April 13th, 1996. Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York. A man is dying in a hospital bed on the prison ward, handcuffed to the rail by one wrist, even though he can barely sit up anymore. He’s 64 years old. Lung cancer. The tumors have been eating through him for months, and the federal government has moved him here from Wende Correctional Facility >> >> because there’s nothing left to do at Wende except let him die in a cell.
His name is James Burke. My He’s been locked up since 1982, 13 years for fixing college basketball games, then 20 to life for a murder the jury deliberated less than a day on. He’s never been charged for the Lufthansa heist. >> >> He’s never been indicted for the murders that followed it.
The bodies frozen in meat trucks, compacted into cars, dismembered and washed ashore on the Jersey coast. Nearly everyone who could have put him at the center of those crimes is dead. And most of them died because he made sure they would. The one man who survived, the one he hesitated too long to kill, told the whole story to a journalist named Nicholas Pileggi who told it to Martin Scorsese who gave it to Robert De Niro.
De Niro played Burke in a film that made $246 million worldwide. But the character’s name wasn’t Burke. It was Conway. Burke’s daughter Catherine had demanded name. But the production refused to pay. So they used his birth name instead, the one his mother gave him before she gave him away. He dies without ever hearing his real name spoken in a movie theater.
The name the audience knows belongs to someone else. The man it belonged to is handcuffed to a bed in Buffalo, and the last thing the cancer takes is his lungs, which is fitting because silence was the thing he was best at. Most people who know the name Jimmy Burke know it through De Niro’s face.
They know the charming heist mastermind, the man who tipped everyone, who planned the biggest cash robbery in American history, and then sat in a diner booth watching the news coverage with a grin. What they don’t know, what the film went out of its way not to tell them, is that Goodfellas took Burke’s violence and gave most of it to Joe Pesci’s character.
The real Burke wasn’t the cool hand behind the operation. >> >> He was worse than both characters combined. But he was suspected in over 50 murders. He beat a man to death with a shovel after finding him still breathing in a car trunk. He strangled an old friend with piano wire and buried him under the bocce court at his bar, then joked over the grave for years while his crew played above it.
He dismembered his wife’s ex-boyfriend on their wedding day. The foster care system that raised him documented the physical and sexual abuse he suffered before he was 13. And by 16 but he was killing people for money. Almost none of this made it into the movie. De Niro played the version America could sit with for 2 and 1/2 hours.
The version that follows is the one that version was built to hide. He was born James Conway on July 5th, 1931 in the Bronx. His mother was Jane Conway, Irish from Dublin, described in multiple accounts as a prostitute. His father was never identified. At approximately 2 years old, Jane Conway placed him in foster care.
But he never saw her again. What followed was a childhood that reads like a case study in how to manufacture a violent criminal. Burke spent his earliest years in a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns, then cycled through dozens of foster homes and state institutions across New York. The abuse he suffered was documented, physical, sexual, emotional, though the records from that era are incomplete.
The pivotal moment came in 1944 when Burke was 13. He was riding in the back seat of a car driven by his foster father. An argument started. The foster father turned around to hit him, lost control of the vehicle, and died in the crash. The surviving widow blamed Burke for the death.
She subjected him to regular severe beatings and repeated sexual abuse until he was eventually removed and returned to the system. A family named Burke finally took him in, a large wooden boardinghouse on Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Ocean Promenade in Rockaway, what Queens. This was by all accounts the first stable home he’d known, clean, comfortable, safe.
He kept their surname for the rest of his life. He visited on holidays. Later, when the money started coming in, he sent them several thousand dollars a month in unmarked envelopes. The paradox this childhood manufactured would define everything that came after. Extreme generosity alongside hair-trigger purposeful violence.
He tipped doormen, bartenders, sandwich deliverymen, everyone. He stuffed $50 bills into the wallets of truck drivers he robbed so they’d tip him off about the next rich load. He learned that a woman whose criminal son had refused to repay her $5,000 loan was living in poverty. So he paid her himself, then killed the son that same day.
