The Real Reason Jimmy Burke Spared the Last Goodfellas Man Alive

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]December 11th, 1978.

[00:00:03]John F. Kennedy [music] International Airport, Queens, New York. 4:21 in the morning.

[00:00:11]A black Ford van pulled up to the front of the Lufthansa Airlines [music] cargo terminal. A Buick crash car pulled in behind it. Two gunmen climbed into the van. Others climbed into the car. Nine men with masks and weapons walked into the cargo building and ordered Lufthansa employees to the floor. They knew [music] the floor plan of the building.

[00:00:34]They knew the location of the vault.

[00:00:36]They knew the double door safety system [music] and how to navigate it without triggering the alarm.

[00:00:42]They knew that a massive shipment of cash had arrived on Friday, December 9th and would remain in the cargo storage through the weekend because an inside man had ensured it would not be moved.

[00:00:54]In 45 minutes, they walked out with [music] 50 boxes, each containing $125,000 and a silver case filled with jewelry and foreign currency.

[00:01:05]$6,250,000 in the trunks [music] of two cars, gone.

[00:01:11]The FBI called it the largest robbery in American history. It was also, [music] in the months that followed, one of the most efficient murder campaigns in the history of organized crime. Jimmy Burke, the man who had planned and orchestrated it, the man whose face Robert De Niro would inhabit 14 years later in Goodfellas, became convinced that the only way to avoid prosecution was to eliminate everyone who could [music] connect him to it. One by one, the men who had been there started disappearing.

[00:01:45]Parnell, Stacks, Edwards, >> [music] >> Martin Krugman, Louis Cafora and his wife, Joanna, Joe Manri, Robert McMahon, Richard Eaton, Tom Monteleone, Theresa Ferrara, Tommy DeSimone.

[00:02:00]Nine people gone before the summer of 1979 [music] and one man who was not.

[00:02:08]Vincent Vinnie Asaro had been [music] in that parking lot on the night of December 11th. He had sat in the crash car with Burke while the robbery happened. He had been there from the planning stages.

[00:02:20]He had his share of the money. He knew everything that the dead men had known.

[00:02:25]He was still alive. He would remain alive for another 45 years through the [music] death of Jimmy Burke in federal prison in 1996.

[00:02:36]Through the publication of Wiseguy and the release of Goodfellas and the elevation of the heist into one of the most mythologized crimes in American history.

[00:02:46]Through a 2015 federal trial at which he was acquitted of all charges >> [music] >> and walked out of a Brooklyn courthouse pumping his fist in the air and shouting free.

[00:02:58]Through a road rage incident [music] that sent him to prison for eight years at 80 years old. Through a stroke in 2019 that produced an early release [music] at 84. He died in October of 2023 at 86 years old.

[00:03:14]>> [music] >> He outlived everyone. The question this video asks and answers is why. The Lufthansa heist did not begin with Jimmy Burke. It began with a Lufthansa employee named Louis Werner who owed a bookie named Martin Krugman $20,000 in gambling debts. [music] Werner was an inside man at the JFK cargo facility who had previously helped steal $22,000 in foreign currency from the terminal in 1976 and had gotten away with it. He told Krugman about the regular large cash shipments. Krugman told Henry Hill, Hill told Burke. Jimmy Burke, born James Conway in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 5th, [music] 1931, was an Irish-American career criminal who had made himself indispensable to the Lucchese crime family through a combination of competence, fearlessness, and extraordinary productivity in the hijacking and robbery world around JFK Airport. He was not Italian. He could never be made.

[00:04:23]He operated under the protection of Lucchese capo Paul Vario, a relationship that gave him the organizational umbrella without the formal title.

[00:04:34]He was also a man who had killed before and who found killing a clean solution to problems.

[00:04:40]His body count across his career was substantial [music] even before the heist's aftermath. Burke approved the plan and assembled the crew. He got Paul Vario's authorization. Vario, who had recently lost a large cocaine shipment [music] to federal agents and needed cash, was enthusiastic.

[00:04:59]The heist required inside knowledge, a competent robbery team, coordination with multiple criminal organizations whose territory touched JFK, >> [music] >> and the blessing of the Bonanno crime family who ran the airport's organized [music] crime operations on their side of the family structure. That last element [music] is the key to this entire story.

[00:05:22]The Bonanno crime family's [music] stake in JFK Airport was significant and long-standing. Their capo, responsible for overseeing the family's airport interests, was a third-generation mob figure from Ozone Park, Queens, [music] named Vincent Asaro.

[00:05:39]Asaro was born in 1935 [music] to Jerome Asaro, himself a Bonanno family member. The mob was his [music] inheritance.

[00:05:48]He grew up in the same neighborhood as Jimmy Burke, South Ozone Park, the dense Queens community [music] built around the airport's employment and the criminal opportunities it generated. He and Burke had been doing business [music] together for years.

[00:06:03]They had killed together at least once.

[00:06:05]In December of 1969, [music] the two men strangled a warehouse owner named Paul Katz with a dog chain [music] after concluding he was cooperating with the FBI.

[00:06:17]They buried Katz's body at Burke's house in South Ozone [music] Park. The FBI would find the remains 44 years later in 2013 while excavating the property.

[00:06:29]These men were not simply [music] business associates. They had committed murder together in the dark >> [music] >> and buried the body and lived with that secret for decades. That is a bond of a specific and permanent kind. When Burke came to Asaro for the Lufthansa operation, he was not asking a stranger for [music] access to an airport. He was asking a man he had killed with.

[00:06:53]Asaro [music] gave his blessing. The Bonanno family's territory at JFK was available for the operation.

