Almost Perfect: The Lufthansa Heist and the Art of the Near-Miss

The guard felt the cold steel against his neck before he heard the voice. It was three in the morning inside the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport. The voice was quiet, almost polite. “Don’t make a sound. Just open the door.” In that moment, the largest cash robbery in American history began. And it began not with a bang, but with a whisper. Sixty-six minutes later, five million dollars in cash and nearly a million in jewels were gone. Like the Antwerp diamond thieves we examined last week, the crew behind this had an almost perfect plan.

The fatal flaw wasn't in the blueprint. It was in the architect. The man behind it all was a Lucchese crime family associate named Jimmy Burke. Jimmy the Gent. He was a planner. A professional. And he had an inside man, a Lufthansa employee named Louis Werner, who was drowning in gambling debts. Werner didn't just give Burke a key. He gave him EVERYTHING. The schedule for the monthly currency shipment from Germany. The layout of the vault. The names of the guards on duty. The precise location of the security cameras, and more importantly, how to disable them.

This wasn't a smash-and-grab. This was a surgical procedure. And you have to admit… there’s a certain elegance to that. On the night of December eleventh, 1978, a black Ford Econoline van pulled up to the cargo building. The men inside weren’t thugs picked up from a street corner. They were a hand-selected crew. They knew their roles. They cut the locks, entered the building, and rounded up the handful of overnight employees with terrifying efficiency. No shouting. No panic. Just cold, practiced professionalism. They used the information from Werner to navigate directly to the double-door vault.

They knew which employee had the first key. They knew where the second key was kept. They were inside the vault in minutes. They loaded one hundred and seventy-nine pounds of untraceable American currency into the van. They were in and out in just over an hour. No alarms were triggered. No shots were fired. By the time the first police car arrived, the van and the six million dollars had simply… vanished into the New York City night. It was a ghost story. A perfect crime. For about twelve hours. The plan had been flawless. The cleanup was a catastrophe.

The first mistake belonged to a man named Parnell "Stacks" Edwards. His only job was to drive the heist van to a car compactor in New Jersey and have it crushed into a metal cube. Instead, he got high, parked the van in a no-parking zone in Brooklyn, and went to his girlfriend's apartment. Two days later, a beat cop found it. The police had the van. And inside the van, they found a fingerprint. The first thread had been pulled. And Jimmy Burke… Jimmy did not tolerate loose threads. He became convinced the entire crew was a liability.

His brilliant, audacious plan was now at risk because of sloppy, greedy men who couldn't follow simple instructions. So he came up with a new plan. A much simpler one. He decided to kill everyone involved. One by one, the men who pulled off the score of a lifetime started turning up dead. "Stacks" Edwards was the first to go, shot in his apartment just a week after the heist. Then others followed. Martin Krugman, the wig-maker who helped conceive the plan. Joe "Buddha" Manri. Robert McMahon. Paolo LiCastri. The FBI couldn't prove who stole the money.

But they had a very clear picture of who was cleaning house. Burke’s paranoia, his absolute refusal to trust anyone, turned a masterpiece of theft into a clumsy, bloody trail of bodies that led directly back to him. The very violence he used to protect his secret became the thing that screamed it to the world. He was eventually arrested, not for the heist, but for his connection to the murders, and convicted on unrelated charges thanks to the testimony of his associate, Henry Hill. Most of the six million dollars was never seen again.

It remains a ghost, a legend of what was, for one brief hour, the perfect score.