Jimmy Burke in the Movies

A listener named Paul Blackwood from Edinburgh Scotland emailed me with some great compliments on the show and suggested I do a story that focuses on “Jimmy the Gent” Burke. I looked around and he is mentioned in several podcasts but only as part of the famous Lufthansa heist.   James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke is one of the most famous Mob associates of all time. We use the word “associate” because he was not Sicilian or even Italian or 1/2 Italian. We know about him mainly because another mob associate, Henry Hill, turned on Burke and became a government witness. Jimmy Burke led a crew of professional thieves and this was documented in the book titled Wiseguys by Nicholas Pileggi. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese produced and directed a film from Pileggi’s book titled GoodFellas When Robert DeNiro took the part of Jimmy Burke, his place in mob history was cemented.  In my humble opinion, this book and film were arguably the best and most accurate depictions of the day-to-day life of a mob crew.

The screenwriters in the 1990 film Goodfellas changed the name of Jimmy the Gent Burke to “Jimmy Conway.” Some claim that the real-life gangster Jimmy Burke was so happy to have Robert DeNiro play him that he phoned him from prison to give him a few pointers. Author/screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi denies this, saying DeNiro and Burke had never spoken, but admitting that there were men around the set all the time who had known all of the principal characters very well. In another Hollywood depiction of this crew, Burke was played by Donald Sutherland in the television film The Big Heist.

Jimmy Burke History

He was born in Bronx, New York. He was the illegitimate son of Jane Conway, a prostitute who was an immigrant from Dublin, Ireland. The name of his father was never known. At age two the social services placed little Jimmy Conway in the first of many foster homes. A large part of his early years was spent in a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns. They say he never saw his mother again and never knew who his father was. As with many of these throw-away kids, he was in many different foster homes and other institutions for orphans. he would suffer physical and sexual abuse in these places. A pivotal event shaped his future life at age 13. He got into an argument with a foster father while the car was moving. The man turned to smack Burke in the back seat and crashed the car. The foster father died in that crash. The deceased man’s widow blamed Burke gave him regular beatings until he was taken back into foster care.

Sometime after this incident, a family named Burke took him in as a foster child. He finally got lucky and they created a clean, comfortable and safe environment for the teenage Jimmy Burke. He lived out his teenage years on Rockaway Beach close to Ocean Promenade. Burke never forgot their kindness and for the rest of his life, he visited these foster parents and when he started making money he would leave unmarked envelopes of cash for them periodically.   The “Burke” family adopted him and he took the family name. Some folks believe that he buried part of the 1978 Lufthansa heist loot at the Burke house. It is a fact that the majority of the take from this Caper has never been found.

As he approached his later teen years, Burke’s trouble with the law became more serious. At age eighteen in 1949, authorities sentenced him to five years in prison for forgery. He was passing counterfeit checks for a Colombo family member named Dominick “Remo” Cersani. The police made him for passing $3,000 dollars of these counterfeit checks at an Ozone Park bank. After his arrest and Burke refused to inform after being offered a free ride because they wanted the mobster Remo, not an 18-year-old underling like Burke. He refused and earned Remo’s eternal gratitude. Remo nicknamed Jimmy “the Irish Guinea” When he went to prison, Remo arranged for his protection from other mob members already incarcerated.

The Early Years