Nicholas Pileggi wrote Wiseguy. Martin Scorsese made Goodfellas. Both told you who got killed after the Lufthansa heist. Neither told you where five point eight million dollars in stolen cash actually ended up. The film follows the bodies. The money has its own trail, and the trail runs through three crime families, a frozen corpse in a Brooklyn trailer, a federal prison wedding chapel, a Foxwoods blackjack table, and an animated movie about ferrets. The men who knew where it went mostly died without telling anyone. The men who came after them spent the money before the FBI could find it.
This is the chapter Goodfellas never showed — because the money trail does not end with a dramatic shot of a corpse in a freezer truck. It ends with a Bonanno capo gambling away the proceeds of the largest cash robbery in American history at a Connecticut casino, twenty-five years after the heist, while the FBI listened on a wiretap.
The Heist Was Three Times Bigger Than Expected
The Lufthansa heist took place at Building 261 of John F. Kennedy International Airport in the early morning hours of December 11, 1978. The crew assembled by James “Jimmy” Burke and led by Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, and four other associates entered the cargo terminal at 3:12 a.m. and exited at 4:16 a.m. with twenty-three packages containing United States currency and four hundred thousand dollars in unset diamonds. The expected take was two million dollars in cash. The actual take was five million in cash plus the diamonds — a total street value the FBI estimated at five point eight million 1978 dollars, equivalent to roughly twenty-five million in current value.
The reason the take was three times larger than expected is that Lufthansa had used the cargo terminal as a Friday-evening cash drop for the German Mark settlements from the previous week’s transatlantic flights. Louis Werner, the Lufthansa cargo supervisor whose gambling debt to Martin Krugman had produced the inside intelligence, had reported the standard weekly volume. He had not known that the airline was holding two extra weeks of accumulated cash because of a banking transit delay. The crew walked out of Building 261 with three weeks of Lufthansa’s transatlantic settlement reserves.
Three Families Split the Take
The Mafia Commission tribute structure required Burke to pay tribute upward to Lucchese capo Paul Vario, since Burke operated under Vario’s authority and had committed the heist within Lucchese territory. Court records and FBI surveillance from the early 1980s document a Burke-to-Vario tribute payment of approximately one point two million dollars in cash, transferred over a six-week period in early 1979. The Lucchese family received its cut.
The Gambino family was owed a share because Paolo LiCastri, a Gambino soldier loaned out to the Burke crew for the heist, had participated as a shooter and security man inside the cargo terminal. LiCastri’s standard split would have gone to him. He was murdered in February 1979 — among the first of the so-called Lufthansa cleanup killings — but the Gambino family’s tribute claim survived him. Court testimony in United States v. Asaro in 2014 established that Gambino captain Daniel Marino received approximately two hundred thousand dollars from Burke as the family’s share. The Gambinos got paid.
The Bonanno family’s claim was less clean. Vincent Asaro, a Bonanno soldier and longtime Burke associate, claimed he had served as security and logistics on the night of the heist. The FBI recorded Asaro on a 2011 wiretap complaining bitterly that Burke had cheated him out of his share of the Lufthansa money. He named names. He described the original split. He described what he had been promised and what he had been paid. The recording became the centerpiece of the 2014 federal indictment that charged him with the Lufthansa heist itself. Asaro was acquitted at trial in 2015 on all counts, despite the wiretap, in one of the most surprising organized crime acquittals of the modern era.
The Frozen Body and the Missing $250,000
The most cinematic Lufthansa execution — the frozen body in the meat truck — happened in February 1979. The film attaches the killing to a character named Frankie Carbone, a composite based on the real Lucchese soldier Angelo Sepe. The corpse the audience sees in the freezer truck did not actually belong to Carbone or Sepe. It belonged to Richard Eaton, a thirty-five-year-old hustler from Florida who had received approximately two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash from Jimmy Burke for an offshore money laundering operation Burke wanted to set up through a Caribbean shell company.
Eaton lost the money. By his own admission to Burke he had blown it on cocaine, hotel rooms, and a failed Florida real estate venture. Burke had him killed in late January 1979 and Eaton’s body was placed in a refrigerated trailer at a meat distribution facility in Brooklyn. The trailer was discovered by a meat company employee on February 12, 1979. Eaton’s body was identified through dental records. The FBI used the discovery as the predicate to bring Burke before a grand jury in 1979 — the first of the Lufthansa-adjacent grand jury proceedings — but Burke was not charged with the murder until five years later, when Henry Hill’s testimony provided the corroboration the prosecution needed.
Scorsese kept the visual of the frozen body in Goodfellas because it is one of the most disturbing images in the source material. He compressed three different Lufthansa victims — Eaton, Sepe, and the heist driver Stacks Edwards — into the composite character of Frankie Carbone. The financial motive for Eaton’s murder, the laundering scheme, and the missing two hundred fifty thousand dollars never made it onto the screen. The money was never recovered.
The FBI Wiretaps That Almost Broke the Case
The FBI’s 1980-1982 wiretaps on Burke’s home phone, his car, and the Robert’s Lounge bar in Ozone Park produced the strongest evidence of the Lufthansa money distribution. Burke himself never named amounts on tape. He was operationally disciplined to a degree the Bureau had not anticipated. But Vario, in three separate intercepted conversations from late 1979, complained about the “Lufthansa take” not being big enough, named figures consistent with the one point two million tribute, and discussed how the remaining money should be invested. Those tapes are part of the Eastern District of New York court record.
