John Tait

John Tait

Jon Tait, a native of Northumberland in northeast England, is a reporter living in Carlisle, Cumbria, in the northwest of England. He is currently pursuing a degree in journalism at Cumbria College of Art & Design. His email address is jtait72@yahoo.co.uk.

Airport Heists

Lufthansa

The daring $6.5 million robbery of a British Airways van in February at Heathrow Airport had all the markings of an inside job, according to former mobster Henry Hill. At JFK, Hill took Air France for $480,000 in 1968 and Lufthansa for a record $6 million in 1978.

by Jon Tait

Former New York gangster Henry Hill is convinced that the daring $6.5 million dawn heist at Heathrow Airport on Feb. 11 – described by British police as the "perfect crime" -- was an inside job.

At 6.30 a.m. two men dressed in British Airways uniforms stopped a BA security van in the cargo hold at Terminal Four and bound the driver with zip cords. They transferred eight red cash boxes - containing used notes bound for New York's JFK from Bahrain - into their own van and drove off. The van was later discovered burnt-out in the residential area of Feltham in West London.

Hill knows something about airport heists. He walked out of the John F. Kennedy Airport with a suitcase packed with $480,000 in cash after raiding Air France in April 1968. And he was part of the Jimmy 'The Gent' Burke gang that masterminded and carried out the notorious Lufthansa robbery, which netted over $6 million in cash and jewels, at JFK 10 years later.