0:00 The guard felt the cold steel against his neck before he heard the voice.0:06 It was three in the morning inside the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK Airport.0:13 The voice was quiet, almost polite.0:16 “Don’t make a sound.0:17 Just open the door.” In that moment, the largest cash robbery in American history began.0:25 And it began not with a bang, but with a whisper.0:29 Sixty-six minutes later, five million dollars in cash and nearly a million in jewels were gone.0:37 Like the Antwerp diamond thieves we examined last week, the crew behind this had an almost perfect plan.0:46 The fatal flaw wasn't in the blueprint.0:49 It was in the architect.0:52 The man behind it all was a Lucchese crime family associate named Jimmy Burke.0:58 Jimmy the Gent.1:00 He was a planner.1:01 A professional.1:02 And he had an inside man, a Lufthansa employee named Louis Werner, who was drowning in gambling debts.1:11 Werner didn't just give Burke a key.1:14 He gave him EVERYTHING.1:16 The schedule for the monthly currency shipment from Germany.1:21 The layout of the vault.1:23 The names of the guards on duty.1:26 The precise location of the security cameras, and more importantly, how to disable them.1:34 This wasn't a smash-and-grab.1:36 This was a surgical procedure.1:39 And you have to admit… there’s a certain elegance to that.1:44 On the night of December eleventh, 1978, a black Ford Econoline van pulled up to the cargo building.1:52 The men inside weren’t thugs picked up from a street corner.1:57 They were a hand-selected crew.2:00 They knew their roles.2:02 They cut the locks, entered the building, and rounded up the handful of overnight employees with terrifying efficiency.2:12 No shouting.2:13 No panic.2:14 Just cold, practiced professionalism.2:17 They used the information from Werner to navigate directly to the double-door vault.2:24 They knew which employee had the first key.2:28 They knew where the second key was kept.2:31 They were inside the vault in minutes.2:35 They loaded one hundred and seventy-nine pounds of untraceable American currency into the van.2:43 They were in and out in just over an hour.2:46 No alarms were triggered.2:49 No shots were fired.2:50 By the time the first police car arrived, the van and the six million dollars had simply… vanished into the New York City night.3:01 It was a ghost story.3:03 A perfect crime.3:04 For about twelve hours.3:06 The plan had been flawless.3:09 The cleanup was a catastrophe.3:11 The first mistake belonged to a man named Parnell "Stacks" Edwards.3:17 His only job was to drive the heist van to a car compactor in New Jersey and have it crushed into a metal cube.3:27 Instead, he got high, parked the van in a no-parking zone in Brooklyn, and went to his girlfriend's apartment.3:36 Two days later, a beat cop found it.3:39 The police had the van.3:41 And inside the van, they found a fingerprint.3:45 The first thread had been pulled.3:48 And Jimmy Burke… Jimmy did not tolerate loose threads.3:52 He became convinced the entire crew was a liability.3:57 His brilliant, audacious plan was now at risk because of sloppy, greedy men who couldn't follow simple instructions.4:07 So he came up with a new plan.4:09 A much simpler one.4:11 He decided to kill everyone involved.4:14 One by one, the men who pulled off the score of a lifetime started turning up dead.4:21 "Stacks" Edwards was the first to go, shot in his apartment just a week after the heist.4:29 Then others followed.4:31 Martin Krugman, the wig-maker who helped conceive the plan.4:36 Joe "Buddha" Manri.4:37 Robert McMahon.4:39 Paolo LiCastri.4:40 The FBI couldn't prove who stole the money.4:44 But they had a very clear picture of who was cleaning house.4:49 Burke’s paranoia, his absolute refusal to trust anyone, turned a masterpiece of theft into a clumsy, bloody trail of bodies that led directly back to him.5:02 The very violence he used to protect his secret became the thing that screamed it to the world.5:10 He was eventually arrested, not for the heist, but for his connection to the murders, and convicted on unrelated charges thanks to the testimony of his associate, Henry Hill.5:25 Most of the six million dollars was never seen again.5:30 It remains a ghost, a legend of what was, for one brief hour, the perfect score.
