Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS | More
In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins dives deep into the life of James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke. Prompted by listener Paul Blackwood of Edinburgh, Gary explores Burke’s world beyond the headlines of the Lufthansa heist.
From his turbulent childhood in foster homes and orphanages to his rise as a feared and respected mobster in the Lucchese family, Burke’s story is one of violence, loyalty, and paranoia. Gary traces Burke’s early years of crime, his ties with Henry Hill and Paul Vario, and the meticulous planning of the Lufthansa heist that netted millions—and left a trail of blood in its aftermath.
The episode also covers Burke’s role in gambling and drug rackets, his eventual downfall in the Boston College point-shaving scandal, and his complicated legacy in mob history. Was Jimmy the Gent a loyal operator, or a ruthless killer who trusted no one? Tune in for a gripping exploration of one of organized crime’s most enigmatic figures.
Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire
Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”
To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here
To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.
To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here
0:06 Introduction to Jimmy Burke
1:12 The Rise of Jimmy the Gent
6:19 Jimmy’s Early Life and Influences
10:25 Family Ties and Notorious Names
14:41 Criminal Ventures Begin
17:51 The Notorious Lufthansa Heist
23:57 The Boston College Scandal
30:49 Conclusion and Legacy
[0:00] I had a listener named Paul Blackwood from Edinburgh, Scotland,
[0:04] email me with some great compliments about the show. So thank you, Paul. Hope you’re listening to this. I will try to remember to send you an email just before I release this one. However, Paul suggested that I do a story that focuses more specifically on Jimmy Burke, also known as Jimmy the Gent. And I looked around, and I agreed with Paul. Burke is mentioned on many podcasts because we all want to discuss the famous Lufthansa. I want to talk about Henry Hill, some of the other mob people in the Lucchese family, but it seems like I wasn’t really finding a show that was just focused on Burke. So, James, Jimmy the Gent, Burke and where he came from and where he went.
[0:43] Oh, and don’t forget to hit me up on Venmo, buy me a cup of coffee once in a while, or maybe go donate on the podcast. I appreciate it. It helps pay the bills and keep me going. Now, Burke may be one of the most famous mob associates of all times, I would say. Oh, there’s some in Chicago. They had a lot of associates in Chicago. But because of, of course, Henry Hill and Robert De Niro playing him,
[1:07] why, he probably would be the most famous mob guy who is not a made man. If Henry Hill had not gone into witness protection, if Henry Hill had not done that book with Nicholas Pelleggi, Wise Guys, or if the famous filmmaker Martin Scorsese hadn’t taken Wise Guys and Pellegi’s book and got Pellegi to help write a script and titled it Goodfellas. And when Robert De Niro took the part of Jimmy the Gent, his place in history was assured, I’ll tell you that, especially in mob history. In my humble opinion, this book and film were arguably the best depictions of day-to-day mob life ever that I’ve ever seen. I thought it was amazing. He did a heck of a job at the casino.
[1:55] And to see the egos of these guys, once they turn, are just amazing. When Lefty Rosenthal heard Robert De Niro was going to play him, he told Pelleggio, oh yeah, I’ll work with you, I’ll work on this. And I’m not sure what brought Henry Hill around, but I got a feeling it was probably the same thing. He found out Ray Liotta was going to play his part in a movie. Really, when these guys like Pelleggio start writing a book about this, They got the huge budget and they pay these guys, you know, no telling how much money, six figures and up. Heck, they paid Frank Galatis $5,000. Just sit down and talk to them the first time for 30, 40 minutes. So when you actually start telling a person’s life story and on the big screen and in the book, why it’s worth a lot of money, it’s life changing money. I got a feeling. Now, the screenwriters in the film Goodfellas changed the name of Jimmy Burke to Jimmy Conway. there was some kickback from the family and they were wanting a piece of the action so they just changed the name.
[2:54] Now, some people have claimed that, of course, this movie came out while Burke was still alive. He was in the penitentiary, and they said that he was so happy to have Robert De Niro play him that he phoned De Niro from the prison to give him a few pointers. And De Niro is pretty well known for this. He reaches out to these guys and meets them and spends a lot of time with them trying to get a feel for their character and what it would be like to be them for a while. Nicholas Pelleggi, they say, denies this, that De Niro and Burke have never spoken. But he said there were men around the set who knew Burke, and Henry Hill would have been one of them, and knew him really well and gave De Niro pointers. I kind of like the story that De Niro got a hold of Burke in a penitentiary and talked to him.
[3:40] Burke was played by Donald Sutherland in another film called The Big Heist. See, everybody wants to talk about Lufthansa. I don’t know how many books there’s been written on that, several. It was a heck of a robbery. We’ll get into that a little bit later. But let’s take a look to see where Jimmy Burke came from. He was born in the Bronx, New York, so he never strayed too far from his birthplace. Like a guy, like if I’d have stayed up in Plattsburgh, Missouri, I’d have never got out of Clinton County. He was the illegitimate son to a woman named Jane Conway, who was a prostitute. He was actually an immigrant from Dublin, Ireland, so he was a real Irishman. He was the son of an immigrant directly from Ireland. The name of his father was never known. You know, the mother may not even known who the father was. At the age of two, the social services in New York City took little Jimmy Conway and put him in the first of many homes and also be in some orphan homes or whatever they, I don’t know if they call them orphan homes anymore. They call them group living situations more than likely. But a large part of his early years was spent in an orphan home ran by the Roman Catholic Church, ran by nuns. They’d say that after she gave him up at age two, he never saw her again.
[4:50] Now, as with many of these throwaway kids, he was in a lot of different places, the institutions, but a lot of different foster homes. You know, these people take in kids, and some of them are good, some of them aren’t so good. They’re just doing it for the money, and some of them take them in for sexual reasons. And so he would suffer physical and sexual abuse in some of these different places. He had a pivotal event that really shaped his life at age 13. He got in an argument with a foster father while driving in a car that the man turned around to smack Burke in the back seat. And we’ve all been there, you know, don’t make me reach back there and whack you. When this guy did this, he crashed the car and he died. The deceased man’s widow blamed Burke and gave him regular beatings until he was actually taken back into social services and placed with another family. The next one, sometime after that, I don’t know if it was the one directly after that, but sometime after that, a family named Burke, which is where he ended up with this name, Burke, took him in as a foster child. And they had a, he would say later that it was a clean, comfortable and safe environment. And he loved those people. He lived out his teenage years on Rockaway Beach, close to Ocean Promenade. You guys that live in New York City and know that, you’ll know exactly where that is. And he never really strayed too far from there either, kind of across the bay just a little bit. He said Burke would never forget their kindness, and for the rest of his life, he would visit these foster parents on special occasions. And when he started making some money, he started leaving large amounts of cash
[6:16] and unmarked envelopes for them periodically.
[6:19] The Burke family had adopted him, so he took the family name and kept it. Some say that he buried part of the 1978 Lufthansa heist, some of the loot that was never found at the Burke house on their property.
[6:32] The majority of the take from that caper has never, ever been found. One of the mysteries of that, kind of like the, not the Lindbergh money, the money from, we had a kidnapping like the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder here in Kansas City. And they paid $600,000 and they only got about half of it back. And half of it ended up with the St. Louis policeman who was working with the St. Louis mob. And some of the money ended up in Chicago later on, but they never found about $300,000 of that $600,000. Jimmy Burke got older, getting up in his upper teens and 20s in 1920.
[7:07] He, of course, his trouble with the law became more serious. Age of 18, actually, in 1949, he got five years in penitentiary for forgery, and he was already working for a Colombo family member named Dominic Remo Sarsani. They had a counterfeit check ring going. I remember working some of these guys. Somebody would steal a check from a business. Somebody would get what we used to call a check protector, And then they would, on that business account, or maybe they would take one check from that business account or get a picture of it and make up a bunch of others. They might even have been totally fake checks or they might have been stolen checks and it would be just a counterfeit signature. Anyhow, when they start, they’d have a whole crew of people and run around and pass these trying to get $500 or $1,000 bucks a whack off each one of them. He got popped with a $3,000 check at the Ozone Park Bank. And after he was arrested I guess the cops knew that this was connected to this Colombo mobster named Remo and they wanted him to talk but he refused to talk and they’d offered him everything you know you take a kid like that at 18 years old and say you know you can walk on this deal dude and he refused and Remo found out about it and he knew that they offered him a free walk on that and.
[8:21] And he was eternally grateful. And actually, when he went into the penitentiary, Remo arranged for his protection with other mob members there and get him introduced into that. He started calling Jimmy Burke, Jimmy the Irish Guinea at the time. Now, if you don’t know what a guinea is, then I feel sorry for you. You got to know what a guinea is. If you don’t know, email me or comment on my Facebook. Say, what is a guinea? As an adult, when Jimmy Burke left the penitentiary, He was really trusted, and he was known as a guy who could get the job done. He was getting big by then. He came out, and he worked as a bricklayer for a while for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers. He got some tattoos, of course, you know, and that probably already had some jailhouse tattoos out of the penitentiary. He developed large muscular arms, and he was a bad dude. And he was also kind of a leader. He was known as a natural leader.
[9:15] But on one hand, he was a stone-cold killer, but mostly he was polite and charming. A really good thief is like that. Everyone I ever met that was really a good thief was a polite, charming dude that had the capability to kill somebody. Henry Hill would describe him as a guy that looked like a real fighter with large hands and a broken nose. He’d always say that if a fight broke out, Burke would be all over people in a second. He would be in there, he’d grab somebody’s tie and slam their face down in the bar before the guy even knew they were in a fight. He had kind of a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you, but he was polite on the other hand, so he wouldn’t have that Irish charm more than likely. During this time, he started building up a small crew of trusted thieves, and Henry Hill was one of them. I’m not sure exactly where they met. Probably in the penitentiary. During the 1960s, Jimmy Burke married a woman named Mickey. And then one of the more well-known stories that illustrate Burke’s temperament was about a former boyfriend of Mickey had been bothering her. She complained to Jimmy and on the day that they were married in 1962,
[10:21] the police found this man’s body cut up in a whole bunch of different pieces. They would go on to have two boys. Now, you got to listen to this. You got to hear the names of these boys. Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke named them after two of the most famous bank robbers, train robbers.
[10:40] In the United States at one time, anyhow I don’t know, they like rank right up there with Robin Hood as being famous thieves they also had a daughter named Catherine who would go on to marry a Bonanno family member named Anthony Indelicato, who was the son of Sonny Reddindelicato, And during the commission trial, the prosecutor would charge this Anthony Indelicato with the murder of Carmine Galente. So Jimmy Burke’s daughter married one of the guys that killed the Carmine, the cigar Galente, the dude they found in that kind of a garden in the back of that, God, what’s the name of that Italian restaurant in Brooklyn with the cigar still in his mouth? One of those local newspaper guys climbed up in a tree and got a really gross graphic shot of Carmine Galente laying there with the cigar. in his mouth. He met Catherine Burke when he was in the penitentiary, and she was visiting another inmate. By the 1970s, a Lucchese family member named Paul Vario, who was a Paul Sorvino character in the Goodfellas movie, he had taken notice of Jimmy Burke and his crew. By this time, he had Henry Hill, who was Ray Liotta, Tommy DeSimone was a Joe Pecci character, and a guy named Angelo Seppe. They used a bar that Jimmy Burke had owned by then called Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park in the Queens. So see, he never really went very far from Rockaway Beach. It’s all kind of in the same area down there.
[12:05] This joint was a hangout for them as well as other small-time mobsters, tipsters, people that come up with tips on loads of expensive, a load of calculators going out and it’s going to be in a truck and maybe a drug dealer is known to have a lot of money or some other mark. Bookmakers, loan sharks, and other assorted criminals. Burke was the quintessential mobster because by this time he’s up in his 30s and he’s running a loan shark operation, a bookmaking operation. There’s a high stakes poker game going down the basement of that bar, which of course he gets a piece of that. Everybody kicks in for having a game down there. Plus if he’s got a high stakes game going down there, why he’ll have somebody in that game that’s a real card mechanic and they can get a big whale in there. Somebody we’d call a whale. Like there’s these guys out there that are maybe on some small chain of grocery stores or have been successful with fast food restaurants or something like that. And they got a lot of money. They like to gamble. They like to hang out with these mob guys.
[13:08] It seems like they don’t mind if they get cheated as long as they can be accepted into that world. We had one here in Kansas City that had about three grocery stores. Had another guy that had a big Chevrolet dealership. I mean, those guys got a lot of money.
[13:22] Now, Jimmy Burke knew how to make money, and he was a real earner for Vario. I mean, Paul Vario would have been his kind of boss, his sponsor, if you will, that he always would kick up to Vario. Whenever he had some kind of action, he would kick up. Burke also owned a dress factory in South Ozone Park in the Queens called Moo Moo Vedas. This business helped him launder cash. When he had a lot of cash from some other illegitimate enterprise, he could run it through the dress factory accounts. And this ability to launder cash himself became really more important when he and Henry Hill got in the narcotics business because we all know there’s a ton of money going through the narcotics business. For some of these drug dealers, it’s like doing something with the cash is the hardest thing about the whole business. In 1972, Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill were arrested for beating up a guy named Gaspar Ceseo. This was a Tampa Bay Area gambler who owed a large gambling debt to a friend of theirs, a union boss named Casey Rosado. They were charged with extortion and convicted and got 10 years in the penitentiary and neither talked or was even tempted to talk at that point in time. Both got paroled out after about six years in the joint, so they paid their dues one more time and kept their mouth shut, which gives them even higher status with the mob.
[14:41] Of course, they went right back to their running grounds, There are stomping grounds, South Ozone Park in East New York and Carnese and Howard Beach area.
[14:51] This South Ozone Park borders right on New York City’s JFK Airport. And the other two areas are adjacent to that. They all border this Jamaica Bay, which is right across the street from Rockaway Beach or across the bay from Rockaway Beach. And so this is a really small world that Jimmy Burke, he was kind of like the big duck in this world. I got a feeling outside of being the mob people in that world, he was a big deal down in there. But it was like he lived in a small town. He never really got very far out of there. He did get out to Boston. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. Their main thing, his crew was robbing trucks delivering goods over the years. And they had informants inside the JFK freight yards and other freight hauling businesses in the area and got to know the truck drivers. I think Henry Hill reported that whenever they stopped a truck driver and actually hijacked the truck at gunpoint, Jimmy Burke always gave the dude a $50 tip. Even though they weren’t really part of the robbery, probably if they’d been part of the robbery and set it up, they probably would have wanted a little more money than $50. But he’d always give them a $50 tip and act real gentlemanly to them. And that’s how he got the nickname Jimmy the Gents, is my understanding is, which has stuck a lot better than being the Irish Guinea. That didn’t seem to stick.
[16:08] This was during the time when Burke and Henry Hill got in the drug business. The Lucchese family, who were their sponsors, Paul Vario was in the Lucchese family, and he sponsored them, and they really banned their members from narcotics trafficking, because, as the usual, because all the government attention on that and draconian sentencing, well, as we used to say, you take a guy 30, 40 years old and give him 50 years in penitentiary and he’s a coke dealer, not like a real hard case many times. He’ll rat out his own mother looking at life, basically, in the penitentiary and being entered into a world that he doesn’t really know. I mean, coke dealers are kind of like white-collar crime people. They’ve never really been in with that down and dirty for the most part. Now, Jimmy the Gent and Henry Hill had, and they could deal with the penitentiary, and they proved they could. But Henry Hill will also prove out that concern was a legitimate concern that the mob had because when he faced this huge, long sentencing for cocaine trafficking, we all know what happened with Henry Hill. Now, the famous Lufthansa heist, we’ve got to talk about that, and we’re going to talk about Jimmy the Gent, happened on December the 11th, 1978. It’s the most famous crime ever in some ways.
[17:19] The Casey family, through Paul Vario, granted him permission to do this because this was actually on Bonanno family territory, shall we say. They claimed the rights to all criminal activity inside the airport. And they also obtained permission from the Gambino family, and they wanted a cut of it, too. So they weren’t taking any chances on stepping on anybody’s toes. I guess they all kind of wanted some rights to anything that came out of JFK.
[17:47] And there was a lot of stuff that came out of JFK over the years. So they did the robbery, and we kind of know that they had some inside help, and they went in there with the guns and they knew the rounds of the guards and the response time and it was really well planned, well set up, had a large crew. Jimmy Burke even took his son along as a crash driver. If somebody started chasing him, he was out there with a vehicle that would run, wouldn’t have an accident if they had to or try to slow down the cops with the crash car. At the end, after the robbery, Paul Barrio sent his son Peter to pick up his end of the take, which in a god it’s my understanding it could have been as much as two to three million dollars because the total take was five to six million dollars.
[18:31] There’s a man with the Bonanno family a capo named Vinny Asaro and he was owed money from the robbery also and I don’t know if he got his or not for sure. Kind of most famously after the robbery went down what we really all know about is Jimmy Burke became more and more paranoid and he kind of wanted to cut people out of their share but one person he didn’t murder was his eldest son Frank James Burke, He’d been on it with it and got a piece of it just for sitting out there in a crash car.
[18:59] And as you know, the film depicts Henry Hill not even going on this robbery, and his book didn’t ever claim to go on it. Now, Jimmy Burke’s son, Frank James Burke, will be murdered a few years later in May in 1987. Cops responded to a shooting in Brooklyn, and they found Frank James Burke’s body with multiple gunshot wounds.
[19:18] They said shortly after this, a drug dealer named Toito Ortiz got arrested and convicted of this murder. I guess if I remember right, he had some cocaine and he’d cut it way down so it really wasn’t anything left to it. He was just trying to hustle this other, probably Puerto Rican drug dealer and thought he could get away with it. I guess he got, he found out you better be careful. You mess with the bull, you get the horn sometimes. I don’t know this Ortiz guy or Otiz or anything about him, but I got a feeling he wasn’t anybody to mess with. Palvario was never charged with the Lufthansa heist, but he ends up in the penitentiary for another racketeering charge.
[19:55] Three people in that deal, Henry Hill and two JFK airport employees, go into witness protection. That was at Lewis Werner and Peter Grunewald. It sounded like it was a German boon group working there. Anyhow, like I said, I’m not going to really go into the details of the heist other than they had the inside information. They took as much as $5 million in cash and jewelry. Some of the other people that got killed was one of the more famous ones, And he was killed, like, by Tommy DeSimone or the Petchy character just seven days after the heist because he screwed up. This Parnell Stacks Edwards is a black dude. He was supposed to get rid of the van in New Jersey’s scrapyard. But he got high instead and just dumped it off somewhere. This Martin Krugman was part of planning on this. And he kept harassing Burke for his money. That was depicted in the movie. And this happened back in December, January the 6th, 1979, less than a month after the heist.
[20:50] Tommy DeSimone kills him. Body was never found. DeSimone will get killed himself. He was identified by one of the guards for some reason because of his well-polished shoes. You know, he was a dude that polished, was a shoeshine boy when he was a kid, and that famous murderer of, what’s his name, Billy Batts, a famous murderer that was in the movie where they killed a dude in the joint because Tommy DeSimone, he was teasing him about how he used to be a shoeshine boy.
