CHAPTER 2
HEISTS
“We have to be patient. Sooner or later that $1,000,000 [reward] is going to take hold of someone, and they’ll talk. That’s the way it usually happens.”
—An FBI agent on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, quoted in The New York Times, June 2, 1992
Mystery is a powerful drug. Decades later, the world still waits eagerly for answers to some of the questions raised by the greatest robberies in history. Where are those masterpieces that once decorated the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston? Who has them? Are they lost for all time? Victims of theft are seldom fascinated by the puzzle of it all, but newspaper readers have long been riveted by robbers and the crimes they commit.
MASKED MEN ROB A TRAIN: THE BOLD EXPLOIT OF A GANG OF MISSOURI OUTLAWS
At 8:40 o’clock last evening, as the passenger express train No. 48 over the Chicago and Alton Road approached a deep cut four miles east of here [Independence, Missouri] and two miles west of Glendale, where the Missouri Pacific track crosses the Chicago and Alton, engineer L. Foote was signaled to stop his train. Thinking possibly that a delayed freight train was in his way, he whistled “down brakes,” and brought the train to a standstill, but not until he had discovered a pile of rocks on the track and that the man who had given the signal wore a mask and proved to be the leader of a well-armed force of men who successfully carried out one of the most daring and skillfully planned robberies that ever occurred.
As the leader appeared in sight, he shouted, as though addressing a large body of followers: “Now, men, to your work! Fire!” Instantly there came a sharp discharge of firearms, which gave the impression that the gang the trainmen had to cope with was a large one. Passengers and trainmen were panic-stricken by the fusillade, and before they could recover from their fright the robbers had complete possession of the train. All the robbers were masked, and, as the expression goes, “armed to the teeth” with revolvers and Henry rifles.
At each door of each passenger car stood one of the gang with revolvers cocked and a threat that the first one who attempted to move would be killed. The advice to remain quiet was heeded by all except Frank Burton, the brakeman upon the front platform of the sleeping car, who heard a freight train coming up behind his train. Intent upon preventing a collision, he jumped from his car, and, lantern in hand, ran down the track toward the on-coming freight. As the robbers saw him going down the track, they opened fire upon him, and though their bullets passed unpleasantly near he was not hurt.
That his life was saved was due to the fact that the engineer shouted to the captain of the band: “For God’s sake, don’t shoot him, he’s trying to save the lives of these people!” Instantly the captain threw up his hands and shouted, “Stop shooting!” The command was obeyed, and Burton succeeded in stopping the freight train and preventing a collision.
Before this incident, the engine had been taken possession of by four of the desperadoes, and engineer Foote and fireman John Steading were compelled to leave the cab, the party threatening to kill them if they refused. They complied, as did the engineer when he was instructed to take his coal pick from the tender and go with the party to the express car. On arriving he was forced to break down the door. It was then discovered that the express messenger, Fox, of St. Louis, was missing, but he was discovered in some bushes at the side of the track, where he had hidden. He was taken from his hiding place and forced to open the safe. The contents were transferred to the pockets of the gang, but the amount secured was so small that the robbers were disgusted, and they knocked the messenger on the head with a revolver.
It is supposed that the robbers at first only intended to rob the express car, for when this job was completed they held a consultation, after which a party of six entered the passenger cars. Many of the passengers, suspecting what was in progress, had taken their valuables from their pockets and hidden them in whatever place seemed to offer security. The scene when the robbers entered the cars beggars description, for women and children wept and men begged as for their lives that they might be allowed to retain their money, which, for a number of emigrants, was all they had in the world.
One of the passengers states that one robber had a huge sack, into which was dumped all the valuables that were secured. The train hands were placed under guard, each with one of the gang holding a revolver at his head. Each person was compelled, under threat of death, to empty the contents of his or her pockets. Ladies were compelled to sit on the floor of the car while the desperadoes stripped them of their jewelry. It is estimated that the amount obtained from the passengers aggregates at least $15,000. When the robbery was completed, the gang left the train and made for the woods, where, it is supposed, they had horses ready to convey them to a place of safety.
As soon as possible the obstructions on the track were removed, and the train proceeded to Kansas City, when a posse of men was organized to capture, the gang. The authorities at Marshall were also informed of the robbery, and from there another posse of men under the charge of a sheriff started to head off the desperadoes if they attempted to head east. From this place also a body of men, under Marshal Murphy, started in pursuit, and scarcely a settlement in the vicinity has not contributed its quota of men to assist. The country is now being thoroughly scoured in every direction.
Conductor Hazelbaker was fired at several times by the robbers, but escaped injury. Fox, the express messenger, who was so badly wounded on the head, passed through here this morning en route from Kansas City to his home in St. Louis. He denies the charges of cowardice made against him, says he was struck down while endeavoring to save the property of his employers—the United States Express Company—and refuses to state the amount of money he had in his safe, a sum reported as having been between $100 and $20,000.
