- Tonight, the heist of the century.
- [John] Over $5 million in cash and jewels disappears
from one of the busiest airports in the country.
- [Matthew] Within hours, it's international news.
They're calling it the crime of the century.
- [Laurence] Authorities have little to go on
until the bodies start piling up.
- [Lis] Every time police track down a suspect,
that person ends up with a bullet in the back of his head.
- [Scott] Over the next six months, you had
eight bodies dropped.
- [Laurence] Now, we'll explore the top theories
as to who's responsible for the Lufthansa heist.
- [Claire] The FBI gets a tip
that someone deposited about $250,000 in a safe deposit box,
but by the time that they're able to investigate,
the money's gone.
- [John] Before he could be brought in for questioning,
his body is found riddled with bullets,
one of them to the back of the head.
- So who orchestrated the Lufthansa heist?
[dramatic music]
- [Laurence] Monday, December 11th, 1978.
New York's John F. Kennedy Airport
among America's busiest.
Around 3:00am, A black van carrying eight masked men
drives past the departure gates to the back of the airport.
- [John] JFK is one of the country's biggest and
busiest airports. But what the ordinary flyer would fail to
notice is outside of the terminals,
there are a whole bunch of warehouses
and those warehouses are used to store cargo
that's bound for other destinations.
If you've got electronics from Japan or wine from France,
they're gonna be stored there
until they can be shipped onward to their final destination.
- [Claire] Lufthansa is essentially the unofficial
airlines of European banks.
They are bringing in American currency, European currency,
security bonds,
and on top of that luxury goods,
furs, Swiss watches, fine jewelry,
all of this stored at the Lufthansa warehouses.
- [Mathew] This is the ramp up right before Christmas.
So they're seeing an influx of merchandise,
influx of cash, influx in jewels.
So that high value room,
which normally has a million,
now has $5 million at least in cash
and about $800,000 in jewels.
Today's value about $28 million
- [Laurence] Later that morning,
it's scheduled to be loaded onto armored Brinks trucks
and delivered to points across Manhattan.
Until then, everything remains under lock and key.
- [Kavitha] The most valuable goods are kept on the third
floor of building 261
in a place called the high value room,
which is always guarded by nighttime guards.
Accessing the high value room is a pretty intricate process.
There are two metal cages divided by a steel door.
- [John] To get through the door,
you first have to get through the first cage,
that has to be closed
and then locked using two keys
that have to be turned simultaneously
before you can even open the next door.
And if this protocol is not strictly followed,
if it is deviated from in even the slightest way,
all sorts of alarms will start sounding
and port authority police will be all over the place.
- [Laurence] For decades, it's been an airtight system,
no one has dared to try to breach it,
but within the hour, all of that will change.
- [Claire] The van drives up and six of the eight men get out.
They cut off the padlock, run into the warehouse
and they seem to have timed it perfectly
because all of the employees are in the employee break room,
all having a meal break.
- [John] They hold all of them at gunpoint
and handcuff them to one another,
and then they take their wallets
and they're looking at their IDs
and they're checking it against a list of guards.
So these guys know which guards are supposed to be there
and they tell the guys while they're on the ground,
"If you guys make any false moves,
not only are we gonna shoot you,
but then we're gonna go to the address on your ID
and we're gonna kill your whole family."
- [Laurence] Missing from the list,
the nighttime supervisor
with the keys to the high value room.
He's still downstairs in his office.
- [Kavitha] They can't actually just storm into his office
because he's got a panic button under his desk
and police would show up almost immediately.
So they pull one of the guards off the floor
with a gun to his head
and they force him to call the supervisor
and he tells him that Lufthansa is on the phone from Germany
and they'll only talk to the person in charge.
So the supervisor comes out to the floor with his keys.
- [Laurence] Now all the thieves have to do
is make sure that the manager turns both keys
at exactly the same moment
or the place will be swarming with cops.
- [John] One of these armed guys says,
"We know how this system works.
If you have a single slip up, you're a dead man."
So he follows the protocol exactly,
gets through the main door, gets into the high value room.
