Doug Feiden - The 10,000,000 Dollar Getaway. The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist

Diversion Books
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Copyright 1980 by Doug Feiden
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-162681-421-9

To Bobby Spellman of the old Journal American and the old New York Post.

Kennedy Airport is the largest inspiration to the criminal impulse within our geographical limits.

Murray Kempton

New York Post columnist

Dont read any newspapers under any circumstances.

Judge Mark A. Costantino,

in the Lufthansa trial

Its Christmas Day,
And were on our way
To a ventilation job
In Gravesend Bay.

Irish cop, New York City

It was a crime that was hatched in the bars of Ozone Park. Barely three hours after it was over, the word was already out on the street. Even before the first corpse surfaced, everyone knew it was coming. The name didnt matter. The face wasnt important. The identification papers in the wallet didnt count for much. The how and the why meant as little as the who. It could just as well have been any one of a number of people. The only thing that mattered was that the first dead man wouldnt be the last. The contracts are out, one mobster said. It was his use of the plural that was most disturbing.

The money from Building 261 hadnt been stashed, or even counted yet. The jewelry hadnt been divided. The foreign currency hadnt been washed. The pawnshops and the black markets hadnt been flooded with hot goods yet. None of the thieves had left town. There would be time soon enough for all of that. For the moment, there were prioritiesgrim priorities. And everyone knew what came next. The contracts are out. Plural.

It was a crime that started clean and ended dirty. The day after it was over, an informant told the FBI: Now, they stack the bodies. The word filtered down through the wise-guy network: Stay low, real low, if you dont want to get ventilated. The word filtered down as it only can in Queens: Trouble brewing. Were going on the mattress. Stay low.

It was a crime that would touch thousands of people, transforming the lives of everybody who got tangled in its web, and ending the lives of at least ten of them. Two days after it was over, the mob capo spoke to his underboss. There were bodies coming. The underboss told his button man. The button man told his cargo thief. The cargo thief told his fence. The fence told his resident street pug.

It was a crime that would alter the Mafias means of doing business in New York, and change, perhaps forever, the very nature of the institution itself. Three days after it was over, the resident street pug told his bookmaker. Bodies were coming. The bookie told his shylock. The shy told his torpedo. The torpedo told his bartender. And the barkeep told his friend, the one who had helped him out of a jam once, the one he owed a favor to, the one who sipped beer when everybody else downed whiskey because the city bought him his drinks, the undercover cop.

If you were a wise guy, and you lived in Brooklyn and you drank in Queens, and your bartender was a wise guy too, and he caught wind of something, and he slipped you the word, you got a break many others would never get. It didnt mean youd stay alive, not in these circles, but at least you had a better chance. It was a crime in which a lot of people would never get that chance. Four days after it was over, from the darkened aerie of one of the most foreboding mob joints in the city, a prominent gangster got a break. Stay outta here, he was told. Theres no percentage in it for you anymore. Who was going to argue? Others he knew wouldnt get the word. Soon theyd be in jail, in hiding, or dead.

The law would come out of this crime looking not much better than the mob. Five days after it was over, the memo came down from the commissioners office at One Police Plaza. Couched in bureaucratese, it made no sense at all. It spoke of a rapidly accelerating turnover rate expected among organized crime figures. It became the job of the station house captains to translate that double talk into a street English their line men could understand. Dump jobs is what it means, said the lieutenant at the 113th. More than one. If they know what theyre talking about downtown, you guysll be finding bodies in car trunks all over the precinct.

It seldom worked out that way, but this time they knew what they were talking about downtown. The lieutenant had been right. Mob bigs had held a sit-down. They drew up a little list. They farmed out the contracts. And six days after it was over, hit teams were on the street, gin mills were staked out, private homes were ringed with bodyguards, and nine men and one woman were already living out their lives on borrowed time. For one man, in fact, time had already run out.

Seven days after it was over, NYPD Homicide got the first call. The detective on duty filed the report in classic deadpan police lingo. Unidentified man shot DOA by unknown perps for unknown reasons, it began. No further, it ended. But there it was, writ large in the police blotter. Just a week after it happened, the bloodletting had begun. The tabloids trumpeted it in streamers across six columns: UP, DOWN, AND INTO THE GRAVE! And the next day, there was a new catchword sprinting through the streets: Flatlands Tony is back.

A not-so-funny comedy of errors and terrors had begun.

A baseball bat across the temple is a sloppy way to kill a man. The trunk of a car in Brooklyn is an unhygienic place to stow his body. But the technology of the hit was never very sophisticated, and that was the way he wanted it. There were many methods, all of them crude, none of them pretty, and Flatlands Tony knew them all.

Two hours in the acid baths, if the chemicals are properly mixed, and all thats left of a man are the gold fillings in his teeth. Ten minutes in an auto salvage compactor, and a six-foot hoodlum becomes approximately the size of a ten-inch fanbelt, his bones ground so finely into the metal that they can become a part of next years Oldsmobile. Equally effective, though not nearly so refined, is the old Sicilian method: six or seven shots fired into the chest and head from a low-caliber handgun at close range. Then theres the Elliot Ness-style submachine gun. Or the Colt pistol with the silencer screwed on to muffle the blast; with a rare touch of poetry, thats known in mob parlance as the whispering death. For disposal, theres the East River, the Hudson, Jamaica Bay, the Gowanus Canal, and the swirling southern currents of the ebb tide.

This was Flatlands Tonys work, murder for hire, and a week after it was over he had already completed his first assignment.

Hulking, barrel-chested, massively built, yet benign, almost grandfatherly in appearance, Flatlands Tony was known as a torpedo to the mob, a hit man to the newspaper-reading public, and a common murderer to the FBI, which desperately wanted to lock him up, but had never quite figured out how. He was scar-faced and in his mid sixties. His hair was gray and wavy, giving him an almost distinguished appearance, and his suits all had continental labels. His mug shots showed him grinning ridiculously. For Flatlands Tony was quick to flash a toothy, endearing, almost childlike smile, a strange trait for a notorious, cold-blooded killer. That smile became his trademark. It seemed somehow to express all the glee he so obviously found in his calling.