No Goodfellas: the brutal true story of Jimmy the Gent and the Lufthansa heist

On February 17 1979, two Brooklyn homicide investigators found the body of a conman named Richard Eaton. It was discovered in the back of an abandoned trailer, frozen near-solid, like a six-foot slab of ice. It took two and a half days for the body to thaw. Eaton had been trussed, with a noose tied around his neck. Sewn inside the lining of his jacket was an address book, inside which investigators found the details of a notorious New York gangster: Jimmy “The Gent” Burke.

Henry Hill – the mobster-turned-informant whose life story became the Hollywood film Goodfellas – later revealed that Eaton had conned The Gent out of $325,000. Eaton was supposed to invest the money in a cocaine deal. Instead, Hill said, Eaton had spent it on “high-flying women, narcotics, weekends in Las Vegas, luxury cars and all that”, according to the 2015 book The Lufthansa Heist. The sum had come from the $5.8 million that Burke’s crew had pilfered in that heist, which took place in 1978. It was the largest unrecovered cash theft in US history: $5 million in cash, $875,000 in jewellery.

Eaton’s murder was the only one for which Burke was ever convicted, but it’s rumoured that he was responsible for 50 others. According to Hill, the basement of Burke’s bar – Robert’s Lounge in Queens, New York – was used as a “sub-level tomb”, under which Burke buried the poor souls who “had done him wrong”. (By the time he was found guilty of killing Eaton, Burke was already in prison – not for murder, robbery, extortion, loansharking, hijacking or drug dealing, but for fixing college basketball games.)

In Goodfellas, released 30 years ago today, Burke was immortalised by Robert De Niro, who played him as Jimmy “The Gent” Conway. Like the film version, Burke was Irish so could never be a “made man” in the full-blooded Italian mafia, but was a powerful associate of the Lucchese crime family (though Hill said that New York’s crime families “fought” for partnership with The Gent). Less authentic is De Niro’s comparatively short stature – the real Burke was a stocky six foot-plus and towered over Hill.

The fictional name of Conway comes from one of the few details known about The Gent’s family history. According to Wiseguy, the book on which Goodfellas is based (written by Hill and Nicholas Pileggi), Burke never knew his birthplace or parents. Records said he was born on July 5 1931 to a woman named Conway.

He was put into care at two years old and moved between multiple foster homes. Hill recalled that Burke was beaten, sexually abused, locked in closets, and pampered by foster carers. At the age of thirteen, an argument with a foster father while driving caused the car to crash, killing the older man.

After turning to crime in his youth, Burke was in and out of juvenile reformatories and eventually prison. Between the ages of 16 and 22, he only spent 86 days outside of correctional facilities. Hill claimed that while in jail, Burke earned a rep for integrity and violence – he never snitched – and carried out murders for also-incarcerated mob chiefs.

Hill was a teenager when he first met Burke. “He couldn’t have been more than 24 or 25 at the time, but he was already a legend,” Hill wrote. “He’d walk in the door and everybody who worked in the joint would go wild.”

Speaking on the Truth vs Hollywood podcast, Daniel Simone – who co-wrote The Lufthansa Heist with Hill – described Burke’s character: “He was prosperous. He was respected by the family bosses, particularly Paul Vario [a caporegime of the Lucchese family]. In fact, many of the Mafia families at times would compete for his association because he was such a reliable earner through schemes and manipulations.

“And Henry Hill loved all those characteristics. He loved the fact that Jimmy Burke would be respected wherever he went – into a restaurant, into a nightclub, chairs would pull out immediately. Burke did not need reservations to book the best table in a restaurant. These were all the fascinating, intoxicating traits that Burke wielded.”

Hill described Burke as “sort of a father figure to us all”. This included Hill, Tommy DeSimone – a psychotic mobster who inspired Joe Pesci’s Goodfellas character – and other members of Burke’s crew, which was named “The Robert’s Lounge gang”.

In The Lufthansa Heist book, Hill explained how Jimmy’s gang would plan their “swindle of the day” at the bar. “We cheated the government, defrauded multi-billion-dollar corporations, high-interest credit-card companies, banks, and those price-gouging airlines,” Hill said.

“According to Jimmy, wealthy conglomerates took advantage of naïve consumers, and he saw justification in stealing from “that horde of crooks”. This was the gospel he taught us, and I for one believed Jimmy “The Gent” Burke was a model citizen.”

