Joe Manri
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Joseph Manriquez-Manri or "Joe Buddha" (December 1, 1932 - May 16, 1979) was a suspect in the Lufthansa heist.
[edit] Employment at the JFK Airport
He was one of several brothers from a family of immigrants residing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He shortened his surname from Manriquez to Manri in the mid-to-late '60s for the sake of his children - at a time when prejudices were the "norm" in NYC schools. For an immigrant with limited education, Joe was successful, and found a job at the John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) for Air France as an incoming cargo foreman, where he became friends with fellow foreman Robert McMahon. Joe was a long-time employee and member of the Local 295 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He was one of the fifteen hundred cargo handlers, controlling the loading and unloading of air freight at JFK for Air France. He was also a member of the National Association of Air Freight which handled the transporting of air freight in and out of the airport. He was fortunate to work for the second largest airline in Europe, and the world's sixth largest airline, operating services to two hundred destinations in a hundred countries together. As a cargo agent he received air freight shipments, supervised their loading and unloading and was responsible for keeping up written records. He also directly handled contracts with air freight forwarders and the customers. McMahon is thought to have been the one who introduced Manriquez to Jimmy Burke.
[edit] Friendship with Robert McMahon
In the 1960s he became a close friend of fellow JFK Airport employee Robert McMahon who was employed as the night-shift Air France cargo foreman. Through his work at the airport Manri and Robert McMahon became close inseparable friends. They had many things in common, both used their positions at the airport to commit crimes, and both were constant womanizers. In the 1970s when Robert started to become estranged from his third wife and mother of his children. He was drinking heavily and womanizing constantly. When McMahon fell on hard times, Joe allowed him to sublet a tenement apartment in South Ozone Park, Queens with him. Joe was sternly drilled in his ways as a bachelor. Robert was a gusher of newly tapped oil spraying about in all directions. Joe's emotional background was tight, controlled, with everything in its proper place, and was unhappy over his weight problems and deeply unaffectionate. His friend McMahon roared out of a conflagration of overlapping, overspilling, competing and confusing flialing emotionsin which was as it seemed, Joe was austere, Robert profligate, Joe was clean and tiny, Robert was messy and unorganized. Over time Manriquez became a close friend of McMahon, and when McMahon fell on financial troubles with child support, gambling, and alimony payments, the two workers moved in together in an Ozone Park, Queens apartment to split the costs of living. Manriquez was a member of the "Robert's Lounge Crew", an associate of Irish-American mobster Jimmy Burke. The difference between the two men was that Giuseppe knew how to save and invest his earnings, Robert gambled at the Aqueduct Racetrack or spend it on escorts, upper class night clubs and discoteques like Studio 54. There wasn't a day that he wasn't playing craps or throwing dice at Robert's Lounge or The Bamboo Lounge.
[edit] Involvement in hijackings and theft
The Air Cargo Center, where the Lufthansa terminal was housed, leased its vast space out at the time of his employment to twenty-eight different airlines including at the time of his employment Sundrome of National Airlines, Eastern Airlines, American Airlines, Lufthansa, Air France and TWA, including many air express agencies Continental Airlines, Evergreen International Airlines, FedEx Freight, Japan Airlines, Korean Air, United Airlines, customhouse brokerage firms, federal customhouse Port Authority of New York and New Jersey inspection services, and private carting companies. Each of the twenty-eight airlines kept their own valuables in specially guarded security rooms, some of them enclosed by steel, cinder blocks or wire cages.
The first accounting of thefts from the Air Cargo Center revealed in 1967, during Manri's employment showed that $2,245,868 in cargo had been stolen during the preceding ten months. This amount though did not include the hundreds of hijackings of airport cargo stolen outside the vicinity of the airport itself, from transport trucks nor did it include thefts in the airport valued less that a $1,000. During the ten-month period in the 1967 survey forty-five major robberies were committed at the Air Cargo Center, including thefts of clothing, palladium ingots, pearls, watches, musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, cigarette, phonograph records, over the counter pharmaceuticals, wigs and diamonds. All of these robberies were suspected to have been performed with information, or assistance from Manri and Robert McMahon.
