JOE MANRI

'Giuseppe Manriquez-Manri' or '''"Joe Buddha"''' (December 1, 1932 South Ozone Park, Queens-May 16, 1979 Mill Basin, Brooklyn) was a suspect in the Lufthansa heist.

Contents

Early life

Joe Manri Hijacking Information

Stolen airline ticket sales

Grand Theft Auto

Bookmaking Operation

Work at the airport

After the Lufthansa Heist

Indiscrpencies with Goodfellas character

In popular culture

References

External links

Early life

Born in South Ozone Park, Queens, Joseph Manri was originally christened as "'''Giuseppe Manriquez'''" but Anglicized the name to Joseph. His family's surname is derived from Manresa, a commune in Catalonia, Barcelona,Spain. His parents immigrants from Paredes de Nava in Valladolid, Spain in the province of Palencia, an autonomous region of Castile and Leon, formerly known as Castilla y Leon and Castilla-La Mancha. He landed a job working for Lufthansa, in the same terminal as future criminal accomplices Louis Werner and Peter Gruenwald from 1970 to 1979. Because of his criminal association with the Lucchese crime family, Casey Rosado who was the President of the Local 71 of the ''Waiter's & Commissary Workers'' at John F. Kennedy Airport with backing from the Lucchese crime family and Johnny Dio protected McMahon from being terminated from his key position at Lufthansa by threatening his employers with a union strike. Joe was overweight as a child, weighing up to 250-pounds as an adult which is how he earned the nickname "Buddha" because of his fleeting physical appearance resembling the then-popular Chinese Buddhist monk from Taiwan Chih Chang because of his Buddha-like ponch who became a popular figure in the 1970's. He was fluent in Spanish and English and a very gruff-natured man. Long before the Lufthansa heist in 1979, Joe legally changed his surname from "Manriquez" to "Manri" in an attempt to pass his Spanish looks as being of Italian descent, but was unsuccessful. On www.crimelibrary.com Manri is wrongfully stated to have been born in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan where in Wiseguy: Life In A Mafia Family, it states he is from South Ozone Park, Queens.

Joe Manri Hijacking Information

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, cigarettes, phonograph records, over the counter pharmaceuticals, wigs and diamonds. All these robberies were suspected to have been performed with information, or through actual assistance from Manri and Robert McMahon.

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 he bought $50,000 worth of tickets from them to fly Sinatra Jr. and a group of eight friends accompanying him around the country. Barzie was eventually caught and convicted of the charges, but did not implicate Manri or Hill.

Grand Theft Auto

In the 1970's 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 dollars 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.

Bookmaking Operation

Joe Manri worked closely with Lufthansa cargo foreman Robert McMahon and bookmaker Steve DePasquale. Since Manri got to interact with many of the backfield airport workers on a routine basis at the Lufthansa terminal, Joe was given the position of bookmaker and numbers runner for his fellow Lufthansa co-workers. Joe would deliver his co-workers wagers to Lucchese crime family capo Steven DePasquale at The Suite or Robert's Lounge. Joe was also a heavy gambler. He also informed co-workers who were degenerate gamblers to visit The Bamboo Lounge or the floating craps games that were organized by a son of Paul Vario, Salvatore "Babe" Vario.

Work at the airport

For an immigrant with limited education, Joe was successful, and found a job at the JFK Airport for Air France as an incoming cargo foreman, where he became friends with fellow foreman Robert
McMahon. McMahon was the one who introduced Manriquez to Jimmy Burke. Over time Manriques 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 mobster Jimmy Burke. Manri allegedly participated in the 1978 Lufthansa Heist as a "stick-up man" and one of the original orchestrators of the robbery, in which an estimated $6,000,000 was taken from a cargo bay at the JFK Airport.
Manri was murdered because he was the only member of the crew who had met with Lufthansa freight supervisor Louis Werner at The Airline Diner located at 69-35 Astoria Boulevard in Astoria, Queens to discuss the robbery plans. Manri, if he turned state's evidence, could implicate Jimmy Burke, Tommy DeSimone, and Angelo John Sepe, who were positively identified by Lufthansa employees who witnessed the robbery, and whoever else had orchestrated the Lufthansa heist.
It is thought that McMahon 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 FBI 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.

After the Lufthansa Heist

Joe Manri was warned by investigating FBI Supervisor Frank Carbone that the two men 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.''

Indiscrpencies 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. 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.

In popular culture

★ He is portrayed as 'Joe Budda' in the 1990 film ''Goodfellas'' by Mike Starr.

★ There is a rap artist from the Ukraine named "Freestyle Frenzy-Joe Buddha".

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

External links

★ All About the Lufthansa Heist by Allen May

★ Lucchese Crime Family Epic: Decent Into Darkness - Part II by Thomas L. Jones