The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  With Katz dead, the Robert’s Lounge crew continued its criminal ways. Valenti said that in the 1970s, he and Vincent did about one score a week, robbing gas stations, racetracks, a milk farm. Often Valenti was armed—he had learned the lesson about “coming dressed” for the crimes.

  There was one episode at a catering hall inside a bowling alley that required Valenti to disguise himself as a woman. The strange get up—Valenti wore a red wig, a pair of burgundy boots and woman’s coat—was to make it seem like he and another criminal named Joe Berger were just a girlfriend and boyfriend waiting for a bus on 101st Avenue in Ozone Park. In fact, the pair’s plan was to wait for the catering-hall manager to take the business proceeds to a night bank deposit slot so they could rob him.

  But while waiting around, some boys came by and noticing Valenti’s beard and cross dressing started to harass him. To defend Valenti’s honor, so to speak, Berger pulled out a gun and was ready to chase the boys away. Valenti told him to put the pistol away and not lose sight of the fact that they were there to grab the money. The manager eventually came by and the pair robbed him of a few thousand dollars, said Valenti. The proceeds were split with his uncle Jerome and Vincent.

  There were other scores. Valenti said he also worked as a collector for Vincent’s loansharking operation, which was funded by money from Burke. At local clubs, Vincent ran some big card games and Valenti sometimes ran the table. By 1977 or 1978, Vincent had a major change in his status. He became initiated into the Mafia, remembered Valenti. Usually, members become made men of a crime family in a ceremony at an apartment or other place that could be made secure from law enforcement surveillance. In Vincent’s case, his ceremony took place in a cemetery mausoleum.

  Once Vincent was a made man, he was placed under the crew of his uncle Michael Zaffarano. In turn, Valenti was under Vincent’s wing as an associate and it was his cousin who would protect him and keep him earning money, the biggest haul of which was soon to come.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “THIS IS IT!”

  “JIMMY BURKE HAS A BIG SCORE COMING UP, and you’re invited to go. Do you want to go?”

  That was the simple invitation Gaspare Valenti remembered getting from Vincent Asaro to become part of what would be the biggest robbery at the time in American history. It was late 1978 and what Burke had it mind could be pretty big, maybe $2 million in cash inside Building 261 on Boundary Road at JFK.

  Two million dollars. It was a lot of cash then and it was a lot of cash even now when Valenti described things on the witness stand. Valenti said he had no illusions about why Vincent wanted him in on the heist. It meant they would get two shares of the loot, which meant that Vincent would be able to claim a percentage of what Valenti got.

  “He wanted to see me to earn, and he would also have a second income from the heist,” said Valenti.

  “Can you explain that?” asked Argentieri.

  “Yeah. If they were eight people, we would get two ends instead of one end, which would be more money for Vinny,” answered Valenti, referring to the way his cousin would have control over two shares of the loot—his own and Valenti’s.

  Throwing his lot in with the crew, Valenti went with Asaro to Robert’s Lounge where the planning would take place. Burke was technically on a work-release program from prison, which meant that at the end of the day he had to report back to a special facility where he would spend the night. But the days were his own to ostensibly work at an approved job. At Robert’s Lounge, Burke and his people started planning like it was the D-Day invasion coming up. They had schematic maps of the floor plan of the Lufthansa facility and did their own surveillance, checking out the airport and figuring out escape routes if things suddenly went bad. Burke had already learned from Werner’s inside information that about as many as fourteen people might be working at the cargo area and congregating in a lunchroom.

  Valenti said that the group involved in the skull sessions at Robert’s Lounge numbered ten. There was Burke, Vincent Asaro, Valenti himself, Angelo Sepe, Tommy DeSimone, Danny Rizzo, Joseph Manri, Anthony Rodriguez, Marty Krugman, and Burke’s own son Frank James. As Valenti remembered it, Burke had a way of naming his sons after famous robbers from the Wild West. Another son was named Jessie James and became a lawyer.

  The plan was straightforward but not without risks.

