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- [Laurence] Monday, December 11th, 1978. New York's John F. Kennedy Airport among America's busiest. Around 3:00am, A black van carrying eight masked men drives past the departure gates to the back of the airport. - [John] JFK is one of the country's biggest and busiest airports. But what the ordinary flyer would fail to notice is outside of the terminals, there are a whole bunch of warehouses and those warehouses are used to store cargo that's bound for other destinations. If you've got electronics from Japan or wine from France, they're gonna be stored there until they can be shipped onward to their final destination.
- [Claire] Lufthansa is essentially the unofficial airlines of European banks. They are bringing in American currency, European currency, security bonds, and on top of that luxury goods, furs, Swiss watches, fine jewelry, all of this stored at the Lufthansa warehouses. - [Mathew] This is the ramp up right before Christmas. So they're seeing an influx of merchandise, influx of cash, influx in jewels. So that high value room, which normally has a million, now has $5 million at least in cash and about $800,000 in jewels. Today's value about $28 million - [Laurence] For decades, it's been an airtight system, no one has dared to try to breach it, but within the hour, all of that will change.
- [Claire] The van drives up and six of the eight men get out. They cut off the padlock, run into the warehouse and they seem to have timed it perfectly because all of the employees are in the employee break room, all having a meal break. - [John] They hold all of them at gunpoint and handcuff them to one another, and then they take their wallets and they're looking at their IDs and they're checking it against a list of guards. So these guys know which guards are supposed to be there and they tell the guys while they're on the ground, "If you guys make any false moves, not only are we gonna shoot you, but then we're gonna go to the address on your ID and we're gonna kill your whole family."
- [Laurence] Missing from the list, the nighttime supervisor with the keys to the high value room. He's still downstairs in his office. - [Kavitha] They can't actually just storm into his office because he's got a panic button under his desk and police would show up almost immediately. So they pull one of the guards off the floor with a gun to his head and they force him to call the supervisor and he tells him that Lufthansa is on the phone from Germany and they'll only talk to the person in charge. So the supervisor comes out to the floor with his keys.
- [Laurence] Now all the thieves have to do is make sure that the manager turns both keys at exactly the same moment or the place will be swarming with cops. - [John] One of these armed guys says, "We know how this system works. If you have a single slip up, you're a dead man." So he follows the protocol exactly, gets through the main door, gets into the high value room. - [Claire] They see more to steal than they could have ever imagined, and they are ready to take it all. They start stuffing all of this cash, jewels, watches into 40 burlap bags and dragging them meticulously out to the van. And by 4:16,
they've completely cleaned out the high value room. - [Kavitha] Usually with cash, you're able to look at the serial numbers and track the currency, but in this case, because it's older currency and because it's coming from overseas, there's no way to actually do that. The serial numbers aren't listed anywhere, so this money is actually untraceable. - [Matthew] They dust for fingerprints, but no forensic evidence is left behind. Within hours, it's international news. They're calling it the crime of the century. These guys just pulled off the perfect crime.
- [Laurence] Though no one died during the Lufthansa heist, a trail of bodies has turned up in its wake. The FBI is now taking a long hard look at one man in the Lucchese family cold enough to murder his fellow conspirators. - [Kavitha] If there's any mobster who wouldn't think twice about shooting a friend in the back of the head, it's Jimmy the Gent. Most people probably know Jimmy the Gent from the character that Robert De Niro played in "Goodfellas." - In 1962, Jimmy Burke is set to marry his fiance and a few weeks before the wedding, he realizes that she's being stalked by an ex.
The day of their wedding, that ex is found killed with his remains strewn about his car. - [Kavitha] Burke is never actually charged with the crime, but his reputation for bloody vengeance starts to spread. - [Laurence] In May, 1980, the Lufthansa case takes a dramatic turn. Longtime Burke associate Henry Hill is arrested on serious drug charges. Under interrogation, he offers to make a deal. - [John] According to Henry Hill, Burke is the guy who planned the heist, executed it and now has been bumping off anybody who might be associated with it.
Hill is afraid that he is on Burke's hit list and that he's going to be next. So better that Burke get put away than he ends up dead. Burke isn't just knocking people off because he doesn't want them testifying against him, he's doing it because everyone who is killed, that's one less person to share the loot. - [Laurence] And every time authorities find a potential new witness to finger Burke, they end up dead. - [Kavitha] By the summer of 1979, nine more suspected people connected with the Lufthansa heist have been found dead.
Authorities still find no clues left behind at these murder scenes, but because associates of the Lucchese family and of Burke's keep turning up dead, they think that maybe he's becoming paranoid and is continuing to cover his tracks. - [Laurence] The Lucchese crime family rules over the borough of Queens and nothing happens on their turf unless it's sanctioned from the top. So after the Lufthansa heist in 1978, feds are convinced that while low-level mobsters might have carried out the actual robbery, the $5 million payload travels much further up the food chain. To get it back, they'll need to bring down the Godfather himself.
- [Kavitha] This time the feds have a secret weapon. They have Henry Hill who's turned informant and is in the witness protection program. And he's worked for the Lucchese family for decades. According to Hill, the Lucchese family have their hands in all kinds of industries across New York, trucking, construction, the garment industry, and they make a lot of money shipping stolen goods and shaking down transportation and union organizations. - The Lucchese family used to be one of the smaller families, but now under this Don, with the increased amount of smuggling and stealing, not just from JFK, but also from LaGuardia and Newark, they've become one of the strongest
and most powerful families in the mob. - [Lis] In addition to Hill's testimony, they also have the testimony of the Don's chauffer who says that just days after the heist, the Don was already planning the execution of many of the people involved. - [Kavitha] Nobody actually speaks to the Don himself directly except for his lieutenants. There are several levels of men before the order of a hit gets to the actual assassin, and that's by design. That's so that there are many levels of protection
so that you can't trace that order directly back to the Don. - [Laurence] If the Feds can't nail Tony Ducks on the murders and the heist itself, there's only one other way authorities think they can bring him down. By finding the money. - [Kavitha] One of authorities major leads points them towards a lieutenant's house in Hollywood, Florida where they believe couriers have brought a lot of this money to and they're sent back to New York to make that run again. According to Henry Hill, once these couriers have either outlived their usefulness or might be getting too close and might turn, Tony Ducks orders their assassination.
- [John] Once the money gets to Florida, where it goes is anyone's guess. The FBI gets a tip that 250,000 of it can be found in a safe deposit box in a Florida bank in Miami, but by the time the FBI gets there, it's been cleaned out. - [Lis] Law enforcement suspects at that point that Tony Ducks has laundered all of this money through legitimate businesses. He's got a flower shop, he's got taxi stands, he's got bars and restaurants, and that money was probably already laundered and will never be found.
Jimmy Burke, the Lucchese, Gambino and Bonanno Family godfathers and other major players, all escaped charges related to the Lufthansa heist. And with all of them now dead, the secret of what happened to the missing millions may be gone forever, making it one of the most elusive and bloody open cases in American history.
