"We came right back to New York. The guy who sold Jimmy the bad coke got a reprieve. There was nothing to do. Even Jimmy couldn't revenge Tommy. It was between the Italians, and on that level Jimmy didn't belong, any more than I did, because my father was Irish.

    "Right after New Year's the Lufthansa heat got to be too much at Robert's, so everyone moved to a new place Vinnie Asaro opened on Rockaway Boulevard. Vinnie was spending a fortune fixing up the place, which was right next door to his fence company. I remember when I got back from Florida, Marty was all over me. He was hanging around Vinnie's new joint now, and he wanted to know about Tommy. He wanted to know about Stacks. What was going on?

    He knew Tommy had had trouble with the Gotti crew and that Stacks was probably hit over a business deal that went bad, but he was nervous. I think he sensed something was wrong. He used to hang around Vinnie's bar waiting for war news.

    "And that's where they whacked him out. At the bar. On January 6. Fran called at seven o'clock the next morning and said Marty hadn't come home that night. I knew right away. I couldn't get back to sleep. She called back at nine. I told her that I'd go out and look for him later that morning.

    "I drove over to Vinnie's fence company, and I saw Jimmy's car parked outside. I walked in and said that Fran had just called me. Jimmy was sitting there. Vinnie was sitting next to him. Jimmy said, 'He's gone.' Just like that. I looked at him. I shook my head. He said, 'Go pick up your wife and go over there. Tell her that he's probably with a girl friend. Give her a story.'

    "When Karen and I got to Fran's she was hysterical. She knew like I knew that he was dead. She said that he had called her at nine-thirty the night before and said he was going to be late. He told her that everything was fine. She said that he was supposed to get some money.

    "I'm sitting there holding her hand and I'm thinking about Jimmy. Murders never bothered Jimmy. He started doing them as a kid in jail for old Mafiosi. In prison you don't have nice little fights. You have to kill the guy you fight. That's where Jimmy learned. Over the years he had killed strangers and he had killed his closest friends. It didn't matter. Business was business, and if he got it into his head that you were dangerous to him, or that you were going to cost him money, or that you were getting cute, he'd kill you. It was that simple. We might have been close. Our families were close. We exchanged Christmas presents. We went on vacations together. Still, I knew he could blow me away right there and get Mickey, his wife, to call Karen and ask where I was. 'We're real worried,' Mickey would say. 'We've been waiting for him. Did he leave yet? What could be holding him up? Do you think he's okay?' Meanwhile Jimmy's planting me with a boxful of lime in the Jamaica Marshes, across the street from where he lives.

    "Fran was blabbering away about the money. She was worried she'd have to pay the loan sharks. I told her not to worry about them. She said she didn't have any money. Karen told her not to worry about it. Marty would turn up. Then Fran broke down about the robbery. She said that Marty was going to give me $150,000 and that he was going to give Frank Menna $50,000. I was trying to console her and at the same time deny that I knew anything about any robbery. But she kept saying that she knew that I knew. She wouldn't stop. I wanted to get away from there as fast as I could. It was just beginning."

=EIGHTEEN=

FOR THE MEDIA, caught in the usual preholiday news doldrums, the Lufthansa robbery was the greatest Christmas present of all. Newspapers and television stations presented it as a six-million- dollar entertainment crime, a show-biz caper in which there hadn't been a shot fired and the only discernible victim was a German airline, for which much of the city's population had very little historic sympathy.

    The ballyhoo in the press was taken by various enforcement agencies as a personal affront. The FBI, with jurisdiction over all interstate crimes and unlimited overtime policies, assigned over a hundred agents to the case in the first forty-eight hours. Custom agents, the Port Authority police, the New York City Police Department, insurance company investigators, Brink's armored truck company, and Lufthansa's own security men swarmed over the scene of the crime, devouring clues and questioning witnesses.

    Edward A. McDonald, the assistant U.S. attorney who was put in charge of the case, was a thirty- two-year-old, six-foot-five-inch former college basketball player who lived with his wife and his three sons in the same tough Brooklyn neighborhood in which he had grown up. McDonald's father and grandfather had both worked on the docks, and he was no stranger to wiseguys. He saw his first gangland killing from the social studies classroom window at Xavierian High School, in Bay Ridge; five days later, when he went over to Bliss Park to practice his jump shot, he found that the mob had dumped a corpse on the basketball court.

    According to McDonald, there was never any mystery about who robbed Lufthansa. Within the first couple of hours at least a half dozen police and FBI informants—many of them part-time hijackers and petty cargo thieves—called to report that Lufthansa had been the work of Jimmy Burke and the crew from Robert's Lounge. At about the same time the Lufthansa cargo workers who had caught a glimpse of the gunman who took his ski mask off during the robbery picked a photograph out of the police lineup book which they said resembled the robber. It turned out to be a mug shot of Tommy De-Simone. A top mobster, who was a member of the Joe Colombo crime family and also happened to be a confidential FBI informant, called his contact agent and identified Jimmy Burke as the man behind Lufthansa and said that Angelo Sepe, Sepe's ex-brother-in-law Anthony Rodriquez, Tommy DeSimone, and Jimmy Burke's twenty-year-old son Frankie were four of the gunmen involved in the robbery. When photographs of these four suspects were shown to cargo workers who had been working the night of the robbery, Kerry Whalen, the night guard who had been hit across the forehead when he first encountered the gunmen, picked out one that he said resembled the man who hit him. It was a mug shot of Angelo Sepe.

    Eyewitness identification of suspects who "resemble" gunmen and the word of mob informants who cannot come forward and testify in court are not enough to charge anyone with a crime. But they are more than enough to put suspects under surveillance. By the end of the first week dozens of FBI men and city cops, using cars, trucks, vans, spotter planes, and helicopters, began a round-the-

clock surveillance of Jimmy Burke, Angelo Sepe, Tommy DeSimone, and Anthony Rodriquez. Undercover cops dressed as cargo workers and truckers started hanging around Robert's Lounge and the Owl Tavern. McDonald got the court's approval to install electronic bugs and homing devices in Jimmy's Olds, Tommy's Lincoln, and the new, white Thunderbird sedan that Sepe had bought shortly after the robbery for nine thousand dollars cash in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. McDonald even leaked stories to the press about the robbery, hoping that they would help stimulate conversations in the bugged cars.

    For the next eight weeks the investigation became a game of nerves. Jimmy and the crew knew they were the prime suspects for the Lufthansa robbery— they could even read about themselves in the newspapers—but they continued to live their normal wiseguy lives, hanging around their same haunts and effortlessly slipping their tails whenever they wished by making unexpected U-turns on busy streets, jumping red lights, or backing up the entry ramps of the city's highways. They managed to lose the FBI spotter planes and helicopters by driving into the FAA's restricted flight zone at JFK, where all nonscheduled plane traffic, including FBI surveillance planes, is prohibited. Even the state-of-the-art car bugs turned out to be less effective than McDonald had hoped: whenever Jimmy, Angelo, and Tommy stepped into their cars, they turned up the volume of their car radios full blast.