I tailed the mobsters behind America's biggest heist: The FBI agent who hunted the real Goodfellas
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- Neil Moran is speaking at Hamptons Whodunit in East Hampton on April 16-19. The Daily Mail is the media partner of the true crime festival
The Grateful Dead song Casey Jones will forever play inside Neil Moran’s head, no matter how hard he tries to forget it.
For more than a month, he heard the tune on repeat while carrying out round-the-clock surveillance on mobster Angelo Sepe, hoping for him to slip up and reveal intel on what was, at the time, the largest heist in American history.
The Lucchese crime family associate had been named as one of six armed assailants who broke into the Lufthansa Airlines cargo terminal at New York’s JFK Airport and stole $5.8 million in cash and jewels on December 11, 1978. Soon, there was a trail of more than a dozen bodies and people began disappearing as Mafia members sought to silence anyone and everyone linked to the infamous heist, which later inspired the 1990s movie Goodfellas.
Then a young FBI special agent in the truck hijacking division in New York, Moran was assigned to the graveyard shift following and listening in to Sepe’s every move.
Between 10pm and 6am each snowy winter night, he tailed the mobster wherever he went, as he made the rounds to clubs in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in his flashy 1979 Ford Thunderbird - one of the most desirable cars in his Italian-American neighborhood of Ozone Park, Queens, and a purchase he had curiously made just days after the multi-million-dollar robbery.
‘I got to know him very well,’ Moran told the Daily Mail.
‘He was a huge fan of the Grateful Dead, and he had Casey Jones blaring over the air all the time. He loved that song and played it constantly. There’s a line in the song ‘Driving that train, High on cocaine’ that all of us following him still joke now that we’ll be able to hear in our minds even on our deathbeds.
‘I also heard a lot of him and his wife arguing at the top of their lungs. Just when we thought he was going to talk about something useful, she'd say something and he'd start screaming at her and she’d be screaming back at him - and the Grateful Dead would still be playing in the background.’
He laughed: ‘It would have been nice if he played nice, soft, relaxing elevator music… I learned a lot about him. But, unfortunately, not the things we wanted to learn about the Lufthansa Heist.’
The Lufthansa cargo Terminal at JFK Airport on December 12, 1978 - one day after a gang of armed men pulled off what was then the largest heist in US history
James 'Jimmy the Gent' Burke is believed to have masterminded and executed the 1978 Lufthansa Heist
It was around 3am on Monday December 11, 1978, when a group of associates of the Lucchese crime family pulled off one of the cleanest, biggest heists in the nation’s history.
Six men dressed in ski masks and armed with shotguns and automatic pistols burst out of a black Ford van and stormed the Lufthansa cargo warehouse at JFK Airport.
Inside, terrified employees were held at gunpoint while the manager was forced to open the huge storage vault.
The gang of thieves loaded $5 million in cash and $850,000 worth of jewelry, consisting of diamonds, gold, pearls, and other precious stones, (a combined worth around $30 million today) into the van and sped off.
The whole thing was over in just 64 minutes. No shots were fired and no one was injured.
The brazen heist was plastered over the front pages of newspapers across the country.
‘Even when it hit the papers, nobody realized how big and involved this thing was - or that organized crime was behind it,’ Moran recalled.
Within days though, the Mafia’s involvement would become clear. A high-level member of one of New York’s notorious Five Families who was also working as an FBI informant handed over the names of some of the people behind the sting.
The plot originated from Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo supervisor who suggested the caper to bookkeeper Marty Krugman as a way to pay off his $20,000 gambling debts.
Police finding the stolen black van used in the Lufthansa Heist in Brooklyn on December 13, 1978
FBI Special Agent Neil Moran was tasked with carrying out surveillance on mobster Angelo Sepe (pictured)
Werner knew that boxes of untraceable bills of cash would fly in from Germany on a Lufthansa cargo flight and be stored briefly in the airport vault.
