It beats waiting in line at an Apple Store.

A pair of brazen crooks punched another hole in the lax JFK security when they stole a trove of new Apple iPad minis — worth $1.5 million — from the same cargo building that was the site of the 1978 Lufthansa heist featured in “GoodFellas,” The Post has learned.

The crooks struck shortly before midnight on Monday and used one of the airport’s own forklifts to load two pallets of the tablet computers into a truck, according to law-enforcement sources.

They might have gotten more, but the thieves drove off leaving three more pallets of the Apple tablets behind after they were challenged by an airport worker returning from dinner.

“So, as a caper goes, it was probably unsuccessful,” a source said.

The thieves were still at large last night. Investigators, suspecting an inside job, have been questioning airport workers and given three of them polygraph tests, the sources said.

The crooks arrived at Building 261 around 11 p.m. in a white tractor trailer according to the sources. They pulled up to the side of the airport building that faces onto a street and has less security than the other side, which is accessible from the airport tarmac.

Sources believe someone let them into the area and then let them out after they grabbed the iPads.

They grabbed about 3,600 of the minis that were being shipped by a company called Cargo Airport Services, which said the iPads had just arrived from China and were destined for locations around the US.

A group of crooks stole $5 million in cash and nearly $900,000 worth of jewelry from the same building at JFK on Dec. 11, 1978.

That haul would be some $21 million if adjusted for inflation and has been ranked as America’s largest robbery of cash ever.

The alleged mastermind of the robbery was Luchese crime-family associate James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke.

He allegedly got away with the crime after whacking nearly all of his co-conspirators in the heist — a legendary gangland bloodbath that was recounted in one of the most famous sequences of the Martin Scorsese film “GoodFellas.”