Vincent Asaro

Mob career

According to Lucchese crime family associate turned informant Henry Hill, Asaro was a caporegime in the Bonanno crime family who oversaw the family's interests in JFK airport. Asaro is the nephew of Michael Zaffarano and since the 1970s, has been the capo of a crew in the Queens faction of the Bonanno family. With his father's help, Vinny's son Jerome Asaro also became a captain in the Bonanno family. However, father and son had a falling out in later years and did not speak with each other.

Lufthansa heist accusations

On January 16, 2014 Asaro was indicted on federal racketeering charges stemming from the 1978 Lufthansa heist. The charges also included the theft of $1.25 million of gold salts, involvement in the pornography industry, and for the ordering of the murder of a cousin who testified in court. Arrested along with Asaro were his son Jerome, acting boss Thomas DiFiore, acting capo Giacomo Bonventre, and soldier John Ragano.

Controversially, author Daniel Simone, Henry Hill's co-writer of their book, The Lufthansa Heist, published on August 1, 2015 by Lyons Press, claims that Henry Hill asserted to him that "Asaro had no involvement in the famous robbery." In fact, Asaro does not appear nor is mentioned in Simone's book. Furthermore, in the Author's Notes and Sources page of The Lufthansa Heist, Simone lists numerous law enforcement agents who collaborated with him in the development of the book and, he attests, none of these subjects ever mentioned Asaro in connection with the Lufthansa robbery. More strangely, those investigators had not known about a Gaspar Valenti, the informant who testified against Asaro.

In November 2015, Asaro was found not guilty of all charges related to the Lufthansa heist.

Paul Katz murder suspect

Asaro was also a suspect in the 1969 death of Paul Katz. Katz owned a warehouse that Asaro and James Burke used to store stolen goods. When law enforcement raided the warehouse, Asaro and Burke immediately suspected Katz of being a government informant. The two men allegedly killed Katz with a dog chain and buried his remains under a vacant house. When the NYPD reopened the Katz case, Asaro and Burke allegedly moved the remains to the house of Burke's daughter and reburied them there. In 2013, a police search uncovered the remains.

Although mainstream media reported Asaro being found "not guilty", on November 12, 2015, Asaro was acquitted on all charges. The acquittal signifies that the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, not that the Defendant, Vincent Asaro was innocent. U.S. vs. Asaro, 14-CR-26 (ARR) (E.D.N.Y. Oct. 7, 2015)

Car arson / Road rage case

in June 2017 Asaro pleaded guilty in a case of ordering car arson against a driver who cut him off in Howard Beach, Queens. He engaged a grandson of John Gotti grandson, John J. Gotti (who also pleaded guilty in the case) to execute the crime . Asaro is currently incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn while awaiting sentencing in the aforementioned case. He faces the possibility of up to twenty years in prison.