Krugman passed the tip to gangster Henry Hill who passed it up the chain of command to James ‘Jimmy the Gent’ Burke, part of Mafia capo Paul Vario’s faction of the Lucchese family. At the time, a big part of organized crime involved hijacking trucks, Moran said, and Burke’s crew was known for carrying out hijackings around JFK airport.
At the time, Neil Moran was a young FBI agent in the New York field office
Inside Burke’s Queens’ bar Robert’s Lounge, he had plotted the heist and recruited a team of men to carry it out.
Burke was the mastermind. Werner the inside man. And the crew included Sepe, Tommy DeSimone and Anthony Rodriguez.
With intel of the mob’s involvement, the case was assigned to the FBI’s truck hijacking squad.
‘We had the names of the guys who carried out the heist but we didn’t have proof,’ Moran said.
Multiple agents were assigned to follow the gangsters on a 24-hour basis.
Moran’s subject was Sepe, a Lucchese associate with a prior federal bank robbery conviction.
‘It went on for days and days,’ Moran said.
‘It was not a very glamorous shift - 10pm to 6am - but it actually turned out to be very active.
‘Sometimes you’re on surveillance in the middle of the night and nothing is happening so it’s hard to stay awake. Not with this guy. He bounced around all the time. He wasn’t often home at night so we never stopped. We traveled all over.’
After the heist, bodies began piling up as Burke sought to silence anyone linked to the robbery
Parnell 'Stacks' Edwards (left) was the first to be killed. Tommy DeSimone vanished even while under FBI surveillance
Paul Vario (left) led a faction of the Lucchese crime family. Marty Krugman (right) was a bookkeeper who was first approached about the potential plot by a Lufthansa employee
Sepe didn’t seem too concerned with lying low either.
Moran remembers the mobster suddenly buying the 1979 Ford Thunderbird.
Not only was it a giveaway he had come into fast cash, but it made the jobs of following him easier.
‘It was an easy car to follow because the taillights were so distinctive, like two horizontal bars, so you could easily see him in traffic many cars ahead,’ he said.
After around a month, law enforcement had enough probable cause to install listening devices into the mobsters’ cars.
In the late-70s, the quality of the recording equipment was primitive.
‘We had to be close to the car to pick up the audio. So then we could only follow him for so long before switching with each other in order to avoid detection,’ Moran explained.
Regardless of how careful the agents were, Moran believes the mobsters likely knew they were being watched.
‘They knew we were around. Which is why Jimmy Burke didn’t want them spending money because word would get out,’ he said.
During the weeks-long bugging of the cars, Moran said he only ever heard a couple of muffled references to the Lufthansa Heist - and nothing significant enough to warrant charges.
It wasn’t long before the bodies of those connected to the heist began piling up.
In 2013, FBI agents search the backyard of a house where James 'Jimmy the Gent' Burke once lived
Burke's home in Ozone Park, Queens, is pictured in January 2014. He was never convicted over the robbery
Mobsters Gaspare Valenti and Vincent Asaro in a photo provided by federal prosecutors in New York
The first co-conspirator to be eliminated was Parnell ‘Stacks’ Edwards, who was tasked with getting rid of the van used by the robbers.
But, instead of driving it to a salvage yard owned by Gambino family member John Gotti to be crushed, Edwards left it outside his girlfriend’s apartment.
On December 13, officers spotted the vehicle parked too close to a fire hydrant, ran the plates and learned it was stolen. It was impounded, with investigators quickly determining it was the van used in the heist. Stacks’s fingerprints were found inside.
He paid for the mistake with his life.
Sepe and DeSimone turned up at his apartment in Queens and shot him five times at point-blank range, Hill later revealed in his book The Lufthansa Heist after he became an FBI informant.
Stacks was the first of many.
‘We started to see a pattern of people being systematically eliminated,’ Moran said.
Krugram, the bookkeeper, disappeared around a month after the robbery.
Burke’s associate Louis ‘Roast Beef’ Cafora and his wife Joanna vanished after they ignored his orders not to splash the cash and bought a custom pink Cadillac.
In February, the body of Richard Eaton - a Burke associate believed to have been involved in laundering the stolen money - was found frozen in a refrigerated truck in Brooklyn.