The Bureau used the wiretaps to flip Henry Hill in 1980, after Hill was arrested on a separate narcotics charge. Hill’s cooperation gave the prosecution the eyewitness corroboration to convict Burke of the Stacks Edwards murder in 1985 and the Boston College point-shaving conspiracy in 1986. Burke received a sentence of twelve years for the gambling fix and a separate twenty-year sentence for the murder, served concurrently. He never confessed to any aspect of the Lufthansa heist itself. He died in federal custody at Roswell Park Cancer Institute on April 13, 1996.
Burke’s Safety Deposit Box and the Prison Romance
Before reporting to federal custody in 1985, Jimmy Burke locked between two and four million dollars in cash and assets in a Queens commercial safety deposit box. The exact amount has never been confirmed. He gave the box keys to his two daughters, Catherine and Jesse Burke. The arrangement was supposed to be a financial reserve for the family during his incarceration. The daughters honored the trust for almost two decades.
The arrangement broke down in 2003, when Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato — a Bonanno hitman serving federal time for the Carmine Galante murder — married Catherine Burke during a federal prison chapel ceremony. The wedding was small. The vows were short. Within months, Bruno had extracted from his new wife the existence of the deposit box and the location of the keys. He passed the information to Bonanno captain Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, who was Bruno’s superior in the Bonanno hierarchy.
Vinnie Gorgeous Gambles Away $4 Million at Foxwoods
Basciano emptied the box over a period of approximately fourteen months, between late 2003 and early 2005. The money was used in three documented categories. The largest portion — court records put it at approximately five hundred thousand dollars — was gambled away at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, primarily at the high-limit blackjack tables. Basciano was a regular at Foxwoods and had developed a documented pattern of high-volume losses dating back to the late 1990s.
A second portion — approximately two hundred fifty thousand dollars — was invested by Basciano in a low-budget animated film about a family of ferrets called Ferretina. The film never went into commercial production. Court documents describe it as a money-laundering vehicle organized through a Bonanno-affiliated production company in New York. The investment is corroborated in two separate FBI 302 reports. The remaining balance — between one and three million dollars depending on the high estimate — was drained on a series of gambling binges, payments to Bonanno associates, and personal expenditures over the next eighteen months.
By the time Basciano was arrested on a federal RICO indictment in November 2004, the Burke deposit box was empty. The money that Jimmy Burke had locked away in 1985 to keep his family solvent during his prison years had been gambled away by his daughter’s prison-chapel husband’s boss, at a Connecticut casino, on blackjack and an animated movie about ferrets.
The FBI Digs Up Burke’s House — 35 Years Later
In June 2013 the FBI executed a federal search warrant on the Ozone Park home where Jimmy Burke had lived from 1968 until his arrest. The Bureau brought jackhammers, ground-penetrating radar units, and a four-person excavation team. The search was based on a tip from Vincent Asaro that Burke had buried a portion of the Lufthansa proceeds — and possibly the remains of one of the Lufthansa cleanup victims — under the basement floor of the house. The search ran for four days. Agents broke through three feet of concrete in the basement. They found nothing. No cash, no remains, no evidence of any kind that anything had ever been buried beneath the house.
The 2013 dig was the FBI’s last institutional acknowledgment that the Lufthansa money had never been recovered. The remaining unaccounted balance — somewhere between one and two million 1978 dollars — has never been located. It was almost certainly spent in the 1980s by Burke himself, his immediate associates, or the Lucchese, Gambino, and Bonanno families that received tribute. There are no Swiss accounts. There is no buried treasure. The largest cash robbery in American history was distributed through the most ordinary mechanisms organized crime uses for any other proceeds — gambling, tribute, laundering, drugs, casinos, and one very low-budget animated movie about ferrets.
What Goodfellas Could Not Follow
The film ends with Henry Hill in witness protection, complaining about egg noodles and ketchup. The implied narrative is that the money disappeared with the people who could spend it. The documented reality is that the money was tracked, partially recovered, partially stolen, and ultimately frittered away over twenty-five years through a series of mob soap-opera transactions that no Hollywood three-act structure could absorb. Burke himself died with the bulk of the cash already moved. His daughters’ second husbands inherited the keys. A Bonanno capo lost the proceeds at a casino. The FBI dug up a Queens basement and found dirt.
The Lufthansa heist was the most cinematic robbery in American organized crime history. Its money trail is the least cinematic possible ending — a slow attrition of cash through the boring, repetitive, gambling-and-laundering machinery that mob families have always used to dispose of every dollar they have ever stolen. Goodfellas ended with the bodies. The money kept moving for thirty more years.
Further Reading
- Goodfellas Never Showed Burke’s Real Kill List
- Goodfellas Never Showed the Heist That Made Henry Hill
- Casino Lied to You About Geraldine McGee
Sources
- Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (1985)
- Daniel Simone and Henry Hill, The Big Heist (2015)
- Anthony DeStefano, Vinnie Gorgeous: The Ugly Rise and Fall of a New York Mobster
- FBI surveillance transcripts, Eastern District of New York, 2003-2011
- United States v. Vincent Asaro, E.D.N.Y. (2014-2015)
▶ The companion documentary covers this on YouTube
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