  “Six or seven would go in to the front of the building and capture them, hold them at bay with guns,” remembered Valenti about how they would contain the Lufthansa workers. “And then the truck was to go around the back of the building, and wait until the bay doors were open, and then pull the truck in.”

  Henry Hill’s job had been to bring the architectural plans from Krugman, but he had no role in the actual heist, recalled Valenti. (The plans had actually been initially provided by Werner.)

  The night of the heist, Valenti said he and Asaro drove together to Burke’s home in Howard Beach. It was going to be the coldest night of the young winter so far, with wind and temperatures getting into the teens. While driving, Asaro gave his cousin a pistol, remembered Valenti, and told him not to run away if anything went wrong.

  Once at Burke’s house, DeSimone took Valenti to a marshy area adjacent to the neighborhood to try out a silencer on a gun. Given DeSimone’s reputation as a man who loved to kill for no reason at all, Valenti was nervous about walking in front of him into the reeds. DeSimone fired the weapon a few times just to check it out.

  Jimmy Burke was the mastermind of the heist, but he knew he couldn’t risk getting caught at the airport if things went wrong. If arrested it would be this third felony case, and that would put him away for a long time in prison. To keep his distance, Burke said he would sit in a crash car with Vincent, referring to a vehicle ready to interrupt and delay any pursuing cops.

  After a final check, Valenti said he and some of the others drove from Burke’s house in a black Ford van to a spot near the airport at 150th Street and Conduit. Inside the vehicle were “everybody except Jimmy and Vinny” although Valenti didn’t precisely say who was included. But he did mention to Argentieri that Frank Burke drove and that Sepe and DeSimone were also in the van.

  Once at the airport gate, Valenti said he got out and used a bolt cutter to cut the lock. Frank Burke drove to the cargo building, let out the robbery crew and then parked the van nearby as he and Valenti waited. They weren’t wearing the ski masks like the other inside robbers were doing because they wanted to look inconspicuous. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, a man—this would have been Lufthansa employee Kerry Whalen—approached the van and Valenti decided he had to react.

  “He must have surmised something was up,” recalled Valenti. “He started running towards the door of the building and we chased him. As he starts to open the door of the building, I hit him with a pistol in the head, and he fell down, yelling ‘help.’ ”

  Frank Burke stuck a gun in Whalen’s face while he was on the ground and told him to relax. Then, both Valenti and Burke picked up Whalen and put him in the back of the van. However, the commotion caught the attention of another man—this would have been Lufthansa employee Rolf Rebmann—who came over to find out what had happened. Valenti tried to say nothing was wrong and then pulled out a pistol, told the man to relax and sit in the van with Whalen.

  Someone from the robbery crew then opened the door of the cargo hangar and Burke drove the van inside. Once in the building, Valenti and Burke took Whalen and the other hostage upstairs to the lunch room where the other Lufthansa workers had been herded and were being watched over by Danny Rizzo. Valenti and Burke then went back down to the truck.

  Lufthansa’s high-value cargo vault had two doors that had to be opened one at a time. If both doors remained open at the same time, the alarm would go off and bring Port Authority police. As Valenti remembered it, he followed DeSimone into the vault. Before them were stacks of boxes and burlap sacks of what they later would find out was jewelry.

  “Tommy took a box from the ri
ght-hand side, there on the shelf, and he threw it down on the floor,” Valenti testified. Then DeSimone stomped on the box, which was cushioned with yellow Styrofoam pellets, which looked like popcorn and spilled out. Then DeSimone stuck his hand in the box and pulled out the money.

  Money. Lots of it. There might be about $125,000 in American currency in each of what by Valenti’s recollection was fifty boxes. Even an idiot could figure out that there was a fortune in that room. Burke had only expected a haul of $2 million in cash. Twenty of the boxes alone would hold $2.5 million. Forty boxes would contain $5 million, the official total used by police. Valenti’s fifty box count was likely incorrect. In any case, this was big.

  “This is it! This is it!” DeSimone screamed. He pulled down two more boxes, and they also had $125,000 in cash.