Kindness and murder operated on parallel tracks in Burke’s mind, and neither one interrupted the other. >> >> Between the ages of 16 and 22, Burke spent a total of only 86 days outside reformatories and prisons. His first major arrest came at 18, September of 1949, sentenced to 5 years for passing approximately $3,000 in counterfeit checks at an Ozone Park bank on behalf of a Colombo family associate named Dominic Cersani.
Police beat Burke trying to extract Cersani’s name. He gave them nothing. But that silence earned him the nickname the Irish Guinea and something far more valuable than a name. It earned him respect in a world where silence was the only currency that couldn’t be counterfeited. Upon parole in the early 1950s, Burke assembled a crew operating across Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, East New York, Canarsie, and Howard Beach, a constellation of working-class neighborhoods bordering John F.
Kennedy International Airport. But they have tea. His earning ability attracted the attention of Paul Vario, a caporegime in the Lucchese crime family who ran his operation from a German bar called Geffken’s on Flatlands Avenue, and a junkyard on Avenue D in Canarsie. Vario provided mafia authority, protection, and connections.
Burke provided cash flow and muscle. As a person of Irish descent, Burke was categorically ineligible to become a made member of Cosa Nostra. The rules required full or half Italian ancestry. And he was limited to the rank of associate under Vario’s crew for the rest of his life. The exclusion didn’t diminish him.
It protected him. As an outsider, he operated with less direct scrutiny from law enforcement focused on tracking made members through the family hierarchy. Burke’s headquarters was Robert’s Lounge, a dingy bar at 114-45 Lefferts Boulevard in South Ozone Park, approximately 2 miles from JFK Airport. The place had card tables, a bocce court in the back, a cellar clubhouse with a mosaic floor, and live blues rock on weekends performed by a lounge singer named Johnny Cha Cha.
What it also had, what the regulars understood without ever saying, was a basement that doubled as a burial ground. On June 6th, 1980, police excavated a human leg bone and a portion of a shoulder bone from beneath the floor. The bocce court held at least one more body, Dominic Cersani, the same man Burke had once gone to prison to protect, uh strangled years later with piano wire after Burke confirmed through a contact in the Queens DA’s office that Cersani had become an informant.
The crew Burke assembled there became known to law enforcement as the Robert’s Lounge Group. Henry Hill, half Irish, half Sicilian, also ineligible for membership, met Burke in 1956 at age 13 running errands at Vario’s cab stand. Hill’s first impression, recorded later in Pileggi’s Wiseguy, Burke was sawbucking him to death, and 20 here, 20 there.
He wasn’t like anyone Hill had ever met. Thomas De Simone, 6 ft tall, 220 lb, known as Two Gun Tommy for the pearl-handled pistols he carried, came from a deep mafia bloodline. His grandfather, Rosario De Simone, >> >> had been boss of the Los Angeles crime family. De Simone was a violent sociopath and Burke’s primary enforcer.
Angelo Sepe, who’d met De Simone at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, was valued for his brutality. Parnell Edwards, Stacks they called him, was an aspiring blues singer and credit card thief who drove for Burke. And Robert McMahon, known as Frenchy, >> >> worked as an Air France cargo supervisor at JFK. He was the inside man for airport operations, receiving a flat 50% of every hijacking he helped organize.
The nickname Jimmy the Gent came from Burke’s method. As Hill explained it, most hijackers took the truck driver’s license as a warning. But Burke took the license, too. Except he stuffed a $50 bill into the guy’s wallet before driving off. Truck drivers reportedly tipped off his crew about rich loads because they wanted to be robbed by Burke.
He ran the JFK corridor the way a concierge runs a hotel, knowing who carried what, when it moved, and what it was worth, and making sure everyone in the chain got paid enough to stay quiet. The Air France robbery proved what Burke’s system could do. April 7th, 1967. McMahon knew that American currency exchanged in France by tourists and military personnel was shipped back through JFK.