It is generally supposed the robbers were a gang under the command of the famous James brothers, who have a worldwide notoriety for their desperate deeds. The number in the party is estimated at from 12 to 16. The leader is described as a tall man with a dark beard, who wore his mask only when in the light. In general he answers to the description of the man who led the gang that robbed a Rock Island train on July 17 last. He introduced himself to the engineer as Jesse James and his “partner,” a short, heavy man, as Dick Little, and several times during the robbery the man calling himself James addressed his companion as Dick.
Photograph, c. 1864, of a young Jesse James posing with three revolvers, likely when he was a member of the guerilla Confederate group Quantrill’s Rangers, during the Civil War.
It was near the same spot that a train on the Chicago and Alton Road was robbed in a similar manner on Oct. 8, 1879. The express messenger was assaulted, the safe broken open, and $50,000 in cash secured.
Engineer Foote makes the following statement: “Between three and four miles east of Independence there is a deep cut, over which the Missouri Pacific track crosses the Chicago and Alton, and it was just before entering the deepest part of this cut that I saw the pile of stones, which was about five feet high, and on the top of which was a stick, to which was attached a red rag, and behind the whole stood the leader of the robbers. Of course, I stopped. I was then approached by four of the gang, and the leader, who said, ‘Step down off that engine and do as I tell you or I will kill you.’ He then told me to get the coal pick, which I did after some parleying, but as a revolver was pointed at my head I could not refuse to obey them.
“They then marched me and John Steading, the fireman, to the express car, and told me to break down the door, which I did. Messenger Fox had hidden himself in the weeds by the roadside, but they swore they would kill me if he didn’t come out, and so I called for him, and he entered the car with two of the robbers, who forced him to open the safe and pour its contents into a sack. They were disappointed at not getting more booty and knocked Fox down twice with the butt end of a navy revolver, cutting his head in a fearful manner. They then marched us to the coaches, where, they kept us covered with revolvers while they robbed the passengers.
“After the last coach had been gone through they marched us back to the engine, when the leader said, ‘Now get back there and we will remove the stones. You have been a bully boy and, here is a little present for you,’ and he handed me two silver dollars. I told him I would remove the obstructions, and the entire gang skipped up over the embankment and were out of sight in a moment. In going through the passengers each one was made to hold up his hands, and what was taken from them was put into a two-bushel sack, which was nearly full of watches, money, and other valuables.”
Later.—A posse of men under Sheriff Casen, of Saline County, tonight brought in three of the robbers, all of whom were captured near the scene of the robbery. They gave their names as Creed Chapman and Sam Chapman, brothers, and John Burgler. J. Wilkinson, alias Nolan, is being “shadowed,” and will be arrested on the arrival of the train he boarded near here bound for Kansas City. One of the persons interested implicates him as a member of the gang. The names of the entire party are known, and their capture is considered a certainty.
—September 9, 1881
NOTE: In January 1882, Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden promised Jesse James’s associate Robert Ford a $10,000 reward and a pardon in exchange for killing the outlaw. Ford shot and killed James three months later. Robert and his brother Charles pleaded guilty to murder and were sentenced to hang, but Crittenden made good on his pledge and pardoned them.
DILLINGER DEFIED CAPTURE FOR YEAR
John Dillinger, the Midwest outlaw who, in the space of a year, became one of the country’s most notorious badmen, a killer of the old frontier tradition, had left a trail of dead and wounded across several states and of terror through the Northwest.
A small army had been on his trail, and several times he had been ambushed. But each time he was able to shoot his way out and flee. Each time, except when he achieved the daring exploit of walking out of the supposedly escape-proof Lake County jail at Crown Point, Ind., last March 4.
Then he cowed guards and other inmates with a piece of wood whittled to resemble a pistol and stained with shoe blacking.
Only last fall did his exploits begin to attract attention. He had been sentenced in 1924, a farm boy who had committed an amateur holdup in his home town, to six years in the Indiana State Prison for robbing a grocery in Groveton.
Met Band in Prison
The prison schooled him in the ways of the outlaw. There he met most of the criminals who later formed his band.
On the request of his father, the family’s minister and the grocer he had held up, he was released by the parole board in May 1933. This, although he had been in trouble since the very beginning of his term, having “hid out” in the machine shop to which he was first assigned, sawed through the bars of his cell door and made his way into an adjoining cell block, fought with another inmate, and given all evidence of being incorrigible. The governor revoked the board’s decision, however, and he was declared a delinquent patrolist.
John Dillinger, c. 1933.
Scoffing at the revocation of his parole, Dillinger, free in spite of the governor, never did return. The old charges became back numbers. He resumed his career of crime. His holdups, carried out in a sensational, almost flamboyant manner, won for him and his mob the reputation of being supercriminals.
In the late summer he staged three robberies, in one holding up the girl cashier of a small-town bank, obtaining $25,000 in all. A fellow inmate of reformatory days was with him. But he wandered into Ohio, was captured and held there as a bank robber.
Engineered Prison Break
From that time on Dillinger grew to his present stature, to which fact and fable have contributed. While he was being held at Lima, Ohio, he engineered a plot by which Harry Pierpont, Russell Clark, John Hamilton and Charles Makley, who had come to know the daring with which he planned for those he dominated at Michigan City penitentiary, escaped from the prison. Six others fled with them.
