Jimmy Burke spent most of his adult life in the orbit of the Lucchese crime family in New York, and for years the law could prove far less about him than it suspected. He was long named as the planner of the theft of about $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport on December 11, 1978, then one of the largest cash thefts in the history of the United States. He was never charged with it. What finally held him were two other cases: a federal racketeering conviction in 1981 for fixing Boston College basketball games, built on the testimony of a former partner, Henry Hill, and a state conviction in Brooklyn for the murder of Richard Eaton, who died in Brooklyn in February 1979.
The Brooklyn jury's verdict brought a sentence of twenty years to life, added to the federal term he was already serving. Burke died in custody in New York State in April 1996, at the age of 64. Other deaths around the airport theft were laid at his door in the years that followed, but no court ever tested any of them. His one conviction for taking a life is the Brooklyn murder.
Burke was born in New York in 1931. By the late 1970s he was an associate of a Lucchese family captain and worked in the same circle as Henry Hill, a younger man who would one day decide his fate. A federal wire report of 1982 called him a reputed organized crime figure from Queens, and when the federal appeals court later set out the facts of the basketball case, it described him as Hill's reputed underworld "Boss," the man whose name the other conspirators were counting on to protect them if bookmakers ever discovered that games were being fixed.
He came to the cases that ended his liberty with a record already behind him. By the time he sat at the defense table in Brooklyn federal court in the fall of 1981, he was a convicted extortionist.
Hill was the man whose word would matter most. In 1980 he was arrested, state authorities indicted him on drug conspiracy charges, and investigators had begun to connect him to the Lufthansa theft. He offered federal officials the whole story of his recent crimes in return for full immunity and for help with the state case against him. Among the things he described was a point-shaving scheme he had joined only months before. By the time the basketball case came to trial, he was living under the protection of the federal witness program, and the cases against the men he had worked with were built largely on what he told prosecutors and juries.
The theft at Kennedy Airport in the early hours of December 11, 1978, made Burke a figure of public interest, and it is the one crime of that winter for which he was never prosecuted. About $5 million in cash and about $1 million in jewelry were taken from the Lufthansa cargo terminal. Neither the money nor the jewelry was ever recovered.
The investigation stalled early and stayed stalled. In February 1979 police arrested one man suspected of taking part, but the evidence was not enough to indict him. By July 1984 the theft remained officially unsolved. Only one man had been convicted in it: an airport employee who had supplied inside information about the terminal, and who was then serving fifteen years. Burke, by then in federal custody for the basketball case, was publicly called the alleged planner of the theft, but suspicion never became an indictment.
When the theft surfaced at Burke's federal trial in 1981, the court kept it at arm's length. Hill's links to the airport case were a point of attack for the defense, and the trial judge limited questioning about it to general references to a significant robbery, so that the jury would not be swayed by a crime none of the defendants was being tried for. The appeals court later upheld that ruling, finding that the risk of prejudice outweighed whatever the details would have added to Hill's impeachment.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged one other man in the theft in 2014, long after Burke's death, and a jury acquitted him in 2015. The theft has never produced a second conviction.
The case that first sent Burke away for a long term began in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1978. Two brothers there, Anthony and Rocco Perla, devised a plan to pay Boston College players to keep the team from beating the point spread in selected games. Rick Kuhn, a senior and one of the team's key players, agreed to take part, and was usually paid $2,500 for each game in which the team failed to cover. The Perlas brought in Paul Mazzei, and Mazzei brought in Hill, who had been released from federal custody that July.
From that point the scheme had a New York end, and Burke stood at the head of it. The Second Circuit later described Hill and Burke as forming what the government called the New York connection: the men responsible for building a bookmaking syndicate to bet on the Boston College games and for arranging protection for everyone involved. On November 16, 1978, the court found, Burke directed Hill, Mazzei and Anthony Perla to go to Boston to meet Kuhn and any other team members who wanted to join.
