Retired Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins discussed Henry Hill, Jimmy the Gent Burke, Paul Vario, and the Lucchese Family with former Federal prosecutor Ed McDonald.
What happened to the $6 million stolen in the Lufthansa heist? Gary Jenkins talks with former federal prosecutor Ed McDonald, who investigated the robbery and worked with Henry Hill after he became a witness.
McDonald explains why Hill cooperated, how his information exposed the Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme, and why prosecutors took a chance on a case against Jimmy “the Gent” Burke. He also recalls meeting Burke in person and the unlikely path that led him to play himself in Goodfellas.
McDonald is the author of Chasing Goodfellas: Lufthansa, Henry Hill, Point Shaving, and Making Movies.
Chapters
– 00:00 Meet Ed McDonald
– 03:00 How the organized crime strike forces worked
– 08:00 The Lufthansa robbery and Boston College connection
– 11:00 Henry Hill and the Lufthansa investigation
– 28:00 How the point-shaving scheme worked
– 35:00 What happened to the Lufthansa money?
– 38:00 McDonald’s encounters with Jimmy Burke
Subscribe to Gangland Wire for more mob history from retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins. Which part of McDonald’s story surprised you most? Tell me in the comments.
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They also discuss what happened after the arrests. The mobsters were charged under Cleveland’s broad “suspicious person” ordinance, but after lawyers became involved, the cases quickly began falling apart. Some men pleaded guilty only to have their sentences effectively waived if they left town, while the remaining cases were dismissed.
Don explains how he used old newspaper accounts, police records, National Archives material and other primary sources to reconstruct the meeting and identify many of the mysterious men appearing in the famous police photographs.
Was Cleveland an important step toward the more organized national Mafia structure that emerged in the years that followed? This episode explores a forgotten gathering that brought some of America’s future Mafia leaders together in one Cleveland hotel.
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Transcript
Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, and I am here with one of the heroes of the fight against the mob in the entire United States really, but particularly in the, the heart of the mob, the seat of the mob, if you will, New York City, Ed McDonald.
Ed McDonald was the prosecutor in the Organized Crime Strike Force back east. I believe he was the head of the strike force in New York City. Another thing interesting about Ed, he played himself in the film Goodfellas. That was an investigation that we’re gonna talk about today, and he’s written a book about called Chasing Goodfellas: Lufthansa, Henry Hill, Point Shaving, and Making Movies.
So welcome, Ed
Ed McDonald: Thanks, Gary, and thanks for the nice words.
Gary Jenkins: It’s really good to have you here. Let’s talk a little bit about your history. You went to, Boston College and Georgetown?
Ed McDonald: Yeah, I went to Boston College undergrad, and I went immediately to law school.
I went to Georgetown Law School and graduated in 1971, and then returned to New York. I [00:01:00] clerked for a federal district judge in in Brooklyn. And after that after one year of my clerkship, I went to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office where I worked for five years, and then was recruited by the the organized crime section for the Brooklyn Strike Force in in downtown Brooklyn, in Brooklyn Heights at at the federal courthouse, and I worked there from 1977 until 1989.
I was the chief from 1982 until 1989.
I grew up in Brooklyn. .. The Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. It’s a working class, middle class neighborhood. And I went to Catholic high school, Catholic elementary school, and my neighborhood was primarily an Irish Catholic enclave but surrounded by Italian American neighborhoods.
And there were many Italian American kids in the neighborhood. And there was some involvement with not with us, but, organized crime. There was some element of organized crime in the neighborhood. It was nothing that, that so inspired me that I wanted to go onto a career to battle these people.
It was just something that was second nature to you in the neighborhood, and you got used to it and never really thought twice about it. [00:02:00]
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, it seems to me like I’ve talking to other guys that grew up in places like that, and it was just like like you’re a fish swimming in water.
You don’t really know you’re swimming in water. You’re swimming in the middle of these mafia enclaves that, cause the parents may be involved in the mob, but they’re not like that at home. They have these regular families and kids that go to the Catholic schools at home. We have it here in Kansas City.
They all send their kids to St. Pius, high school and go to all the football games, which is, I think, is one of the interesting things about the mob.
Ed McDonald: Many of the Italian American kids I grew up with and went to elementary school and high school with I didn’t know anything about their families, but later on there were several of them who I discovered later in, in my career as a federal prosecutor that their families were very well connected.
Some of them had, had high level figures in the Genovese crime family, Bonanno crime family. And I never realized it as a kid growing up. And it was interesting when they came and years later, after I left the government, they would come and they would talk to me about, their cousin yeah. And I was like, “You gotta [00:03:00] be kidding me. I didn’t know you were related to that guy.”
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, really. Interesting. So Ed, explain to the guys about the organized crime, the strike force, ’cause the strike force is different from the US Attorney’s office. I remember when we first were talking in Kansas City about our strike force.
We had one of the many ones in the United States. A- and so I didn’t really understand, but I knew there was a separation, so explain that, how that’s structured.
Ed McDonald: Yeah, so in, in the early 1960s when Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General of the United States he was pioneering with other people in the Justice Department the concept of sending attorneys from the organized crime and racketeering sections, section into areas of the United States where there was a, a high incidence of organized crime, where organized crime had a significant presence.
I think the first one was probably around 1966. They sent a group of attorneys into into Buffalo. The idea was that they were gonna go in and they were gonna root out organized crime in a matter of a year or two. Obviously that was absurd. And as the more they [00:04:00] thought about it in Washington, they decided that…
They felt that the US Attorney’s Office, this is back in the ’60s, where US Attorney’s Offices were much more political than they became in, in the following decades. And many people would were becoming US attorney were politicians. And they didn’t wanna rock the boat too much, and in some parts of the country, organized crime families had a a significant presence in the political life of the, the areas in which they were operating.