Hamilton, Makley and Pierpont came to Lima. Working as if they were following well-laid plans, they raided the jail and released their chief. Sheriff Jess Sarber of Allen County resisted. They shot and killed him. That was on Oct. 12.
Dillinger gave an indication of the bravado that would later attract the attention of London, Paris and Berlin as well as the United States when he next appeared in Chicago. The police got wind of it.
A trap was set for him by the Chicago police as he visited a doctor’s office on Nov. 16. Dillinger adopted a device that later was to insure his death by violence, but his escape until then. He shot his way out.
Federal Reward Offered
Events followed swiftly after that, multiplying until his name became a byword for outlawry, his career a reason for the passage of laws in Congress and the posting of a $10,000 reward by the United States government for his capture.
Only four days after he had walked from the trap he appeared at Racine, Wis., at the head of his lawless band. They raided the American Bank and Trust Company, obtained more than $10,000 and escaped.
Spectacular in the way he staged his lawless escapades, devil-may-care in his encounters with the law, he nevertheless brought every possible modern facility into play in his skirmishes. He used fast cars. He had bulletproof vests. His men used machine guns.
And when, with Hamilton and Makley, he took possession of the safe-deposit vault of the Unity Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago on Dec. 13, he reached his loot with electric torches. A haul of $8,700 and a large amount of jewelry was netted.
John Hamilton, Dillinger’s lieutenant, and probably others of the gang remained in Chicago. The following day the police picked up Hamilton’s trail. Police sergeant William T. Shanley set a trap for him. Hamilton, following his chief’s cue, shot his way out, killing Shanley. A second victim lay dead on the Dillinger trail.
Six days later another Dillinger group fell afoul of the police at Paris, Ill. Edward Shouse, an aide of the outlaw, was captured. But in the gun battle, Eugene Teague, an Indiana State policeman, was killed, the third victim.
Dillinger was traced to a North Side apartment. The Chicago police closed in on Dec. 21. This time the casualties were on Dillinger’s side. Lewis Katzewitz of Streator, Sam Ginsburg, an escaped Michigan prisoner, and Charles Tilden, who had broken out of an Illinois prison, were slain.
Ten days later the battle was declared a fight to the finish. The Chicago police received orders to shoot members of the gang on sight. But that very night, Dillinger declared his defiance by staging a hold-up of the Beverly Gardens, a resort, wounding two highway policemen in escaping.
On Jan. 6, 1934, the police picked up the trail of Jack Klutas, a gang leader affiliated with Dillinger, in Bellwood, a Chicago suburb. He was shot and killed, and five were dead.
Then another policeman fell, mortally wounded, before a Dillinger onslaught. He, Hamilton and another member of the mob held up the First National Bank of East Chicago. Escaping with more than $20,000, the careening Dillinger automobile passed Policeman William P. O’Malley. Before the policeman become aware of his antagonist, shots burst out and the policeman was dead.
Captured by “Hick Cops”
Dillinger was captured on Jan. 25. He, Makley, Clark and Pierpont appeared quietly in Tucson, Ariz. They had considerable luggage and their hotel caught fire. They offered large rewards for the rescue of the luggage and obtained it.
One of the firemen read a detective story magazine and saw Dillinger’s picture. He told the local police. One by one the members of the gang were captured before they could resort to arms. The luggage held a miniature arsenal. Dillinger was chagrined at his capture by what he called “hick cops.”
Pierpont, Makley and Clark were sent to Ohio. Pierpont and Makley were sentenced to death for the Sarber murder, Clark to life imprisonment. Dillinger was taken to the Crown Point Jail.
The desperado announced to his fellow prisoners that he intended to break jail. They guffawed. In his cell, from a block of wood, he fashioned what looked like an automatic pistol. The morning of March 3 he held up a guard and the warden, cowed other guards, robbed 33 persons of $15 “for expenses” and helped himself to two of the jail’s machine guns.
Stealing the automobile of the woman sheriff, he drove away with a murderer, Herbert Youngblood, a Negro. He carried with him a deputy sheriff and a garage attendant as hostages, throwing them out later on.
A nationwide search was started. The Indiana officials were criticized by Attorney General Cummings, the prosecutor of Lake County. Dillinger picked up where he had left off.
Ten days later he raided the Mason City, Iowa, bank. He was wounded in the shoulder. He forced a physician in St. Paul to treat him, and was able to continue. But on March 16, two more deaths marked his trail.
Youngblood turned up in Port Huron, Mich., and boasted of his successful jailbreak. The police heard of it. In the ensuing battle Youngblood and Under-Sheriff Charles Cavanaugh were killed.
Dillinger himself was trapped on March 31 in St. Paul. Government operatives had thrown a cordon about him. Confronted in an apartment with Eugene Green and a woman companion, he made his way to freedom behind a barrage of bullets. He and Green were wounded.
Green died of these and other wounds a few days later, on April 11. Dillinger, with pistol leveled, forced Dr. Clayton E. May of Minneapolis to treat him. The doctor was imprisoned because, terror-stricken, he had not informed the authorities.
Then the outlaw’s exploits became unbelievable. He visited his father, John Sr., at the latter’s homestead near Mooresville, Ind., and the neighbors marked the visit by petitioning the governor for a pardon for the killer.
