An 80-year-old man has been found not guilty of taking part in a brazen New York airport heist in 1978 that helped to inspire the mafia movie Goodfellas.

Reputed mobster Vincent Asaro was cleared of murder, extortion, and other crimes by a jury at the Brooklyn federal court yesterday.

The audacious airport heist is regarded as one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in America and was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film starring Robert De Niro.

Prosecutors had argued that Mr Asaro had waited in a decoy car with another gangster, Jimmy Burke, about a mile from John F. Kennedy International Airport on 7 December, 1978, as a group of masked men stole $6million worth of cash and jewels from a Lufthansa Airlines cargo building.

Mr Asaro, whom prosecutors said was a third-generation member of the secretive Bonanno crime family, had been in custody since his arrest last January.

He yelled out “Free!” as he left the courthouse, where major mob figures such as the Gambino family head John Gotti and Genovese crime boss Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante have been convicted.

“I was shocked, I was really shocked. I got two years here, and I'm dying to get home,” Mr Asaro said.

The Lufthansa airport heist is a key part of the plot in Goodfellas

When asked what he planned to do with his freedom, he said: “Have a good meal and see my family.”

As he got into a waiting car, Mr Asaro joked to his lawyers: “Sam, don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”

Mr Asaro was also cleared of strangling a suspected informant with a dog chain in 1969, soliciting the murder of a relative, and robbing an armoured car.

His three-week trial featured a number of former organised crime figures.

Among those witnesses was Mr Asaro’s cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who wore a wire for years and who linked Mr Asaro to the Lufthansa robbery and the 1969 murder.

Mr Valenti claimed to be one of the robbers who took part in the heist.

Asked what Mr Asaro thought of his cousin, he said: “You don’t even want to know.”

Assistant US Attorney Alicyn Cooley had argued in her closing statement that Mr Asaro “fully embraced” the secretive life he was born into and that his apparent devotion to the Bonannos “was as permanent as the ‘death before dishonour’ tattoo on his arm”.