- [Claire] They see more to steal than they could have ever
imagined, and they are ready to take it all.
They start stuffing all of this cash, jewels, watches
into 40 burlap bags
and dragging them meticulously out to the van.
And by 4:16,
they've completely cleaned out the high value room.
- [Laurence] It's the perfect heist.
In just 75 minutes,
the thieves pulled off the largest cash robbery
in US history at the time,
28 million in today's dollars.
- [Kavitha] Usually with cash,
you're able to look at the serial numbers
and track the currency,
but in this case, because it's older currency
and because it's coming from overseas,
there's no way to actually do that.
The serial numbers aren't listed anywhere,
so this money is actually untraceable.
- [Matthew] They dust for fingerprints,
but no forensic evidence is left behind.
Within hours, it's international news.
They're calling it the crime of the century.
These guys just pulled off the perfect crime.
- [Laurence] One thing seems highly probable
that this was an inside job.
- [John] They knew too much.
They knew, for example,
exactly which guards were gonna be on duty.
They knew what time exactly,
3:00am they'd be going on their break.
They knew the protocol
that was required to get through those doors
and into the high value room.
So at least one of the robbers
had to be someone on the inside.
- [Kavitha] Two days after the heist, the FBI gets an anonymous
tip that a low level Lufthansa cargo agent
named Peter Gruenewald might be involved.
- [Eric] Peter Gruenewald is approached by the FBI
and at first, he really rebuffs them.
I don't know anything, I don't wanna be part of this.
But they're pretty sure that he knows something.
- [John] After the FBI questions him,
He does something that makes him even more of a suspect.
He uses his employee discount to buy airline tickets
to five different locations.
The Philippines, Tokyo, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and Bogota, Columbia.
Obviously, he's buying multiple tickets
because he doesn't want anyone who's on his tail
to find him.
However, all of these flights are leaving from JFK.
- [Laurence] Gruenewald ultimately chooses
the Bogota flight
where agents are waiting for him at the departure gate.
- [Claire] Peter Gruenewald folds entirely under pressure
and what he says is,
yes, technically I did organize this heist,
but I did not know it was gonna happen,
someone stole my plan.
- [Eric] Peter Gruenewald is driving to work
on the morning of Monday, December 11th, 1978
when he hears that there's been this big heist
at the Lufthansa cargo terminal
and it sounds like exactly his idea
and he thinks, Louis did it.
- [Laurence] Louis Werner
who had been with Lufthansa since 1968
works as a cargo supervisor for the airline.
- [Kavitha] He immediately went and confronted Louis Werner
and accused him of stealing his plans
and carrying the heist out without him.
So he demands $300,000 from Werner to keep quiet.
Werner, however, only gives him $10,000
and basically tells him to keep that
and that he would throw him more money
once things cool down.
- [Laurence] Using the information
provided by Gruenewald,
police quickly turned their attention
to his would-be accomplice, Louis Werner.
- [John] His job is to sign
for the money that's been brought in by Lufthansa
before it's taken away and placed in a secure bank.
But on Friday, December 8th
when this big shipment was there,
he conveniently arranged
to be away from his post for a full 90 minutes.
So when the Brinks truck gets there,
there's no one to sign for the money.
That means it's going to be in the high value room
all weekend.
- [Claire] The FBI starts trailing Werner
and it confirms all of their suspicions.
He's paid off all of his gambling debts
and on top of that, he's bragging to everyone he can.
He's bragging to his girlfriend and his estranged wife.
He's telling everyone that he's involved in the heist.
- [Matthew] So Werner not a seasoned criminal,
makes a lot of mistakes.
First thing he does, he spends a lot of money.
He buys a brand new van, takes his girlfriend
and her kids on a luxurious vacation.
How do you get this money working a job
where you're only getting paid 20 grand a year?
He is the prime suspect at this point.
So they grab him coming out of a bowling alley
with his girlfriend.
- [Laurence] The fed's pressure Werner
to give up his accomplices,
but he refuses to name names.
A trial date is set for May 4th, 1979.