And so the, they wanted to… And they also felt that they were looking for, the organized crime section were looking for people who they would call career prosecutors, people who would stay for, rather than assistant US attorneys, not two, three, four years, but rather for 10, 15, maybe 20 years and make a, a, a career out of it, retire from the Justice Department.
And so they started recruiting people, many from local district attorney’s office, some from federal prosecutor’s offices, with the idea that they would stay for a long period of time, be career prosecutors. And and that’s how they created the strike force concept. And they [00:05:00] were, I guess originally there were, like, 16 or 17 strike forces, but after a while, the, some of the US Attorney’s Office, the US attorneys were lobbying to get their, this is back in the ’60s and early ’70s, to get the strike forces dissolved and blended into the US Attorney’s Offices because the strike forces were getting too much credit when organized, big-time organized crime cases were getting a lot of publicity, and that meant the US attorney in that region was not getting to call the press conference and get the credit for the strike force prosecution.
In the early ’70s, mid-’70s, the Justice Department decided to abolish the strike force program. And and the i-, what was happening was they were getting great numbers. They were having significant numbers of curri- g- convictions. And of course, they would go to the, go to Congress every year and say, “We need money for our organized crime program.
We’ve gotten X number of convictions, hundreds of convictions.” What were they for? For gambling, false statements on a bank loan. Yeah. Nobody was going to jail. The number of convictions were high, [00:06:00] but there was very little significance. Occasionally, there would be a significant con- conviction in the organized crime program, but rarely were there big-time convictions.
Rather than abolish the program, they decided to completely change it. And the they ch- they got rid of many of the people who were in the Strike Force program. They went on a mission or campaign to hire career prosecutors from other US attorneys offices, from other regions, and from local district attorneys offices, and they completely revived the program.
And they changed the whole concept and said that instead of going for big numbers, they were going for big fish. So the co- the idea, starting around 1976, 1977, was to bring cases that would result in the takedowns of the leaderships of the families in the regions where they operated, and also to hit the mafia where they were making their greatest money, and that was in the area of labor racketeering.
Through the takeover and domination and control of [00:07:00] labor unions, they were able to get footholds in industries and completely pervert those industries and make significant amounts of money. And so that’s what happened. I was recruited in 1977 to join the Brooklyn Strike Force. Brooklyn Strike Force was…
So there were five families. The five largest families in the country were located in the New York area, so therefore it made sense that the, the Brooklyn Strike Force would be the biggest office in the country, biggest strike force office in the country. And indeed it was by far the biggest office.
We had 15 lawyers on staff and, I was very happy in the Manhattan DA’s office. And I had some misgivings about leaving and going to the strike force, but Tom Puccio, who was my predecessor convinced me to join him as his deputy chief. And I really didn’t have that much experience, but he took a gamble on me, and I became one of the two deputy chiefs in the office.
And I certainly made the right decision. I was in the right place at the right time. We were just having an unbelievable influx of great cases that were being brought to us, primarily by the FBI, [00:08:00] but by, by other agencies. The I- you know, we were supposed to… The strike forces were to bring together all of the various law enforcement agencies, federal, state, and local, in their regions and have them work together to bring significant organized crime and lacr- labor racketeering cases.
And and I had the good fortune of, as I said, being in the right place at the right time. One of the cases that we had was not an organized crime case, but was the ABSCAM case, was the undercover FBI investigation that we supervised. And then I had the good fortune to be on a team of four lawyers at the strike force who prosecuted.
I tried Senator Harrison Williams, who was a, the United States senator from New Jersey, and was involved in a prosecution of four other congressmen who were snared in the in the ABSCAM investigation. And then at the same time, I was working on my organized crime cases and as the cases that I write about in the book.
Were the early cases from my strike force days, the the Lufthansa robbery investigation and prosecution, which is the largest robbery at [00:09:00] the time in the history of the country. And that sort of led to with the cooperation of Henry Hill, who was the subject of the movie Goodfellas. He cooperated and inadvertently gave us the the Boston College point shaving case, which I also investigated with the FBI and eventually prosecuted.
Which is
Gary Jenkins: Interesting since you went to Boston College, so
Ed McDonald: It’s, it is. It’s, it was very interesting. It was a real, I went to Boston College, and I played freshman basketball for a while.
Gary Jenkins: Oh,
Ed McDonald: really? I made the freshman basketball team, and since I wasn’t getting much playing time, I eventually I…
It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life. I quit the team. I wasn’t gonna be good enough to make the varsity after my second, in my second year, and I realized that. And I wasn’t getting much playing time as a freshman, but still I was very proud to have made the team. But nonetheless, I had this great connection to the school.
I loved the school. I was great. It was incredible. I still am. I’m disappointed very much lately with our program but … I was a big fan. And I thought, when Henry Hill told us about it, I thought that the agents had put Henry up to… the FBI agents had put Henry [00:10:00] up to, pulling my leg.
They were pulling a prank on me. Oh, really? And I didn’t believe them. I says, “Yo, cut it out. This is crazy. Get…” And I was mad. And I said, “I got no time to be wasting with this crap.” And they go, “What are you talking about?” Henry had no idea I went to Boston College and, Yeah. Yeah. … it was just really inadvertent that we stumbled upon it.
He never even thought it was a crime. And he said- Oh, yeah. I can see that … “We didn’t pay to lose. We didn’t pay to just, win by less. And it was just college kids.” “It didn’t matter.”
Gary Jenkins: Let, let’s go back. Let’s talk about Henry Hill and the turning of him. Yeah … he, everybody… this is a really well-known story because of Nicholas Pileggi and Goodfellas, the movie, and the book and everything.
