Incidents of larceny were a daily occurrence at the airport, and those imprudent enough to talk about what was going on were routinely murdered, usually just days after going to the police. Corrupt cops on Jimmy Burke's payroll tipped him off about informants and potential witnesses. The bodies, sometimes as many as a dozen a year, were left strangled, trussed, and shot in the trunks of stolen cars abandoned in the long-term parking lots that surrounded the airport. With Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Skinny Bobby Amelia, Stanley Diamond, Joey Allegro, and Jimmy Santos, an ex-cop who did tune for a stickup and decided to join the bad guys, Jimmy Burke raised robbing the airport to an art form.

    Occasionally a criminal savant finds a particular field in which he excels and in which he delights. For Jimmy Burke it was hijacking. To watch Jimmy Burke tear through the cartons of a newly hijacked trailer was to watch a greedy child at Christmas. He would rip into the first few stolen crates until his passion to possess and touch each of the stolen items abated. Then he would peer inside the crates, pat their sides, sniff the air around them, lift them in his arms, and begin to carry them off the trucks, even though he always hired neighborhood guys for the heavy lifting. When Jimmy was unloading a truck, there was almost a beatific contentedness glowing on his sweat-drenched face. Henry often thought that his friend Jimmy was never happier than when unloading a freshly hijacked truck.

    In addition to his uncanny talent for making money, Jimmy Burke was also one of the most feared men in the city's organized-crime establishment. He had a reputation for violence that dated back to his early years in prison, when he was rumored to have done killings there for mob chiefs who were in prison with him at the tune. His explosive temper terrified some of the most terrifying men in the city, and the stories about him left even his friends a little chilled. He seemed to possess a bizarre combination of generosity and an enthusiasm for homicide. On one occasion Jimmy is said to have given the elderly, impoverished mother of a young hood five thousand dollars. The woman's son was said to have owed his mother the money but had refused to pay her. Jimmy was apparently so incensed at this lack of regard for motherhood that he gave the woman the five thousand in the morning, claiming it was from her son, and then allegedly killed the woman's son before dusk. In 1962, when Jimmy and Mickey decided to get married, he discovered that Mickey was being bothered by an old boyfriend, who was calling her on the phone, yelling at her on the street, and circling her house for hours in his car. On the day Jimmy and Mickey Burke were married the police found the remains of his wife's old boyfriend. The body had been carefully cut into over a dozen pieces and tossed all over the inside of his car.

    But it was Jimmy's talent for making money that clearly won him a place in the hearts of the mob's rulers. He was so extraordinary that, in an unprecedented move, the Colombo crime family in Brooklyn and the Lucchese family in Queens negotiated to share his services. The notion that two Italian-run crime families would even consider having a sit-down to negotiate the services of an Irishman only added to the Burke legend.

    Still, none of his friends ever really knew very much about Jimmy Burke. In fact, even Jimmy didn't know very much about himself. He never knew exactly when and where he was born, and he never knew either of his real parents. According to the records of the Manhattan Foundling Home, he was born July 5, 1931, to a woman named Conway. At the age of two he was designated a neglected child and entered into the Roman Catholic Church's foster-care program. For the next eleven years he was moved in and out of dozens of foster homes, where, psychiatric social workers would later reveal, he had been beaten, sexually abused, pampered, lied to, ignored, screamed at, locked in closets, and treated kindly by so many different sets of temporary parents that he had great difficulty remembering more than a few of their names and faces.

    In the summer of 1944, at the age of thirteen, Jimmy was riding in a car with his latest set of foster parents. When he began to act up in the rear seat, his foster father, a stern man with an explosive temper, turned around to slap him. The car suddenly went out of control, crashed, and killed the man instantly. Jimmy's foster mother blamed him for her husband's death and began to beat him regularly, but the Vanguard Childcare Agency refused to move Jimmy into another foster home. Jimmy began running away and getting into trouble. Two months after the accident Jimmy was arrested for juvenile delinquency. He was charged with being disorderly in a Queens playground. The charge was later dismissed, but the next year, at the age of fourteen, he was charged with burglarizing a house near his foster home and with taking twelve hundred dollars in cash. He was placed in the Mount Loretto Reformatory, a juvenile jail for incorrigible youngsters, on Staten Island. It was supposed to have the same isolating effect on young people as Alcatraz was alleged to have on noncompliant adults. In truth, serving time in Mount Loretto's was almost a badge of honor among the youngsters with whom Jimmy Burke had begun to travel.

    In September of 1949, after innumerable beatings and arrests at the hands of the police and after a number of stints in various juvenile jails, including Elmira, Jimmy was arrested for trying to pass three thousand dollars' worth of fraudulent checks in a Queens bank. Because of his youth and innocent appearance Jimmy had been used as a "passer" by Dominick Cerami, a Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, hood who headed a gang of professional check cashers. In the squad room on the second floor of the 75th Precinct in Queens, detectives cuffed Jimmy's hands behind his back and began punching him in the stomach in an effort to get him to implicate Cerami in the scheme. Jimmy took the beating and refused to talk. He was sentenced to five years in Auburn for bank forgery. He was eighteen. It was his first trip to an adult prison. The day he walked into Auburn, a huge stone prison with steel gates, set in a frozen stretch of upper New York State, Jimmy was greeted by over a dozen of the prison's toughest inmates. They had been awaiting his arrival in the prison reception area. Two of the men approached Jimmy. They were friends of Dominick Cerami, and they were grateful for what he had done on Cerami's behalf. They told him that if he had any problems in Auburn, he should come to them. Jimmy Burke had met the mob. "The thing you've got to understand about Jimmy is that he loved to steal. He ate and breathed it. I think if you ever offered Jimmy a billion dollars not to steal, he'd turn you down and then try to figure out how to steal it from you. It was the only thing he enjoyed. It kept him alive. As a kid he stole his food. He rolled drunks. All those years he was really living on the streets until he'd get picked up and turned over to the foundling home. Then he'd go to another foster home or a reform school until he ran away again. He used to sleep in parked cars. He was a little kid. He had a couple of places to sleep and wash in the backstretch at Aqueduct. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two Jimmy had only been out of jail a total of eighty-six days. Jimmy's childhood was spent either behind bars or on the lam and stealing. It got so that the bars didn't bother him. They made no difference to him whatever. He didn't even see the bars. He was invulnerable.

    "By 1970 Jimmy owned hijacking at Kennedy Airport. Of course he had Paulie's okay, but it was Jimmy who decided what and when shipments and trucks were worth taking. It was Jimmy who picked the crew for each job, Jimmy who lined up the fences and drops.