Vinny Asaro, Lufthansa Heist's Last Loose End

Vincent Asaro at Brooklyn Federal Court in 1966.

Expanded slightly: In a Brooklyn courtroom this week commenced the trial of an 80-year-old Bonanno family gangster, Vincent Asaro, who allegedly was involved in the notorious 1978 Lufthansa Heist. Not only was he supposedly the Bonanno family's overseer at JFK airport, the prosecution charged, noting that Asaro himself played a direct role in the heist.

Ex-underboss Salvatore Vitale testified yesterday, providing a window into events surrounding the notorious robbery at JFK airport. Asaro supposedly was heard muttering "motherfucker" constantly under his breath during testimony, trying all the while to stare Vitale in the eye.

Asaro personally handed off a case stuffed with jewelry from the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist to future Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, Vitale said Monday at the first ever mob-related trial over the historic "unsolved" crime. Massino himself also is slated to testify, among others.


“When Joe got in the car he had the case that Vinny gave him,” Vitale testified. “He had it in his lap…He opened up the case and he showed me all kinds of chains and he said ‘this is from the Lufthansa score.’”

Later that day, Vitale went to Massino’s Queens house and was shown a portion of the breathtaking haul.

“All of the jewelry was laid out on the dining room table,” Vitale said, adding his measly piece of the fortune was only one measly necklace.

“A couple of days later I drove Joey to the diamond district on Canal Street and after I parked we entered into a jewelry store,” Vitale said. “There was a guy there — him and Joe went in the back with the case and I never saw the case again.”

On cross examination, Asaro’s attorney, Elizabeth Macedonio, sought to bash Vitale’s testimony as unreliable.


Opening Statements
“The defendant is a gangster through and through — he lived and breathed the Mafia,” prosecutor Lindsay Gerdes said in her opening statement as Asaro, 80, looked on wearing a gray sweater.

“On the night of the heist itself, the robbery team brought all the tools they would need — guns, masks, gloves,” she said.

“The defendant and Jimmy Burke waited nearby in a car, ready to act as a crash car if the police happened to stumble upon the crew,” she said. Apparently Asaro was a direct participant in the crime.

“Jimmy Burke and Vincent Asaro were true partners in crime,” Gerdes said. “Hijacking, robbing, murder.”

She later referred to the Lufthansa job as “truly the score of all scores. Boxes and boxes of money and jewelry. More money than anyone could have dreamed.”

Gaspare Valenti, a cousin of Asaro's and also a Bonanno associate, is expected to tell jurors today that Asaro had talked about his involvement in the heist -- emphasizing in his colorful language that he'd failed to receive his fair share.

“We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get, we got fucked all around. Got fucked around. That ­fucking Jimmy [Burke] kept everything,” Asaro complained on tape, according to prosecutors. (He constantly bitched about how cheap everyone around him was, yet his own supposed greed may be a key reason his cousin flipped on him.)

In addition to the robbery, loansharking, gambling and assault raps, Asaro is charged with killing a suspected FBI cooperator with a dog chain in 1969.

During its opening statement Monday, the defense stressed the burden of proof is on the government. It said prosecutors are relying on "incentived" criminals for a lot of their argument.

Of Asaro's alleged involvement in the fabled heist, McMahon has said: "Innocence. Pure, actual innocence. He didn't do it, had nothing to do with it. Pretty much all the people that did it got murdered ... So, the fact that my client didn't get murdered would suggest that he didn't have anything to do with it, so I'll start right there."

Prosecutors haven't revealed why their key witnesses turned on Asaro, though it's believed he may have held a grudge after being cheated out of a cut of Asaro's $750,000 take from the heist.

The $6 million in 2015 dollars would be worth $21.9 million, with each share worth $2.7 million, according to information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The crew behind the scheme, including mastermind Jimmy Burke, had believed the haul would've been much less. It had actually been pegged at $2 million. Part of the reason so many were killed is that the haul was so much larger than Burke had believed.

It brought down so much heat on all the families, Burke began systematically killing all the actual participants in the crime, mostly lowly hired guns destined to receive the smallest shares from the loot.

Louis Werner, an airport cargo worker, is the only one to ever be convicted for the crime.

Valenti, a Bonanno associate who has pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, is expected to take the witness stand to testify about Asaro's alleged role in the Lufthansa heist and a gruesome murder of a suspected mob turncoat.

Other witnesses will include former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, the first New York Mafia boss to turn informant after being found guilty following a major racketeering case.