And I assume Nicholas Pileggi, did he spend a lot of time with you before he wrote that book? Or did he just spend all of his time with Henry Hill? He really does his research.
Ed McDonald: Yeah, no, he, I spoke to him about it. See he made a deal with Henry’s lawyer. Henry had to have… When Henry cooperated, he had a lawyer appointed to represent him.
I write all about this in the book, and I actually knew the lawyer. He was, he, who was assigned to represent him. The crazy story is that the judge was , [00:11:00] leaving early for the day. It was a long weekend before Memorial Day, and Henry needed a lawyer, and the judge wasn’t around.
And he said, “You pick the guy. You just pick the guy.” And so I ended up picking the lawyer who represented Henry, much to my chagrin, because he later turned out to be somebody who was, created more problems than, than it was worth. But Henry’s lawyer he realized there was a lot of publicity associated with Henry when he cooperated.
He wasn’t a made guy, yeah. 10 years later, made guys were rolling, like nobody’s business. But at the time, Henry was a real big fish. So the local newspaper, in particular Jimmy Breslin was a great writer back in the day and, for the tabloids.
He had a great line and said, “With Henry Hill’s cooperation, they’re building new wings on federal prisons,”
Gary Jenkins: Now, when he came in, the n- the movie depicted him as a, kind of a bad drug addict or guy certainly was doing a lot of cocaine at the time and they made that cocaine case on him.
So that’s what- Caused him to flip i- is the draconian sentencing you might get out of a cocaine case like that. But [00:12:00] was he a drug addict also at that time?
Ed McDonald: Yeah, he was. He was. . The FBI had him on the radar screen. At this point, h- this was in, in, in in May of 1980 when Henry cooperated.
Going back to the middle of 1979, . i convicted the inside man, the Lufthansa employee, and I write about that, and it’s a very entertaining trial that we had, and we had an investigation that led to his identification and then ultimately his indictment, and then I tried the case.
And it’s an hysterical trial. . The judge was funny, and it was so many entertaining characters, colorful people in it. Yeah. And I think the story of the trial, the Lufthansa trial, is a very entertaining story. But but by the time it was over, Burke, Jimmy Burke, Jimmy the Gent, was responsible for executing the robbery, and he organized the crew and had them, do the robbery itself.
Henry was involved in bringing the information to Jimmy and was, was involved in the planning stages of the robbery. He wasn’t there on site. But in any case, Henry was on the radar screen. We convict Werner. Lou Werner was the name of the Lufthansa employee. And by [00:13:00] that time by the time we convicted him, let’s say by the summer of the late spring of 19 80, Burke had killed most of the other people who were involved, the potential witnesses.
Now, he killed them for two reasons. One, because he wanted to silence them. He was concerned that they might cooperate. And secondly He wanted their loot. He wanted their share of the proceeds. The, there were fewer and fewer witnesses as the months went on because so many, there were so many bodies being discovered as, in the wake of the robbery.
, We were coming up dry. So we had these other cases. I was was assigned to work on the Abscam case. I was assigned, I had put on hold a prosecution of Alphonse Persico, who was the acting boss of the Colombo crime family. Junior Persico, Carmine Persico, was the the younger brother, but he was the boss of the family.
He was incarcerated, and Allie Boy was running the family. I had a case on him, which I had to try which I did. And so my attention was being diverted with Persico and with with the Lufthansa robbery. You talk about being in the right place at the right time.
, I left the Manhattan DA’s office where I was doing appeals and, all of a sudden I find [00:14:00] myself- Yeah … in the middle of, the largest robbery in history, Abscam, prosecuting Persico, and then it just went on and on in the other y- in the following years when I was in the in the strike force until ’89.
. I was losing my enthusiasm for Lufthansa because I just didn’t see where we were going anywhere. We had Burke, we had Henry. We subpoenaed him to the grand jury. Came in, he was drunk. I didn’t put him before the grand jury, and I said, we’re coming after you.
He winked at me and says yeah, I, yeah, I’ll see you around, pal.” And he leaves. And another nine months, a year goes by, and Steve Carbone, who was the supervisor, comes to me and says, Henry got arrested,” not by the feds, but by the local Nassau County District Attorney’s office.
Oh. So to make a long story short, we more or less stole Henry from the Nassau County DA’s office. Again, this is the subject of a major confrontation with them. There’s all sorts of interesting intrigue with their, threatening to prosecute Henry. We had to go to court.
We ended up testifying in Nassau County Court. I, one of my assistants, and the [00:15:00] FBI agents, it was really v- very unusual for us to be carrying water for this, this lowlife gangster, heroin addict, co- cocaine addict. And but, we did, and the judge found in favor of Henry.
He believed us, and he disbelieved the people in the Nassau County DA’s office. It was crazy. But but at that point, before Henry cooperated, I was moving on to other things. Henry cooperates, and so often, people say, “Oh my God, what you… you did a great job. You were able to turn Henry.
You really have a way with turning these witnesses.” Henry had made up his mind. He was cooperating before he ever met me. He was facing five separate indictments in Nassau County for which if he were convicted, he was gonna face life in prison. His wife was facing an indictment for narcotics trafficking ’cause she was in his crew as well.
And not only was he facing life in jail, but, once he was indicted, Paul Vario, who was the head of his, whole crew, and Jimmy Burke, who was, one of Vario’s right-hand men they were gonna kill him. ‘Cause- Yeah … facing a life sentence, [00:16:00] not being in the mob, not having omerta he was likely to cooperate.
So the way to prevent him from cooperating was to kill him. So either he was gonna go to jail for life or he was gonna be killed. Maybe his wife would be killed, ’cause she knew things. And so Henry had… When Henry came in to see me, we arrested him. He got r- released on bail a- and we got a material witness, what’s called a material witness order, saying that we had reason to believe he was gonna become a fugitive.
