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The connection between the Lufthansa heist and a point-shaving scandal at BC

Jimmy the Gent

The arrest this week of an alleged New York capo on a variety of organized crime charges might seem to have little to do with Boston, especially not the planning and execution of a huge heist at Kennedy Airport.

But some of the evidence, the New York Times reports, comes in the form of human remains dug up from under the Queens home of the daughter of James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, the supposed mastermind of the Lufthansa heist - and a key participant in a point-shaving scandal at Boston College that started a few months after the Lufthansa job.

Wikipedia has more on Burke and the 1978-79 BC basketball team. Burke helped organize the BC plot, which involved not just the players but a national network of bookies, even as he was busy murdering many of the smaller fish who helped him carry out the Lufthansa job. The Lufthansa crime became so famous, it was made into a movie, "Goodfellas," with Robert De Niro playing Burkey.

In 1982, Burke, who, like Whitey Bulger, owned a bar and liked preferred people himself, was convicted for his role as financier of the BC plot. He later got a life sentence for a murder unrelated to the BC scandal.

H/t Lisa. Photo via Wikipedia.

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Comments

The movie Goodfellas was based on Nicholas Pileggi's book "Wiseguy", which has a lot more detail on Henry Hill's life than the movie. There's information in there about the BC point-shaving scandal as well as a lot of Hill's other activities that either aren't covered in the movie or only glossed over (e.g. the whole drug connection from Pittsburgh).

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"According to Pileggi, Scorsese cold-called the writer and told him, 'I've been waiting for this book my entire life.' To which Pileggi replied 'I've been waiting for this phone call my entire life'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodfellas

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For the movie, Burke was renamed Jimmy Conway, fer crissakes.

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