NEW YORK (AP) – For decades, prosecutors say, Vincent Asaro managed to keep his role in an infamous mob heist immortalized in the hit movie “Goodfellas” hidden from the outside world while 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 and will go on trial Monday on charges he pocketed a cut of the $6 million Lufthansa robbery at Kennedy Airport in 1978 – one of the largest cash thefts in American history.
If convicted, he’d 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.
Asaro, 80, who has a history of convictions for lesser mob-related crimes, was arrested again after his cousin, Gaspare Valenti, came forward with new information about the heist and agreed to wear a wire to try to coax admissions out of the reputed longtime member of the Bonanno crime family. Prosecutors haven’t revealed why their key witnesses turned on Asaro, though it’s believed he may have held a grudge after being cheated out of a cut of Asaro’s $750,000 take from the heist, said Jerry Capeci, a Mafia expert who writes the ganglandnews.com web column.