- [Kavitha] With the help of Gruenewald's testimony,
Werner is found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
So basically within six months of the heist,
authorities have their first conviction
and the conviction of the potential architect
of the whole plot.
- [Laurence] But if Werner was one of the original planners
and the key man inside,
it doesn't explain what happens to the $5 million
after he goes to jail.
- [John] Werner says he never spoke
with any of the other participants face to face.
He simply got phone calls instructing him what to do
and then, of course, he made phone calls
passing information along
and he didn't know any names.
Even though he's the one who had the plan,
he was not the one who was behind it.
And in fact, that money was with whoever did.
- [Laurence] In the months after the Lufthansa heist,
feds that only someone in the New York mafia
would be brazen enough
to pull off a robbery of this magnitude.
- [Ana] New York City in the '70s
is pretty much run by the mob.
There are five families
and they each have their own district.
JFK is controlled by the Lucchese family,
but right around JFK and Queens,
other mob families control that area.
So there's a little bit of cooperation among the families.
- [John] For much of the Lucchese family's existence,
it was known as the least high profile of the five families.
However, in the mid 1970s, a new Don took over
and he was determined
to make the Lucchese family more powerful
and he did that by stealing
just about anything he could get his hands on.
- [Laurence] One of the Lucchese family's favorite hangouts
is Robert's lounge.
It's a run-of-the-mill bar
in the working class Ozone Park neighborhood,
a few miles from JFK airport.
- Authorities start to track members of the Lucchese family
and the activities around the lounge
and they start to notice that one of the mafia members
has been spending a lot of money recently
as if he has suddenly come into some cash.
His name is Angelo Sepe.
He buys his girlfriend a brand new Cadillac
and he drops $9,000 in cash
on a brand new 1979 Ford Thunderbird.
- [Lis] Authorities know Angelo Sepe
as being affiliated with the Lucchese family
as being sort of a muscle man for the Lucchese family.
And here's this guy with his new T-Bird.
So what they do is they put a bug in the T-Bird
and they think they have great stuff
because Angelo Sepe is talking about the heist
in the T-Bird.
- [John] They think they're onto something big.
Okay, this is the big break in the case.
Unfortunately, when they play the tape back later,
the voices are muffled.
Only bits and pieces can be picked up.
- Angelo Sepe, as a way to combat the possibility
that his car was bugged
would turn up the radio when he'd have these conversations,
which would jumble their surveillance.
The people that were listening
would have a difficult time deciphering
between whether the participants
in the conspiracy were talking
or was it a disc jockey talking
or was it a song that was playing on the radio.
- [Laurence] Police know Sepe as an enforcer,
mob muscle who collects debts and carries out hits.
Lately there have been several murders
of potential Lufthansa suspects,
all frequent visitors to Robert's lounge.
One is Stacks Edwards,
who is known to have ties to the Lucchese family
- [Ana] Stacks Edwards has one job in this heist
and that is to make the black van
used in the heist disappear.
But rather than do as instructed,
he parks it illegally.
He partied all night with his girlfriend
and he passed out.
Forgot about the van.
- [Lis] Meanwhile, the cops all over New York,
I mean, this is the biggest thing going.
They're looking for that van.
And they find it right in front of a fire hydrant.
They dust it for prints
and lo and behold, they find Stack's prints on it.
Immediately, he's on the watch list.
And the FBI, law enforcement,
everybody wants to speak to this guy
- [John] Before he could be brought in for questioning,
his body is found riddled with bullets.
Five of them total, one of them to the back of the head,
which is the calling card of a mob hit execution style.
Within the week, two more Lucchese associates
turn up dead.
One of them is a bookmaker.
His body is found in a Brooklyn garbage dump.
Another Lucchese associate who's called the stick up man
is found in his car slumped over the steering wheel,
a bullet in the back of his head.
- [Kavitha] It seems that whoever's carrying out these
executions is going after potential Lufthansa perpetrators
before authorities can question them.
And if there's one suspect in all of these,
it's Angelo Sepe.
- [Laurence] Authorities are convinced
that Sepe is somehow connected to all three murders.
