The robbery was depicted in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film Goodfellas.
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In this January 23, 3014 courtroom drawing, Vincent Asaro, left, is joined by his attorney, Gerald McMahon, at federal court in New York.
“He lived and breathed the Mafia”, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsay K. Gerdes.
The Lufthansa heist is just one a series of crimes ranging from murder to loan-sharking that prosecutors have alleged that Asaro, 80, of Howard Beach, committed in his rise from a Bonanno family associate and “tough guy” to soldier and captain.
Prosecutors contend Asaro followed his grandfather and father into the “family business” in the 1970s.
“The defendant is a gangster through and through”, Gerdes said.
Most of the other suspected participants in the robbery disappeared, were killed or died, making it hard for authorities to piece the case together.
Law enforcement methods like wiretaps and using cooperating witnesses wearing body wires came into their own during the heyday of mob prosecutions in the 1980s to 1990s, said Marshall Miller, a former high-ranking official in the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Asaro’s defence lawyers are expected to counter by accusing prosecutors of relying on shoddy testimony from ageing gangsters with incentives to lie.
Vitale became an informant after his arrest in 2003. “He surrounded himself with people he believed would never turn on him”.
“When necessary, they lie to each other, and they lie to save themselves”, Diane Ferrone told jurors at the start of the trial in New York. Once a liar, always a liar’.
Asaro is accused of myriad mob-related crimes since the late 1960s – the 1969 strangulation murder of Paul Katz, the Lufthansa heist, arson, extortion and robbery.
Asaro has pleaded not guilty. The value of the booty today is estimated at around $20m.
“To pull it off at an airport – you hate to say criminals should get credit, but you have to credit them for pulling it off”, Abadinsky said.
The case was one of the United States’ most notorious unsolved crimes until Asaro was arrested a year ago.
He became the latest mobster to fall prey to a breach in the Mafia’s once-sacred code of silence that has decimated the ranks of New York’s five Italian crime families.
The first witness, former Bonanno underboss Salvatore Vitale, gave the jury the rules of La Cosa Nostra including an important one he had broken: “If you meet with law enforcement, we have the right to kill you”. The list includes former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino.
In this April, 1979 file photo, James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke is led handcuffed from a law enforcement vehicle in New York.
But a procession of high ranking hoods who abandoned that ideal are expected to testify against Asaro in the coming weeks. He’s also expected to testify at the Asaro trial. Asaro is standing trial for the infamous Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy Airport. They also say he was a degenerate gambler who blew much of it at the racetrack.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation found it buried in another Queens basement in 2013.
Burke is thought to have been responsible for killing a half-dozen members of the robbery crew so they wouldn’t rat to the police.
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If convicted of racketeering conspiracy and other charges, Asaro faces a maximum sentence of life behind bars.
