Parnell “Stacks” Edwards was killed on December 18, 1978, at 6:17 in the morning. Tommy DeSimone walked into his Ozone Park, Queens apartment and fired six shots, five of which struck the 28-year-old in the face and chest. The killing took 11 seconds. The Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas reduced Edwards to a punchline, a cocaine-addicted crew member who couldn’t follow a simple instruction.
But the real story of the man behind that scene is far more complex. Before he drifted into the criminal world, Edwards was a professional boxer with real discipline and a legitimate athletic career. Parnell Steven Edwards was born in Brooklyn on July 19, 1950. He grew up in Brownsville, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city at the time.
His father worked in a factory and his mother cleaned houses. For most kids in that environment, options were scarce. Edwards had one advantage, he could fight. By age 14, he was six feet tall, lean, and fast.
A local trainer spotted him in a street fight and urged him to come to the gym. At 15, Edwards began training at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, a legendary boxing hub where Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier trained. It was a demanding environment where talent was tested daily against hardened fighters, and Edwards survived. He turned professional at 19.
Between 1969 and 1974, he fought 14 bouts as a lightweight at 135 pounds, compiling a record of seven wins, five losses, and two draws. The record wasn’t spectacular, but it reflected consistent professionalism. He showed up for every fight, never quit mid-bout, trained six days a week without being told, and didn’t drink or smoke. Promoters and trainers respected his reliability.
The problem was the money. A journeyman boxer in the 1970s earned between $500 and $2,000 per fight, and Edwards fought roughly four times a year. That meant an annual income of about $2,000 in New York City, which was impossible to live on. The sport he had devoted his adolescence to never provided financial security, no matter how disciplined he was.
There is a persistent myth that Edwards served as Muhammad Ali’s bodyguard. The reality is less glamorous but more telling. During the early 1970s, Ali trained for major fights in New York and Pennsylvania, and his camps were chaotic environments filled with sparring partners, journalists, fans, and hangers-on. Edwards was one of several fighters hired to stand at doors, check who was coming in, and control crowds.
The proximity to Ali was real, but the access was limited. He wasn’t traveling with Ali or staying in the same hotels. For a kid from Brownsville, being inside those camps felt like arrival. It felt like being close to greatness was the same as participating in it.
That gap between proximity and participation, between being near power and actually having it, would follow Edwards for the rest of his short life. By 1975, his boxing career was effectively finished. At 25, Edwards had no improving record, no title shots, and no money. He tried legitimate work, taking jobs in construction and as a nightclub bouncer in Queens.
Both paid, but neither replaced the identity that boxing had given him. The discipline that had defined him for a decade began to erode without the structure of the gym. By 1977, Edwards had developed a cocaine habit. It was expensive, and he didn’t have the money to sustain it.
He began spending time around gamblers, bookmakers, and small-time criminals in Queens. Through those connections, he ended up at Roberts Lounge in South Ozone Park, inside the orbit of Jimmy Burke, a Lucchese crime family associate who ran hijacking and fencing operations. Burke didn’t recruit Edwards because he was smart or ambitious. He recruited him because Edwards was available, physically imposing, and desperate.
The jobs were small at first, driving cars, picking up packages, and standing at doors. Burke paid well compared to what Edwards had earned as a boxer, $200 for a night’s work, $500 for a weekend, up to $1,000 for riskier jobs. For a man who had fought four times a year for a fraction of that, it felt like serious money. It felt like being valued.
Edwards never understood his position. In the hierarchy of organized crime, there are bosses, underbosses, captains, soldiers, associates, and below all of that, hired help. Edwards wasn’t even an associate. He had no family connections, no institutional protection, and no leverage.
If he disappeared, nobody in the Lucchese family would ask questions. Burke knew this, and that’s why he chose him. Men who are most useful to criminals like Burke are always the most expendable. On December 11, 1978, at 3:17 in the morning, six armed men entered the Lufthansa cargo terminal at John F.
Kennedy International Airport and walked out with $5. 8 million in cash and $850,000 in jewelry. It was the largest cash robbery in American history. Burke masterminded it, Tommy DeSimone executed it, and Henry Hill facilitated it.
Edwards was given one job, drive the getaway van to a scrapyard in New Jersey and have it crushed. The van was the single most dangerous piece of physical evidence. It had fingerprints on the steering wheel, door handles, and gear shift. Edwards’ cut for the job was $10,000.
All he had to do was drive 15 miles and watch the van get compressed. Instead, he drove the van to his girlfriend’s apartment building in Ozone Park. He parked it on the street, went inside, smoked cocaine, and fell asleep. The van sat there for three days.
On December 14, police found it parked too close to a fire hydrant and towed it. Crime scene technicians lifted fingerprints from everywhere, Edwards’ prints and those of other crew members. In 72 hours, the perfect heist had a physical evidence problem. The question that rarely gets asked is why Burke gave the most critical post-heist job to a cocaine addict.
Burke wasn’t stupid. He had watched Edwards’ reliability deteriorate for months. The answer is that Burke didn’t trust Edwards to handle the job properly. He trusted Edwards to fail.
By December of 1978, Edwards knew too much, the crew, the plan, the participants, and where the money went. He was a cocaine addict, which made him unpredictable. He was desperate, which made him potentially purchasable. And he was unprotected, which meant killing him carried no consequences.
When the job wasn’t done, Burke had his justification. Edwards compromised the crew, left evidence, and put everyone at risk. That narrative made the murder feel like consequence rather than premeditation, but it was premeditation. Burke had killed Martin Krugman, who had done nothing wrong.
He killed Louis Cafora, who had just bought a Cadillac. He killed Robert McMahon and Joe Manri, who had stayed quiet and followed orders. Burke killed people because they knew things, not because they had done things. Edwards knew things, and he was the easiest one to kill.
On December 18, 1978, at 6:17 in the morning, DeSimone and Angelo Sepe walked into Edwards’ apartment. They didn’t knock. DeSimone told Edwards’ girlfriend to go into the bedroom. She went.
DeSimone raised the gun and fired six times. Five bullets hit Edwards in the face and chest. One lodged in the wall. The whole thing took 11 seconds.
Goodfellas gave the role of Stacks Edwards to Samuel L. Jackson, who played what was on the page, an unreliable junkie who gets killed. There was no room in that version for the boxer, the discipline, or the decade spent inside legitimate athletic culture before desperation pushed him elsewhere. There is a detail almost nobody talks about.
In 1975, before his career fully collapsed, a trainer offered Edwards a full-time job at Gleason’s Gym training young fighters. It was steady income and a future built on the only thing he had ever been truly good at. Edwards turned it down. He said he wanted one more shot at a real fight.
That shot never came, and by the time he was ready to accept the offer, it was gone. Edwards was buried in Brooklyn, not far from where he grew up. The funeral was small. His mother was there, his girlfriend, and a few faces from the old boxing gyms.
Nobody from Burke’s crew attended. They had already forgotten him before the dirt was settled. Edwards was not a screw-up.
He was a man the system failed first and the mob killed second.