And the judge who tried the case, the Lufthansa case, Judge Cost- Mark Costantino, signed a an order allowing us to represent to arrest Henry as a material witness. The agents arrest him. They brought him to my office in in downtown Brooklyn, which was, like, close to where I lived, and I came running down there at 10 o’clock at night.
And yeah, I could see right away Henry had no choice. But even then, Henry was, he was still conniving. He was saying, “Look,” “just let me go back out on the street. I can be your man in the street.” I’ve
Gary Jenkins: heard that. I can be- I’ve heard that, yes. He- Just let me go back on the street. I’ll get you this.
I’ll get you that.
Ed McDonald: So- Just let me out. I’ve heard that … just let me out. Just let me [00:17:00] out and I’m gonna take off and go god knows where. Yeah. So but that wasn’t happening. And so he agreed that he was gonna cooperate, but he says, “Look, I gotta get my wife down here, talk about, you gotta tell them about the program.”
So the, the funny story is the next day the, the wife shows up to talk about the program with the idea that she’s going into the program. And they have two children. In, in the movie it’s two girls, but in fact it was a boy and a girl. They were probably about, thir- 14 and maybe 12, 11.
And but he shows up with his… He brings in his mother-in-law and his father-in-law- … and his two sisters-in-law. And, but that wasn’t enough. He brings in two more girlfriends who wanna go into the program. Oh, man. Who wanna sign up to go into the program. Big Bird, who was a… Her name was Robin, but they called her Big Bird ’cause she was about six feet tall, and another woman named Judy from Pittsburgh.
She was part of this drug crew- Yeah … that he was working with. And the in-laws decided at the end of the day they weren’t gonna go into the program, but the two girls wanted to go into the program. And we ultimately decided not to. They didn’t have enough information for us, and [00:18:00] we didn’t put them in the program.
Gary Jenkins: Let me recap just a little bit here. You you guys made a case on the inside guy of Lufthansa inside the airport. You had made a case on him- and so you’re working on, you knew Jimmy the Gent Burke and his crew had done this.
You knew that- That’s right … but you didn’t have enough to charge him, and Henry Hill was part of that crew. And then as those guys start dying off and getting killed, you really had almost given up on ever making this case, when Henry Hill then catches this drug case, and he comes in and he’s gonna sock that one home for you.
Ed McDonald: Exactly. All right. And the inside man, so he was convicted in 1979. The, the morning after the conviction was announced, it was in all the newspapers, in, on television at night Burke had sent , a contact man, a guy by the name of Joe Manriquez.
They called him Joe Manri or Joe Buddha, and he was always with his best friend, who was a guy named Frenchy McMahon. The morning after the, the conviction, their bodies were found in in a car [00:19:00] in in Canarsie, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. And you talk about a chilling message that they were sending.
Here- Yeah … and these are the only guys, even if were to cooperate, he was only gonna be able to say, ” He didn’t know the names of these people. He only could say he, he met with Joe Buddha, was the only guy he remembered. Yeah. He did not cooperate for another another, say, 16, 17 months- Yeah
because he was so terrified by by what, what had happened. And so it was only after his appeal was decided, a year and a half later, that he cooperated. By the time he cooperated, everybody he could identify was Joe Buddha and gave us all the information about people who were dead.
Yeah. So he was absolutely useless as a witness. I supported his motion for a sentence reduction. The judge gave him 15 years, and I supported the motion for a sentence reduction. The judge, who was usually pretty, pretty lenient sentencer, said who are you gonna prosecute on the basis of what he gives you?”
I says nobody.” It’s, he says, “Too bad, Loeb. He’s staying in.” So he ended up doing about, I guess he did about nine years. Yeah.
And when he came [00:20:00] out, he went into the witness protection program and, died a few years ago.
Gary Jenkins: And Henry, you know- But back to Henry Hill, you’ve got him coming in, and he’s starting to lay it all out, a lot of other things.
He’s laying out a lot of stuff, ’cause he knew about a lot of things. I can imagine the intelligence take alone from him, his knowledge of what he had about the workings would’ve been invaluable to other investigations
Ed McDonald: You know, the, th- I made him available. Obviously the FBI had first crack.
But I made him available to, the Department of Labor, to the IRS, to the customs, to, on and on. The, the New York City Police Department had people coming over interviewing him all the time, probably until 1986. He cooperated- Yeah … in 1980. It was 1986, he was still being debriefed.
And probably continued. They were continuing to call him probably into the ’90s when they’d have questions about people. And he he was a very important witness. He testified in a number of cases. And there were a number of people who pleaded guilty in, in cases in which he was going to be a witness.
We had a major project on racketeering at Kennedy Airport involving the the [00:21:00] international air freight business and trucking at the airport. And it was that racket was controlled by the Lucchese crime family, and in particular by Paul Vario.. We implicated the underboss in the family, Tom McSantoro.
And we had, a whole number of people who… W- we probably indicted 15 people in that case, including the whole, hierarchy of the two Teamster locals at Kennedy Airport. And Henry was gonna be one of the critical witnesses in the case, and one of several. And we had wiretaps, et cetera.
Henry wasn’t the only person testifying, but certainly his presence as a witness would contribute to the guilty pleas we got. Yeah. And also in other, many other cases in which he was a valuable witness for us.
Gary Jenkins: Wasn’t he hard to control during that time? Was as much as he drank, I noticed after he got out-
and he started going around talking and everything he appeared drunk quite a few times
Ed McDonald: But if, if your listeners are interested in the answer to the question was he hard to control, they’ll love the chapter of my book about me and Henry.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: Okay. Because I spent a good deal of my life-
Bailing him [00:22:00] out of trouble- Exactly … interceding for him. He was he was uncontrollable. He was an absolute character. He was… He would drive me and… He’d drive me and the FBI agents absolutely nuts. He was so irresponsible, so unreliable, But on the other hand, y- everybody liked him.
