The
Lufthansa heist was a robbery at
John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 11, 1978. An estimated $5.875 million ($ million today) was stolen, with $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time. In popular culture, it is the main subject of the two well-known television films,
The 10 Million Dollar Getaway and
The Big Heist, and is a key plot element in the 1990 film
Goodfellas. In July 2015,
Rowman and Littlefield published a book titled
The Lufthansa Heist by
Daniel Simone and co-authored by
Henry Hill which is considered the primary reference and details the story of the crime. The heist's magnitude made it one of the longest-investigated crimes in the United States: for over 35 years after it happened, the latest arrest associated with it was made in 2014.