On a summer morning in 2013, FBI agents tore through the concrete floor of a small house in Queens, New York, near Liberty Avenue. The sound of power tools echoed through the basement as investigators chipped away at the cement, layer by layer, while forensic experts waited beside an open pit. Just a few blocks away, an aging Bonanno crime family associate named Vincent Asaro sat behind the wheel of his car. The man climbing into the passenger seat was Gaspar Valenti, Asaro’s cousin and longtime criminal partner.
What Asaro did not know was that Valenti was cooperating with the government. A recording device captured every word. Valenti told him that federal agents were all over Liberty Avenue. Asaro seemed confused.
For what? Valenti avoided giving the exact address. He knew the recording had to sound natural. He said only that he meant the place near Liberty Avenue.
That was enough. Asaro’s tone changed. For a few seconds neither man needed to say the name Paul Katz, the truck driver and warehouse worker who had vanished 44 years earlier after leaving his home to meet men connected to Jimmy Burke. Valenti asked what he could do.
Asaro replied that there was nothing to do. Then he ended the conversation with a warning: “Don’t call me. ”
Inside the basement, the FBI kept digging. The mob had believed that Paul Katz’s remains were gone, moved twice.
First, his body was buried under the floor. Years later, men returned, smashed the concrete, and tried to remove every trace. But they missed something. Bones, teeth, scraps of clothing, small pieces of a murdered man were left beneath a house that for decades had been tied to people close to Jimmy Burke.
The remains had waited under the neighborhood longer than many of the investigators searching for them had been alive. And the man who told the FBI where to dig was sitting next to one of the men prosecutors believed had helped put Katz there. But Paul Katz was not killed because of the Lufthansa heist. He had been dead for nine years before Burke’s crew robbed the airport.
His connection to that criminal machine mattered more than any participation in it. Katz knew the operation before it became famous. He knew where Jimmy Burke stored stolen goods. He knew which trucks arrived carrying stolen property.
He knew which men unloaded them. He knew how Burke’s gang made money before millions of dollars vanished from the Lufthansa terminal. And when police raided his warehouse, Jimmy Burke began asking the only question that could turn a business partner into a corpse. Paul Katz lived in Queens with his wife and five children.
He made a living as a truck driver and warehouse worker. On paper, those were ordinary jobs within the massive transportation economy around New York. But around John F. Kennedy Airport, the docks, freight terminals, factories, and highways, access to trucks meant access to wealth.
Stores across the city depended on daily deliveries. Clothing, furniture, electronics, food, cigarettes, appliances, and furs could fill a single truck with thousands of dollars in goods. A load could be sold quickly because buyers did not always ask where the discount came from. Truck hijacking was only the beginning.
Thieves needed information about what a vehicle carried and when it would leave. That information could come from a driver, a dispatcher, a warehouse worker, an airport employee, or someone watching a loading area. Then a crew would intercept the truck. The driver could be threatened, restrained, or ordered out.
The truck would be moved before police got a clear description. Stolen merchandise created another problem: it took up space. A truck loaded with clothes or furniture could not be hidden behind a social club. The load had to be unloaded, separated, and stored until middlemen found buyers.
That made warehouses essential. Warehouses created distance between the theft and the sale. Jimmy Burke was one of the men who connected those layers. He was an Irish-American criminal linked to the Lucchese crime family.
Because he was not Italian, he could never formally join, but he did not need a mafia title to control thieves and killers. He ran his operations out of Roberts Lounge in South Ozone Park. The bar looked ordinary from the outside. Inside, it operated as an office for men whose work could never produce formal contracts.
Burke heard about potential heists there. Drivers and hijackers brought information. Criminal partners discussed stolen goods, gambling, loans, and disputes. No secretary recorded decisions.
No accountant logged every payment. That lack of paperwork protected Burke from investigators. It also made personal knowledge extremely dangerous. A person who attended meetings inside Roberts Lounge might know who arranged a theft even when the stolen property could not be traced.
Paul Katz entered this world through his warehouse. According to testimony given years later, Gaspar Valenti visited the warehouse several times in the late 1960s. Trucks could back up to the loading dock, allowing men to move goods directly inside. Valenti recalled seeing people unloading stolen cargo.
The warehouse was valuable because it sat between Burke’s thieves and the buyers receiving stolen goods. Katz did not control Burke’s crew, but he controlled a site the crew needed. That gave him broad knowledge. He could identify the men delivering trucks.
He could describe the merchandise. He could connect stolen shipments to the people storing them. He could explain where goods went after they vanished from the road. For a while, that knowledge made him useful.