Raided a Police Station
With posses on his trail, he and a companion raided a police station at Warsaw, Ind., stealing two bulletproof vests and two pistols, and made contact again with Hamilton by visiting the criminal’s sister in Michigan.
Although the federal authorities were massing agents against him, he and his gang decided on a holiday in the Wisconsin woods. They motored to a resort near Mercer, practiced target shooting and enjoyed restful card games.
The federal agents got wind of the hideout. The resort was surrounded. But dogs barked the alarm and a battle began. Two Civilian Conservation Corps members and a local resident were fired on, and one of the CCC men was killed.
Terrific battles were fought about the resort, in which W. Carter Baum, a federal agent, was killed, but Dillinger and his men stole cars and escaped to St. Paul.
There they fought a gun battle with sheriff’s deputies and escaped. But the gang was scattered. A small army was marshaled to close in on Dillinger. Congress was stirred. Ten anticrime bills were passed by the House and his name resounded in debate.
But for three months he eluded pursuers. He had been wounded in the battle around Mercer. Albert Reilly, one of his aides, was captured in Minneapolis and said his chief was dead. But Dillinger’s father exhibited a letter from the son in denial.
Two detectives were shot to death in East Chicago on May 24. Dillinger was suspected. The kidnapping of Edward Bremer, St. Paul banker, was laid to a plot kindled by a fertile, twisted brain. By that time the legend began outrunning the story.
The amount of his thefts has been estimated at $5,000,000. Gunmen copied his methods, however, and fact became inseparable from fiction. The deaths he caused directly totaled about a score, including police, federal agents, bystanders and the thugs who had allied themselves with him.
—July 23, 1934
BANDITS ROB MAIL TRAIN OUTSIDE LONDON; RECORD LOSS MAY EXCEED $5,000,000
Masked bandits robbed a mail train near London early today and escaped with at least $2,800,000, and perhaps more than $5,000,000, in cash and gems. The robbery may have been the biggest ever.
The gang of 8 to 15 men ambushed the Glasgow-to-London train before dawn in the outskirts of London.
Most of the loot consisted of more than £1 million ($2,800,000) in used pound banknotes, which are easily disposable. They were being sent to big London banks from provincial branches.
If the estimate of the loot proves accurate, the robbery was larger than the Brink’s robbery in Boston on Jan. 17, 1950, in which cash and securities totaling $2,775,395 were stolen. The cash amounted to $1,218,211.
Last Aug. 15, a mail robbery on Cape Cod amounted to $1,551,277 in cash, exceeding the cash lost in the Brink’s robbery.
For audacity and skillful planning, the post office and the British railways could not recall a parallel to the predawn raid.
Briefly, the gang stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train with two faked signals, one to slow it and the other to halt it. The diesel engine rumbled to a stop near Cheddington, a village of 539 inhabitants 36 miles northwest of London.
The robbers, some carrying firearms against a completely unarmed mail crew, uncoupled the engine and the first two cars. They then forced the engineer to drive ahead to a bridge over a road where they dumped about 120 registered mailbags into a waiting truck.
So expertly was the raid carried out that the 75 mail sorters in the last 10 cars of the train knew nothing about it until it was over.
Experts were impressed with the gang’s intimate knowledge of railroading and their detailed planning. When they uncoupled the train, for example, they were able to operate both the hydraulic and steambrake systems without raising attention.
Detectives step across the rails to retrieve a crowbar near Bridego Railway Bridge in Buckinghamshire, England, on August 10, 1963, the day after the “Great Train Robbery.”
They were so thorough that they cut roadside telephone lines into the village. When they shackled the engineer and his co-engineer together after the raid, they used the very latest type of handcuffs.
Det. Superintendent Malcolm Fewtrell of the Buckinghamshire Criminal Investigation Department said that “this was obviously a brilliantly planned operation.” Reginald Bevins, the postmaster general, who rushed to London tonight from his home in Liverpool, said the robbery might have been an inside job.
Asked whether he felt any sneaking admiration for the way the raid had been carried out, Mr. Bevins said: “I don’t feel any admiration for these gentlemen at all; in fact, I would not use the word gentlemen.”
All of London’s big banks were believed to have had packages of banknotes aboard the train.
The insurance position of the banknotes is vague. One bank, the Midland, said that it did not insure banknotes in transit but that this might not be a universal practice.
Mr. Bevins said that £20 ($56) was the maximum compensation for the loss of a registered package. This, however, is the maximum compensation for the minimum fee of 25 cents.
The postmaster general offered a reward of £10,000 leading to the criminals’ arrest, but this was a third of the amount offered by two banks.
The National Provincial Bank alone estimated its loss in excess of £500.000 ($1.4 million), almost all in banknotes. The British Linen Bank of Scotland said it had lost £55,000 ($154,000).
Insurance adjusters were offering rewards equivalent to $70,000 on behalf of the two banks. Tonight railroad detectives were combing the records of past employees. Every available officer in Scotland Yard’s flying squad of detectives was checking the bureau’s files or seeking known “snouts,” underworld contacts, for clues to the gang.