It's possible he's killing off fellow mobsters
either to shut them up
or to prevent them from claiming their share
of the Lufthansa loot.
- [Lis] Lucky for law enforcement, they can bring Sepe
in for an unrelated drug charge.
Now, when they bring him in,
they ask him about the heist,
he says nothing, I know nothing.
It gives them time to go search his house.
They find nothing.
They know he's involved,
but they just don't have enough.
So he goes away for some time on a parole violation
and they figure once he gets out from that,
they will follow him until he screws up, makes an error.
- [John] After 10 months in jail, Sepe goes free
and the FBI start tailing him again.
Then comes a twist in the investigation.
Angelo Sepe, mob enforcer turns up dead.
They find his body
in the basement of his apartment building,
three bullets in his head
and his 19-year-old girlfriend dead, one shot to the mouth.
Well now, it turns out Sepe himself is a victim.
That means he isn't the guy behind the heist,
he's working for someone else.
And whoever that is, wants him to be silenced as well.
- [Laurence] Though no one died during the Lufthansa heist,
a trail of bodies has turned up in its wake.
The FBI is now taking a long hard look
at one man in the Lucchese family
cold enough to murder his fellow conspirators.
- [Kavitha] If there's any mobster
who wouldn't think twice about shooting a friend
in the back of the head, it's Jimmy the Gent.
Most people probably know Jimmy the Gent
from the character that Robert De Niro played
in "Goodfellas."
- In 1962, Jimmy Burke is set to marry his fiance
and a few weeks before the wedding,
he realizes that she's being stalked by an ex.
The day of their wedding,
that ex is found killed
with his remains strewn about his car.
- [Kavitha] Burke is never actually charged with the crime,
but his reputation for bloody vengeance starts to spread.
He gets a new job in the Lucchese family.
They put him to work hijacking cargo trucks
and he earns the nickname Jimmy the Gent
because he said to politely offer $50
to the drivers of these trucks
in exchange for their contents.
- [Laurence] By 1978, Burke has grown wealthy
so much so that he buys Robert's Lounge,
making it an official hangout for him
and his fellow thieves.
- [Claire] Because of Burke's role in Truck hijackings,
his connection with the Lucchese family
and his connection with the JFK rackets,
law enforcement are pretty sure
that he has his hands
in some way connected to the Lufthansa heist.
They just have to figure out how to prove this.
- [John] In order to get Jimmy,
they start arresting anyone they can
who spends time in Robert's Lounge.
These are people with parole violation,
minor criminal records,
and they offer pardons in exchange for information
that might lead to the arrest of Jimmy.
One low level bookie
confesses that he is in Robert's Lounge
the night after the heist
and that Jimmy comes in, waving a bunch of cash around,
saying, "Let's have a drink on Lufthansa."
- [Kavitha] Jimmy is well aware that the cops are following him.
There's one time where there's an undercover cop at the bar
and Jimmy orders himself a round of drinks
and a glass of milk for the cop.
There's another time when they had bugged his car
and he found it and shot it three times.
- [Claire] He is so convinced that he's invincible,
that he's really toying with law enforcement.
He knows that there are people surveilling his house.
So he gets up in the middle of the night
and he will go on these little joy rides
and he knows that these guys
have to follow him wherever he goes.
He just drives around the neighborhood
and when he comes back,
he waves and laughs and just heads back in and goes to bed.
- [Laurence] Burke's cockiness may come from the fact that
he appears to have an airtight alibi
for the early hours of December 11th, 1978.
- [John] He's arrested in Georgia for possession of
cocaine and he's sentenced to three months in a rehab program.
He does those three months
in the community treatment program
in Times Square in Manhattan.
And he's supposed to be there all the time
and he's checked on on regular intervals.
That's where he is on the night of the heist.
So how could he possibly be involved in it?
- [Laurence] And every time authorities
find a potential new witness to finger Burke,
they end up dead.
- [Kavitha] By the summer of 1979,
nine more suspected people
connected with the Lufthansa heist have been found dead.