Burke was, according to Hill, a “criminal savant” and loved to steal. “If you ever offered Jimmy a billion dollars,” said Hill, “he'd turn you down and then try to figure out how to steal it from you.” Burke controlled hijackings and robberies of goods coming through John F Kennedy Airport. His crew robbed furs, diamonds, suits, silks, watches, guns and plenty more.

As is depicted in Goodfellas, his nickname of “The Gent” came from his generous tipping. He’d even slip $50 in the wallets of the truck drivers they hijacked. “The way I see it, I’m taking the man’s license so I know who he is and where he lives,” Burke told Hill. “The least I can do is to give the poor b------ a few bucks for his troubles so he can get a duplicate driver’s license.”

Burke relied on insiders for information on incoming cargoes. For protection, Burke had corrupt cops in his pocket; they tipped him off about informants and witnesses, who invariably wound up dead. “The bodies, sometimes as many as a dozen a year,” Hill wrote in Wiseguy, “were left strangled, trussed and shot in the trunks of stolen cars abandoned in the long-term parking lots that surrounded the airport.”

Hill once described how Burke would send roses to the wives and mothers of incarcerated gangsters on special occasions; but his explosive temper was feared by even the most frightening underworld figures. “At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world, but then he could blow you away for dessert,” said Hill.

In one notorious tale, Burke discovered that an ex-boyfriend was harassing his wife-to-be, Mickey. Later, on Jimmy and Mickey’s wedding day, the ex-boyfriend’s body was found inside his car – chopped into more than a dozen pieces.

Hill also recounted how in Hill’s own club, The Suite, Burke once choked journalist Jimmy Breslin almost to death with his own tie – punishment for an unflattering article on Paul Vario. “He just tightened the tie and had Breslin begging for his life,” Hill wrote in his 2004 book Gangsters and Goodfellas. “And there were 50 people in the place at the time.

“Jimmy didn’t give a f---. [He] had the hugest forearms I had ever seen. If he grabbed ahold of you, you weren’t getting away. I guess Jimmy felt he needed to show Breslin what it really meant to be a tough Irishman. Hysterical. We laughed about that one all night.”

Burke’s most famous murder, thanks to its place as a key plot point in Goodfellas, also took place in The Suite (and later in the car when they realised he wasn’t dead yet): William “Billy Batts” Bentvena, a made man from the Gambino crime family who had just served six years in prison. In the film, Batts (Frank Vincent) is killed for making fun of Pesci’s Tommy (“Go home and get your f-----’ shine box”). In reality, Burke and DeSimone killed Batts over loan-shark and bookmaking territories.

“When Batts went to prison, Burke sneaked in there and took over Batts’s operation,” Simone explained. “So now Batts wanted his territory back, and Burke simply was not going to allow that. And that was the reason – the real reason – why they killed him.”

In 1972, Burke and Hill travelled to Tampa, Florida, where they assaulted a businessman called Gaspar Ciaccio, for money owed to union boss Casey Rosado. The assault became a federal extortion case, and both Burke and Hill were sentenced to 10 years. Burke was paroled after six.

“Jimmy,” Hill wrote, “a man with a stomach of stainless steel and genes borrowed from the devil, never sweated. This one, though, frayed his nerves. He couldn’t resign [himself] to a long stretch in prison for a little assault.

“Then again, look at the slew of people the Gent had killed without paying for it. But in his psychopathic mind, as he saw it, “they had it coming”. He’d say, ‘Somebody’s gotta keep the low-lifes in line. Otherwise, every day a new crook comes out of the woodwork and hustles or hurts you in some way.’”

After his release, Burke joined Hill in a drug dealing operation, but they kept it from the Lucchese bosses. Drugs were banned, not because of a mafia moral code, but because drug charges carried such large sentences that anyone arrested might be tempted to cut a deal. (And, clearly, they were right: when Hill was eventually arrested, he ratted out his mobster pals.)

Hill also introduced Burke to a college basketball point-shaving scam. During the 1978–9 season, they bribed players from the Boston College Eagles to win and lose games by a certain number of points – and not “cover the spread” – so they could place bets and win big. Burke fronted the money for the bets and provided a network of bookmakers.

It was also Hill who alerted Burke to the potential Lufthansa job. He had been tipped off by low-level criminal and wig-maker Marty Krugman, who in turn was tipped off by an airport cargo supervisor named Louis Werner, who owed Krugman $20,000 in gambling debts. As Hill informed Burke, millions of dollars in untraced notes would be held in the Lufthansa airlines vault at John F Kennedy Airport.

“Any time Henry learned of an opportunity for a score, he would do one thing – he would immediately go to Burke and tell Jimmy about it,” said former federal prosecutor Ed McDonald, speaking on Truth vs Hollywood. “Jimmy would make the decision, and work out the plans and the details, and how they would go about making the money.”