Yeah. He was like, he was a hapless mobster. I used to call him the Beetle Bailey of gangsters. I don’t know if, people remember who Beetle Bailey was. He was a cartoon character about a guy who was in the Army.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: And he screwed everything up. That was like Henry.
. Jimmy didn’t allow him to go on the robbery at the- Yeah … Lufthansa cargo terminal because he was just… he kinda screwed things up. But he had all these connections. Everybody liked him. So somebody knew about it, they brought the, the idea of the inside man to to Henry.
He brought it to Jimmy. So he was valuable to the Vario crew for what he was able to generate. He generated the Boston College point shaving case in which they made money. He generated the robbery of the Air France terminal, several years earlier, [00:23:00] and the big robbery here in the city at the this Estee Lauder’s apartment.
So he had these connections where people would come to him, and he then would bring them to Jimmy and to other people in the Lucchese family. So he was an earner for the family, but he never could be trusted upon to… He never could be trusted to do something significant. But he was… he remembered everything, and- Yeah
He didn’t know people’s names. He knew them by their nicknames, and everybody was Mother Effer. Mo- Mother Effer. Yeah. Mother Effer. That’s all he… He… “Who are you talking about now?” So confused who you’re talking about.
People say you read about Henry or you hear about Henry on podcasts or… I get these Instagram things and Facebook things, and they’ll… Things will come out. They’ll talk about Henry. Henry was in the program until for 10 years before he was kicked out after 10 years, and he had to fend for…
So Henry goes into the program He gets admitted June of… This is with his wife and two kids. June of 1980 In August of 1981, I’m preparing to try the Boston College point shaving case. So this is, what, 14 [00:24:00] months. And I got a call from Washington. Henry had blown his cover in Omaha, Nebraska.
Gary Jenkins: I heard
Ed McDonald: that, yes.
Got moved to, he got moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati in Kentucky. And and then in the summer of in 1981 d- a year into his enrollment in the program, he blows his cover in his second city outside of Cincinnati. And they called me and said, he’s out of the program.”
I said, “You can’t k- kick him out of the program. I need him in this case. This is a major prosecution.” I says, “I need him against Vario and these other people.” But the Boston College point shaving case, I’m about ready to go to trial. And w- they said, “Look, what we’ll do is we’ll move him to another city,” they moved him to Seattle, “and we will fund him until the end of December.”
So as of January 1st, 2000 1982 A year and a half after he was ad- admitted to the program, Henry was kicked out of the program. I was constantly trying to keep him in the program.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: I was… And then he was, after [00:25:00] that he kept getting arrested. He was… I don’t think he was ever arrested in the Kansas City area, but he was arrested.
I don’t remember, but- Was. My favorite story is this. He, he, DUIs all the time, yeah. Yeah. And when he gets arrested for DUI, he throws a punch at the cop who’s arresting him.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: Don- don’t you know who I am, yeah. But the best is that he gets arrested for breaking and entering at 3:00 in the morning.
I said, “This-” No. I called the prosecutor and said, “What’s going on?” He said, I says, “Henry was not a burglar.” He says, “No, what happened was he was drunk and the bars closed.” Ah. And I forget what city he was living in. Yes. And he broke into a grocery store and was found, sitting on the floor by the cops-
drinking a six-pack of beer.
Gary Jenkins: Yes. I know a guy, I know a guy that happened to. So he- He just broke into a liquor store ’cause he wanted a drink and everything was closed. I knew a guy like that. It’s crazy.
Ed McDonald: So I have a whole chapter in the book- … talking about my experiences with Henry while he was cooperating in- Wow.
And that’s- Oh, obviously I write about it in the point shaving s- saga …
Gary Jenkins: really interesting …
Ed McDonald: but then all these other things that he [00:26:00] worked on.
Gary Jenkins: That, that point shaving, I have a question about that. Do you go into a little bit of detail about how they do that, how they did that?
I did a story on it of, I don’t know, a year or two ago. I found a little bit of information about it. Did, did he knew somebody up in Boston? Or how did that come about? Yeah so I re- I assume you write detail about
Ed McDonald: in your book. Basically what the book is the book is the story of the, the Lufthansa robbery, how it was executed, how we investigated it, how I prosecuted the inside man.
And I tell the story through, the eyes of the prosecutor. How I worked with the FBI to investigate that the, that, that case, the Lufthansa case, how I worked with the FBI to investigate the point shaving case, how we uncovered the point shaving case. And I really try to present it through the eyes of the prosecutor.
I spent a lot of time at the trial talking about the colorful characters, the, you know- Okay … unforgettable characters, the, the criminal defense lawyers, the witnesses, the judges. So many people we encountered, the agents, the marshals. It’s it’s really an, it’s [00:27:00] very… I think these two stories of the two pr- investigations and trials are incredibly interesting.
And then I take it to, my life with Henry, the crazy things that happened. And I stayed in touch with Henry until he died in two… I left the government in 1989. I stayed in touch with him until 2012 when he died. And I encountered him in New York. I’d see him in Los Angeles when I had to go out there for work.
And then I finish it with the chapter about- This, this, here’s this work-a-day Joe. Certainly I had a very interesting job, but I had nothing to do with entertainment or with the movies. And here it’s just just John Q. Citizen gets- … I make a joke and say, “Yeah, I’ll play myself in a movie.”
Yeah. And they don’t think I’m kidding, and they gave me a screen test, and now I’m being directed by Martin Scorsese and- … robert De Niro. And so I think it’s a very interesting, entertaining chapter and sort of story about my involvement in the movie. But, Yeah.
