The Lufthansa Heist: The JFK Cargo Vault and What Failed

At about 3 a.m. on 11 December 1978, six masked gunmen took $5 million in cash and about $1 million in jewellery from Lufthansa’s cargo building at Kennedy Airport. This is the story of the room the money sat in, the man who knew its routine, and the gaps he used.

The Lufthansa heist at a glance

Sources for the table: the time, the gunmen, the boxes and the sentence from the federal appeal judgment in Werner’s case;¹ Building 261 from Crime+Investigation;² the first wire report from the Associated Press;³ the totals, Burke, Asaro and the recovery from AP, CBS and the Independent.⁴⁵⁶⁷

The cargo building and why the cash was there

Lufthansa’s cargo building at JFK wasn’t a bank. It was a place where freight came off aircraft, waited and went on its way, and some of that freight was money. HISTORY describes the trade: the airline regularly flew large amounts of US currency back from Europe, dollars that American tourists and servicemen had exchanged abroad, and Brink’s trucks normally took it straight on to American banks.⁸ The Associated Press, reporting in 2014, called the stolen cash “untraceable US currency that was being returned to the United States from Germany”.⁹

When a delivery landed too late for the last truck, the money stayed at the airport until the next business day.⁸ In the building that meant a storage room for valuable shipments, protected by an alarm.¹ Crime+Investigation says it sat behind two doors, and HISTORY gives its size as 10 by 20 feet, about the size of a single garage.²⁸

The Friday the truck left empty

The most useful document on all this is dry reading: the 1980 judgment of the federal appeals court in New York that upheld the inside man’s conviction. We went through it for the cargo procedure rather than the gangsters, and it’s specific. On Friday 8 December 1978 a Brink’s armoured truck drove up to the Lufthansa cargo area to collect $5,000,000 in currency for Chase Manhattan Bank.¹

The court sets out what happened next. Louis Werner’s job included assigning pick-up orders, and he assigned nobody to bring the shipments out to the guards. He then said he wouldn’t clear them without a supervisor or security officer present, which the court called “admittedly a novel procedure”. The guards waited, eventually had to leave, and the $5 million was left to be picked up after the weekend.¹ It was still in the building in the early hours of Monday.

The first wire story on the morning of the robbery had the details a little differently: $3 million in American money flown from Frankfurt to Chase Manhattan, as part of a haul of about $5 million in cash and jewels.³ By the time of Werner’s trial the cash alone was put at $5 million.¹

The plan and the inside man

Werner had worked for Lufthansa since 1968. He met incoming Lufthansa flights and was responsible for moving shipments marked “valuable” or “important” into the cargo building and securing them.¹ In other words, the man whose job was to protect the money in transit knew more about its timing than anyone outside the airline.

According to the testimony summarised by the court, Werner talked about a “bigger score” with his friend Peter Gruenewald and with William Fischetti. Gruenewald tried to recruit a group of robbers and failed, so Werner went to his bookmaker, Frank Menna, who put him in touch with Martin Krugman. Krugman “professed interest in the plan”.¹ Gruenewald and Fischetti said Werner expected $300,000 for his part, and his gambling debts were paid off shortly after the robbery.¹ HISTORY tells it the other way round, with Gruenewald dreaming up the plan and Werner taking it from him; the court record has Werner approaching the others.⁸¹

From Krugman the plan reached the crew around James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, a Lucchese crime family associate who, with Henry Hill and others, worked the airport for years.⁸⁵ The robbers were promised $750,000 each, according to later court papers, and most never got it.⁹ They had been told to expect about $2 million in cash.⁷²

The night of 11 December 1978

What follows keeps to what the court and the contemporary reports recorded. We don’t go into how a valuables room could be attacked, only into what happened there.

At about 3 a.m. on Monday 11 December, six masked gunmen entered the Lufthansa cargo building and surprised eleven employees on their meal break.¹ Crime+Investigation says Werner had told the gang the night shift would be on its break at that hour, and that Rudi Eirich, the employee who held the vault keys, was brought from his office elsewhere in the building and forced at gunpoint to unlock the two doors.² The first Associated Press report said the men beat a guard and tied up everyone, and that one worker was forced to open what it called a safe.³

The court put it in one sentence: the gunmen ordered an employee “to disengage the alarm system and open the storage room in which the valuable shipments were kept”.¹ Inside were 40 boxes holding $5,000,000 in currency and other boxes of jewellery worth about $1,000,000. The robbers loaded them into a black van and drove away.¹ Testimony at a trial in 2015 described a “mountain” of $100 bills.⁷ The whole thing took a little over an hour.⁸²

Timeline

• 8 Oct 1976 $22,000 in foreign currency disappears from a Lufthansa “val bag” at JFK.
• 8 Dec 1978 A Brink’s truck comes for $5 million and leaves without it.
• 11 Dec 1978 About 3 a.m., six gunmen raid the cargo building.
• 6 Jan 1979 Martin Krugman disappears.
• 28 Feb 1980 The appeals court upholds Louis Werner’s conviction.
• Spring 1980 Henry Hill is arrested on drug charges and starts to cooperate with the FBI.
• 13 Apr 1996 Jimmy Burke dies in prison, never charged with the robbery.
• 23 Jan 2014 Vincent Asaro is arrested and charged over the heist.
• 12 Nov 2015 A Brooklyn jury acquits Asaro.