Because the Gambino crime family also ran operations at JFK, Burke had to get the green light from future Gambino boss John Gotti. Gotti agreed, but placed a violent hood named Paolo LiCastri on Burke’s team to ensure he got his cut. As described by Daniel Simone, Burke’s heist crew (which did not include Henry Hill) was not up to scratch.

“Their collective intelligence equated to a flickering lightbulb,” said Simone in 2015. “One was dyslexic, another could hardly read or write and three were actually illiterate.”

Hill explained how Burke trained each member of the crew on their specific job only. “This was so no single robber knew every detail, a safeguard against their flapping mouths.”

The heist was carried out around 3am on December 11 1978. The six-man team took just over an hour. There was more money inside the vault than the crew was expecting. According to Hill, Burke dumped the loot into a greasy pit dug into a garage floor. The money was never recovered and the only person ever convicted was Louis Werner, who was sentenced to 15 years.

Investigators had quickly identified Burke’s gang as likely suspects, and the intense scrutiny made Burke paranoid – not helped by drink and drug use.

“The Gent was high on heroin day and night, plus he drank bourbon from the minute he woke in the morning to the time he blacked out,” wrote Hill. “The booze and drugs added to his paranoia that everybody who knew about Lufthansa was gonna rat him out.”

According to Hill, Burke ordered or carried out murders of almost everyone involved. “Guys were getting whacked left and right over Lufthansa,” Hill wrote, “and I had first-hand knowledge Jimmy was the one doing it.”

“Burke was beyond himself,” said FBI investigator Steve Carbone, talking on Truth vs Hollywood. “He couldn’t handle it because he thought any minute the walls were going to come tumbling down. He didn’t realise that we [the FBI] didn’t have that much… He probably would have been safe with a couple of homicides, but he took care of everybody.”

Crew members, insiders, and even spouses were wiped out: Parnell “Stacks” Edwards (played by Samuel L. Jackson in Goodfellas) was shot for failing to get rid of the crew’s van, which was quickly discovered by police. Krugman – who pestered Burke for a $500,000 cut, then threatened to go to the DA – disappeared (Hill claimed Krugman was buried under the basement in Robert’s Lounge).

Louis Cafora and his wife Joanna – who were preparing to turn informant – also disappeared (their car was apparently crushed with them inside); Joe “Buddha” Manri and Robert “Frenchy” McMahon were found dead together in a car, each shot in the back of the head; and Paolo LiCastri was found in garbage, his body shot to pieces.

Around the same time, the Boston College basketball scam went wrong. After success on a handful of games, the Eagles failed to lose to Holy Cross by the required margin and lost The Gent $60,000. As recalled on the American Scandal podcast, Hill watched the game at Burke’s home. After the game, Burke stood up, calmly at first, then kicked in his television set. Burke put in an order to make the college players “go away” but they were ultimately spared. “His associates have enough headaches right now,” Hill told one of the players. “They didn’t need a bunch of dead college kids to add to the mess.”

Like Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, Tommy DeSimone was also killed, though not by Burke. DeSimone was lured to his death under the pretence he was going to be “made”. His killing was partly revenge for killing Batts and partly for removing his mask during the Lufthansa robbery – he was a liability to the bosses. Hill recalled that Burke “burst into tears” when he discovered DeSimone had been killed. But still, Burke ordered the killing of DeSimone’s girlfriend, Theresa Ferrara. Her dismembered body washed up in New Jersey.

“Unfortunately, they got to them before we did,” Ed McDonald said, referring to the witnesses and informants. “The Lufthansa robbery, in some sense, was not solved. We failed in prosecuting Jimmy Burke.”

When Henry Hill was arrested on drug charges in 1980, Burke began calling Hill’s house multiple times. Hill became convinced that Burke and Lucchese bosses planned to have him killed. To save himself and avoid jail, Hill flipped on his crime family.

When Hill off-handedly told investigators about the Boston basketball scam, McDonald was furious: McDonald himself had attended Boston College and played basketball.

Burke was sentenced for his part in the basketball scam and, while in prison, was indicted for the murder of Richard Eaton and given a life sentence. Burke died of cancer in 1996. His legacy still wasn’t over: in 2013, the FBI found human remains at a home belonging to Burke’s daughter.

McDonald later wondered if Jimmy Burke considered fixing basketball games to be a crime. “I sometimes used to think that Burke must have been thinking to himself: ‘What is McDonald thinking about here? I did Lufthansa.’”