[00:07:00]He allegedly participated in the crash car role with Burke on the night of December 11th, sitting in the parking lot while the robbery proceeded inside, positioned to intercept any police response that arrived before the team could escape. The mechanics of what went wrong in the aftermath [music] are worth understanding precisely because they explain why the cleanup campaign happened and why it ended where [music] it did. Stacks Edwards was the first to die.

[00:07:31]He had been assigned one specific task, [music] drive the van to a junkyard in New Jersey where it would be crushed, destroying the primary physical evidence connecting Burke's crew to the robbery.

[00:07:43]Instead, he drove to his girlfriend's apartment, consumed alcohol and [music] cocaine, and went to sleep. He parked in a no parking zone next to a fire hydrant.

[00:07:54]Two days after the heist, a police officer ran the plates on a van matching the robbery description.

[00:08:01]The plates came back stolen. The van went to the impound lot. Stacks' fingerprints were on it. The FBI had a thread. Burke had a problem. Rather than give everyone their $400,000 share and trust [music] their silence, Burke calculated differently. Seven days after the heist, Tommy DeSimone and [music] Angelo Sepe visited Stacks at his apartment. DeSimone shot him five times [music] with a.25 caliber revolver. Martin Krugman had been the liaison [music] between the airport insiders and Burke's world. He was also, in [music] Burke's assessment, too loud about the money he was owed. He pushed. He demanded. He was the kind of man whose need for recognition and compensation outweighed his operational discipline.

[00:08:51]Hill said Burke and Sepe killed and dismembered Krugman a month after the robbery and disposed of the remains.

[00:08:59]Louis Cafora and his wife Joanna were next. Cafora had been told to lay low and make no conspicuous purchases. He bought his wife a custom pink Cadillac.

[00:09:11]He drove it near the JFK cargo area where the FBI investigation was active.

[00:09:17]Burke had him [music] and Joanna killed. Hill said the couple was compacted together with their car [music] at an auto wrecking yard. Their bodies were never found.

[00:09:27]Joe Manri and Robert McMahon, who had been part of the actual robbery team inside the terminal, were killed in the spring of 1979.

[00:09:37]Richard Eaton [music] and Tom Monteleone, who were laundering heist money through businesses in Florida, were killed. Theresa Ferrara, who had access to the laundering operation and was suspected of skimming, was killed.

[00:09:51]Her headless torso washed ashore in New Jersey. Tommy DeSimone, who had been one of Burke's primary weapons throughout the cleanup campaign, was killed by the Gambino family, not by Burke, but for the separate matter of having murdered two Gambino-connected men without commission approval. He was 32 years old. His death in January of 1979 is the murder depicted in Goodfellas as the fake induction that was actually an execution.

[00:10:24]Nine bodies. By the summer of 1979, 7 months after the heist, the evidence problem had been addressed through elimination.

[00:10:34]Rather than give each participant four or five hundred thousand dollars, Burke had found it cleaner and more profitable to give them nothing and [music] put them in the ground. Henry Hill survived because he had not been inside the terminal. He was a planner and organizer, not a participant, [music] and because he had connections and information valuable enough that his survival, for a time, was tactically [music] preferable to his elimination.

[00:11:01]He survived until Burke was recorded discussing having him killed. At that point, Hill, faced with a choice between cooperating with federal authorities and dying in a manner similar to what had happened to Stacks Edwards, became a government witness.

[00:11:17]His testimony eventually sent Burke to [music] prison for the murder of a drug dealer, never for the heist itself, which [music] was never prosecuted successfully, and Vincent Asaro lived.

[00:11:29]The specific question this video [music] is built around why Burke spared Asaro when he killed everyone else has an answer that is less mysterious [music] than the title implies.

[00:11:41]But considerably more revealing about how organized crime actually functions than a simple survival by luck narrative would be. The answer is institutional.

[00:11:52]It is not personal.

[00:11:53]Every person Burke killed in the aftermath of the Lufthansa heist was either not a made man or was connected to families in [music] ways that did not prevent his action.

[00:12:03]Stacks Edwards was not made. He was an associate of African-American background [music] working with Burke's crew.

[00:12:10]Krugman was a civilian bookie. Carfora and his wife were not protected [music] figures.

[00:12:16]Manri and McMahon were working level participants without the institutional backing that would have made their elimination costly. Vincent Asaro was a made man. Specifically, he was a capo in the Bonanno crime [music] family.

[00:12:31]In the American Mafia of 1979, killing a made man without commission approval was a capital offense.

[00:12:40]The rule existed [music] precisely because without it, the institution could not function. Bosses [music] could not build organizations if their members could be killed by outside parties without consequence. The rule was enforced with the specific seriousness that mob rules received when they served the interests of the [music] most powerful people in the organization.

[00:13:02]Burke was an Irish-American Lucchese associate. He was not made. He had no formal standing that would have protected him from the consequences of killing a Bonanno capo. If he [music] had moved against Asaro, the Bonanno family, which had lent its JFK territory to the heist operation and had a vested interest in the protection of its own capo, would have had every organizational right >> [music] >> to respond. Paul Vario had approved the Lufthansa operation. That approval came with the implicit understanding that the Bonanno family's participation [music] would be respected. As Aro's role was the Bonanno family's [music] stake in the operation.

[00:13:45]Killing him would have been killing the Bonanno's man in their own territory, [music] an act that would have required Vario to either absorb the consequence or go to war. Burke killed the people he could kill.

[00:13:57]>> [music] >> He did not kill the people who would cost him something he could not afford to pay.

[00:14:01]This is the real reason Vinny Asaro was still alive in November of 2015 >> [music] >> when he walked out of a Brooklyn federal courthouse throwing his fist in the air.

[00:14:11]Not because Burke had affection for him.

[00:14:13]Not because Asaro had some quality the others lacked. Because Asaro had an institutional [music] position that made him expensive to eliminate. And Burke's cleanup campaign was at its core a financial calculation.