Saints Of New York (21 page)

'Frank,
I thought you were finally getting to Lufthansa today.'

'I
am. Lou Werner was the Lufthansa cargo supervisor. There was nothing, just
nothing
that Lou didn't know about Lufthansa's
traffic, in and out.'

'So
what does this have to do with Marty?'

'Lou
buys off Marty with a tip about Lufthansa and the money, and Marty takes it to
Jimmy Burke, king of hijackers. Jimmy acts nonchalant: he might be into it, he
might not. He doesn't want Marty to know he's interested because he hates the guy.
I mean,
really
hates him. Jimmy was an insomniac, and sometimes when he was watching
late-night TV, he would see Marty in these
wig
commercials
himself, and he bitched about the fact that Marty had money for TV ads, but not
for protection money for his store. Apparently Jimmy had tried to get Marty to
pay protection, but Marty threatened to go to the DA. After that Jimmy never
trusted him.

'Regardless
of that, the amount of money that Marty was talking about, what could Jimmy
Burke do? Was he going to pass up on something like that because of a wig
salesman? He had his buddy Henry Hill speak with Marty Krugman, and Marty dealt
with Lou Werner. Everything was distant, everything was twice- removed. Jimmy
didn't even want Marty to know that he was going to be doing the airport job
himself. But there it was, the biggest robbery in history. This was US dollars,
all random and unmarked, coming in from West Germany. This was money spent by
American servicemen and tourists over there. It comes back here on Lufthansa
flights, it's stored overnight in the cargo bays, and then it gets moved out to
the banks.

'Lou
Werner gives them the names of all the employees and guards. They know the name
of the terminal's senior cargo agent, the name of the night supervisor, the
only employee with the right keys and combinations to open the double-door
vault. They know there's a primary door, and if the secondary door was opened
before the primary door was closed, then a silent alarm would be activated at
the Port Authority police office. They knew everything.'

'And what did
they get away with?'

'Five
million dollars, cash. And then another eight hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars' worth of jewelry. And Burke kept it very tight to his chest. He shut
everything down once they hit Lufthansa. No-one said a word, no-one breathed a
word, that was his order. No-one spent anything, no-one discussed it in their
homes, their cars, their back yards.'

'But it didn't
go as planned?'

'Oh,
the robbery went as planned. The robbery went exactly as planned. They had the
place down cold, they knew it off by heart because of Lou Werner's detailed
information, and they were in and out in an hour. The difficulty was that this
was now a very high profile case, and all over the news. December 1978, five
million dollars? I can't even begin to imagine what that would translate to
now. Anyway, Jimmy was paranoid. He knew that with the number of people
involved, and the very long sentences that would come down if they were caught,
there was always the possibility that somebody might strike a deal with the DA
to keep themselves out of jail. Organizationally, he had managed things well,
and there was only one person who had ever met Lou Werner face-to-face—'

'Marty
Krugman.'

'Well,
no. The only one of Burke's gang that ever met Lou Werner was a guy called Joe
Manri, but Marty was the mouthpiece. He was the one making all the noise, and
so Burke killed Marty Krugman first. And once he'd killed him, it sort of set
the precedent for anyone else who said anything out of turn. Jimmy Burke had
connections into the OCCB, one of which was my father, and he let it be known
that if anyone came in blabbing about the Lufthansa heist he needed to know
about it. All told, there were ten murders as a result of Lufthansa, and though
the general belief is that Jimmy and his people killed them all, I can tell you
that that was not the case.'

'Your
father—'

'My
father knew all about it. He condoned it, and even if he hadn't had to kill
anyone himself he would have assigned people to do that for Jimmy Burke.'

'And
Jimmy Burke paid him?'

'Yeah,
he paid him.'

'How
much?'

'I
have no idea. A hundred grand, maybe two hundred and fifty grand. Burke had
five million dollars. He had however many accomplices who were vanishing at a
rapid rate. I'm sure that Jimmy Burke wound up with most of that money all to
himself.'

'And
the investigation?'

'Well,
the Feds sent in a hundred agents in the first forty-eight hours. They had
police from the NYPD and the Port Authority; they had insurance company
investigators; people from Brinks, Lufthansa's own internal security crews.
Everyone was down there. The FBI got Burke's name somehow - not enough evidence
to arrest him, but enough to put surveillance on him and a few of the others
who had done the robbery - but Burke and his people managed to lose the
helicopter traces by driving into FAA restricted flight zone areas at JFK. The
Feds bugged their cars, but they had whispered conversations in the back seats
with
the
radios
turned up full volume.'

'Did
they get any of them?'

'Well,
they knew right from the get-go that it had to be
an
inside job. Burke's crew had hit
precisely the correct warehouse out of a possible twenty-two on a three hundred
and fifty-acre site. The cargo agent and the night supervisor told the investigators
that the gunmen had known their names, the layout of the building, known about
the vault doors, the whole works. Lufthansa's security people had given over
Lou Werner's name within hours of the robbery because he'd already been a
suspect in an earlier foreign currency robbery. That time there had been
insufficient evidence against him, but this time Werner had actually stopped
the Brinks security truck from collecting the five million dollars on the
previous Friday night. He told them that he needed the signature of a cargo
executive to let them take the money, which was not the usual procedure, but he
forbade them to take the shipment and kept them waiting for an hour and a half.
They were eventually ordered to continue their round without the Lufthansa
cash, so the Feds knew that not only had Lou arranged that the cash was still
there, but he was pretty much the only person who knew it was still inside the
vault.'

