Word: lufthansa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lufthansa Airlines cargo facility at New York's Kennedy International Airport is called one of the safest in the world. The "valuable room," a white brick structure about one story high, is rigged with electronic alarms and monitored 24 hours a day by closed-circuit television. Yet last week six masked men, acting with speed and daring worthy of Lufthansa's own Red Baron, broke through this security to pull off the biggest cash robbery ever in U.S. history...
...vault were about 50 Ibs. of paper money from the Commerzbank of Frankfurt to the Chase Manhattan Bank. It was a treasure far bigger than the $2.78 million taken in the Brink's holdup of 1950, bigger even than the $4.3 million Purolator heist in 1974 in Chicago. The Lufthansa bandits' haul: about $5 million in American dollars, nearly $1 million in jewelry, as well as an undetermined amount of foreign currency...
...freezing wind was whipping across Jamaica Bay when the bandits struck at 3:05 a.m. They drove a stolen 1978 black Ford van along North Boundary Road and turned onto a roadway at the north end of the Lufthansa cargo area. The thieves first stopped and clipped a chain securing the gate, and then proceeded about 400 ft. to a ramp. There an airline employee, Kerry Whalen, challenged them. The gang pistol-whipped him, threw him to the floor of the van and drove onto the loading bay area...
Inside the building, three other robbers, who had entered earlier, knew that the Lufthansa night crew was on a coffee break. They rounded up the employees in the lunchroom and handcuffed them. Then they joined the others, opened the door to the warehouse, drove the van inside and went straight to the high-security vault. With them they took the manager. One of the robbers held a gun to the manager's head, and, threatening to kill him, forced him to open the vault. With all employees handcuffed, the six men started throwing the boxes of money and jewelry into...
Police also believe that an employee may have tipped off the robbers to Lufthansa's treasure. Apparently it was there by a fluke. The money was scheduled to be transferred from Kennedy into Manhattan on the Friday before the heist, but when a Brink's truck arrived to take the money to Chase Manhattan, the Lufthansa foreman was too busy directing another shipment to open the vault. Some investigators think that there may have been a conspiracy to keep the money at the facility over the weekend...