[21:17] And they killed a dude just for that. That was a hell of an acting job, Betsy did. That deal where he acts like he’s mad at Ray Liotta at Henry Hill where he said, well, you know, you think I’m funny? How funny how? And you could just see Liotta did a heck of a job of acting too. You just see Liotta’s face change. And we all know that feeling. We’re having fun. All of a sudden, we realize somebody’s mad at us. And all of a sudden, you get this little look of fear and questioning like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? and they’ll go across your face and then they’ll see it and then they’ll get it back. I had a guy in the police department do that to me one time. He really got me. He was a great big dude.
[21:55] He walked up behind me and he was like he was madder now. And he looked out at me and he just had this like rage on his face. He said, Gary, I’m going, and like I said, he was a big dude and he was one bad dude. And I know he saw the look of fear on my face. I was sitting down and he was standing up also. And then he starts laughing because he knew he got me so that was a good one the next one was lewis caforo he’s the one that bought the pink cadillac right afterwards with the with some of the loot that he’s got his hands on and he was found dead in his cadillac later that year in march with his wife i depicted that in the movie joe manry was one of the guys that went in carrying guns, and he brought some heat down by talking about this, and it got back to Burke, so he was found dead in his car along with a friend of his. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably they figured he knew all about it, and he may have talked too. You know, actually, I think he went on the thing. He would think he was another one of the robbers, so the mistress of Paul Vario, Teresa Ferrara.
[23:03] Actually, I didn’t have any role in it, but she went missing and they found her body several months later during this time so i don’t know if it’s associated with it or not exactly paolo licastri who was a gambino soldier and he was one of the kind of observers one of the crew they speculate that burke just didn’t want to give him the gambino share the loot so he ended up being found dead.
[23:31] Angelo Seppi, who was one of the original Burke crew members, he was identified as one of the robbers, bought a bunch of stuff after the robbery. The Gambinos killed him a few years later. He never got charged with it and probably was unrelated to the robbery. 1982, Jimmy Burke will be convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
[23:54] Now, this conviction was not for the Lufthansa heist. It was for his involvement in the 1978-79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal. Henry Hill was part of that scam, and he testified against Burke. He also testified against Burke about a 1979 murder of a drug dealer named Richard Eaton. And Burke will end up, because of Henry Hill, he’ll end up getting about 20 years in the penitentiary. And when he’s much older, it’s going to be hard to do 20 years because it’d be crimes of violence.
[24:27] But that Boston point shaving scandal, I thought, well, I’ve heard of that. I don’t really know anything about it. I guess it’s in Henry Hill’s books. I looked it up. This was a scheme back in Boston, where Boston College is. It was conceived by a guy named Rocco Perla and his brother Anthony, who were bookies and gamblers. They lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They recruited a high school friend of theirs named Rick Kuhn who was entering his senior year at Boston College and then was a great basketball player. The name of their team is the Eagles. Kuhn, after they approached Kuhn, he agreed to try to hold a score within the point spread or go outside the point spread, it’s easier to hold it within the published point spread on certain games. So, for example, then the first time if Boston College was an eight-point favorite, they’d give him $25 if the Boston College Eagles won by less than eight points and they put all their money down on the other team. Always get that mixed up. So I’m not going to keep trying to go into what that means. You guys that are gamblers understand the point system. Somebody gives you points and what you got to do to win and lose, I’ll leave that for you to figure out. You know better than I do.
[25:42] Once Rocco and Tony Perla got this deal set up with Kuhn and felt like they had an edge, they set up a betting syndicate to get a lot more money to go down. And that’s where they ended up getting directed to Henry Hill somehow. But they did. They were trying to connect with the mob. And he was a guy that they got sent to because he was with the Lucchese family. He took him to Burke because Henry Hill isn’t going to do something like this on his own. And Burke’s got kind of got the money and access to more money. And so Jimmy Burke agreed to front the money to pay off the players each week and he would set up a string of bookies to take this different action from different people and got people that would keep their mouths shut because once people got onto this, it’s going to start screwing up the point spread and everybody’s going to try to figure it out and want a piece of this action.