  “Take all of these fifty boxes,” DeSimone ordered. Take the burlap sacks of gold chains, the watches—in other words, take as much as we can. The crew opened some metal boxes. They held diamonds, emeralds, stones DeSimone couldn’t even pronounce. Into the van they all went, and then the whole take was driven away.

  But where would they go? As strange as it might seem for such an historic robbery, Burke and his crew hadn’t even figured out where to go once they left the airport. They were lucky the cops never came. They didn’t even have an escape plan.

  “Bring it to my cousin’s house,” Vincent yelled, according to Valenti.

  The van was driven to The Hole where Valenti was living with his wife and children, as well as his mother and sister, who were all asleep. Forming a human chain, Valenti and the others unloaded the van, and placed the stuff in the basement. Burke and DeSimone both had to be taken back to their respective prison halfway houses, so Vincent took them into Manhattan, said Valenti.

  With Burke, DeSimone, and Vincent gone, Valenti said he and the others started separating out the jewelry and counting the money. The whole thing took about two hours. Gold chains. Platinum chains. Cartier watches. Diamonds. Rubies. Emeralds. Rings. Lots of gold. They also saw some German marks. They counted the cash and came up with $6.25 million, said Valenti.

  Vincent was in a state of “euphoria” when he was told the value of the horde, remembered Valenti. But Vincent quickly tempered his joy with words of caution. After all, this was the Mafia where money was the goal of life. As Sal Vitale had always believed, only your friends could hurt you and with so much loot at stake friends could quickly become enemies.

  “He said we got to be real careful now,” Valenti remembered Vincent telling him. “He said they’ll look to rob us, you know, look to kill us and take the stuff.”

  That was definitely a downer for Valenti, whose family was in the house with the stash. There were at least two crime families, the Bonanno and Lucchese families involved, and the Gambino borgata learned of it when Fat Andy Ruggiano was told. They could go into a feeding frenzy. Murder wouldn’t be an impediment either. Then there was Jimmy Burke who would kill somebody if they looked at him the wrong way.

  Immediately, the FBI got on to leads that the Robert’s Lounge crew was involved, so the bar on Lefferts Boulevard became a place to avoid. Valenti stayed away and bought some Christmas trees to sell by his house. Why? He had to burn the evidence from the heist, the burlap, the boxes. When you sell Christmas trees on the street in Queens there was always a fire in a can for warmth. In this case everything burned except the Styrofoam so Valenti had to bag it up and take it a few blocks away to a sanitation dump.

  The split for the heist came to $750,000 per person, said Valenti. It was more money than any of them would ever see in a lifetime, assuming they lived to see it. But the money was also a curse. No one could spend it quickly or on anything that would show. If they did go on a spending spree, Burke would have them killed for being stupid. The FBI was watching everybody hanging around Robert’s Lounge, and they would know if anybody started showing signs of having big money. Banks were also out of the question. Forget about brokerage accounts, stocks, bonds. They could all be traced.

  So like generations of immigrants who never trusted the banks, Valenti was forced by necessity to hide his cash with friends in batches of $100,000 to $150,000. He also found spaces in door frames to secret the money. Valenti didn’t get the money all at once, but when he did he said he made sure that some was kicked up to Paul Vario and his family: about $200,000. Porn king Michael Zaffarano, who was Vincent’s captain in the Bonanno family, got $100,000 and Angelo Sepe took some up to upstate New York where someone in the family of Carmine Persico, the long-imprisoned boss of the Colombo family, had a home, said Valenti.

  The jewelry was also dispersed. Some went to Massino, just as Vitale had said, for tribute. John Gotti, then an up-and-coming member of the Gambino family, got some watches, said Valenti, just as a way of keeping peace and making sure his crew didn’t try to rob Burke’s team. Some mob connected jewelers took some of the stuff. It was spread around.