Theresa Ferrera, a Long Island beauty salon owner linked to the Lucchese family, vanished the same month. Her headless torso later washed ashore in New Jersey.
Two others were found shot execution-style inside a Buick in Brooklyn a few months later.
Henry Hill had originally passed the idea about the heist up the chain of command to James ‘Jimmy the Gent’ Burke
Hill ended up flipping and went into witness protection, giving intel that saw Burke finally imprisoned for other crimes
Even DeSimone, who was under round-the-clock FBI surveillance, suddenly vanished.
‘He just disappeared off the face of the earth and was never seen or heard from again,’ Moran said.
‘We didn’t know if he had fled the country. Then a while later we learned he had been murdered by the family he was being inducted into.’
By the summer of 1979, at least nine people tied to the heist had been murdered. Many more were missing.
Neil Moran is speaking at Hamptons Whodunit later this month
At one point, Moran was sent to a junkyard in Canarsie because the FBI received intel that Burke was planning a hit on the owner.
‘The mobsters called the guy ‘Tommy Wheels’ because he was in a wheelchair. You can’t make this stuff up,’ Moran said.
‘My boss said ‘get yourself to the junkyard and don’t let Tommy Wheels out of your sight.’ We set up there watching and every so often we would see the front of a wheelchair nudging out into the street like he was checking for somebody or something. But nothing happened. To this day, I don’t know what his connection was to the robbery.’
By February 1979, the FBI had enough evidence to arrest Sepe.
‘We didn't really have enough probable cause to convict, but the US Attorney's Office felt that we had enough to arrest him and then perhaps we could get him to cooperate. They were just taking a stab at it,’ Moran said.
It was a Saturday afternoon and Moran was following Sepe through Manhattan, then into Queens, waiting for the go-ahead. Burke happened to be in Sepe’s car with him at the time.
More than three decades after the heist, a major break came when aging Bonanno crime family capo Vincent Asaro was charged in 2014
Despite his own cousin testifying at trial to Asaro’s role in the robbery, he was acquitted at trial (pictured walking free from court in Brooklyn after the verdict)
‘When we were told that the arrest warrant had been signed by a judge, we pulled them over in Jamaica and arrested Sepe.’
Moran then drove Sepe’s Thunderbird back to the FBI office. ‘The other agents joked they could hear me loud and clear in the car from the bug.
‘Needless to say, he didn’t end up cooperating, and we didn't have enough for a conviction.’
The only person ever convicted over the heist was Werner. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Burke had eliminated most of the other co-conspirators. And, despite knowing their names within days, there was not enough evidence to bring charges against those still alive.
No trace of the stolen cash and jewelry was ever found.
The few survivors of the heist later ended up dead or in prison.
Sepe and his girlfriend were found shot dead execution-style inside a Brooklyn basement apartment in 1984.
Hill flipped and went into witness protection, giving intel that saw Burke finally imprisoned, not for the Lufthansa Heist but for the Boston College basketball point-fixing scandal and for Eaton's murder. He died in prison in 1996.
The robbery inspired the movie Goodfellas. Having lived through the real-life story, Moran is a big fan of the film
More than three decades after the heist, a major break came when aging Bonanno crime family capo Vincent Asaro was charged in 2014. Despite his own cousin testifying at trial to Asaro’s role in the robbery, he was acquitted at trial.
Having lived through the real-life story, Moran is a big fan of the movie Goodfellas.
‘When me and my colleagues watched the movie, I remember we said ‘Oh my gosh, there’s Angelo’s car.’ They went to the trouble of putting the exact car and color we followed every day there in the background of one scene,’ Moran said.
‘It was quite accurate. I’m not saying every single thing but details like that and the way Jimmy Burke - who was played by Robert De Niro - was systematically wiping everyone out one-by-one is exactly the way it happened.’
Neil Moran is speaking at the Hamptons Whodunit festival, the mystery and true crime event taking place in East Hampton from April 16-19, 2026. The Daily Mail is the media partner of the festival