The only obstacle was a single key to the strong room guarded by a security employee who never let it leave his person. McMahon introduced the guard to an expensive escort at the Jade East Motel near the airport. While the guard was occupied, Hill stole the key from his pants, >> >> jumped into Burke’s car, Santoro, and raced to a locksmith who duplicated 15 of 18 keys, lacking blanks for three.
One duplicate worked. McMahon timed the robbery for just before midnight on a Jewish holiday that delayed the next bank collection. At 11:40 in the evening, Hill and De Simone walked into the Air France cargo terminal with an empty suitcase, unlocked the strong room, loaded seven bags of cash, and walked out.
$420,000. No alarm, no shots, no injuries. The the robbery wasn’t discovered until 4 days later when a Wells Fargo truck arrived for pickup. No one was ever prosecuted. The Air France score established Burke’s reputation as a planner. But his reputation for violence didn’t need a heist.
It’d been accumulating for years, incident by documented incident, each one revealing the same pattern. Burke’s violence wasn’t impulsive, it was architectural. He didn’t kill people who angered him. He killed people who threatened the structure he’d built. On his wedding day in 1962, police found the body of Mickey’s ex-boyfriend, a man who’d been stalking her, calling the house, yelling at her on sidewalks, cut into more than a dozen pieces and strewn inside his own car.
That account comes from Pileggi’s Wiseguy, source to Hill, so its reliability carries the usual caveats. The but the pattern it describes is consistent with everything documented afterward. Searsani’s killing was colder. Burke had learned through a contact in the Queens District Attorney’s Office that his old mentor had turned informant.
He told Searsani they should take a ride. De Simone was in the backseat with piano wire. Hill recalled that Searsani fought hard, kicked and swung and soiled himself before he died. They buried him under the bocce court behind Robert’s Lounge. For years afterward, uh Burke would stand on that court, look down, and say, “Hey Remo, how are you doing?” The Billy Batts murder, June of 1970, showed the financial logic underneath of violence.
William Bentvena, a Gambino made man freshly released from prison, had been taunting De Simone at Henry Hill’s nightclub called The Suite in Queens, calling him a shoeshine boy. De Simone pistol-whipped Bentvena. Burke joined the beating. They loaded the body into Hill’s car trunk. Hours later, uh stopping at De Simone’s mother’s house for a shovel and lime, they opened the trunk and found Bentvena still breathing.
Burke and De Simone beat him to death with a shovel and tire iron. The film depicted this as Tommy’s impulsive reaction to an insult, a single evening of escalation. In reality, the confrontation at the party and the killing occurred approximately 2 weeks apart, and Burke had a calculated financial motive.
But he’d taken over Bentvena’s loan shark business during Bentvena’s imprisonment >> >> and had no intention of returning it. In November of 1972, Burke and Hill traveled to Tampa, Florida to collect a gambling debt from a man named Gaspar Ciaccio. They beat him and held him hostage. Both were convicted of federal extortion and sentenced to 10 years at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.
Now, Burke served approximately 6 years before parole, returning to the street in October of 1978, 5 weeks before the Lufthansa heist. The tip started with a gambling debt. Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo agent at JFK, owed $20,000 to a bookmaker named Martin Krugman, Marty the Rug they called him, because he also ran a men’s wig shop in East New York.
Werner knew that approximately once a month, uh Lufthansa flew large amounts of untraceable American currency to its cargo terminal at building 261, dollars exchanged by servicemen and tourists in West Germany. If a shipment arrived after the last Brink’s armored truck departed for the day, the cash sat in the vault until the next business day.