Timeline sources: the Werner judgment, HISTORY, the Independent, CBS and AP.¹⁸⁵⁴⁷

How much was stolen: the figures don’t agree

If you’ve seen three different totals for the Lufthansa heist, that’s because there are at least three in print. The court record is the firmest: $5 million in currency and $1 million in jewellery, which the indictment called a “six million dollar robbery”.¹ Here’s how the other sources line up.

Sources for the table, in order of first mention.¹³⁹⁴⁵⁸ The early wire figures are the kind of thing you’d expect a few hours after a robbery, while staff were still counting. As one police officer put it at the time, “They’re still counting.”³ Lufthansa’s spokesman said it wasn’t yet clear exactly what had been taken, but that the thieves seemed to know what they were looking for.³

It was the largest cash robbery in the United States at the time. The court called it “the largest armed robbery in American history”, and a 2014 news report, citing the book The Heist, said it held the US cash record until December 1982.¹⁶ HISTORY puts the cash alone at about $21 million in today’s money.⁸

The aftermath: arrests, killings and one conviction

The getaway van undid the plan almost at once. It was meant to be crushed at a junkyard; instead the driver, Parnell “Stacks” Edwards, left it near his girlfriend’s flat, and police found it two days later with his fingerprints inside.²⁸ Edwards was the first person connected to the robbery to be murdered. Martin Krugman, the bookmaker who had passed on Werner’s plan, disappeared on 6 January 1979.⁸

The killings went on through 1979. HISTORY counts eight men connected to the robbery dead or missing by that summer; the Independent’s obituary of Burke, drawing on Henry Hill’s account, says the search for an informant cost the lives of 14 people who were in some way connected with it.⁸⁵ Both sources say Burke was believed to be behind many of them. None of those deaths led to a conviction for the robbery itself.

Werner’s trial

Werner was tried in the federal court for the Eastern District of New York, with Gruenewald and Fischetti as the prosecution’s key witnesses. He didn’t testify. He was convicted of the 1978 robbery and conspiracy under the Hobbs Act and of the 1976 currency theft, and sentenced to two concurrent terms of 15 years, plus fines.¹ The two crimes were tried together, and the appeals court explained why that was fair.

Burke, Hill and the Asaro trial

Henry Hill was arrested on drug charges in the spring of 1980 and agreed to testify. His evidence helped convict Burke of a basketball point-shaving scheme and of an unrelated murder, but not of the robbery.⁸ Burke got 20 years to life for the murder of Richard Eaton, a drug dealer the Independent describes as a Lufthansa money-launderer, and died in prison in Buffalo, New York, on 13 April 1996.⁵⁶

The case came back in January 2014, when the FBI arrested Vincent Asaro, then 78 and an alleged Bonanno family captain, and charged him over the heist and a 1969 murder.⁹⁴ His cousin Gaspare Valenti testified that he had been one of the robbers and that Asaro drafted him, telling him Burke had “a big score at the airport coming up”. On 12 November 2015 a Brooklyn jury acquitted Asaro; his lawyers had argued he was framed by paid cooperators.⁷ So the only conviction for the robbery is still Werner’s.⁴⁵

The Goodfellas connection: film and record

Most people meet the Lufthansa heist through Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). The film was based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, which told the story of Henry Hill’s life in the mob and his later cooperation with the authorities, and Robert De Niro’s character was inspired by Burke.⁹ The Independent called the book the one “on which Goodfellas was closely based”.⁵

That’s the catch for anyone using the film as history. Much of the popular story, including Burke as the organiser, comes from Hill, a participant turned government witness.⁶⁸ It may well be true, but it was never tested in a trial for the robbery. What a court did establish is narrower and, from our point of view, more interesting: an airline employee who knew the cargo routine, a shipment held over a weekend, and a room opened by staff at gunpoint.¹

What failed in the cargo vault

We looked for a published inquiry into Lufthansa’s cargo security after the robbery, or an official account of what the airline or the airport changed, and couldn’t find one we could open. So this section sticks to what the court record shows went wrong, in three groups.

The first problem is the one every vault has. A storage room is only as good as the people who handle what goes in and out of it, and the person best placed to rob it is often the one employed to look after it. The second is about timing. A bank vault holds money because that’s its job; a cargo room held it because a truck had left without it. That’s a different kind of risk, and it’s the one Werner, by the court’s account, could create himself.¹

The third is older than the airport. Banks had faced robbers who forced the people with the combination since the nineteenth century, and clockwork was one answer: Holbrook and Fish’s 1857 patent for a clockwork guard on a lock is an early example. A cargo room that has to take deliveries from night flights can’t simply stay shut until morning, which, as we see it, is part of why the Lufthansa room was opened by people rather than beaten as metal. Our guide to how bank vaults work covers the hardware and the procedures banks use around it.

Five years later the same pattern turned up at Heathrow. In the Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983 a gang with inside help from a guard arrived as the morning shift opened up and forced the keyholders to open the vault. Thirty-two years after that, the Hatton Garden burglars went the other way and cut through a wall over a bank holiday weekend. The Lufthansa robbers belong with the first group: as in many of the cases in our history of safe-cracking, the weak point was never the steel.

For other raids that looked like a success on the night and went badly afterwards, see our round-up of infamous failed bank robberies.

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