The ambush had all the drama of the Western train robberies that British television audiences have grown to recognize. Missing only were the ping of bullets against steel and a coachful of terrified passengers.
The traveling post office, rarely seen by the public and unmentioned in published timetables, was one of four such specials that streak through the dark each night. Each carries 75 postal workers and is called either an “up special,” if it carries mail “up” to London, or a “down special” to the provinces or Scotland.
With staggering thoroughness, the gang had cut the telephone lines to nearby farmhouses and set a railroad signal a mile north of the ambush at amber, or “slow,” to prepare the engineer for the fake stop signal. Armed with crowbars, their faces hidden, the gang waited.
The big diesel stopped for the signal. The signal’s green light had been covered with an old glove and its red light had been illuminated with four batteries brought by the gang.
David Whitby, the 26-year-old co-engineer, said later: “We stopped and I got out to go to the telephone at the signal. On examining it, I found the wires had been cut. I went back to tell the driver and saw a man looking out from between the second and third coaches. I told my driver and went back to this man and said: ‘What’s up, mate?’ He walked across the line and said, ‘Come here.’ He pushed me down the bank and another man grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth. He said: ‘If you shout, I will kill you.’ I said: ‘I won’t shout.’”
“They took me back to the engine and I found they had coshed [slugged] my driver,” said Jack Mills, the engineer. “They put one end of a pair of handcuffs on one of my wrists and one of the men held the other end.”
A second group of bandits had uncoupled the last 10 cars of the train, separating the registered mail in the second coach from the ordinary mail in the rest of the train.
“They knew what they were doing,” a railroad official said later.
Mr. Whitby said: “They made my driver go forward to Sears Crossing. When we stopped, they handcuffed me to him.
Two Forced to Lie Down
“They made us get out of the engine and lie down at the side of the train while they went to unload the coach. They left one man to guard us and he made us walk down to the second coach.”
Mr. Mills, suffering from a crowbar blow to the head, had recovered sufficiently to follow the gang’s orders to take the shortened train to a small marking near the bridge at Sears Crossing.
A truck waited in a narrow road under the bridge. Members of the gang threw the mailbags onto the track shoulder, where others carried them to the truck.
The robbery took place on a busy, four-track line that links northwestern England and western Scotland with London. The mail train, heading south, was stopped at an overhead signal three miles north of Cheddington Station. The front section was taken another mile south to Bridego bridge, two miles north of the station.
Sears Crossing, which the railroad men referred to in their account of the robbery, is a dirt road that crosses the tracks leading to a farmhouse. It is three-fourths of a mile north of the bridge.
“When they had finished unloading,” Mr. Whitby said, “they made my driver and me get in with the four G.P.O. [General Post Office] men in there.”
He was referring to the mail car that had contained the valuable shipment.
“They told us to wait for half an hour and then they left,” he continued.
“I believe they threatened the G.P.O. men verbally that they would use a gun on them. The G.P.O. men tried to stop them getting in, but they broke in apparently.”
Meanwhile, the mail sorters in the rear cars were still busy at work, unaware of the robbery.
Rear Guard Knocked Out
The rear guard put lanterns on the tracks to warn oncoming trains and walked to the front to determine the cause of the long delay.
The guard, Thomas Miller, said:
“You can imagine my surprise when I saw the two coaches and engine gone.”
“The post office were just finishing up their work and they thought the engine had broken down. I hopped it up the line after that, trying to find a phone, but all the lines had been cut. Then, about 200 yards down, I came across the coaches and engine. There was blood in the cab and the windows on the near side of the coach had been smashed in and the door busted open.”
The entire incident took 15 minutes and the police were not alerted until 45 minutes after the robbery was over. It was not discovered until a signalman realized that the mail train had not passed through the signal block. He summoned a search train.
After the robbers had gone, a trainman in a rear coach, realizing that something was amiss, ran to a nearby farmhouse to summon help. He found that there was no phone in the house. It wouldn’t have mattered, however, because the roadside cables had been cut.
Britain has had her share of dramatic mail-train robberies, but none approaching this one.
Other robbers have dressed up as railway men, started fires in passenger compartments and even tried to cause a diversion by releasing a swarm of bees.
The previous record mail robbery in Britain took place May 21, 1952, when seven men held up a post office truck on Oxford Street in London. They got away with £238,000 ($666,400), mostly in banknotes. Some 400 informers and suspects were questioned, but no one was ever brought to justice for that robbery.
—August 9, 1963
NOTE: Scotland Yard caught most of the robbers within a month of the crime, and they received prison terms of up to 30 years. The most notorious member of the gang, Ronnie Biggs, escaped from Wandsworth Prison in 1965 and ended up in Brazil, where for decades he lived a sometimes lavish lifestyle under his real name. In failing health, Biggs voluntarily returned to England in 2001 to serve the remainder of his term. He was given compassionate release in 2009 and died in 2013. Most of the loot taken in the heist was never recovered.
STAR OF INDIA AND 8 OTHER STOLEN GEMS RETURNED TO CITY FROM MIAMI LOCKER
The fabulous Star of India, the world’s largest sapphire, and 8 of the 23 other gems stolen from the American Museum of Natural History were returned to New York yesterday in the coat pocket of an assistant district attorney.