Authorities still find no clues left behind
at these murder scenes,
but because associates of the Lucchese family
and of Burke's keep turning up dead,
they think that maybe he's becoming paranoid
and is continuing to cover his tracks.
- [Laurence] Then in May, 1980,
the Lufthansa case takes a dramatic turn.
Longtime Burke associate Henry Hill
is arrested on serious drug charges.
Under interrogation, he offers to make a deal.
- [John] According to Henry Hill,
Burke is the guy who planned the heist, executed it
and now has been bumping off
anybody who might be associated with it.
Hill is afraid that he is on Burke's hit list
and that he's going to be next.
So better that Burke get put away than he ends up dead.
Burke isn't just knocking people off
because he doesn't want them testifying against him,
he's doing it because everyone who is killed,
that's one less person to share the loot.
- [Claire] Hill alleges that Burke snuck out of the treatment
center in between the bed checks
and on the night of the heist,
he is in fact one of the six men there.
- [Laurence] Hill's testimony syncs up
with everything else the Feds have discovered.
The trouble is, it's still not enough
to pin the heist on Burke.
- [John] Law enforcement can't find anyone
to corroborate Hill's claims
and added to that, Hill's doing this
in exchange for a reduced sentence and federal protection.
So this calls into question
the sincerity of everything he says.
- [Laurence] Still authorities are certain
they have their man in Burke.
They just need to find another way to bring him to justice.
- [Kavitha] Authorities Start questioning Henry Hill
about his own alibi for that night
and he says he can't possibly
have been involved in the heist
because he was off at Boston College,
conducting a point shaving scheme
under the orders of Burke.
As part of the scheme, Burke and Hill would pay players
to throw certain plays or score a certain number of points
in order to get within a certain scoring range.
That allows gamblers to then
place high value bets on these games
and reap huge monetary benefits.
- [Ana] In 1982, Jimmy Burke is convicted
of racketeering and sports betting
and he's sent away for 12 years.
But 12 years isn't enough time for Henry Hill to feel safe,
so he provides the authorities
with more information on another crime
to try and keep Jimmy Burke behind bars.
'Cause the minute Jimmy gets out, Henry's a dead man.
- [Claire] Burke is sent to prison, but not for the
Lufthansa heist. It's a classic mob history story.
You've got someone, you can't pin a crime on them,
but you can pin other things.
The problem is,
still means that the original crime is unsolved.
- [John] If all we have to go on is Henry Hill's testimony,
it seems like the Lufthansa case is closed.
But there's one nagging concern about this,
Burke is not a mob heavyweight.
Even if Burke is the one who plans the robbery
and executes the robbery,
he's gotta get the blessing
of somebody higher up in the organization
and whoever that is
might be the one who's made off
with the missing millions of dollars.
- [Laurence] The Lucchese crime family
rules over the borough of Queens
and nothing happens on their turf
unless it's sanctioned from the top.
So after the Lufthansa heist in 1978,
feds are convinced that while low-level mobsters
might have carried out the actual robbery,
the $5 million payload travels
much further up the food chain.
To get it back,
they'll need to bring down the Godfather himself.
- [Matthew] Crime families operate and are successful for
so long because you have this separation.
The guy that's ordering these crimes to be committed
is so far separated
from the people that actually committing crimes
that when the FBI and the local police
are making these arrests,
they can only get this bottom level,
but the people above them that are pulling the strings,
they never go to jail.
- [Kavitha] This time the feds have a secret weapon.
They have Henry Hill who's turned informant
and is in the witness protection program.
And he's worked for the Lucchese family for decades.
According to Hill, the Lucchese family have their hands in
all kinds of industries across New York,
trucking, construction, the garment industry,
and they make a lot of money shipping stolen goods
and shaking down transportation and union organizations.
- The Lucchese family used to be
one of the smaller families,
but now under this Don,
with the increased amount of smuggling and stealing,
not just from JFK, but also from LaGuardia and Newark,
they've become one of the strongest
and most powerful families in the mob.
- [John] The head of the Lucchese family is Don Antonio
Corallo, better known as Tony Ducks.