His family began to notice changes. His son Lawrence later testified that merchandise started coming into their home during 1969. Clothing, fur coats, furniture, and electronics were brought inside, sometimes through a bedroom window. The goods never stayed long.
They arrived, were stored, and then someone came to collect them. Lawrence was a young child. He saw things but could not understand the criminal operation behind them. His mother understood more.
Paul’s involvement caused tensions in the household. Stolen goods might bring money, but they also brought fear, arrests, and men whose loyalty depended on silence. The business continued until law enforcement reached the warehouse. Police raided the site and arrested men connected to the stolen property.
Vincent Asaro was among those taken in that operation. Asaro was a Bonanno family associate who worked closely with Burke despite belonging to a different crime family. Criminal partnerships did not always respect formal family boundaries when the money was large enough. According to Valenti’s testimony, Asaro returned to Roberts Lounge after the arrest in a rage.
He complained that other men had been released while he had been held overnight. That detail mattered. In the criminal world, an arrest rarely looked accidental. If one man remained in custody while others walked free, he began to wonder whether someone had made a deal.
Who received special treatment? Who spoke secretly with investigators? Who gave information to protect himself? Suspicion settled on Paul Katz.
After Katz was released on bail, law enforcement officers began calling his home. His son remembered hearing the name of Detective Sal Petix. Lawrence later testified that he understood the officers were there to help his father. The calls increased the tension inside the family.
Paul argued with his wife. She seemed nervous and afraid. Paul began talking about leaving New York. The family had bought property upstate.
He showed them plans for a house in the country, far from stolen trucks, criminal partners, and detective phone calls. To his children, the move looked like a quiet fresh start. To Jimmy Burke’s men, it looked like an attempt to run. If Katz had started helping the police, moving would not erase what he had already revealed.
And if he had not helped them, the mere contact was enough to destroy him. That was the mafia’s rule. A suspected informant never got a chance to prove his innocence in conversation. Suspicion itself was evidence enough.
The danger was not only in what Katz had said. It was in everything he could say. He knew the warehouse. He knew the stolen goods.
He knew the men tied to Roberts Lounge. He knew Burke’s methods. An investigator did not need Katz to solve every robbery. He needed Katz only to provide a starting point.
One name could lead to surveillance. One warehouse could lead to another location. One truck could connect a driver to a fence. The entire criminal machine depended on keeping every layer separate.
Paul Katz could connect them. On December 6, 1969, Katz’s children were home watching television when the phone rang. Paul answered. According to what his daughter later said in court, he told the family he had to meet some men at the candy store.
The description sounded innocent. Candy stores and small cafes were common meeting places in the neighborhood. Men went in, bought cigarettes or coffee, and talked without any formal arrangement. But Paul’s wife was immediately afraid.
She begged him not to go. When he refused, she asked him to take one of their children along. A child might protect him from violence. He refused again.
She asked him to take the family dog. He still refused. According to his son, Paul told the family that if he was not back in two hours, they should call the police. That statement revealed what he knew.
This was not an ordinary meeting. He understood there was a chance he would not come back. But refusing to meet Burke’s partners might look like proof that he had betrayed them. Paul left the house.
His wife locked the doors and turned off the lights. She made the children hide quietly inside while she waited. An hour passed, then another. Paul never returned.
The next day, his wife called Detective Sal Petix and reported him missing. That choice later became part of the government’s argument that Katz had been cooperating. She did not call any of her husband’s criminal partners. She called the detective who had been speaking with him after his arrest.
Searches turned up nothing. No witnesses came forward with a full account. No one admitted to arranging the meeting. Paul Katz simply disappeared from Queens.
His wife and children left New York soon afterward. They had no proof he was dead. All they knew was that he had gone to meet men from the criminal world and never come home. That uncertainty lasted for decades.
Certain death produces grief. Disappearance creates questions that return every morning. Was Paul killed? Did he run to protect them?
Was he living somewhere under another name? Could he still walk through the door? His wife never remarried. According to the family, she kept hoping he would return.
She died without ever learning what happened to her husband. The government’s reconstruction of the murder emerged only years later. Gaspar Valenti eventually told investigators that Vincent Asaro had contacted him around the time of Katz’s disappearance. Asaro needed access to a vacant house under construction near Liberty Avenue.
Valenti had connections to properties being built in the area. The address was 8148 102nd Road. The basement was unfinished. A hole could be dug before the floor was completed.
According to Valenti, Jimmy Burke and Vincent Asaro strangled Paul Katz with a dog chain because they believed he was an informant. Valenti did not claim to have witnessed the killing itself. He said he participated in hiding the result. A body was brought to the vacant house.