The games themselves went unevenly. In the first test, against Providence on December 6, 1978, Boston College won by nineteen points and the fix failed. Against Harvard on December 16, Boston College was favored by twelve and won by three, the margin the bettors wanted, and Kuhn was paid. On December 23, UCLA beat Boston College by twenty-two points. Against the University of Connecticut on January 17, 1979, the conspirators bet the other way and the team beat the spread, as they had wagered it would. Against Fordham on February 3, Boston College was a thirteen-point favorite and won by seven. A February 6 game against St. John's ended as a push, with no money won or lost on the spread. On February 10, against Holy Cross, the bet failed, and the defendants lost a substantial sum.
The scheme came apart after the season was over, and it came apart through Hill. Once he had described it to federal officials, the FBI went looking for the players. On September 3, 1980, two FBI agents questioned Kuhn in Pennsylvania. They told him twice that he was not legally required to speak with them. He talked anyway and made statements against his own interest, without the warnings given to suspects in custody. The agents left once he had finished, and he was not arrested that day.
In February 1981 Hill told his own version of the scheme in Sports Illustrated, in an article written with one of the magazine's reporters, and the case became national news. A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York, sitting in Brooklyn, indicted Burke, Mazzei, Kuhn and the two Perla brothers. Hill was named as a co-conspirator but not as a defendant. The indictment charged each man with three offenses: conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, conspiracy to commit sports bribery, and interstate travel with intent to commit bribery. The prosecution was handled by the federal organized crime task force in Brooklyn.
The Sports Illustrated article became a battleground before the trial began. Burke's lawyers served a subpoena on Time, Inc., the magazine's parent company, and on the reporter, for the documents behind the article, hoping to find material that would contradict Hill on the witness stand. Time, Inc. moved to quash it, invoking the reporter's privilege. The trial judge quashed the subpoena before trial, allowed the defense to renew it once Hill had testified, and quashed it again.
The trial opened in federal court in Brooklyn in the fall of 1981 and lasted about four weeks. Five men sat at the defense tables, and the government's case went well beyond Hill. Two Boston College players testified for the prosecution, including the team captain, who admitted taking money through Kuhn but denied ever joining a fix. The jury heard confessions from Kuhn and from Anthony Perla, and the government laid out telephone records, Western Union records and hotel records that tracked the conspirators' movements and payments. The reporter who had worked with Hill took the stand as well and described the points on which Hill's trial testimony differed from what he had said for the article.
Hill was still the center of it, and the defense spent much of the trial on his credibility. He admitted a long criminal history, including robbery, arson and hijacking, and earlier convictions for extortion, loansharking and drug trafficking. The jury heard a redacted version of his immunity agreement and learned that he had every reason to please the government. On appeal, Burke's lawyer would call Hill's testimony the indispensable core of the case against his client.
Deliberations ran into a weekend. Shortly after noon on a Saturday, the jurors sent a note asking whether they had to reach verdicts on all five defendants. The judge told them he preferred verdicts on everyone if they could reach them without violating their consciences. They deliberated into the evening, went home, and came back on Monday. That afternoon, in November 1981, they convicted all five men on every count.
Kuhn, Mazzei and Anthony Perla each received ten years on the racketeering count, with concurrent five-year terms on the other two. Rocco Perla received four years. Burke, whom the government had placed at the top of the New York end of the operation, was sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined $30,000, the heaviest punishment imposed on anyone in the case.
He did not accept it quietly. In the spring of 1982 he moved for a new trial on the basis of what he called newly discovered evidence. The government opposed the motion, and the conviction stood. That May, in papers filed in the same court, the organized crime task force disclosed that Kuhn, free on $50,000 bail while his appeal was pending, had agreed to cooperate with the government in the hope of shortening his own term.
Burke appealed together with Kuhn and the Perla brothers. A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit heard argument on September 20, 1982, and decided the case, United States v. Burke, on January 28, 1983. A companion appeal by Mazzei was decided the same day.
