Jimmy the Gent

Jimmy Burke was a key player in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy and brilliantly portrayed by Robert De Niro in Goodfellas, but the explosive life story of the underworld architect of the greatest heist in American history has never been told—until now in the first-ever, fully comprehensive biography of the notorious Jimmy the Gent.

James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke wasn’t blood to the Lucchese crime family of the Italian Mafia, but the brazen Irishman’s moneymaking criminal enterprises, fearlessness, and loyalty earned him respect among the crime bosses he served. Coldhearted, calculating, and vicious, Jimmy the Gent would eventually carve his own sensational path through the underworld.

Jimmy’s crowning achievement—the legendary 1978 multimillion-dollar Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport—is an untold story that Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative Mob journalist Anthony M. DeStefano, author of The Big Heist, uncovers for the first time. From Jimmy’s unsettled youth, having been abandoned by his brutal father and long-suffering mother and shuffled through several foster homes, to his delinquent teen years of crimes and street-smart survival, Jimmy eventually found a family who warmed to him: the Luccheses, the dominant force in New York and New Jersey’s organized crime.

From protégé to mentor, Jimmy would soon rub shoulders with the likes of eventual informant Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, Paul Vario, and William “Billy Batts” Bentvena. And though Burke would spend nearly one-third of his life behind bars, in the end, he managed to outlast the treacheries of his lifetime.

Featuring new insights and revelations involving the violent decades-long aftermath of the legendary heist, Jimmy the Gent is the riveting full story behind the man who would become firmly ensconced in Mob folklore as one of the most notorious Irish gangsters and grand larcenists of the 20th century.