The hole was waiting. Paul Katz was placed beneath the basement floor. Valenti covered the grave with concrete. The house was finished.
Walls went up. Families eventually moved into the rooms. Every ordinary sound inside the building happened above a secret. Footsteps crossing the floor.
Furniture being moved. Children may have played only a few feet from where Paul Katz had been hidden. Jimmy Burke understood that controlling the property reduced the risk of discovery. According to trial evidence, the house was purchased through people connected to his circle and remained tied to Burke’s family for decades.
The concrete grave protected the killers because no one looking for a missing truck driver had any reason to break through a private basement floor. Time passed. Burke’s criminal empire grew. Roberts Lounge became linked to larger heists.
Then, in December 1978, Burke’s crew carried out the Lufthansa robbery at JFK Airport, stealing more than five million dollars in cash and about one million dollars in jewelry. Paul Katz had no part in that heist. He had been under the basement floor for nine years. But the robbery was run by the same kind of network he had known.
Inside information, airport connections, drivers, storage sites, fences, and trusted men who understood that silence was permanent. The Lufthansa heist made Jimmy Burke famous. The murder of Katz showed that Burke protected his secrets with violence long before the airport job. Men around the heist began to disappear, as Burke feared witnesses, mistakes, and disputes over money.
Paul had tested that system before millions were stolen. The warehouse raid had taught Burke that a man did not need to openly betray the gang to become dangerous. It was enough to make Burke feel uncertain. By the mid-1980s, Jimmy Burke was in prison.
Then word reached his partners that investigators were asking again about Paul Katz. The basement grave no longer seemed safe. According to Valenti’s testimony, Vincent Asaro summoned him to a stolen goods business and delivered a message from Burke. The body had to be moved.
Valenti later described Burke as suspicious and anxious during his imprisonment. The crime had stayed hidden for years, but Burke seemed to fear that someone would identify the house. Asaro directed Valenti and his son Jerome Asaro to return to the basement. They broke through the concrete floor.
The men found skeletal remains and decayed clothing inside the grave. They tried to remove everything. The remains were placed in containers and carried away. Where most of Paul Katz’s body was taken was never publicly known.
The men repaired the floor. They believed they had erased the last evidence. But removing a skeleton from a narrow grave is difficult. Small bones separate.
Teeth stay in the soil. Fragments get trapped under the concrete. The men missed parts of Paul’s hand and wrist. They missed vertebrae.
They missed pieces of other areas of his body. The basement kept what they failed to collect. The secret waited another generation. Jimmy Burke died in a federal prison in 1996 while serving a sentence for another murder.
He never stood trial for killing Paul Katz. Roberts Lounge disappeared. The Lufthansa money became legend. Books and films turned Burke’s criminal world into entertainment.
Paul’s family still had no grave. Then Gaspar Valenti began cooperating. Valenti had spent decades around the Bonanno family and Vincent Asaro. He admitted his own crimes and hoped cooperation would reduce his sentence.
That gave the defense an argument: a cooperating criminal has reasons to lie. Valenti needed evidence to support his story. He gave the FBI the address. On June 17, 2013, agents entered the Queens home with a search warrant and began digging the basement.
That was the morning Valenti climbed into Vincent Asaro’s car wearing a recording device. The conversation became powerful because neither man spoke openly. Valenti mentioned federal agents near Liberty Avenue. Asaro asked why they were there.
When Valenti clarified the location he meant, the tone changed. Valenti asked what he could do. Asaro told him there was nothing to do. Then came the final instruction: “Don’t call me.
” After Valenti left the car, FBI surveillance watched Asaro’s movements. Agents saw him drive past the dig site and later go to a business connected to his son Jerome. Inside the house, forensic experts found human remains, hair, teeth, and pieces of clothing. DNA tests compared the remains to samples from Paul Katz’s children and sister.
The result confirmed the victim’s identity. The bones belonged to Paul. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Forty-four years after he left to meet men at the candy store, Paul Katz had finally been found.
There was not enough left of him to explain every detail of the killing. But what remained was enough to prove he had not abandoned his family voluntarily. The discovery led to federal charges against Vincent Asaro and others in January 2014. The indictment placed the murder of Paul within the same racketeering case as the Lufthansa heist.
That connection created a misunderstanding that persists to this day. Paul Katz did not take part in the Lufthansa robbery. His murder was included because prosecutors argued that Vincent Asaro’s criminal partnership with Jimmy Burke spanned decades, from the warehouse operation and the Katz killing to the famous airport heist. Jerome Asaro admitted to helping move the body in the 1980s.
He pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that included acting as an accessory after the fact.