The subpoena was Burke's own issue, and the court gave it the most attention. It held that a party seeking a reporter's materials in a criminal case must meet the same test the circuit applied in civil cases: a clear and specific showing that the material is highly material and relevant, necessary or critical to the claim, and not obtainable from other available sources. Burke had sought the papers only to impeach Hill. The court held that he had "completely failed" to make the required showing. Hill had already been impeached thoroughly, so further impeachment would have been merely cumulative, and the defense had not tried other sources, among them Hill's own attorney. The court added that a trial judge faced with a request for sensitive press material may review it privately, in camera, but found no reasonable basis for requiring it in this case.
The panel rejected the rest of the appeal point by point. The defendants argued that the judge should have told the jurors they could return a partial verdict; the court found the jurors' note ambiguous, the judge's answer evenhanded rather than coercive, and noted that the jury had deliberated for hours afterward. They argued that the publicity around the magazine article had prejudiced the grand jurors who indicted them, and asked for a hearing; the court held that a defendant making that claim must show actual prejudice, and that general assertions were not enough. The limits on cross-examination about the airport theft and the refusal to sever the trial were upheld as well. In the companion case, the court rejected Mazzei's argument that the racketeering enterprise had to be proved as something separate from the pattern of crimes.
The Second Circuit affirmed the judgments against every appellant. Burke's sentence stood, and in July 1984 he was still serving it in federal custody.
The victim died in Brooklyn in February 1979, about ten weeks after the airport theft and in the middle of the basketball season that the conspirators were betting on. For more than four years no one was charged.
The charge came in 1984. Burke was already in federal custody on the basketball sentence when a Kings County grand jury indicted him for the murder, and the case went to trial in Brooklyn.
The jury convicted him, and the court sentenced him to twenty years to life. By May 1987 he was serving the state sentence and the federal term for the basketball scheme together. The murder conviction had nothing to do with the airport case, and nothing in it resolved who had planned the theft.
Burke spent the rest of his life in custody. The state sentence carried a minimum term of twenty years, and he never came close to the end of it: he died in New York State in April 1996, at the age of 64, eleven years into the term. He had never been charged in the airport theft that defined his public reputation.
The only death for which Burke was convicted is the Brooklyn murder of February 1979. His guilt in that case rests on a jury's verdict.
Burke was never charged in the Lufthansa cargo theft. Every description of him as its planner was an allegation that no court tested. The airport employee convicted in the theft and the Bonanno captain acquitted in 2015 were the only two men charged in it.
Later writers attributed other deaths to Burke. He was never indicted for any of them, no jury ever heard evidence about them, and they remain attributions only.
The fixing of Boston College games is a matter of federal conviction. Particular details of Burke's role beyond those found by the Second Circuit, including accounts of what he said to players and how much money he lost, come from Hill alone.
1931: Burke is born in New York.
Summer 1978: The Perla brothers devise the point-shaving scheme in Pittsburgh.
November 16, 1978: Burke directs Hill, Mazzei and Anthony Perla to meet Boston College players in Boston, as later found by the Second Circuit.
December 6, 1978 to February 10, 1979: The scheme runs through the games set out by the appeals court.
December 11, 1978: About $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry are taken from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at Kennedy Airport; Burke is later named as the alleged planner but never charged.
February 1979: The victim of the later murder conviction dies in Brooklyn.
1980: Hill, indicted on state drug conspiracy charges, seeks federal immunity and describes the scheme.
September 3, 1980: FBI agents question Kuhn in Pennsylvania.
February 1981: Hill's account appears in Sports Illustrated.
Fall 1981: The federal trial of Burke and four co-defendants opens in Brooklyn.
November 1981: The jury convicts all five defendants on every count; Burke is sentenced to twenty years and fined $30,000.
Spring 1982: Burke moves for a new trial; the government opposes it.
September 20, 1982: The Second Circuit hears the appeal.
January 28, 1983: The Second Circuit affirms the federal convictions in United States v. Burke.
1984: A Kings County grand jury indicts Burke for the Brooklyn murder.
1985: A Brooklyn jury convicts Burke of the murder; he is sentenced to twenty years to life.
By May 1987: Burke is serving the state and federal sentences together.
April 1996: Burke dies in custody in New York State, aged 64.
2014: One other man is charged in the Lufthansa theft; he is acquitted in 2015.