He's been in charge of the family since 1974
and he gets his nickname
because of his uncanny ability to duck law enforcement.
Part of what makes him so hard to arrest
is he's got 500 foot soldiers under his command.
He also rarely leaves his mansion in Queens
where he's surrounded by a two story brick wall,
bodyguards and attack dogs.
- [Kavitha] Authorities already pretty much know this,
but Henry Hill confirms
that while the Lufthansa heist might have been
Jimmy Burke's idea or his brainchild,
he still needs the Don's blessing
and Hill confirms that Tony Ducks
gave him his blessing to carry out the heist
in exchange for 50% of the loot.
- [Laurence] According to Hill,
Tony Ducks isn't just doling out blessings
and collecting money,
he's organizing every detail of the operation.
- [John] At the time of the heist,
Jimmy Burke is serving time in the rehab center
in Times Square in New York.
The thing is, he should be serving that time in Georgia,
because after all,
that's where he was busted for cocaine possession.
Agents are wondering whether it's Tony Ducks
who managed to arrange to have Burke
serve his time in New York rather than Georgia.
So if that's the case,
then really Tony Ducks is the one
who's in control of this operation
and not Jimmy the Gent.
- [Lis] In addition to Hill's testimony,
they also have the testimony of the Don's chauffer
who says that just days after the heist,
the Don was already planning the execution
of many of the people involved.
- [Kavitha] Nobody actually speaks to the Don himself
directly except for his lieutenants.
There are several levels of men
before the order of a hit gets to the actual assassin,
and that's by design.
That's so that there are many levels of protection
so that you can't trace that order
directly back to the Don.
- [Laurence] If the Feds can't nail Tony Ducks
on the murders and the heist itself,
there's only one other way authorities think
they can bring him down.
By finding the money.
- [John] Authorities already know
about the network that Tony Ducks uses to distribute money,
but he seems to be behaving with more caution than usual.
Understandable after a heist of this size.
The way his network operates is that the cash first comes
to his walled compound in Queens.
Then he takes his cut,
which is gonna be laundered through his various businesses,
but the rest of it is parceled out in small quantities
and carried via couriers
to various locations in the United States.
- [Kavitha] One of authorities major leads
points them towards a lieutenant's house
in Hollywood, Florida
where they believe couriers have brought
a lot of this money to
and they're sent back to New York to make that run again.
According to Henry Hill,
once these couriers have either outlived their usefulness
or might be getting too close and might turn,
Tony Ducks orders their assassination.
- [John] Once the money gets to Florida,
where it goes is anyone's guess.
The FBI gets a tip that 250,000 of it
can be found in a safe deposit box
in a Florida bank in Miami,
but by the time the FBI gets there, it's been cleaned out.
- [Lis] Law enforcement suspects at that point
that Tony Ducks has laundered
all of this money through legitimate businesses.
He's got a flower shop, he's got taxi stands,
he's got bars and restaurants,
and that money was probably already laundered
and will never be found.
- [Matthew] At this point, the only person ever arrested
and convicted of the Lufthansa heist is Louis Werner.
Tony Ducks ducks another one here,
and it's never pinned to him.
They find none of the cash
and no evidence to bring him into court.
- [Laurence] It is been almost seven years,
and the FBI is no closer to tracking down the Mastermind
or the $5 million in cash from the Lufthansa heist of 1978.
- [Claire] The trail has gone completely cold by the
early 1980s. Not only can the Feds not find the money,
but key witnesses refuse to talk.
Pretty much every suspect that they have in mind
has been killed,
and there's really no way to connect the remaining players
to the crime itself.
Things start to change though,
when in 1985, there's a new mob boss
on the rise in the Gambino family,
who Feds realize might have had a hand in Lufthansa as well.
- [Scott] John Gotti killed his way to power in December of 1985
by organizing the assassination of his predecessor,
Paul Castellano,
in a very high profile gangland execution
carried out in midtown Manhattan
during the Christmas shopping season.
- [Kavitha] The reason Gotti felt that he had to murder his
godfather is because he's totally anti-drugs
and doesn't want the Gambino family
involved in narcotics at all.
