On 17 February 2011, Vincent Asaro and his cousin Gaspare Valenti were chatting in Sonny’s, an auto repair shop in Queens owned by one of their associates. The recording of the conversation is so muffled by hammering that it is unclear who is talking, but the words are discernible: “I have nothing in the house to eat. I have nothing, no food. Fucking nothing.”



How the great are fallen. Thirty-two years earlier, on 11 December 1978, the pair were allegedly part of the 12-man team that carried off one of the most audacious deeds of the New York mafia – the Lufthansa robbery at JFK airport that netted $5m in untraceable cash and a further million in jewellery.

The heist would go down in history as the pinnacle of the mob’s power and impenetrability, with an added layer of Hollywood lustre provided by Martin Scorsese in his 1990 film Goodfellas. Such was the strength of the mafia code of silence, or omerta, supplemented by a succession of violent deaths and disappearances of potential witnesses, that no one other than the inside man, the airport worker Louis Werner, has ever been held accountable.

Until now.

All this week, visitors to courtroom 8C in the federal criminal court in downtown Brooklyn have been treated to the rare spectacle of two old fellas going at each other. In the witness box, Valenti, 68, looking sun-tanned and dapper in a cream-coloured suit, has given his account of the Lufthansa heist and the bloody events that followed.

On the other side of the courtroom, all of 20ft away at the defense table, Asaro, now 80, has been quietly listening, his tattoo of the mafia mantra “Death before dishonor” tucked out of sight beneath a black jumper. From time to time Vinny, as his friends call him, has turned to smile at his relatives or stare impassively at reporters in the press bench.

Early on in Goodfellas, Robert de Niro, playing the role based on the late Jimmy “the Gent” Burke, who led the Lufthansa robbery, imparts two life lessons to a novice: “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” It is the breach of these two cardinal rules that has decimated the Italian American organised crime network in New York in recent years, culminating with this week’s extraordinary scenes in courtroom 8C.

For five years from 2008, when he turned state cooperator, Valenti wore a wire and recorded hundreds of hours of conversation with his cousin. They chatted in a deli called Tuscany, a bagel place in Howard Beach, in their cars and at Esquire diner within a stone’s throw of the location of the JFK heist.

The recordings, and Valenti’s courtroom testimony on the back of them, have given the anonymous jury a crash course in Mafia-speak.

“What are wiseguys?” the witness was asked by the prosecution on Thursday.

“Goodfellas, made members,” he replied in an East Brooklyn drawl.

“Skipper” means a captain of a crime family – the rank allegedly held by Asaro in the Bonanno organized crime network at the time of his arrest last year. “Taken down” is to be demoted from captain to the basic level of soldier, as Asaro once allegedly was as punishment for his gambling addiction.

Made members – those who have taken the vow of omerta – introduce each other as “friends”.

“That’s the way wiseguys introduce themselves to other made members – they say ‘He’s a friend of mine’,” Valenti told the court.

In one snippet of recording, Asaro tells his cousin: “You have to learn the rules.”

What rules were those, Valenti was asked.

“The rules of respect,” he said.

A chill spread across the courtroom as Valenti was heard on tape saying to the defendant: “You know that dentist. I have to go back to him because my fucking gum is killing me.”

The prosecutor asked Valenti to tell the jury what he meant by “needing to go to the dentist”. There was an intake of breath – what new horror would be revealed?

“I had an abscess on my gum and I needed to have it looked at,” he said.

Valenti gave his account of the Lufthansa heist over two days of testimony. The night before the raid, he said Asaro told him: “Make sure you do everything you’re supposed to do. Don’t dog it. Don’t run away. Stand your ground.”

Valenti was asked by the prosecution to annotate a 1978 photograph of the JFK hangar with the Lufthansa jet that carried the currency from West Germany parked in front of it. Valenti marked the spot where he said he cut the bolt on the gate to allow their black Ford van to enter the compound and park outside the hangar, drawing a big red cross where he said the vault had been.

When they realized the size of their haul, he said: “It was euphoria. We thought there was $2m in cash and there was $6m. I was separating gold chains and watches and the diamonds and emeralds and rubies.”

But the court also heard of the very unhappy consequences of one of the largest thefts in US history. Valenti prompted a prolonged legal argument between judge Allyne Ross and lawyers for both sides when he said that the leader of the gang, Jimmy Burke, who died in prison in 1996, had kept much of the money for himself.

The spoils had not been handed over to several of the other mobsters who “died shortly after the heist”. Ross issued a stern instruction to the jury not to read anything into that comment.

Nor was Asaro satisfied with his pickings, griping in the recordings: “We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get. We got fucked all round. That fucking Jimmy kept everything.”

What they did get, they frittered away on the horses.

“We did it to ourselves,” Asaro said. “It’s the curse of gambling.”

Which helps explain why two ageing mobsters who were allegedly involved in the multi-million-dollar crime of the century should find themselves three decades later with no food in the house and the feeling they were part of a dying breed.

“I’m the only wiseguy left in my neighborhood,” Asaro said on tape, to his much loved and trusted cousin.