  It was up to Burke to dole out payments to both Valenti and Vincent, which he did in lots of $20,000 to $100,000 at times. Valenti gambled a lot of his money away, but he said Vincent eventually bought a home in Moriches on Long Island, cars and a boat. Yet, with other members of the heist going missing or dying, the other shares and whatever wasn’t paid out in tribute seemed to remain with Burke, who must have had a personal stash amounting into the millions of dollars. Some of that money, investigators believed later, went to finance a drug deal Burke did in Florida involving Richard Eaton.

  Valenti only met Eaton once, and that was on a Saturday night at the club Afters, a nicely appointed night spot near 86th Street and Rockaway Boulevard. The place was owned by Burke, Vincent, and another man and its name Afters signified “after Lufthansa.” It was a popular place, and while only opened for about a year attracted entertainers like the singing groups Blondie and Gladys Knight and The Pips, recalled Valenti. Burke introduced Valenti to Eaton, and the conversation over dinner revolved around a big drug deal Burke and Eaton had done in Florida. There was a lot of laughter, and Eaton was enjoying a dish of shrimp scampi. Nobody seemed to have a care in the world. Valenti noticed Eaton’s dish because he himself was hungry.

  The group closed After at about 3:00 A.M., and Valenti stopped by a White Castle and picked up some burgers to eat at home with his wife. You either liked White Castle burgers or loved them, and in Valenti’s case, they were a good comfort food, even at such a strange hour. Then he went to sleep. During the night, Valenti was awakened by a tapping on the bedroom window. He looked out and saw Vincent’s son Jerry. In the Mafia when your boss calls, you respond immediately, no questions asked.

  “I went and let him in the hallway,” Valenti remembered. “And he told me, ‘My father sent me.’ He said, ‘We got to dig a hole.’”

  Valenti said he knew that by digging a hole they were going to hide a body. But this was the dead of winter. The problem was that down in the area of The Hole, the neighborhood where Valenti lived, the ground and even the roads froze solid, often with thick sheets of ice because the drainage was so poor. To thaw the ground Valenti burned some kerosene but that didn’t work. Burke showed up with his son Frank and Vincent but even they couldn’t make any headway in digging.

  They were stumped. There was a body to be buried yet it was impossible to dig in the cold ground. So, Valenti remembered that there was a trailer on some property his mother owned nearby. Someone figured that the body could be kept in the trailer overnight until Valenti had a friend use a backhoe to dig a hole, ostensibly for a new foundation. All they had to do was move the body into the trailer.

  “Jerry and I walked down to the trailer, and Frankie Burke drove the car, backed it into the trailer, opened the trunk, and Jerry and Frankie lifted the body and put it in the trailer,” said Valenti. It was then that he saw the face of the corpse. It was Richard Eaton, the man who only hours earlier had been enjoying an Italian repast.

  But as luck would have it, things went terribly wrong as they often did at The
Hole. The next morning a cop came by Valenti’s house and said it looked like there had been a Mafia hit outside the trailer. Some kids who used the trailer as a playground discovered the body. Valenti convincingly feigned ignorance and concocted a story about having seen a car with two black men in the area the previous night. Valenti’s lie deflected attention from himself and for that matter Asaro. But Burke would be dogged by the corpse years later when Henry Hill talked to the FBI about the way his comrade in crime had admitted killing Eaton. The result was Burke’s indictment and conviction in 1985 for Eaton’s murder.

  There was one other trivial consequence from that horrible night for Valenti. He could never again even think about eating shrimp scampi.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  THE FIRST DAY OF GASPARE VALENTI’S TESTIMONY was riveting, to say the least. For the first time in the history of the Lufthansa heist someone who purported to be an insider, a criminal actually on the scene, gave sworn testimony about the fabled score. In many ways, what Valenti described tracked closely to what had already been revealed in the Werner trial, as well as the book Wiseguy and other retellings of the story.

  But there were some key difference with Valenti, notably the specific number and identity of the people involved in the planning and his having done the beating of Lufthansa worker Kerry Whalen and not Angelo Sepe as previously claimed by law enforcement. There were also now more details laid out about how the loot was spread and who else in the mob got tribute.