Uh Werner had already tested the system. He and a coworker named Peter Gruenwald had stolen $22,000 in foreign currency from Lufthansa in 1976 without getting caught. Werner brought the tip to Krugman. Krugman brought it to Henry Hill. Hill brought it to Burke. Paul Vario greenlit the operation. Planning took place at Robert’s Lounge.
Werner provided the intelligence that made the heist possible, floor plans of the cargo warehouse, employee schedules, and the critical detail about the double-door vault system. One door had to be shut and locked before the second could open. If anyone tried to open both simultaneously, an alarm would trigger to Port Authority police, and the airport could be locked down within 90 seconds.
Only one employee, night shift cargo traffic manager Rudy Eirich, knew the combination to both doors. Saturday, December 9th, 1978. Uh Werner alerts the crew that a large cash shipment has arrived and will remain in the warehouse through the weekend. Monday, December 11th, approximately 3:00 in the morning. A black Ford Econoline 150 van carrying six men arrives at building 261.
A late-model Buick, the crash car, sits in the terminal lot with its lights off. The six men who enter the building are Tommy De Simone, Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, they called him Roast Beef, Joe Manri, known as Buddha, uh Robert McMahon, and Paolo Li Castri, a Gambino family representative whose presence was required because the heist occurred on Gambino-controlled airport territory.
One man cuts the padlock on the gate with bolt cutters. Four enter through the east tower in ski masks and gloves. Senior cargo agent John Murray, napping at his desk, is the first captured, escorted to the lunch room where five other employees are on their 3:00 a.m. meal break. All six are ordered face down on the floor.
A cargo transfer agent named Kerry Whalen, returning from a run at American Airlines, notices the van and tries to run. >> >> He’s pistol-whipped with a .45 caliber. Eirich is summoned over the intercom under a fake story about a Frankfurt shipment, then marched at gunpoint to the vault, the critical sequence.
Eirich opens the first vault door, closes and relocks it, opens the second, following the exact procedure Werner described to avoid the 90-second alarm. Inside the 10 by 20-foot vault room, the robbers find approximately 72 15-pound cartons of untraceable cash. The van backs up to the loading ramp. Two men load the parcels.
Employee car keys are confiscated. One robber, later identified through police mugshots as Tommy DeSimone, pulls off his ski mask and bursts into the cafeteria in euphoria. He’s told to put it back on, but employees catch a glimpse of his face. By 4:16 in the morning, both vehicles are gone. The employees are told not to call the police until 4:30.
They honor the deadline. At the Canarsie auto shop where Burke is waiting, the money is transferred to two automobiles. Burke and his son Frank drive off in one. The remaining crew takes the other. Vario sends his son Peter to collect the family’s share. The total take, $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry. $5.875 million, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time, equivalent to roughly $28 million today.
Every dollar was untraceable American currency. The plan started unraveling within 48 hours. Stacks Edwards, tasked with driving the van to a New Jersey junkyard for destruction, got high on cocaine, visited his girlfriend, >> >> and fell asleep. The van was found parked in front of a fire hydrant in a no parking zone in Canarsie.
Edwards’ fingerprints were on the steering wheel. A footprint matched sneakers later recovered from his apartment. Within 3 days, the FBI had identified Burke’s crew as the likely perpetrators. Each participant had been promised between $10,000 and $50,000, calculated against an expected $2 million haul, roughly a third of the actual take.
Burke kept the vast majority. As a Bonanno capo named Vincent Asaro complained years later in secretly recorded conversations, they never got their money right. That guy Jimmy kept everything. Hill put it more directly. Rather than give everyone four or five hundred thousand a piece, Burke decided it was easier to put a quarter bullet in their head.
Not a single dollar of the stolen money has ever been recovered. The killing started 7 days after the heist. December 18th, 1978. Stacks Edwards, uh shot five to six times in the head and chest with a .25-caliber silenced pistol >> >> at his Queens apartment by Tommy DeSimone and Angelo Sepe on Burke’s direct order. Edwards was eating breakfast when they arrived.