Asaro was a Bonanno soldier, with the Mafia slogan 'death before dishonor' tattooed on his forearm in late 1978 when the Lufthansa cargo terminal was robbed.

The men stole about $5 million in untraceable US currency that was being returned to the United States from Germany, along with about $1 million in jewelry.

Valenti, wore a wire on Asaro and is expected to hang murders on the elderly Mafioso, whom the Sicilian faction of the Bonanno family was touting to take over a few years prior to Asaro's arrest early last year.

Here's the New York Daily News's first story on the Lufhansa Heist: Five gunmen steal an estimated $5 million from Lufthansa cargo hangar at Kennedy Airport in 1978, originally published on Dec. 12, 1978. 

The story was written by William Federici and Owen Moritz.

Five gunmen steal an estimated $5 million from Lufthansa cargo hangar at Kennedy Airport in 1978, originally published on Dec. 12, 1978.

In what may be the nation's biggest cash heist ever, five masked gunmen slipped through a supposedly impenetrable security net around a Lufthansa cargo hangar at Kennedy Airport early yesterday and rode off with an estimated $5 million in easily spendable American and foreign money.
And just for good luck, the bandits, also carried off another $300,000 to $500,000 in gold, pearls and jewelry to complete a heist that makes the legendary Brink's job, of which $1.2 million was cash, look like a theft from another century, before inflation.
The gunmen hit the two-block-long hangar of the Red Baron's airline at 3:15 a.m. when its "high value" room was bursting with money. A Lufthansa jet had landed with $2 million to $3 million in currency being shipped to the Chase Manhattan and Federal Reserve banks here. Another $2 million or so was on hand.

Port Authority police said two gunmen circled around to a back entrance of the huge cargo area — the place is girded by cyclone fences — clipped a lock without touching off an alarm, then seized at gunpoint a guard making his rounds.

The gunmen forced the guard to deactivate a silent alarm and open the front entrance to admit a black van that contained three more gunmen, police said. With the guard in handcuffs, the five swept into the hangar on the northern flank of the airport, rounded up nine workers on their lunch break and locked them in a second-floor cafeteria. They forced a guard to reveal the combination to a safe. And then, for more than an hour, they looted a 14-by-14-foot cinder-block vault of 30 bags of cash and jewels.

The five loaded the van and fled.

"They were prepared," said an airport spokesman. "They had enough handcuffs for all 10 employees."

"We've got every reason to believe this is an inside job because of the way they went through a sophisticated alarm system," he said.

The currency haul, largely in dollars but including some Swiss francs and West German marks, was estimated at $5 million at day's end. But authorities were still trying to reckon to precise amount.

If confirmed, the cash heist would set a new entry in American record books, exceeding the $4.3 million cash haul from the Chicago warehouse of Purolator Security Inc. four years ago and the $1.2 million in the fabled Brink's hijacking.

An employee shows the FBI where he and others were tied up during the Lufthansa robbery.

Banking sources said the cash was "used" money, meaning it was unmarked. Most of the money was from tourism and dollar exchanges, and some of it was considered "old" money — money due to be turned over to the Federal Reserve Bank in exchange for new dollars.

"We do this sort of thing only occasionally," a Chase official said, explaining why currency had been shipped from Frankfurt. Usually, money is transferred by wire in what amounts to a paper transaction.

In addition to the Lufthansa shipment, which arrived at 12:55 a.m., the vault contained cash and jewels that had been in storage since Friday after a usual 3:15 p.m. Friday pickup.

A Brink's Inc. truck had arrived Friday at the prescribed time to pick up the money, according to one account, but the airline foreman was on the field directing the unloading of another delivery. Told to wait, the Brink's guards said they had to leave because of a tight schedule.

Brink's officials declined comment.

According to Port Authority detectives, the five bandits wore stocking masks, and three carried .38-caliber handguns. The other two carried a shotgun and a .45.

One part-time worker, Kerry Whelan, a college student, was pistol-whipped when he attempted to escape while the gunmen were handcuffing the cargo handlers and agents. His wounds required five stitches.

Those familiar with the huge Lufthansa complex said the gunman had to know their way around in order to pull off the heist with such precision. The bandits knew which of several cinderblock rooms was the "high value" room.

The gunmen also knew the grounds well, entering from a back entrance which faces the Belt Parkway. The escape via the front entrance which leads to a service lead of the Van Wyck Expressway, authorities said.