JIMMY BURKE - The Brain Behind The Lufthansa Heist

0:01 Jimmy Burke leaned against the mahogany bar of Robert's Lounge in Queens, the amber light catching the sharp crease of his suit and the practiced ease of a man who owned every shadow in the room. It was May 1970, and the air was thick with the scent of expensive cigars and the heavy, metallic tang of coming violence. William Billy Batts Benvena, a made man in the Gambino family fresh out of a six -year stretch in Danbury. was holding court, his voice booming with the unearned confidence of a ghost returned to life.

0:34 Jimmy watched him, his expression a mask of Irish charm, even as he calculated the cost of every word bats uttered. Burke had spent those six years meticulously absorbing bats' lucrative loan sharking rackets, and he had no intention of handing them back to a man whose only remaining currency was a reputation that had started to rust. The room shifted when Tommy DeSimone walked in. At 24, Tommy was an imposing physical force, over six feet tall and built like a wall of raw nerves and cocaine -fueled aggression.

1:11 He wasn't the pint -sized firecracker portrayed in the movies. He was a mountain of man who used his size to terrorize anyone who breathed the wrong way. Bats looked up, a smirk playing on his lips. and reach back into a past Tommy had tried to bury under a mountain of bodies. He asked the kid if he still shined shoes. It was a classic mob power play, a verbal slap intended to remind the young lion exactly where he'd started. The insult hit Tommy like a physical blow, his face turning a shade of deep, bruised purple.

1:44 He leaned over to Burke and Henry Hill, his voice aloh, vibrating hiss. I'm gonna kill that fuck. Hill thought it was just the usual bravado. But Jimmy Burke saw the opportunity he'd been waiting for. He didn't pull Tommy back. He let the fuse burn. Two weeks later, the bill came due at The Suite, a club owned by Henry Hill. The bar was nearly empty. The late night, quiet shattered only by the sound of ice and glasses. Jimmy Burke sat close to Bats, playing the role of the generous host, getting the Gambino soldier good and drunk, wrapping him in a false sense of security.

2:23 When Tommy arrived, the atmosphere curdled instantly. Tommy didn't hesitate. He pulled out a .38 revolver and began to pistol whip bats with a rhythmic sickening thud. Jimmy didn't just watch. He moved with the practiced efficiency of a predator grabbing bats and holding him down so Tommy could finish the job. They weren't just killing a man. They were executing a rank. In the logic of the underworld, You don't touch a made man without permission from the Commission. By the time they stopped, Bat's head was a ruined mass of dark blood and bone.

2:58 They wrapped him in tablecloths and stuffed him into the trunk of Henry Hill's car, the weight of the crime literal and heavy. The horror deepened on the drive toward the Connecticut border. Halfway there, they heard a rhythmic banging against the interior of the trunk. Bat's was still breathing. When they pulled over and popped the lid, the man they thought they'd disposed of was trying to claw his way back to the living. Tommy didn't blink. He took a kitchen knife and stabbed bats 30 or 40 times, a frenzied, primal attack that left the interior of the car looking like a slaughterhouse.

3:34 Jimmy finished it with a tire iron. They buried him under a dog kennel in upstate New York, convinced they had buried the evidence of their war against the rules. But Jimmy Burke knew better. He knew that in their world, A secret is only a secret as long as everyone involved stays alive or stays loyal. And Tommy D. Simone was becoming increasingly incapable of doing either. For nine years, the ghost of Billy Batts hovered over the crew, a debt that refused to be settled. Jimmy's charisma acted as the glue, keeping the Lucchese associates together, even as the pressure mounted.

4:12 He was Jimmy the Gent. The man who tipped truck drivers hundreds of dollars after hijacking their loads. The man who treated his crew like family. But that family had a strict hierarchy of survival. By late 1978, the stakes reached a fever pitch with the Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport. The score was massive, nearly six million dollars in cash and jewelry. But it brought a level of heat that scorched everything it touched. Jimmy's response was a wave of internal cleansings. He started eliminating anyone who could link him to the robbery, from Purnell Stacks Edwards to Martin Krugman.

4:50 The gent was long gone, replaced by a man who saw every associate as a potential witness for the FBI. Tommy DeSimone, however, was a different kind of problem. He was Burke's most reliable killer, a man who had participated in the Bats' murder and countless others. But Tommy was also falling apart. His cocaine use had turned his natural volatility into a dangerous, unpredictable madness. He was murdering drug dealers for sport and bragging about the bats hit in social clubs, treating the most dangerous secret in New York like a trophy.

5:25 Jimmy Burke watched his protege and realized that Tommy wasn't just a weapon anymore. He was a liability that could destroy them all. If Tommy were arrested for the Lufthansa heist or any of his dozens of unauthorized kills, the feds would surely lean on him. And Jimmy knew that a man as unstable as Tommy might trade his mentor's life for a lighter sentence. The tension broke in January 1979. The Gambino family had finally gathered enough proof that Tommy was the one who had disappeared Billy Batts and another associate, Ronald Foxy -Gerroth.

6:03 They went to Paul Vario, the Lucchese Capo, and demanded justice. Vario who had grown weary of Tommy's recklessness and was furious over Tommy's attempted assault on Henry Hill's wife. Karen gave the green light. Actually, Vario was the one who had tipped off the Gambino's. Jimmy Burke was faced with a choice. Protect the man he treated like a son or let the institutional machinery of the Mafia solve his biggest problem. He didn't warn Tommy. He didn't tell him that the making ceremony he'd been promised was a fiction designed to lead him to a grave.

6:40 Jimmy stayed silent, a betrayal disguised as mob protocol. On January 14th, 1979, Tommy DeSimone walked into a social club in Queens, dressed in his finest suit, believing he was finally becoming untouchable. Instead, he walked into a room of men who saw him only as a mess to be cleaned up. The details of his end are murky. Some say John Gotti pulled the trigger himself as revenge for his friend bats. Others say it was a professional hit orchestrated by Vario's son. But the result was the same. Tommy vanished.

7:17 His body likely put through an industrial compactor and buried in a landfill. When the news reached Jimmy Burke in a phone booth, Henry Hill witnessed a rare moment of public emotion. Burt jammed the phone down with enough force to shatter it and burst into tears. With a tears of grief for a lost friend, or tears of profound relief that the one man who could truly implicate him in the murder of a made man was finally gone. In Jimmy's world, those two feelings were often one and the same. The legacy of Jimmy Burke isn't one of criminal brotherhood, but of cold, calculated survival.

7:57 He outlived Tommy, He outlived the heist, but he couldn't outlive the testimony of Henry Hill. In 1982, the man who had helped him bury bats and clean up the Lufthansa mess finally flipped, sending Jimmy to prison for the rest of his life. Both Burke and Vario had their own personal reasons to get rid of Henry Hill. In a show Vario wants him gone because he'd been dealing in cocaine, but in reality he wanted him out or the way because he wanted to continue on with his affair with Karen, Henry's wife.

8:30 Burke wanted him gone because by this time Burke had become paranoid about everybody who knew anything about the Lufthansa heist. Burke died in a prison hospital in 1996, his life defined by the very violence he used to control the world around him. Here remains a study in the terrifying intersection of charm and sociopathy. A man who could cry for a friend while simultaneously ensuring that friend never lived to tell their shared secrets. If you think this story captures the brutal reality of a life, pass it along to someone who appreciates the dark side of history.

9:06 And that's the way I heard it.