He was found with a piece of chicken still in his mouth. DeSimone called Edwards’ mother the next day to say how sorry he was about what happened to Stacks. The motive was simple. Edwards had failed to destroy the van that led the FBI to all of them. T Paul Vario personally sanctioned the hit. January 6th, 1979. Martin Krugman, disappeared, body never found.
According to Hill, Krugman was killed at a mob-run bar on Rockaway Boulevard in Queens and dismembered. Krugman had been pestering Burke relentlessly for his share of the money. Burke feared the pestering would escalate to cooperation with the FBI. Bones discovered at Robert’s Lounge in June of 1980 may have been Krugman’s, matter though identification was never confirmed.
Richard Eaton, killed approximately January 17th, body discovered February 18th, 1979. A con artist Burke had trusted with $250,000 proceeds to launder through a Fort Lauderdale nightclub called the Players Lounge. Eaton skimmed the money. Burke had him bound, gagged, and locked inside an abandoned refrigerated tractor trailer in a Brooklyn area known as the pit.
Children playing in a garbage-filled lot found the frozen hog-tied body wrapped in a blanket with a rope around his neck. Sewn into the lining of Eaton’s clothing was an address book containing Burke’s name, address, and phone number. Burke told Hill afterward, “Don’t worry about him anymore. I whacked the swindler out.
” This is the only murder for which Burke was ever convicted. The dead man carried Burke’s identity on his body, which is the kind of mistake Burke never made twice. Uh February 10th, 1979. Teresa Ferrara, 26 years old. She received a phone call at her beauty shop in Bellmore, Long Island, was told to meet someone at a nearby diner, told her niece she had a chance to make an easy $10,000 and left behind her purse, her car keys, and her mink coat.
Her dismembered, headless torso washed ashore at Barnegat Inlet near Toms River, New Jersey, 3 months later. Lastly, she was identified through her recent breast augmentation surgery. Ferrara was Tommy DeSimone’s mistress and suspected of being an FBI informant. Angelo Sepe is believed to have carried out the killing on Burke’s orders.
Approximately March 8th, 1979. Louis and Joanna Cefalu, according to Hill, the couple was killed and compacted together with their car at an auto wrecking yard. Bodies never found. Cefalu had been Burke’s prison cellmate. His crime, in Burke’s calculation, was he was buying his wife a custom pink Cadillac Fleetwood and driving it near the JFK cargo area while the FBI was watching.
He also talked about mob business to Joanna. Burke’s logic was clean. Anyone who couldn’t keep quiet was a liability, and a liability’s spouse was a witness. March 22nd, 1979. Tom Monteleone, the Florida bar owner who’d conspired with Eaton to steal the $250,000, found murdered in Connecticut. May 16th, uh 1979.
Joe Manri and Robert McMahon, both heist participants, found side by side in the front seat of a Buick in a Brooklyn parking garage. Each shot execution style with a bullet to the back of the head. June 13th, 1979. >> [snorts] >> Paolo Li Castri, the Gambino family’s representative inside building 261, found riddled with bullets, set on fire, and dumped naked on a burning trash heap in Brooklyn.
Burke didn’t want to pay Li Castri or the Gambinos their share of the money. The cost of a bullet was cheaper than the percentage. Tommy DeSimone disappeared around January 14th, 1979. Killed not by Burke, but by the Gambino crime family as retaliation for his unsanctioned murders of men Billy Bats and Ronald Jerothe.
He was lured with the promise of being made, then executed. Hill described Burke’s reaction, slamming a phone receiver so hard the entire telephone booth shook, then emerging with tears in his eyes. “They whacked Tommy.” In July of 1984, Angelo Sepe and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Joanna Lombardo, were shot in Sepe’s Bensonhurst apartment.
