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犯罪與劫案
1978年12月11日 · 紐約約翰·肯尼迪國際機場
搶劫與盜竊狀態: 部分偵破
詳細檔案目前僅提供英文版本。
圖片: User:KenzieAbraham · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
$ 5,9 mlnin cash and jewellery (1978)
Lufthansa regularly flew American cash, exchanged by servicemen and tourists in West Germany, back to New York. It was kept in a vault in cargo building 261 at JFK until a bank collected it. The cargo employee Louis Werner had gambling debts and passed on, through a bookmaker, when a large consignment was in store and how the security worked. That information reached Jimmy Burke.
At about three in the morning on 11 December 1978 six masked men drove a van onto the site. They overpowered the night shift, forced a supervisor to open the vault's double-door system without triggering the alarm and loaded about forty parcels into the van. After a little over an hour they were gone. Nobody was killed; one employee was struck on the head.
The van was supposed to be destroyed but was found two days later in Brooklyn, with fingerprints. That quickly led the FBI to Burke's circle, but the evidence could not be completed. Only Werner was convicted, in 1979. In the months after the robbery at least six people who knew about it were murdered, presumably to stop them from talking.
Burke was never tried for the robbery; in the 1980s he was convicted of other crimes, partly on the testimony of Henry Hill, and he died in prison in 1996. In 2015 Vincent Asaro, then eighty, was acquitted of involvement. The money has never been found. Hill's account formed the basis of the book Wiseguy and the film Goodfellas.