[edit] "Known associate of Jimmy Burke"
Joe had been proposed to be a member of the Lucchese crime family sometime before 1968. After he was nominated by Jimmy Burke or Frank Manzo he was called to meet with Paul Vario to confirm the heritage of his biological father. For all Paul Vario or Johnny Dio knew was that Manri could have been another nationality and had changed his name, which was what exactly Joe had done. As a recruit under Jimmy Burke, Joe was scrutinized on the subject. It was thought that someone must have known Manri had originally been Manriquez. Due to his Spanish heritage, Joe could never be a made man, although he still had hopes. Jimmy Burke, who overlooked the Lucchese crime family hijacking operation at John F. Kennedy Airport was a close friend of Joe Manri. Burke then sent Joe Manri to look over the plan at the The Airline Diner (now The Jackson Hole Diner) located at 69-35 Astoria Boulevard in Astoria, Queens with Werner on the hood of his car to see the exact plan layout for the Lufthansa heist. The plan was approved and Joe Manri was later sent to pay Werner for his well orchestrated plan. Louis even told Manri where Frank James Burke should park his car, so as not to arouse suspicion from the airport security.
[edit] Stolen airline ticket sales
Joe first became involved in the gang through Henry Hill helping steal airline tickets with stolen credit cards in 1967 with Parnell Edwards whose expertise was credit card fraud and fellow JFK employee Robert McMahon. Manri and Henry Hill would purchase thousands' of dollars worth of airline tickets which they would either cash for a full reimbursement or sell them at 50% discounts to willing customers. Frank Sinatra Jr.'s manager Dante Barzotinni, known to mobsters as "Tino Barzie" was one of Manri and Hill's best customers. One time Dante bought $50,000 worth of tickets from them to fly Frank Sinatra Jr. and a group of eight friends accompanying him on a trip around the country. Barzie was eventually indicted and convicted of the purchasing stolen airline tickets in the 1970s, but did not implicate either Manri or Henry Hill. He would also swindle the most expensive Las Vegas casinos through his job position. The major Vegas casinos routinely pay for the air fare for VIP guests. Every time Henry, Jimmy, Paul or members of the Vario Crew went to Las Vegas, Nevada Joe would purchase ten to fifteen bogus first class tickets from Lufthansa with stolen credit cards, and the casinos would give the travelling mobsters a compensation check that was valued up to $15,000 to compensate for their group of ghost passengers.
[edit] Grand Theft Auto
In the 1970s Joe started stealing cars. He would hot wire pre-selected small compact fuel efficient cars from the long term parking lots around JFK Airport and in the neighborhoods of Woodmere, New York, Howard Beach, Queens, Woodhaven, Queens, Ozone Park, Queens, Jamaica, Queens, Ridgewood, Queens, Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, Maspeth, Queens, Floral Park, Queens, Elmont, New York and Valley Stream, New York. He would deliver them to Clyde Brooks at the Bargain Auto Junkyard in Starrett City, Brooklyn on Flatlands Avenue. After Joe would leave the car, his mobster accomplices Henry Hill and Edguardo Rigaud would change the license plate and vehicle identification number with a scraped automobile from the yard. The stolen vehicles would then later be shipped from the New York Harbor to Port-au-Prince, Haiti through Edguardo's import-export company in Ozone Park, Queens. Joe would be paid $100 per car on delivery. Joe was never convicted of his part in Henry Hill's chop shops and grand theft auto smuggling ring. Joe was very prosperous in stealing cars and earned good money that way.