Sepe three times in the head, Lombardo once in the mouth while she slept. That was a Lucchese family hit, ordered after Sepe robbed a Lucchese-affiliated drug dealer. Sepe had once said, he almost casually, “When my time comes, my own people will kill me.” The total body count connected to Lufthansa, depending on who’s counting and which sources you trust, runs between 10 and 16 people.
Burke killed nearly every participant in the largest cash robbery in American history. And it worked. He was never charged for the heist. The witnesses were gone. The money was gone. The only physical evidence that connected Burke to any of the aftermath was the address book sewn into a dead man’s coat.
Here’s what Burke built, and this is worth naming clearly, an architecture of silence. Not secrecy, silence. He didn’t hide what he’d done. He eliminated the people who could say he’d done it. And for 35 years, that architecture held. Burke killed these people to avoid paying them and to erase the trail back to himself.
Some of them, Ferrara, uh Joanna Cefalu, were barely connected to the heist itself. At what point does a strategy that ruthlessly effective stop being a strategy and become something else entirely? Compulsion, pleasure, the only solution a man raised on violence knows how to reach for. Tell me what you think in the comments.
The irony that brought Burke down is almost too neat to believe. The man who evaded prosecution for the biggest cash robbery on American soil. He who killed a dozen people and buried them across three boroughs and two states was convicted for fixing college basketball games. The scheme was minor by Burke standards.
Modest bets on Boston College games during the 1978 to 79 season rigged through a forward named Rick Kuhn and a network of small-time Pittsburgh gamblers called the Perla brothers. Burke fronted the money. Hill managed the players. [ __ ] the per game payoff to Kuhn was approximately $2,500. The operation nearly collapsed when a Boston College guard named Ernie Cobb scored eight points in the final minute of a February game against Holy Cross costing Burke roughly $50,000.
Hill remembered Burke putting his foot through the television. It was penny ante compared to Lufthansa, but it left a paper trail. Telephone records, Western Union transfers, bookmaker contacts that Lufthansa never did. But Burke was convicted in 1982 of conspiracy and sentenced to 20 years, later reduced to 12.
He protested at sentencing. I gave the little bastard some bucks to bet on games. That’s all. The real catalyst for Burke’s fall wasn’t basketball. It was drugs. After the release from Lewisburg around 1978, Burke and Hill had moved into cocaine trafficking, a direct violation of the Lucchese family’s explicit ban on narcotics.
The family feared, correctly, that heavy drug sentences would turn soldiers into cooperators. In April of 1980, Hill was arrested on narcotics charges. The FBI played him recordings of Burke and Vario discussing having Hill killed. On May 27th, 1980, Hill signed a cooperation agreement with the FBI Strike Force.
His testimony over the next several years produced approximately 50 convictions, including both Burke and Vario. >> [snorts] >> The murder conviction came in February of 1985 marked for Richard Eaton. The sentence was 20 to life. At sentencing, Burke shouted, “The bastard died of hypothermia.” An attempt to prosecute him for the Billy Batts killing was dropped because Hill was the sole surviving witness, insufficient for a conviction.
Burke had killed everyone else who was there. If you’re still with me on this one, a subscription would mean a lot. There’s more to the story and it’s the part the movie couldn’t tell. The gap between James Burke and Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway is substantial and the sanitization was deliberate. The most significant distortion was structural.
The film transferred the bulk of Burke’s violence to Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito. In reality, Burke was arguably more dangerous than De Simone. The Weddin Day dismemberment, the piano wire strangulation of Serzani, Burke’s direct participation in beating Billy Batts to death with a shovel, none of these appear in the film. The movie shows Conway as calculating and cold.
The record shows Burke as calculating, cold, and hands-on, a man who did his own killing when it mattered. Specific events were altered. The Billy Batts murder was compressed from a calculated two-week sequence driven by financial motive into a single evening of impulsive escalation. The Air France robbery was simplified to receiving keys from McMahon.
