Vincent Asaro (left) looks on as Sal Vitale testifies during Asaro’s trial in this court sketch from New York yesterday. Vincent Asaro, a member of the Bonanno organised crime family, is charged with participating in a 1978 heist wherein a crew of masked men stole $6mn in cash and jewellery from a Lufthansa Airlines cargo building at John F. Kennedy Airport.

AFP/New York


An 80-year-old alleged mobster accused of playing a role in the spectacular 1978 airport heist immortalised in Martin Scorsese’s movie Goodfellas went on trial in New York yesterday.
Vincent Asaro, reputedly a member of the notorious Bonanno crime family, is accused of murder, violence and extortion that allegedly span 45 years from the late 1960s to 2013. He pleads not guilty.
In custody since his arrest in January 2014, the man who had triple bypass surgery in 2013, faces spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted by a jury in the federal court in Brooklyn.
In what was the biggest heist on US soil, armed mobsters stole $5mn in cash and nearly $1mn in jewels from a Lufthansa Airlines vault at New York’s JFK on December 11, 1978.
The value of the booty today is estimated at around $20mn.
Salvatore Vitale, a former number two in the Bonanno mafia who turned informant after his 2003 arrest, testified that his boss, Joe Massino, collected a case stuffed full of jewellery from Asaro after the heist.
The 68-year-old was convicted in 2010 to time already served over 11 murders, and is now out of jail but in a witness protection programme.
Vitale testified that in the 1970s he took Massino to see Asaro and that, upon returning to the car, Massino opened up a case on his lap that was filled with gold necklaces.
“He said ‘this is from the Lufthansa score’,” Vitale quoted Massino as telling him. He saw the jewellery again later laid out on Massino’s dining room table.
“He gave me a chain, he was always a big spender, he gave me a chain as a gift,” said Vitale.
A couple of days later he drove Massino to a New York diamond market where “Joe went in the back with the case and I never saw the case again,” he said.
The trial, which is expected to last weeks, will lay bare accusations of murder, racketeering, robbery, extortion, arson, illegal gambling, loansharking and assault.
US prosecutors say Asaro strangled Paul Katz, a presumed informant, with a dog chain in 1969. His body parts were discovered in a New York basement in 2013.
Prosecutor Lindsay Gerdes narrated the grisly murder to jurors, saying: “The man with death before dishonour tattooed on his forearm sits in this court room today.
“That man is Vincent Asaro.”
Asaro sat next to his defence team, his hair swept back and dressed in a casual sweater, before the packed courtroom in Brooklyn.
His lawyers say there is a lack of evidence against their client and that the government’s star witness wore a wire for five years.
“If Vincent Asaro is truly the dangerous, violent, murdering individual depicted by the government, why did it take so long to arrest him?” said defense lawyer Diane Ferrone.
Asaro was arrested by the FBI in January 2014 in a series of raids that also netted his middle-aged son Jerome and three other suspects.
The 1978 heist became legendary after its alleged mastermind James Burke - also known as Jimmy the Gent - killed off members of the crew to avoid being shopped to the police.
Asaro, Burke and their co-conspirators allegedly expected to receive around $750,000 in cash and large quantities of gold jewelry after the robbery.
Scorsese immortalised the criminal feat in his Oscar-winning 1990 movie Goodfellas, long considered one of the best crime films of all time.
Burke, who died of cancer in prison in 1996, was the inspiration for Robert De Niro’s character Jimmy Conway in the film.  Asaro was not depicted in the film.
The charges against him date from January 1968 to June 2013.
He is accused, with Burke, of strangling Katz because they suspected he was co-operating with investigators, burying his body under a cement basement floor of an empty home.
In the mid-1980s, Asaro allegedly ordered his son Jerome and another individual to dig up the body and move it to avoid detection.
Almost 35 years later, the FBI recovered a right hand and wrist, hair, teeth, clothing and human tissue identified by DNA as belonging to Katz from the Burke family home in Queens.
Prosecutors also accuse Asaro of soliciting in the early 1980s the murder of a cousin who managed to escape to Florida on a tip-off.
He and his son are charged with participating in additional armed robberies, including around $1mn in gold salts.