Gary Jenkins: I was just gonna ask that about making movies part of your title.
Yeah.
Ed McDonald: I diverted from your- Yeah … original question, which [00:28:00] was about how we how Henry got involved in point shaving at Boston College. Henry was in, in prison with Jimmy at Lewisburg. It was a 1973 extortion that took place in Tampa, Florida. The two of them went down there directed by Vario to recover some money on a debt, and they…
It’s a long story. It’s another very interesting story. But they got a, they got convicted. They both were sentenced to… They were in prison. And they were in Lewisburg in Pennsylvania. And while Henry was there, he got friendly with a drug dealer from Pittsburgh named Paul Mazzi. Paul Mazzi was a court stenographer who began to dabble in LSD, and got caught, went to federal prison, and becomes friendly with Henry.
Mazzi gets out in 1979, ’78, around the same… Just before Henry, and said, “Look, I’m gonna go back to selling drugs when I get back to Pittsburgh. I’d like to set up a connection with New York, and I could supply them, and you could supply New York, you can supply us, and we can work together.”
Henry, and Henry gets out of [00:29:00] prison in ’78, and that’s what he does. He gets together with Mazzi. He’s out in Pittsburgh one weekend, and Mazzi says, “Listen, I have a friend, a guy named Tony Perla, who’s a small-time bookmaker and drug dealer. Who’s also a high school librarian, believe it or not.
And had a ma- had a master’s degree in library science.” And he Perla had a brother, has a brother, had a brother then, who had gone to school with Rick Kuhn, who was a basketball player for Boston College from the Pittsburgh area. And Mazzi tells Henry that the Perlas have this kid, Rick Kuhn, who might be interested in shaving points in the upcoming season.
He’s going into his senior year at BC. He’s the backup center. He’s not gonna have a career beyond his years at BC.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: And so he was- they basically, worked him so that he was agreeable to shaving points. But they needed, what they needed, the Pittsburgh guys needed, they needed protection because if points are being shaved, games are being rigged, bookmakers were taking significant action.
Once they get wind of the fact that the games have been [00:30:00] fixed- Yeah … the scores are fixed, they’re not gonna pay off. And so they needed some muscle to back them up to make sure that the the their bets would be paid, their winning bets would be paid. And in addition, they needed a network of bookmakers throughout the country, which was what their dream was, so they could lay down, lay, significant action.
And so Henry was intrigued by this when he heard about it. He meets with Tony Perla, and when Burke is getting out of prison himself, when he comes back to New York in November of 1978 Henry tells Jimmy about it. Jimmy says, sounds good.” In Jimmy’s mind, Jimmy’s planning the Lufthansa robbery by this time, and he has his whole crew to take over again, and a million things going on.
Sure, the BC point shaving case was like a footnote in his –
Gary Jenkins: Yeah …
Ed McDonald: agenda of crimes at this point. Turned out to be
Gary Jenkins: more than a footnote, but
Ed McDonald: Yeah, that’s right. It was his demise. And so Jimmy says, “Bring these guys from Pittsburgh in.” So they come in, they meet Jimmy, they meet Paul Vario, and they get the go-ahead.
They go up they, and they go up to see Kuhn. Kuhn brings another player along, and the [00:31:00] kids agree to go along with it. And they were like… Henry’s recollection was n- not 100%, but through records and the testimony of other witnesses we developed, there were 10 to 12 games that were the subject of the fix.
Two were were dumped, where they lost by more than a point spread, by more than they were supposed to lose, and other games in which they shaved points. Now, they weren’t always successful. Sometimes they didn’t shave a sufficient number of points for the, for the, the fixers to win their bets.
So Henry gives it up, and then we had to corroborate… we weren’t gonna prosecute anybody on the basis of Henry Hill’s testimony alone. Oh, yeah. He comes in, he gives us Burke. On, on a silver platter for the- Yeah … the Lufthansa robbery. But there’s nothing on that platter other than Hen- other than Henry’s testimony, and we couldn’t proceed against Burke.
And that’s what we had at first on the point shaving case, and then we went out and, the FBI went out and they, contacted a bunch of witnesses. We brought some witnesses to my office, and, we were able to have a sufficient amount of evidence so that we tried, I [00:32:00] tried in October and November of 19 ’81.
The, the two Perella brothers from Pittsburgh, Mazzi from Pittsburgh Rick Kuhn, who was the player from Pittsburgh on the Boston College team. And, the… I was reluctant to prosecute Burke because we didn’t have much in the way of corroboration beyond, to corroborate Henry’s testimony for Burke.
But, Steve Carbone in particular at the FBI, the supervisor, he just was after me, and, he was relentless in, in saying, “You have to get Jimmy. You have to get Jimmy. You have to indict Jimmy. You have to indict Jimmy.” And, my experience with agents is that the agents are very happy once the indictment, once the arrest is made, once the indictment comes down.
Yeah. And, they’re, “Hey-” Come into your
Gary Jenkins: lap and go on. Yeah.
Ed McDonald: I used to love it when agents- Yeah … would come up to me after an indictment, and they’d congratulate me for the indictment. I said, “What are you congratulating me for? You can indict anybody.” Yeah. “Now I have to go to court, and I gotta try the case.”
So that’s what I was concerned about. But I thought, the, our strategy was this, or at least my mindset was this- The case is gonna be the subject of a lot of attention, is what I, I was thinking. [00:33:00] And Kuhn, when he was interviewed by the FBI at, 7:00 in the morning in Pittsburgh, taken completely unawares he confessed.
And he was afraid to cooperate and because he was afraid he was gonna be killed. He knew he was dealing with New York gangsters. So he went to trial. So I knew that when the verdict was reached in the case, and it was gonna be announced in all the newspapers or on TV, it would say, “Rick Kuhn, Boston College player was convicted.
