Angelo Sepe lay dead on the floor of his basement apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on the morning of July 18, 1984. He was 42 years old, shot multiple times in the head. Next to him, 19-year-old Joanne Lombardo had been killed with a single execution-style shot through the mouth. A loaded gun sat untouched on a nearby table.
Drug paraphernalia was scattered around the room, left to suggest a deal gone wrong. Police found no witnesses, no suspects, and no justice. Just two more bodies in a Brooklyn basement. Sepe was not an ordinary mobster.
He had lived through the aftermath of the Lufthansa heist, the largest cash robbery in American history, when Jimmy Burke systematically murdered nearly everyone connected to the $6 million score. Sepe had been one of Burke’s most trusted killers, a man who helped execute the robbery and then helped eliminate the witnesses. He survived years longer than most of that cursed crew. In the end, it was not the FBI that got him, and it was not Burke’s paranoia.
It was his own crime family, the Lucchese organization he had served since he was a teenager, that put the bullets in his head. Angelo John Sepe was born in Ozone Park, Queens, in 1941. He had his first arrest at age 14 and a growing rap sheet by his early twenties: petty larceny, burglary, bank robbery, assault. He was arrested 14 times before turning 30.
Lean and wiry, he was the kind of man you would not remember in a lineup, which made him valuable for the work he did. Yet those who knew him remembered a softer side. Sepe collected stray animals, nursing injured birds and abandoned cats back to health in his home. Neighbors saw the hardened criminal carefully wrapping a broken bird’s wing with tape and popsicle sticks.
The same hands that would put a bullet in a man’s head spent evenings caring for sparrows. In the early 1970s, Sepe came to the attention of James Burke, the legendary hijacker known as Jimmy the Gent, who ran his operations out of Robert’s Lounge in Queens. Burke cultivated killers, and Sepe was eager to learn. He became part of Burke’s tight circle of thieves and murderers connected to Paul Vario’s faction of the Lucchese family.
These were not made men. They were associates, doing the robberies, beatings, and killings while hoping for the day they would be formally inducted into La Cosa Nostra. For most, that day never came. Sepe’s closest friend was Tommy DeSimone, the real Tommy Two Guns, a tall, meticulously groomed man who carried two pearl-handled pistols.
The two were inseparable. They hijacked together, killed together, and even committed murders while incarcerated, taking contracts from mob bosses doing time with them. By 1978, Burke had spent years in federal prison on extortion charges. When he returned to Queens, he found his crew in need of a big score.
That score came from an unlikely source: Louis Werner, a 47-year-old Lufthansa cargo supervisor at Kennedy Airport. Werner was drowning in gambling debt, owing $18,000 to bookmakers on a $15,000 annual salary. He had already robbed Lufthansa once before, stealing $22,000 in foreign currency with a coworker in 1976. Now he needed something much bigger.
Werner reached out through his bookie, Martin Krugman. Krugman knew Henry Hill. Hill knew Burke. Within days, the pieces were moving.
Werner provided everything Burke needed: detailed sketches of the building, the vault location, alarm specifications, employee schedules, and security procedures. His cut was supposed to be 10 percent, $500,000. He never received a penny. On December 11, 1978, at 2:55 a.
m. , a black Ford Econoline van pulled up to the Lufthansa cargo terminal. Six men in dark clothing and ski masks were inside. Angelo Sepe was among them, his job to intimidate and control.
The crew entered the building, rounded up ten employees, and forced the night shift manager to disable the alarm and open the vault. Inside were 72 cartons containing $5. 8 million in cash and $850,000 in jewelry. The total take was around $6 million, the largest cash robbery in American history at the time.
The crew loaded everything in less than 30 minutes. No shots fired. No alarms triggered. The gang drove to a garage in Canarsie, where Burke was waiting.
The money was transferred to two cars and distributed among the crew. One man was left behind with a simple job: Parnell Stacks Edwards was supposed to dispose of the van, crush it at a junkyard in New Jersey. Instead, he drove to his girlfriend’s apartment, did cocaine, and fell asleep. Two days later, police spotted the van parked too close to a fire hydrant.
They ran the plates, found it stolen, and impounded it. Crime scene techs found fingerprints everywhere. Stacks’s fingerprints. Burke’s paranoia exploded.
