of violence, and shakedowns. But added to the government’s list were a number of murders linked to the period after Lufthansa that had widely been tied to Burke: Martin Krugman, Joseph Manri, Robert McMahon, and the disappearance of Thomas DeSimone, as well as the killing of Richard Eaton.

  The government wasn’t trying to pin all of those murders on Asaro. Not by a long shot. Instead, prosecutors hoped that remarks Asaro made about the killings to certain potential witnesses would show how trusting he had been of them. It was a way of bringing into the courtroom through the back door the Lufthansa killings, which had captivated New York for so long. It may not have been the prosecution’s intent to stoke such interest in the case, but reporters began to salivate over the prospect of seeing life imitate art in the courtroom. “RealFellas Revealed: Secrets of Lufthansa heist double-cross & slays,” blared the Daily News in one headline after prosecutors filed their papers.

  Of course, Asaro wanted to have that evidence kept out. His attorneys said that evidence of the GoodFellas murders was not only irrelevant to the case but raised the likelihood that the jury would be confused or prejudiced against Asaro. It would be hard, the attorneys argued, to keep the lurid details of the violent deaths of those involved in Lufthansa from tainting Asaro and bolstering the argument that he was a killer of Katz as the government alleged.

  But if the world was waiting to see a reprise of tales of infamous murder in the Lufthansa trial, Ross throw cold water on that notion. Going through each of the murders and disappearances prosecutors wanted to introduce into the Asaro trial, Ross found some compelling reasons to keep most of it away from the jury and the public. The fact that wig merchant Marty Krugman had been a pest to Burke by asking about the robbery and other things was okay to come before the jury because it showed the existence of the Lufthansa robbery conspiracy charged against Asaro, reasoned Ross. But evidence that Burke had said to Valenti that Krugman was killed for complaining about the way the loot was split was another matter. The fact that Krugman had been killed wasn’t really part of the robbery conspiracy, she said.

  “At some point the collapse of relationships and murder of co-conspirators after the heist ceases to be an epilogue to the heist, and begins to tell the story of a whole new set of crimes,” reasoned Ross in her ruling on the evidence. “Marty’s murder does not mend a ‘break in the natural sequence of the narrative of evidence’ about the Lufthansa heist. Nor is it required to show trust between Burke and [Valenti].”

  There was just too great a risk of confusing the jury and prejudicing it against Asaro to refer to a murder “possibly ordered” by his associates so Ross decided that part of the evidence about Krugman’s death had to be kept out of the trial.

  Thomas DeSimone’s disappearance caused similar problems for Ross as she found in the Krugman case. Ross, like most people, assumed that DeSimone had been murdered after the heist. But again she found that his presumed homicide had no bearing on the planning and execution of the Lufthansa robbery. Valenti could testify about his closeness to DeSimone but didn’t have to tell a story about another murder, which if the jury learned of it could confuse the panel and prejudice it against Asaro by raising the implication that his “associates tended to meet violent deaths.”

  The double homicides of Joe Manri and Robert McMahon weren’t killings the prosecution had accused Asaro of having a role in. In fact, according to court papers, gangster Anthony Stabile was the one who killed the pair on Burke’s orders, information that contradicted Henry Hill’s earlier claims that Paolo Licastri had admitted he was the triggerman. Argentieri had argued in her court papers that information about the double murders would help relate why Valenti was afraid to meet with Stabile and confided such apprehension to Asaro. The government’s argument was that Valenti’s confiding to Asaro was evidence of the relationship that existed between the two men.

  But for Ross, evidence of the Manri-McMahon killings was essentially overkill if the prosecution was trying to show the level of trust between Valenti and his cousin Asaro. “I find that [Valenti’s] request for defendant’s advice is of low probative value given the other evidence available in this case,” said Ross. There was just no justification for using evidence of two murders, which again would create an “aura of extreme violence” around Asaro, she ruled.

  The government had also wanted to use evidence about the murder of Louis Cafora to prove the Bonanno family link to the heist and as a roundabout way of proving the general proposition that gangsters consult their superiors before doing killings. In the case of Cafora, who disappeared with his wife, the government specifically wanted to show that Asaro, Valenti, and Michael Zaffarano had talked at one point about the fact that Asaro did want to help out in the killing. But to Ross, such evidence didn’t show any connection between the Bonanno family and the actual Lufthansa heist itself and information about the Cafora killing was not to come before the jury.

  So by her ruling, Ross knocked out evidence about the Krugman, DeSimone, Manri, McMahon, and Cafora homicides. For the most part, the gory aftermath of the Lufthansa robbery was not going to see the light of day when Vincent Asaro went on trial. But one Lufthansa-era killing could make its way into the case, that of Richard Eaton, who had died because of the way he had stiffed Jimmy Burke over money from a drug deal. In his debriefings, Valenti had told the FBI that after Eaton had been killed he was enlisted by Jerome Asaro to dig a hole to bury the corpse but that the cold ground in February prevented that from happening. The body was then taken to a trailer on some Brooklyn property Valenti’s family owned for storage until a backhoe could be found to dig the grave. However, Eaton’s body was discovered by police in the trailer and afterward, according to Valenti, Vincent Asaro told him where and why Eaton had been killed by Burke.

  For the prosecution, evidence of the Eaton murder not only helped to prove the Lufthansa heist charge but also the alle
gation about the murder of Paul Katz some ten years earlier. Evidence of the Eaton slaying helped show the close relationship between heist organizer Burke, Asaro, his son Jerome, and Valenti, prosecutors maintained. All those men had developed a trusting relationship, which allowed them “to successfully execute and cover up the most risky and violent offenses, including the Katz murder and the Lufthansa Heist,” the government argued.

  Ross also said some other Lufthansa-related evidence could come into the case. The late Gambino crime captain Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano had a girth that matched his nickname. Ruggiano’s widening waistline came from the fact that he liked food, so much so that he opened a popular café in Ozone Park, which became something of a crime-family hangout. Ruggiano had a jewelry business where he sometimes fenced stolen jewels and according to the FBI had been approached by Burke and Asaro to put some of the jewelry stolen in the heist into play. The FBI knew this because Ruggiano’s son, also named Anthony, had been told the details by his father. While Fat Andy, who died in 1999 of a heart attack, may have been an old-school stand-up gangster who never squealed, his son, a Gambino associate, was made of different stuff and eventually became an FBI cooperating witness to save his skin after participating in a number of crimes, including the murder of his own brother-in-law, Frank Boccia.

  Prosecutors wanted to use Junior Ruggiano’s testimony against Asaro for the reason that it showed more about the Lufthansa conspiracy and the attempts by Asaro and Burke to fence the stolen property without having to share more than they had to with their Bonanno and Lucchese crime-family bosses—notably Philip Rastelli and Paul Vario. Junior Ruggiano’s testimony was needed because his father was dead and couldn’t be called as a witness. Normally the younger Ruggiano’s recollections would be hearsay. But Ross, noting that Fat Andy was dead, ruled that Junior Ruggiano’s recollections about his father’s statements to him could be used as evidence. By talking to his son and admitting that he had obtained some of the stolen Lufthansa jewelry for his store, Fat Andy was admitting that he not only was a jewelry fence but shared in some of the Lufthansa spoils. For Ross, those were statements against Fat Andy’s “penal interest” meaning they implicated him in wrongdoing and could be used by the government as evidence even though they might be hearsay.