[edit] Gangland execution
Manri, if he turned state's evidence, could implicate Jimmy Burke and help implicate the suspects Tommy DeSimone, Angelo John Sepe, who were positively identified by Lufthansa employees who witnessed the robbery, and his friend Robert McMahon. It is thought that Manri was murdered because of his boisterous and natural swagger, which worried Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke. Manri had been sent by Jimmy Burke to check out Louis Werner's plan that Werner had sketched out, huddled outside the Kennedy Airport Diner on the hood of his car. Burke had also placed Manri responsible for leaving $85,000 at the airport motel for Werner, which was his payment. Had Louis Werner chosen to cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation he could have only implicated Manri. On the afternoon of May 16, 1979 in Brooklyn, just over half a year after the robbery, Manri and McMahon were found dead in a 1972 Buick Riviera. Each had received a single gunshot wound to the back of the head from a .45 caliber pistol. . It is also suspected that Jimmy Burke paid Paolo LiCastri $50,000 to murder McMahon and Manri. Afterwards, Paolo LiCastri himself would later be found murdered, most likely at the hands of his benefactor Jimmy Burke. The two Lufthansa employees were not shot and dumped in a dumpster to be discovered to sanitation workers, as portrayed in the movie Goodfellas. During the initial investigation conducted by police upon discovery of the bodies, one of the onlookers in the crowd was rising mobster Sammy Gravano who would briefly mention seeing the slain corpses of McMahon and Manri in their Buick Riviera in his biography.
[edit] Lufthansa Investigation in Retrospect
Joe Manri was warned by investigating FBI Supervisor Frank Carbone that he and Robert McMahon were at risk of dangerous repercussions following the Lufthansa heist, but he refused to come in. Frank would later comment about the investigation in retrospect, “We could have saved their lives if only they had come to us. But our efforts to warn them fell on deaf ears – they were either too greedy or too scared. You hate to see people killed. But it’s also a great frustration to us. They were links in the case that are cut off now.
[edit] In popular culture
- He is portrayed as Joe Budda in the 1990 film Goodfellas by Clem Caserta.
- There is a rap artist from the Ukraine named "Freestyle Frenzy-Joe Buddha".
- In the HBO series The Sopranos there is a fictional character named Dante "Buddha" Greco portrayed by the actor Anthony J. Ribustello. He is an associate of the Soprano crime family (formerly known as the DiMeo crime family) and a member of the Jackie Aprile crew. Dante appears in the episodes "All Happy Families...", "Irregular Around the Margins", "All Due Respect", "Members Only", "Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request", "Live Free or Die", "Stage 5", "Chasing It", "Walk Like a Man", "Kennedy and Heidi", "The Blue Comet," and "Made in America."
[edit] Discrepancies with Goodfellas character
In the 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, Joe Manri is shown as as the airport employee who orchestrates the entire robbery. He is seen delivering the information about the Lufthansa heist to Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke, with Martin Krugman later commenting about Buddha afterwards. When in reality Louis Werner informed Frank Menna, who told his bookmaker Martin Krugman, who then told Henry Hill, whom informed Jimmy Burke about the robbery plan.
[edit] References
- Russo, Gus and Henry Hill. Gangsters and GoodFellas: Wiseguys and Life on the Run. Mainstream Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1840188812
- Volkman, Ernest and John Cummings. The Heist: How a Gang Stole $8,000,000 at Kennedy Airport and Lived to Regret It. New York: Franklin Watts, 1986. ISBN 0531150240
- "HOW THE MAFIA LOOTS JFK AIRPORT MORE THAN $59 BILLION OF FREIGHT and 27 million passengers a year are irresistible pickings for mobsters, who have made it a hotbed of stealing, smuggling and extortion" from Fortune Magazine Roy Rowan and Christopher Knowlton June 22, 1987
- Felden, Doug, The 10,000,000-Dollar Getaway Jove Pubns (July 1980) ISBN 0515054526
[edit] External links
- All About the Lufthansa Heist by Allen May
- Lucchese Crime Family Epic: Decent Into Darkness - Part II by Thomas L. Jones
- AMERICAN MAFIOSO Bonanno Family Capo Regime: Vito Bonventre
- Crime Library: Jimmy the Gent and Paulie by Thomas L. Jones