The elaborate scheme involving the escort at the Jade East Motel, the stolen key, but and the locksmith was cut entirely. The Boston College point-shaving scandal, the crime that actually sent Burke to prison, received only throwaway treatment in the film despite spanning an entire basketball season.
Thomas De Simone was physically transformed. The real De Simone stood over 6 ft and weighed 220 lb. Joe Pesci is 5 ft 4. De Niro prepared obsessively. He called Henry Hill several times daily during filming asking how Burke walked, uh held his cigarette, held a shot glass. Hill taught De Niro what he later described as the correct technique for pistol-whipping a victim.
Hill called the finished film 95% accurate, a generous assessment. From the man whose accounts required the name changes, composite characters, and narrative compressions that define the distance between the film and the life it claimed to depict. And this is where the story requires a caveat that most accounts of Burke never bothered to deliver.
For virtually everything the public knows about Burke’s interior life, his habits, his humor, his reasoning, the specific details of how he killed and why, comes from Henry Hill. Hill was a convicted criminal, a documented liar, an alcoholic, a cocaine and methamphetamine user, and a man with powerful legal and financial incentives to tell dramatic stories.
He was expelled from the Witness Protection Program in 1987 for drug trafficking and repeatedly revealing his identity. He and he gave two different accounts of Billy Batts’ body disposal, crushed in a junkyard in Wiseguy, buried in Robert’s Lounge basement on the Goodfellas DVD commentary. His claim that De Simone tried to assault Karen Hill while Henry was in prison has been contradicted by prison release records.
At the 2015 trial of Vincent Asaro, cooperating witness Gaspar Avellino testified that Hill wasn’t even present at the Lufthansa heist, that he made a big thing about being on the score, and he wasn’t. This doesn’t mean Hill’s testimony was fabricated wholesale. Federal courts [snorts] found it sufficiently credible to convict Burke twice, and the appellate court acknowledged Hill had been thoroughly impeached at trial, but upheld the verdicts.
The physical evidence, Edwards’ fingerprints on the van, Burke’s name in Eaton’s coat, the could the bodies that turned up exactly where Hill said they would, corroborated the framework of his account. But the colorful details, the dialogue, the specific moments of tenderness and terror that made Wiseguy a bestseller and Goodfellas a masterpiece, those rest on the word of a man who spent his last two decades monetizing his own story on talk shows, in tabloids, and in increasingly unreliable memoirs.
The real Burke may be as much Hill’s creation as Scorsese’s. Uh the difference is that Scorsese knew he was making fiction. Burke died in that Buffalo hospital bed on April 13th, 1996. He was buried at Saint Charles Cemetery in East Farmingdale, Long Island. A modest plot with nothing on the headstone that announces who lies beneath.
Robert’s Lounge at 114-45 Lefferts Boulevard >> >> was renamed the South Side Inn after the Lufthansa investigation drew media attention. The location later became a karaoke bar. The bocce court is gone. The basement where police found human bones has been poured over with new concrete more than once. But the house, 81-48 102nd Road South Ozone Park, still stands.
A red brick row house on a quiet residential block 2 miles from JFK Airport where Jimmy Burke raised children he named after outlaws and beat for wetting their beds. In June of 2013, 17 years after Burke died, the FBI came back to that house with jackhammers and sledgehammers acting on information from a new cooperating witness connected to the Gambino and Bonanno families.
They pulled up the basement floor. The New York City medical examiner confirmed human remains. Catherine Burke, Jimmy’s daughter married by then to a Bonanno capo, still owned the property. The house sits there today on a block where the neighbors mow their lawns and the traffic from the airport hums overhead.
The ground beneath it held its secrets for over 30 years before anyone came back with the right tools and the right questions. And the money, $5.875 million in untraceable American currency stolen on a Monday morning in December of 1978, has never been found. Not a dollar, not a bill. Whatever Burke did with it, he took that answer to Saint Charles Cemetery where the headstone says nothing and the silence he built is finally permanent.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
