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Forklift fondleslab 'fellas flee with vast haul of iPad Minis at JFK

Perhaps now in Vegas tucking them into dancers' G-strings

Rather than waiting minutes in an iPad-mini queue, a couple of enterprising fellas took it upon themselves to hit up the airport for easy dough.

Just like Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, these guys needed money - or a few thousand handily miniaturised mobile computing devices - so they robbed the joint described by Ray Liotta's Henry Hill character as "better than Citibank".

The crooks made off with about 3,600 iPad minis that had just landed at New York's JFK International Airport from China, making a daring escape in a white tractor-trailer. The gangsters loaded the minis, worth $1.5m, with one of JFK's own forklifts in two pallets.

Unfortunately for them, they had to leave three more pallets behind after they "were challenged by an airport worker returning from dinner", the New York Post reported.

The thieves got away, though, and investigators suspect an inside job because they reckon someone let them into the airport and furnished them with the forklift they needed.

The heist happened in the same building as the 1978 Lufthansa job, when mafiosi stole $5m in cash and nearly $900,000 in jewellery, the equivalent of $21m today.

The alleged criminal mastermind was Lucchese crime-family associate James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, who supposedly got away with the crime by whacking nearly all of his co-conspirators in a gangster bloodbath portrayed in the Goodfellas movie. ®

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