The gems were recovered in two waterlogged suede pouches from a locker in a Miami bus terminal with the help of Allan Dale Kuhn, one of three ne’er-do-wells who have been charged with the daring burglary of last Oct. 29.
The other defendants are Jack Roland Murphy, known as Murph the Surf, and Roger Frederick Clark. All three describe themselves as skin divers, surfers and beach boys. The authorities call them “notorious jewel thieves.”
Still missing is the magnificent DeLong Star Ruby, which weighs 100 carats, and a diamond crystal called the Eagle Diamond, of 15.37 carats. The other stones are smaller. All were removed from the museum’s J. P. Morgan gem gallery.
Agreement Cuts Charges
Under an arrangement agreed to by District Attorney Frank S. Hogan’s office, the defendants will plead guilty to third-degree burglary, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
It was learned that Mr. Hogan’s office, despite the DeLong ruby’s not being returned, will still recommend a sentence of one year. Earlier Mr. Hogan was said to be insisting that both the Star of India and the DeLong ruby be returned in the arrangement.
It was understood that the agreement did not cover any of the other robbery charges against the defendants.
Murphy faces a charge of assault and robbery in a $250 holdup of a clerk in the Algonquin Hotel here in New York. In Miami, along with Kuhn, he is accused of the pistol-whipping of Eva Gabor, the actress, and stealing $550,000 in jewels from her. And last Saturday, Murphy and Clark were charged with the burglary of $52,000 worth of costume jewelry from a private home.
Gems Displayed on Scarf
Mr. Hogan displayed the recovered gems on a $1.98 black scarf borrowed from one of his secretaries.
In addition to the Star of India, which weighs 563.35 carats, the other pieces recovered were the Midnight Star sapphire, 116 carats; an engraved emerald, 87 carats; an engraved emerald keystone-shaped stone, 67 carats; a 32-carat emerald; a smaller emerald; an inch-long emerald carved in an egg shape; an aquamarine-faceted stone nearly square, 400 carats, and an oval aquamarine weighing 737 carats.
On Tuesday night, Kuhn, Assistant District Attorney Maurice Nadjari and three detectives, Richard Maline, Peter Meenan and John McNally, flew to Florida. The mission was to recover as many of the gems as possible in return for leniency in sentencing.
Newsmen Enter Chase
On arriving Kuhn made a series of phone calls and said he expected to have the gems by Wednesday evening. By that time, newspapers had carried stories of the supposedly secret trip and newsmen started following the group.
Evasive maneuvering began, most of it to avoid reporters and photographers, some of them hiding in bushes, some carrying walkie-talkies and some pulling ignition wires on cars the authorities had rented so they would not start.
Kuhn, the detectives and Mr. Nadjari moved from one hotel to another in their hectic effort to lose the reporters. At one point, they nimbly jumped 20 feet from a motel window to shake off their pursuers. Detectives said that caused Kuhn to comment, as he jumped with the group: “I’m glad you fellows aren’t burglars. You’d put me out of business.”
Finally, 10 or 12 hotels and motels later, they succeeded in shaking off the newsmen. But Kuhn was continually making and receiving phone calls. To a fence or a friend who held the gems? The answer has not been disclosed. The key call was made about 3 a.m. yesterday. Kuhn and the authorities were at the University Inn, a motel near the University of Miami.
Caller Gives Secret
A caller told a detective who picked up the phone: “The jewels are in a locker in the bus terminal at Northeast Fourth Street.”
The caller then gave the location of the locker and the place where the key to it was hidden. Det. Maline left the motel and picked up the key, which belonged to a locker in a bus terminal in downtown Miami. The detective found two wet brown suede pouches in locker 0911, located in a tier of lockers on a loading platform outside the waiting room. After removing the pouches from the locker, the detective opened the drawstrings and found the jewels, each wrapped in wet tissue paper.
Jack “Murph the Surf” is escorted to the Miami Beach police station by detectives after he was arrested with three other men for armed robbery, January 28, 1968—three years after he was released from prison after serving time for the museum heist.
Had the pouches been in the ocean? The defendants are expert swimmers and divers. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.
It was reported that the locker had been used every day since Dec. 12. An employee of the terminal said: “Someone put a quarter in the locker every day until today.”
Mr. Maline, still alone, returned to the motel with the pouches, and Mr. Nadjari called Mr. Hogan at his home.
“Chief, I’m sorry to wake you up,” he told Mr. Hogan. “We’ve completed our mission and we’re leaving on an 8:15 a.m. plane.” The prosecutor said he did not go into “specifics” with Mr. Nadjari, and Mr. Hogan refused to talk about anything the group had done in Miami other than to say that most of the time had been spent trying to elude newsmen.
It is known that on Wednesday afternoon Kuhn called his lawyer, Gilbert S. Rosenthal, and told him: “We ought to have the stuff in a few hours and get back to New York some time tonight.”
Aboard the plane for New York, Mr. Nadjari took the gems from the pouches and transferred them, each in fresh tissue paper, into an air-sickness bag.