Guys from Pittsburgh were convicted.” But, and and a footnote… not a footnote, but, paragraph seven of the story would say, “New York gangster Jimmy ‘the Gent’ Burke was acquitted.” That’s if I lost the case. And he- but he was an important target from, for us, for me, for the agents.
And so we’d been going after him for Lufthansa. We’d been go- we knew about all these robbery, all these murders that he was responsible for. And so to us he was this really significant target. With pressure from the FBI, from Carbone I decided I would go ahead and even if I lost, I wouldn’t be that much of a black eye, ’cause I was almost certain to convict [00:34:00] Kuhn.
Yeah. And fortunately, we had sufficient evidence and we we convicted Burke as well. . It was a satisfying experience. Interesting story. The trial was- Yeah, that’s- … just filled with c- characters, and it’s just, hysterical. It makes for really funny reading. And what I try to do in the book I try to explain to the layperson in simple terms what a prosecutor does in both putting the case together, conducting the investigation, and putting the case together in preparation for trial, and then the decisions I was making about how to cross-examine people, the order of witnesses, how I was gonna do my summation, how I would deal with the judge, how would I would…
how I interacted with the other defense lawyers, some of whom were very difficult. And so it’s… I think it’s a primer on how to try a, a big-time or conduct a big-time f- federal investigation and then conduct big-time federal trials.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, really. All right, the question everybody has is, are we gonna find out in the book what happened to all the Lufthansa money?
Are you gonna answer that in the [00:35:00] book? You can leave that lay out there.
Ed McDonald: No, I’ll… I can tell you. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s what happened to the money is . the FBI had, informants all over the place, And then Henry, of course, cooperated, and Henry was probably Burke’s closest friend, and so he knew what Jimmy was doing with the money.
, You look at the money by today’s standards, have these cryptocurrency scandals- Yeah. Yeah … and some of these- $100 million. Yeah. … hundred million, a billion dollar cases now, yeah. At the time, the $6 million robbery was, like, unfathomable. I mean- Yeah … what could these guys do with all this money?
But, really, at the end of the day, it’s not that much money. And so we know that from Henry that Jimmy took a significant amount of money and invested it in narcotics. Jimmy was, of course, prohibited from engaging in narcotics trafficking, but he saw when he got out of jail how much money Henry was making on his narcotics deal.
He got in with Henry, and then he was doing it, he was in partnership with Henry. Yeah. So a lot of that money went into drugs. And then in addition, money went into dress factories, garment [00:36:00] factories in the New York area. And money went to Vario. They had to pay tribute to the Lucchese family, so Vario got a significant portion of it.
And what they did was, Burke was very astute, and he wanted to curry favor with the other families, as… And Vario was, is part of this whole thing. So they paid tribute to the leadership, the leaders of the four other families. Yeah. So by the time they distributed the money to other gangsters and, put the money into drug deals, and of course and and manufacturing, garment manufacturing I’m sure that money earned money.
Who knows where, what, where, how ultimately how it, it ended up, but that’s where the money went. Now, we are often criticized that we didn’t recover any of the loot, and in, in fact, we did. We, we did recover the loot, some loot. And I’m not gonna say I’m proud to say, but I can tell you that and I’ve said it before to others recently, that after the Lou Werner, the inside man for Lufthansa was convicted, he was convicted in 19 1989.
It wasn’t [00:37:00] until was it 1981 that he or 1980, he cooperated. And he identified… He got $80,000. Most of his money had been spent by the time he was arrested. And he gave m- some money to his daughter. And by the time he cooperated, we went to his daughter and to his son-in-law, and we recovered $4,000 of the money that had not been spent yet.
So we actually recovered $4,000 of the $6 million that had been stolen.
Gary Jenkins: A little bit’s better than nothing,
Ed McDonald: it’s almost nothing.
But the people who executed the robbery never really got to enjoy the money.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: They were either killed or in Jimmy’s case went to jail for something else.
But they didn’t get to live a life on the street where they could spend it.
Gary Jenkins: Really. Chasing Goodfellas: Lufthansa, Henry Hill, Point Shaving, and Making Movies by Edward McDonald, former head of the strike force in Brooklyn. Ed, I really appreciate you coming on and telling this story and sharing this with my guys, ’cause it’s a fascinating story and a really good insider’s look at this this whole [00:38:00] huge chapter of organized crime.
I guess one last question. What was it like being in the same room with Jimmy the Gent Burke? He was so deadly. – He was such a killer. What was that guy like? Was he one of these guys that was just like, “Hey, old fellow, well met,” and kinda friendly, or did he give you the death stare all the time?
Ed McDonald: They called him Jimmy the Gent. . I wouldn’t say he was menacing. The first time I met him the, the van that was used for the robbery it was supposed to be disposed of by a guy named Stacks Edwards, who- Oh, yeah … gets executed in the movie. He was actually played by Samuel L.
Jackson. He had a- Yeah … big part. It was before he became a fam- famous actor. And so the van is recovered, and in the van there’s a a sneaker print from a Puma sneaker, a Puma Clyde sneaker, which were very popular sneakers at, back in the late ’70s. I had a- actually had a pair myself.
And Jimmy was seen frequently wearing Puma Clydes. So I I got a court order directing Jimmy to come to my office with his Puma Clydes. And so he did, and we took an imprint [00:39:00] of the Puma Clydes. It turned out that it wasn’t a match for what had been in the, Yeah … in the van. But I saw Jimmy when he came in, and yeah, he nodded.
He didn’t shake my hand or anything, but he just nodded. He was pleasant. He was just very matter of fact about the whole thing. Subsequently I never saw him after that until the trial. But when the, the At one point when Henry was cooperating, Jimmy we violated Jimmy on his parole at one point, and then he gets out seven months later.