Gotti and his crew had been indicted on a drug charge,
so he's now afraid that when the Don finds out,
he'll have him killed.
So it's basically a situation where
Gotti whacks godfather before he gets whacked himself.
- [Laurence] Now, with narcotics sales
sanctioned from the very top,
the Gambino family becomes one of the most profitable
and violent gangs in New York City.
- [Matthew] Under the control now of John Gotti as the
Godfather, the Lucchese family expand their criminal empire,
this is the time where they start to make huge profits.
But also, John Gotti is not a low-key under the radar guy.
The Dapper John, like he's seen a newspaper all the time,
he gets a second nickname and that's the Teflon Don
because every time they came after him
for these different crimes,
it just kind of slid off of him.
- [Claire] Gotti's flashy lifestyle
definitely draws the attention of law enforcement,
and almost immediately after coming to power,
Feds start wiretapping, bugging his establishments,
trying to get information about him
in order to bring him and the Gambino family down.
- [John] Thanks to those wiretaps,
in 1986, Gotti is arrested
on charges of racketeering and extortion.
As authorities are building their case against Gotti,
another thing comes up.
It turns out that Gotti received a huge cut
of the take from the Lufthansa heist.
- [Laurence] This comes as a surprise to the FBI.
The agency knows the Lucchese mob is behind the heist,
but never suspected they could have been cooperating
with a rival family.
- [Kavitha] The Gambino family holds a lot of sway
in parts of South Queens near JFK,
which is territory that they basically share
with the Lucchese family.
So it would've been pretty natural
for Gotti and the Gambino family
to be key players in the Lufthansa heist.
- [Matthew] During the course of the investigation,
they find out that Gotti is integral as part of the heist.
They use his garage as a way point
to transfer the money from the robbery to a switch car.
And then Gotti offers his other services to crush that van
to destroy evidence.
- [Scott] Stacks Edwards got delayed and the car got
discovered. But initially the plan for John Gotti
was that him and his crew
were gonna get rid of the getaway vehicle.
- [John] That scrap yard is owned by the Gambinos.
This suggests that the Gambino family
has been involved in the heist from the very beginning.
Allegedly Gotti's take from the Lufthansa heist
comes to around $200,000.
- [Laurence] Considering that other participants
collect only a small portion of the money they're owed,
Gotti's whopping payout suggest
he played a major role behind the scenes.
- [Kavitha] If Gotti did help haul the Lufthansa Loot,
it's likely that it was shuttled
throughout the various Gambino family activities,
including high level narcotics.
So whether it's the Lucchese family or the Gambino family,
the result is the same.
The money is nowhere to be found.
In 1992, Gotti is finally convicted
not for the Lufthansa heist,
but on various conspiracy charges.
Agents continue to try to get him to confess to the heist,
but he remains silent.
- [John] With Gotti's death in 2002,
the only one directly involved in the heist
who goes to jail for it is Louis Werner.
Everyone else either walks
or takes the secret to their graves.
- [Laurence] For nearly four decades
after the Lufthansa heist,
the investigation remains cold.
Neither the mastermind nor the 5 million in stolen cash
has ever been found.
- In 2014, authorities make their first arrest
in the Lufthansa case in over 35 years.
They arrest 80-year-old Vincent Asaro,
who's a made man and member of the Bonanno family.
Authorities say that Asaro has been pretty entrenched
in the Bonanno family syndicate for decades.
- The FBI has suspected for many years
that Asaro might have some connection to the case,
but they never had any hard evidence to implicate him.
However, in this new investigation and trial,
the FBI thinks it's found enough
to connect a third mob family to the heist.
- [Claire] In 1978, at the time of the Lufthansa heist,
the Bonanno crime family is essentially the smallest
of the five families in New York.
And this small size allows them to really partner up
with the other four families
to pull off heists in other crimes.
Even though it's been decades since the Lufthansa heist,
authorities still want to figure out
where that $5 million went,
and they're convinced that Vini Asaro
and the Bonanno crime family
might have the missing information they need
to track down this money.