The Northeast Airlines jet touched down at the Kennedy International Airport with Kuhn, the detectives and Mr. Nadjari at 10:55 a.m. Six detectives boarded the plane. When everyone else was off the aircraft, Kuhn, his hands manacled in front of him, stepped off the plane with the detectives. He was tanned, his orange-colored hair neatly combed, and he was dressed in a camel hair coat with a fur collar.
The group proceeded to two unmarked detective cars. Kuhn traveled in a vehicle with Assistant Chief Inspector Joseph Coyle, who has headed the investigation into the burglary.
At 11:53 a.m. a plainclothes man carrying three suitcases pushed into the door at 155 Leonard Street, Mr. Hogan’s office. Only after he had entered an elevator did newsmen realize there were airport tags on the luggage.
As he went up the elevator, he said he was carrying “Nadjari’s luggage.”
The car carrying Kuhn stopped at the intersection of Leonard and Centre Streets rather than pull up at the entrance to the prosecutor’s office. Across the street, walking casually and unnoticed, was Mr. Nadjari carrying the gems in his black coat pocket.
The district attorney said that as soon as Mr. Nadjari had laid the gems on his desk, Dr. Bryan Mason, curator of gems at the museum, was called into his office. Mr. Hogan said that Dr. Mason, after examining the stones through a jeweler’s eyepiece, had found them to be undamaged during their absence from the museum.
The expected plea of guilty by the defendants is to cover the three other counts in the indictment that value the gems at $300,000, as well as a charge of felonious possession of marijuana against Clark.
Federal Action Weighed
Federal authorities were said to be concerned as to whether to proceed against the three defendants on charges of interstate theft, a crime punishable by 10 years and a $10,000 fine. The government isn’t bound by any arrangement made by Mr. Hogan, but there has always been close cooperation between Mr. Hogan and U.S. Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau.
The defendants appeared briefly before Supreme Court Justice Mitchell D. Schweitzer yesterday and Mr. Rosenthal was granted an adjournment in the case until Tuesday. Bail was continued for Kuhn, Murphy and Clark.
Kuhn was returned to his cell in Manhattan City Prison where Clark and Murphy are also held. None could raise bail.
The district attorney declined to answer questions as to whether the jewels not recovered had been cut up and disposed of and whether he had hopes of recovering any of the stones still missing, particularly the DeLong ruby. All he would say was that the investigation was not closed.
—January 9, 1965
NOTE: Clark, Kuhn and Murphy, who carried out the theft by lowering themselves from the museum’s roof to an unlocked window, pleaded guilty and were sentenced in 1965 to three years in prison. In 1965, insurance magnate John D. MacArthur paid $25,000 to recover the DeLong Star Ruby from Florida loan sharks who had been holding it.
THE BIG LUFTHANSA ROBBERY AND ITS TRAIL OF MURDER
Relying on old connections in the world of crime, Steve Carbone put out the word that he was looking for Joseph Manri and Paolo LiCastri. He wanted to warn them that their lives were in danger.
He believed that the people behind the $5.8 million armed robbery of Lufthansa’s air cargo building a year ago had decided that the two men had served their purposes and should be eliminated. But Mr. Carbone, a supervisor in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not get to them in time.
“We could have saved their lives if only they had come to us,” Mr. Carbone said.
“But our efforts to warn them fell on deaf ears—they were either too greedy or too scared. You hate to see people killed. But it’s also a great frustration to us. They were links in the case that are cut off now.”
Mr. Manri and Mr. LiCastri were two of several suspects who received death sentences gangland style, at the hands of hired killers, following the largest cash robbery in the country’s history. Investigators say they are confident their luck will turn, and that one day they will solve the most dramatic case of their careers.
Eventually, Mr. Carbone thinks, they will recover some of the $5 million in cash and almost $1 million in jewelry that the robbers loaded into a stolen van and took from the German airline’s cargo building at Kennedy International Airport in the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1978. The robbers were six or seven men wearing ski masks and carrying shotguns and automatic pistols.
“It’s a case that just won’t die,” said Mr. Carbone, who was once a high school English teacher. “Every time it has breathed its last breath, something new comes up. It’s like a gigantic puzzle, and now we have a lot of the pieces.”
The bodies of Mr. Manri and a companion, Robert McMahon, were found last May 16 slumped in a brown Buick LeSabre in a deserted area in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn. They had been shot in the back of the head. In Mr. Carbone’s opinion, the murderer was likely someone they knew.
As for Mr. LiCastri, his bullet-torn body was found face down last June 13 on a pile of garbage in a lot off Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn.
An illegal alien from Sicily who had sneaked back into the country after serving time for manslaughter and then being deported, Mr. LiCastri was the sixth victim that the FBI believes was silenced because of his role in the Lufthansa robbery. There is a seventh, whose dismembered body has yet to be identified, whom the FBI thinks is also related to the case.
Two other suspects have been missing for a year. More killings are expected. The federal agents who are working on the case, a group that varies from 3 to 100, say they may be powerless to prevent them.
Long, Unproductive Interviews
In the last year they have gone on fruitless searches for cash or bodies and have delved into murders that later proved unconnected to the Lufthansa robbery. They have spent days listening to surreptitiously recorded tapes, hoping to hear something new.
