This is about the robbery itself. For the book on the topic, see The Lufthansa Heist.
The Lufthansa heist was a robbery at John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 11, 1978. An estimated $5.875 million ($21.6 million today) was stolen, with $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time. In popular culture, it is the main subject of the two well-known television films, The 10 Million Dollar Getaway (1991) and The Big Heist (2001); and is a key plot element in the film Goodfellas (1990). In July 2015, Rowman and Littlefield published a book titled The Lufthansa Heist, co-authored by Daniel Simone and mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill, which is considered the primary reference and details the story of the crime. The heist's magnitude made it one of the longest-investigated crimes in the United States: for over 35 years after it happened, the latest arrest associated with it was made in 2014.Jimmy Burke was the mastermind of the heist but was never officially charged with the crime or related crimes.
The heist was planned by Jimmy Burke, an associate of the Lucchese crime family, and carried out by several associates. The plot began when bookmaker Martin Krugman told Henry Hill (an associate of Jimmy Burke's) about millions of dollars in untraceable money: American currency flown in once a month from monetary exchanges for military servicemen and tourists in West Germany. The currency would arrive via Lufthansa and was then stored in a vault at Kennedy Airport. The information had originally come from Louis Werner, a worker at the airport who owed Krugman $20,000 for gambling debts ($79,000 adjusted for inflation) and from his co-worker Peter Gruenwald. Werner and Gruenwald had previously been successful in stealing $22,000 in foreign currency ($93,000 adjusted for inflation) from their employer Lufthansa in 1976.