With the money split twenty ways, there were twenty potential witnesses. Burke calculated that it was easier to kill the crew than to pay them. Angelo Sepe became his executioner. Seven days after the heist, Sepe and DeSimone walked into Stacks Edwards’s apartment.
Stacks trusted them. DeSimone shot him six times in the head. That was murder number one. Martin Krugman went next.
He kept asking for his cut, and he kept showing up at Robert’s Lounge while FBI surveillance was parked outside. In early January 1979, Krugman vanished. Henry Hill claimed Burke and Sepe killed him, dismembered his body with a chainsaw, and scattered the pieces. His body was never found.
Louie Cefalu, who weighed 300 pounds, ignored Burke’s order to lay low and bought his wife a custom pink Cadillac. Within weeks, both Cefalus disappeared. Robert Frenchy McMahon and Joe Buddha Manri, both part of the robbery crew, refused to cooperate with the FBI. On May 16, 1979, they were found shot execution-style in the back of the head, sitting together in a parked Buick in Brooklyn.
Paolo LiCastri, a Sicilian enforcer sent by the Gambino family, annoyed Burke with his demands. In June 1979, his burned, naked, bullet-riddled corpse was found on a trash heap. Richard Eaton and Tom Monteleone, accused of skimming laundered heist cash, were eliminated; children discovered Eaton’s hog-tied, frozen body in a meat truck. Teresa Ferrara’s headless torso washed ashore in New Jersey.
By summer 1979, nine people connected to Lufthansa were dead or missing. Angelo Sepe was still breathing. He survived because he kept his mouth shut, followed orders, and remained useful. Burke still needed his trigger man.
DeSimone did not survive. He was called to a meeting where he believed he was finally being made, formally inducted into the Lucchese family. He never came back. Years later it emerged that John Gotti had him killed, not because of Lufthansa, but because years earlier DeSimone had murdered a Gambino associate without permission.
Sepe lost his best friend and could do nothing about it. In the Mafia, you do not avenge unauthorized hits. You accept them. Burke was eventually arrested for fixing Boston College basketball games and later convicted of murdering Richard Eaton.
He died in prison in 1996 from lung cancer, never officially charged with anything connected to Lufthansa. The FBI could not build a case. Too many witnesses were dead. The money was never recovered.
Louis Werner, the inside man, was the only person ever convicted, sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Sepe survived five and a half years after the heist. He returned to low-level crime, served time for parole violations, and stayed connected to the Lucchese family. By 1984, he was 42, a criminal lifer living in a basement apartment in Bensonhurst.
He kept a loaded gun nearby. According to police reports, he had told associates a chilling prophecy: when his time came, his own people would kill him. In early 1984, Sepe made a fatal mistake. He robbed a drug dealer, beat him up, and took thousands of dollars in cash and cocaine.
The dealer paid protection money to the Mafia. When a protected dealer is robbed, the family must respond or the entire protection racket collapses. Every dealer and bookie in Brooklyn would stop paying. The order came down from within the Lucchese family.
The same family Sepe had served his entire adult life. The same family he had killed for. None of that mattered. He broke the rules, and the rules are absolute.
On the morning of July 18, 1984, someone knocked on Sepe’s door. Multiple shooters entered quickly. Sepe was shot multiple times in the head. His girlfriend was shot once through the mouth.
The loaded gun on the table was never touched. The drug paraphernalia was left as window dressing. Police arrived at 8:10 a. m.
, investigated, and closed the case unsolved. Federal prosecutor Edward McDonald told the New York Times that investigators believed Sepe was one of the gunmen in the Lufthansa robbery, but there was never enough evidence for an indictment because so many witnesses had been killed. Sepe became the 11th person connected to Lufthansa to die. The case remained officially unsolved until Vincent Asaro was tried and acquitted in 2015, 37 years after the heist.
Not a single dollar of the $6. 6 million was ever recovered. Today, there is nothing marking the basement apartment at 8869 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst. No plaque, no memorial.
Just another Brooklyn address where, four decades ago, two people were executed. Angelo Sepe lived the Mafia life for 25 years. When it ended, it ended quickly, violently, and permanently, just as he had predicted.
His own people killed him.