- [Laurence] The key witness at the trial is Asaro's cousin,
a longtime Bonanno associate turned FBI informant.
- [Kavitha] At Asaro's trial,
it becomes known that his cousin
had secretly recorded conversations between them
between 2010 and 2013
and one of these recordings,
Asaro allegedly confesses to the Lufthansa heist.
The cousin gets Asaro to reminisce
about that night in December, 1978
when he showed up with burlap sacks
filled with cash and gold coins
and crates filled with watches and jewels.
- [Claire] Asaro's cousin essentially gets Vinni Asaro
to admit to the whole events
of the evening of the Lufthansa heist,
including how Asaro talked his cousin
into being the person who would hide the money.
According to this taped confession,
a week later, someone shows up at his cousin's door,
rings the doorbell, and takes all the loot.
- [Laurence] When Asaro takes the stand
and is forced to listen to the secret recordings,
he dismisses them with a wave of his hand.
- [John] Asaro takes the stand and is completely defiant.
He accuses his cousin of simply being a rat
who will say anything
in order to have his own crimes pardoned.
Asaro admits under cross-examination
that he knew about the heist,
but it was carried out
by people he knew who hung out with him at Robert's Lounge.
Asaro says, I was never really involved.
- [Lis] Another witness corroborates the cousin
by saying that he saw Asaro with an at attache case
full of money and jewels,
and he saw Asaro giving that attache case
to a Bonanno leader sort of as a tribute.
So, of course, he would've known about Lufthansa heist.
- [Kavitha] Asaro claims that he was offered hush money
from Jimmy the Gent
to keep quiet about the heist,
but that he never received it
and he didn't go after that money
because he says he knew better
than to approach a man as violent as Jimmy.
But another informant counters that claim.
He says Asaro was suddenly able to pay off
all of his gambling debts in just one day,
and then he proceeded to place even more bets thereafter.
- [Lis] By the 1990s, Asaro had really lost everything.
He was a gambler, he was into drugs.
He used to be a captain of the Bonanno family
and they demoted him.
He really was kind of nothing.
He was living out in a small house in Queens,
until 2014 when he was charged
with being involved in the heist.
- [Claire] Asaro is quite a character during his trial.
He is very insistent
that he needs to have a clear sight line
to all of his accusers,
and he essentially goes out of his way to threaten them.
He even mouths obscenities while he's on the stand.
- [John] Asaro's defense team
plays along with these belittling tactics
by portraying his cousin
as just a desperate guy
who is out to have his own crimes forgiven
by making up stories about a member of the family.
- [Laurence] The strategy seems to work.
On November 12th, 2015,
after just two days of deliberation,
the jury announces its verdict.
Not guilty on all charges.
- [Kavitha] Prosecutors are just speechless.
They've been working on this case for years
and they had a dozen witnesses testifying
that they thought that this would stick.
Jurors don't offer any explanation for their verdict.
But many do feel that the prosecutor's reliance
on turned informants and witnesses
who were trying to expunge their own records was unreliable.
- [Laurence] It's yet another setback
for the decades old criminal investigation
and most likely, the government's last chance
to try someone for the Lufthansa heist.
- [John] Asaro walks free.
He claps for the jurors, he hugs his lawyers.
He thanks the judge,
and then he goes to get into his car,
and as he does so, he says to his lawyer
a very mafia sounding quip,
"Don't let them see the body in the trunk."
- [Kavitha] Unfortunately, Asaro's full involvement
in the Lufthansa heist and the whereabouts of the $5 million
might never be fully known.
He dies in 2023 in his modest house in Queens,
just a few miles from JFK.
- To this day, the only person
actually convicted in the Lufthansa heist
is low-level airline worker, Louis Werner.
Jimmy Burke, the Lucchese, Gambino
and Bonanno Family godfathers
and other major players,
all escaped charges related to the Lufthansa heist.
And with all of them now dead,
the secret of what happened to the missing millions
may be gone forever,
making it one of the most elusive
and bloody open cases in American history.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."