5 Things Goodfellas Didn’t Tell You About the Lufthansa Heist

The Lufthansa heist was the biggest cash robbery in U.S. history — and the only man ever convicted of it never set foot in the terminal the night it happened. Here are 5 things Goodfellas didn’t tell you.

In Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese gives you the Lufthansa heist as a montage of pink Cadillacs and fur coats. The real robbery — December 11, 1978, at the cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport — was bigger and colder than the two hours the film had to spend on it. Around $6 million in untraceable bills walked out of that vault, and almost no one who touched it lived to spend it.

This video is the hub over four deep-cut singles already on this channel. We count down five gaps between the movie and the documented record: the disputed take and the untraceable cash; Marty Krugman, the wig-shop bookmaker the film renamed “Morrie,” who brought the score and got killed for his cut; Louis Werner, the Lufthansa cargo supervisor whose $20,000 gambling debt made him the inside man; the nine bodies James Burke — the real “Jimmy Conway” Robert De Niro plays — left in seven months; and the courtroom ending the movie could never film. The only person ever convicted of the Lufthansa heist was Werner, the inside man who was home asleep while ski-masked men cleaned out his terminal (United States v. Louis Werner, 2d Cir. 1980). James Burke, the reputed mastermind, was never charged for the heist and died in prison in 1996. The ~$6 million was never recovered.

Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, S