Short Book Review: The Big Heist (audiobook edition)

Anthony M. DeStefano (author), Keith Sellon-Wright (narrator), The Big Heist: the Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia, and Murder. Ashland, OR: Blackstone Audio, 2017.  ISBN: 9781441708526.

 

Genre: nonfiction, audiobook

Subgenre: true crime, New York Mafia, New York City

Format: e-book audiobook

Source: Hoopla Digital, via Madison County (KY) Public Library

 

 

This is a more recent book about the Lufthansa Heist. I read Henry Hill's The Lufthansa Heist back in October of 2020 (link to my review). Like other people, I do find the story of the heist to be fascinating, so I picked up this book out of curiosity and because it updates the story for modern readers. 

The book starts describing the significance of the heist at the time, and how it has remained a fascination in U.S. imagination. It mentions previous books on the topic, but those previous works ended their accounts in the 1980s. This book updates the narrative. New details come from informants and new interviews as well as the recent court records. The book also takes a broad historical outlook of the mob in NYC including their control of  JFK airport. Author argues that understanding much of this outlook helps readers better understand the heist. Also, for a while the FBI at the time was not as aggressive about prosecuting the mob until a bit later in the 70s and 80s. The NYPD were not that much better; the author found in his research accounts of corruption and cops working with the mob at the time. In addition, he describes a bit of his writing process, how he learned and got insights from his coverage of NYC mob and the garment district in NYC. Also, he discusses how he was able to take advantage of new research. 

The book is arranged in three sections: Asaro's world of the mob at the time leading to the heist. This was a time when the mob was at its pinnacle. Next, we look at how the heist was conceived and planned. Finally, we get the story of Valenti's betrayal of Asaro and the prosecution in 2015. 

By the way, a lot of the reason the heist succeeded is security was seriously lax in those days, including details like poor if non-existent background checks for employees airlines and companies hired. It would be extremely difficult to pull a similar heist today given all the security measures, especially after 9/11.

Much of the story of the heist may be details readers may have read about before in previous books. So if you have read about the heist before, you are not going to get that much new stuff regarding the heist. What you do get is an update of what happened after the heist, including later prosecutions and what happened to some of the characters afterwards.

When I picked this up, I did not realize the book was abridged; Hoopla does not really provide proper bibliographic information. It was still pretty good. The narrator has a good voice, and the text overall offers a good narrative. If you are interesting in this story or the history of the New York City mob in general at the time, this is a pretty good selection. Overall, I liked it. It was not a big deal, but it was a good read.

3 out of 5 stars. 

This book qualifies for the following 2017 Reading Challenges: