Brooklyn prepares for trial over Lufthansa heist featured in Goodfellas

Associated Press in New York
Saturday 17 October 2015 19.43 BST

For decades, prosecutors say, Vincent Asaro managed to keep hidden his role in an infamous mob heist that was immortalised in the hit movie Goodfellas. As he did so, others of his generation were locked up or died gangland deaths.

A frail-looking Asaro finally emerged from the shadows after his arrest last year. He will go on trial on Monday on charges that he pocketed a cut of the $6m Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy Airport in 1978 – one of the largest cash thefts in American history.

If convicted, he will become the latest casualty of an erosion of the Mafia’s code of silence that has decimated the aging upper echelon of New York City’s underworld, sometimes called the “Oldfellas”.

Prosecutors at the trial in federal court in Brooklyn will give jurors a lesson in a bygone era when the five Italian Mafia families had a greater appetite for brazen crimes and deadly payback for betrayals. The defense will counter by accusing the government of using shady turncoat gangsters with faded memories or incentives to lie.

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