'They
arrested him?'

'Well,
they put surveillance on him, they bugged him, they interviewed people he knew.
They spoke to his wife, Beverley, who had left him some time before, and she
told them that Lou had called her up, told her that he was coming into a great
deal of money, and that she would seriously regret leaving him. Lou also told
his best friend about the robbery a month before it even happened, and agreed
to give him thirty grand for his taxicab business. Then he found out that this
best friend was actually having an affair with the ex-wife, and he called up this
guy and said he could go fuck himself as far as the thirty grand was concerned.
Once the robbery was all over the newspapers, Lou told his girlfriend all about
it, how clever he was, how proud she should be of him, but she panicked, told
him that he would wind up in jail. Lou was really upset about her reaction. He
hoped she'd be impressed with what a smart guy he was, but she went all crazy
and hysterical so Lou, all down and depressed, goes to his favorite bar and
tells the barman all about it.'

'So
he was not the smartest guy in the world.'

'Well,
he was an amateur. He wasn't Jimmy Burke, that's for sure. And this old buddy
of his - the one that was screwing Lou's wife - well, he was so afraid that his
own wife would find out about his affair with Beverley Werner that he agreed to
help the FBI any which way he could. It was a straightforward job from there.
They got testimony from half a dozen different people that Lou Werner had
spoken to and took him in.'

'And
he informed on Burke and the rest of the people?'

'Well,
that's what they thought he would do. The assistant US attorney who was heading
up the case, a guy called Ed McDonald, got the name of a Lufthansa cargo
employee called Peter Gruenewald. Word was that Werner and Gruenewald had put
the plan together. McDonald interrogated Gruenewald, who denied everything,
but they found out that Gruenewald had applied for tickets to Bogota, and then
on to Taiwan. Then they found one of the guys that Gruenewald had approached as
a possible contender for carrying out the job that he and Werner had planned.
They had enough to tie Gruenewald in with Lufthansa, so he elected
to
cooperate
with McDonald.

'Well,
McDonald thought that Werner would just roll over on everyone involved. He'd
talked about nothing else but Lufthansa before he was arrested, but the moment
they took him in
he
closed
up like a clam. He said he had nothing to do with
the
robbery, that he had merely boasted
about it to his wife and
his
girlfriend
to satisfy his own ego. Until they confronted him with Gruenewald. Werner
damned near had a heart attack right
there
and
then, but he still insisted that he knew nothing about
the
robbery. Regardless, with testimony from
Gruenewald,
from
Beverley
Werner, from Lou's girlfriend, from the bartender, McDonald went to trial. May
1978, a ten-day trial, and
Lou
Werner
was found guilty of organizing the Lufthansa robbery. Now Lou could go one way
or the other. He could give up Joe Manri, and Manri could then give up Jimmy
Burke and the rest of the crew, or he could keep his mouth shut.'

'What
did he do?'

'Well,
he didn't get a chance to make a decision. The same night a squad car unit in
Brooklyn found the dead bodies of Joe Manri and another colleague of his,
Robert McMahon, in a car on the corner of Shenectady and Avenue M. Both had
been shot with a single .44 in the back of the head.'

'You're
going into a lot of small details, Frank. Why is that?'

'Because
. . . well, because I think . . . Well, if my father was involved directly in
any of this, then I think it might have been that. I think he might have killed
Manri and McMahon and prevented Lou Werner from ever giving Ed McDonald the
connection he wanted to Jimmy Burke.'

'You
actually believe he might have done that?'

'I
think so, yes.'

'Why?'

'It
was April of '79 when Lou Werner was tried. I was nearly fifteen years old, and
I remember my father coming home that evening. We'd been following the thing on
the TV. It was a big deal, you know, and they'd been going on about it for
days. Anyway, he came home, and there was some feature or news program, and the
guy was saying that Werner had been convicted and was waiting sentence, and
there was a possibility he might cooperate with the US Attorney's Office in an
effort to reduce his sentence.'

'And
your father was watching it with you?'

'He
was. It was some hours before the report came in about the two dead guys in
Brooklyn, and my dad just smiled to himself, like I wasn't even there, and he
said that it didn't matter what happened now. He said that it didn't matter
what Lou Werner said now, that they would never get the guys who did it. And I
looked at him right after he said it, and there was this expression on his
face, you know? I thought then, and I think now, that he was the one who shot
those two guys in their car and got Jimmy Burke off the hook for Lufthansa.'

'Oh
my God—'

'You
don't need to tell me. This was the guy with all the citations and commends.
This was the guy, the hero, who headed up the Saints of New York.'

Parrish
took a walk after his session with Marie Griffin. It was a little after ten.
Radick had not yet arrived, and there was no message at the desk. Ordinarily,
Parrish would have chased him up, but this morning - this of all mornings - he
wanted some time and space for himself.

It
took him twenty-five minutes to reach St. Michael's. He stood outside for a few
moments, and then he made his way in, staying back behind the pews, traversing
left and walking down the outside aisle. He stopped halfway, took a seat, and
listened to the sound of nothing.