Hey everyone and welcome to Real Life for a Crime Daily for Wednesday, February 22, 2023,

and I'm Jim Chapman. I'm Woody Overton. And I'm Mike Agavino. And today we are going to continue

with our crimes of the Century series. Going in a little bit different direction today,

talking about the Lufthansa Heist of 1978. For those of you who don't know, Lufthansa is the

national airline of Germany and has been around for a gazillion years, believe it's owned by

the German government. The biggest heist in US history at the time it was committed

at JFK Airport in New York in 1978. We are going to talk about the heist. We're going to talk about

the people involved on the inside, the people involved on the outside, how pieces of this story

were blended into the movie Goodfellas and go back and forth a little bit between some of the

characters in the movie and those in Real Life. And I think you'll find this really informative.

So I'm going to first talk about the mafia a little bit and give you a feel for

structures and who's got what job and how it all kind of works.

Yeah, so in 1931 following decades of turf warfare, Brooklyn,

bootlegger, Salvatore, Maran Zano established the leaders of the New York City's five largest

Italian American criminal organizations and declared himself Kapo de Tuti Kapi, which is

translated the boss of all bosses. Maran Zano was soon killed off. The other bosses preferred

sharing leadership under what became known as the commission, but his creation lived on in the five

families of New York became central players in the saga of the American mafia. The five families

of New York consisted of the banana family, the Colombo family, the Genevese family, the Luckezi family,

and the Gambino family. The New York Mafia in the 70s have their hands in everything,

extortion, hijacking, gambling, loan sharking, drug trafficking, prostitution, weapons dealing,

smuggling, counterfeiting, robbery, and a ton of other things. And they favored unregulated or

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