James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke

Burke is the man credited with organising the largest cash robbery in American history to that point, and he was never charged with it. That gap between what the record shows and what everybody involved understood to be true is the honest summary of his career.

He was an associate of the Lucchese family, ran his own crew from a bar in South Ozone Park, and was Irish, which meant that whatever he earned and whatever he was worth to the family, he could not be a member of it.

Lufthansa

On 11 December 1978 a crew took roughly five million dollars in cash and close to nine hundred thousand in jewellery from the Lufthansa cargo building at Kennedy Airport. The tip came from inside the airline. Burke put the job together.

In the months that followed, a number of the men connected to it were murdered. The pattern is documented; the instruction behind it is not.

The convictions that stuck

In 1982 Burke was convicted in federal court over a point-shaving scheme involving Boston College basketball players, on evidence that included Henry Hill's testimony. In 1985 he was convicted in state court of the murder of a drug dealer named Richard Eaton, whose body had been found in a frozen trailer in Brooklyn in 1979.

He was sentenced to twenty years for the first and twenty to life for the second, and he did not leave custody again.

He died of lung cancer at Wende Correctional Facility in New York on 13 April 1996, aged sixty-four.