By the time Henry cooperates, he’s out on the street. And based on Henry’s information, we start digging up the bottom of Robert’s Lounge, the bar there where Jimmy was, Jimmy’s base of operation, of operations. And he So when we sent the agents out there to do the digging to get the bones the bodies with the remnants of the remains of the bodies, that is Jimmy calls a press conference.
And he announces to the people who are out there, the guys from the tabloids and ver- AP, wherever else, and television stations. He invited Ed McDonald to come out and, participate, Which I got a big kick out of. Of course, we didn’t come up with anything.
I came home one night with my wife on a [00:40:00] Saturday night, right around the time they were doing the digging, and the nervous wreck 15-year-old babysitter has a note, and she says, “Tom Sweeney,” who was the FBI, FBI agent, who was the, the, the case agent on the Lufthansa robbery. “Tom Sweeney called.
We found bones.” And she was like all nervous over this. Turns out they were horse bones. Horse bones. Yeah. And so I then eventually, of course, I tried the case in the fall of 1981, and I saw Jimmy every day for six weeks. Yeah. And then I saw him at the time of sentencing. And so he, as I, I describe it in a book, I’m fascinated by this guy.
He’s Irish American guy.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: And he was stoic. He was dressed in a suit every day. He was refined, s- sort of almost sophisticated looking. His lawyer- it was like right out of a movie to be the mob lawyer. Slicked back hair and shiny suits- Yeah … and ba-boom, ba-bop, yeah. And Jimmy just, didn’t speak to the co-defendants, didn’t speak, didn’t interact with their lawyers, was just a total stoic. But every morning, “Good morning. [00:41:00] Look at me. Make eye contact. Good morning.” He just, he’s a fascinating guy. And so after we convict him on the point shaving case, judge gave him 20 years.
He later reduced it to 12. But we had a murder case that Henry gave us of a drug dealer that we said that Jimmy had killed, this drug dealer, a fella by the name of Eaton. At the time, the feds didn’t have jurisdiction to bring murder cases only in exceptional circumstances, so we referred it to the Brooklyn DA’s office.
So Jimmy was indicted and tried for the Eaton murder, and he was convicted. And so when Henry was testifying, I decided to go over to the Brooklyn courthouse, to the state courthouse and see what was going on. When I went, walked into the courtroom right after lunch, all the seats were taken except for law enforcement s- and press seats in the first row.
So I got a seat in the first row, literally, like I could touch Burke from where I was sitting. And he comes out, and he sits down, and he looks right at me, and he doesn’t say anything. And I said, “Oh, geez, I guess he’s [00:42:00] not too pleased with me anymore.” And he’s looking… But I realized he’s looking past me.
I look over my shoulder, and it’s his wife and his two daughters.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Ed McDonald: And so he turns around, and the proceedings re- resume. And there’s another break in the proceedings, and he turns around to look at his wife and kids, and it- now he sees me. Yeah. And he go- and I- we make eye contact, and he says, “How you doing?
You’re looking great.”
Gary Jenkins: That’s a good one. All
Ed McDonald: right. I’ll tell you one other, one other amazing story about him When in the, on that murder case, I had a detective, Doug Lavianne, who worked for me, a New York City detective. And he and the the homicide detective who was working the case, they went out to Milan, Michigan, where Henry was incarcerated, to bring him back to New York to face his charges for the state murder case.
And Lavianne, Doug Lavianne brings him back and he puts him in the detention center at the jail where he’s gonna be arraigned later in the day. So Doug calls me from the detention center and he [00:43:00] said, I put him in the detention center, the holding pen right next to the courtroom, and his case is gonna be called in three or four hours.”
And he looked at me, and I just had this look. And, he was the, he was… There was nobody in that cell. There had to be 30 or 40 people crammed in like sardines. There wasn’t another person who was white in the cell. Yeah. And there was nobody over the age of 21 or 22. And I just had this e- I just got this look from him, and I think maybe…
I r- I leaned on him, I tried to talk to him on the way in, and he kept saying no on the way, on the plane coming in. And he says, “He’s not cooperating, but I just have a glimmer of hope that he’s gonna do…” Calls me back after the arraignment and says, “I just finished with the arraignment.” I said what happened?”
He says, “When I went to get him out of the pens to bring him in for, to be arraigned in the courtroom, people were lining up, ‘Yo, Jimmy!'” “Jimmy the Gent, I knew…” All these young Black kids, Spanish kids, they’re all slapping him up, “Jimmy the Gent, I met the boss. Are you kidding
Gary Jenkins: me?” Oh, my God.
Ed McDonald: So I said, [00:44:00] “There’s a guy who knows how to do time.”
He-
Gary Jenkins: Yeah,
Ed McDonald: there is
Gary Jenkins: a guy …
Ed McDonald: just this amazing character.
Gary Jenkins: I heard on the wiretap once, , ., “Man,” he said, “When they’re trying to run you out of town on a rail,” he said, “Go out like you’re leading a parade.” Jimmy’s the guy that goes out like he’s leading a parade, doesn’t he?
He’s
Ed McDonald: something else,
Gary Jenkins: oh, man. He- All right. Ed McDonald. The book is Chasing Goodfellas: Lufthansa, Henry Hill, Point Shaving and Making Movies. Thanks so much, Ed, for coming on the show. Okay.
Ed McDonald: October 13th it’s being released.
Gary Jenkins: Oh, okay. All right. We’ll get this out there. Thanks a lot, Ed.
Ed McDonald: Okay. All right.
Thanks, Gary. It was a pleasure. I got a couple more books coming
Gary Jenkins: we’ll talk soon again. Okay. Yeah, let me know. Make sure I get the information on them.