[26:32] Henry Hill and Burke, a guy who had to get the approval of the KZ family campo, Paul Vario, so there’s some other people that know about it that are greedy and want to make more money and more money. Vario and Burke told Henry Hill that he was going to be the point of contact with the Boston gamblers and the players up there, the Perla brothers, Rocco and Anthony Perla, so he had to fly out to Boston many times. When they were debriefing Henry Hill, they were looking at his record, but they’re looking at what he’d been doing over the past several months, and they saw that he had been to Boston a bunch of times, and that’s when he started laying this out for them. They didn’t even know about it. Nobody knew about it. If he hadn’t opened his mouth, nobody had ever known about it. And the first game was Providence against Boston College, and the Boston won by 19 points, but the line was 6 points. So Henry Hill, I guess Jimmy Burke was kind of fit to be tied over that, and he told Henry Hill to tell his dude in Coon he couldn’t play basketball with broken hands. The next game they tried was Boston College playing Harvard. Boston was favored by 12 points, and they won by a 3-point margin. So…
[27:41] Jimmy Burke’s happy again. They all won money, got their money back, and then some. So next one was against UCLA. At that time, especially, it was a huge basketball powerhouse, and Boston was an underdog by 15 points, so they lost by 22 points, and the syndicate won again. After that one loss, that first one, they got Rick Coon and said, you got to recruit somebody else, and he got into a guy named Ernie Cobb, who’s a leading scorer on the team, but never really was proven if Cobb agreed to participate.
[28:13] Later on that season, players let him down again. They lost a lot of money on a game. Hill would later say that Burke was so mad he kicked out the screen of his television set and wanted Hill to go do something to these players, but he just never got around to it, and they just got out of the scheme. They realized it wasn’t any kind of a foolproof deal, and I always wondered about that. I know you hear about that every once in the wild. People are always trying to do it, but it’s hard to do to totally fix an athletic event like that. There’s a podcast out there with a referee named Tim Monahy or something like that. He was an NBA referee.
[28:51] In that podcast, I interviewed him a lot and a lot of other people that are around that world and FBI agents that worked that case on him. He got caught helping the mob shave points. But referees, as he explained with referees, you know, you can call fouls or not call fouls. You can maybe call a really bad call and get the coach or the guy that you want thrown out of the game, possibly. The referees can really control a game. This guy said that the FBI agent they interviewed in that podcast, he said that the mob loves basketball because there’s a lot fewer people that you got to get some kind of an edge with to know about. Maybe you just got intelligence information on them that somebody’s girlfriend left them or somebody gets drunk every night before a game or certain nights before a game or referees have, you know, they get something on a referee and the referee, they can’t really save points.
[29:50] It’s referees. There’s only three referees and there’s only 10 players. So it’s not so many people as football. And football and basketball are the only things that’s really a whole lot of action on. Baseball would really be hard to manipulate, I’d think, although we do have the Black Sox scandal. There’s so many people involved that it would be hard to do. Well, after Henry Hill broke down on that scheme, of course, he had to make a deal that he wouldn’t be prosecuted for it. But also, one of the main reasons he did it, this guy didn’t do anything unless he got real something out of it. Because if he just hadn’t said anything about it, it would never come to light, more than likely. He had a state narcotics charge in Massachusetts, so he told the agents that you got to get that dropped too, and they did.
[30:31] Jimmy Burke got 12 years on that particular case. They did a RICO thing on it, and they got one of the Boston bookies that they were using and one of the players, and I don’t think it was Rick Kuhn. He had recruited another player or two before it was over, and they collaborated. Henry Hill’s testimony. So that’s kind of the deal on Jimmy the Jim Burke.
[30:50] We all know he died of cancer a few years ago. is no longer to be feared, and he doesn’t really leave a bunch of brothers and people out there that were loyal to him. Well, that sucker was loyal to the mob. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem if you got that problem or gambling. If not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go and I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks guys.