There have been long nights in the FBI’s Queens office, in the shadow of the neighborhoods—Howard Beach and Ozone Park—where several of the suspects live. Fifty or sixty tips have been investigated, Mr. Carbone said, but fewer than a tenth have produced anything of value.
And yet an initial tip, provided by informers within days of the robbery, gave investigators the names of four whom they believe were involved, and what is regarded as a solid notion of the powers behind the robbery.
That information also helped provide the FBI with a legal basis for conducting electronic surveillance of the suspects, allowing them to monitor conversations that took place in the suspects’ cars. Other information, gathered through almost 1,000 interviews with airport employees, led last spring to the trial of Louis Werner, a Lufthansa cargo agent who was convicted of having given the robbers crucial inside assistance. He remains the only person to be charged or tried so far in the case.
After his conviction but before his sentencing to 16 years imprisonment last June, Mr. Werner was taken before a federal grand jury, granted immunity from further prosecution and asked to tell what he knew. He was held in contempt when he refused to answer questions, apparently afraid of retribution by accomplices.
Only one suspect decided to cooperate in exchange for leniency, according to Mr. Carbone, who has supervised two special agents, Thomas Sweeney and Gary Kirby, who have worked on the case full-time. They credit the assistance of Det. Jack Fitzsimmons of the New York City Police Department’s Queens task force, Sgt. James Shea of the department’s 12th Homicide Zone, the personnel of the 113th Precinct, the Nassau County Police and Det. Thomas Stollard of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Termed a Double Cross
According to testimony at the trial of Mr. Werner, the idea for the robbery originated with Peter Gruenawald, a Lufthansa cargo worker who was his friend but ended up testifying against him. Mr. Gruenawald, who is now under federal protection, stalled about carrying out the plan when he became disillusioned with those originally recruited for it from a bar in Queens.
Mr. Werner, 47, was depicted at trial as a gambler who ultimately double-crossed Mr. Gruenawald by arranging the robbery without him. Authorities now believe Mr. Werner never knew the identities of the men who invaded and robbed the cargo building. But they say he received $80,000 before he was arrested and gave Mr. Gruenawald $10,000 of his share to guarantee his silence.
According to testimony at Mr. Werner’s trial, the cargo agent went to his bookmaker, Frank Menna, who introduced him to a big bookmaker named Martin Krugman. Authorities have concluded that Mr. Krugman, a beautician from Nassau County, brought the scheme to the men who pulled it off. Mr. Krugman disappeared a month after the crime and has not been heard from.
Although the name never came up at Mr. Werner’s trial, James Burke of Howard Beach is the man investigators are convinced was approached by Mr. Krugman to carry out the plan. According to Chief Edward J. Stoll, formerly of the Queens detectives, Mr. Burke is an associate of the Paul Vario organized crime “family,” a group said to be responsible for much of the cargo thefts that have plagued the Kennedy Airport.
Mr. Vario, who now lives in Florida, has often been identified as a prominent member of the Lucchese organized crime family, now said to be headed by Anthony Corallo. Authorities believe that Mr. Vario and Mr. Corallo are both receiving tribute from the proceeds of the crime.
Federal surveillance indicated that Mr. Burke went to Florida after the robbery, but it is not known whether he met there with Mr. Vario. Mr. Burke made the trip with Angelo J. Sepe, one of the four persons named by an informer as one of the Lufthansa robbers, as was Mr. Burke’s son, Frank.
Mr. Sepe, who is 38 and comes from Ozone Park, has been arrested more than a dozen times since 1955 and was on probation for an armed robbery of a bank payroll at the time of his arrest last February as one of the Lufthansa robbers.
Mr. Sepe has not been indicted. But Federal authorities had parole revoked for him and Mr. Burke on the ground that they had associated with known criminals. They are now back in prison, but are eligible for release this month.
A Loan-Sharking Conviction
At the time of the robbery, Mr. Burke was in a Manhattan halfway house, following his release from the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta where he had been sentenced to 10 years on a 1972 loansharking conviction. Mr. Burke, who is 49 and whose extensive criminal record dates to 1948, had been sent to the halfway house on Oct. 18, 1978, and was released from it on Jan. 25, 1979.
Another suspect, Thomas DeSimone, arrived at the halfway house the same day as Mr. Burke, with whom the police say he had participated in at least one previous crime. Mr. DeSimone, 34, who also came from Ozone Park, had served one-third of a 10-year sentence at the penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., on a conviction for theft from an interstate shipment and interfering by force with interstate commerce. Mr. DeSimone was released from the halfway house on Dec. 12, 1978, one day after the Lufthansa robbery. His wife, Cookie, reported him missing a month later, and he has not been found.
Matthew Walsh, the director of the halfway house, which rented rooms in the Woodward Hotel on Broadway and 55th Street, said that Mr. DeSimone and Mr. Burke were friends while at the center. He also said that theoretically residents could sneak away at night without being noticed.
At the time of his disappearance, Mr. DeSimone—believed to have been one of the armed robbers—was wanted in Queens for questioning in a murder that took place a week after the Lufthansa robbery. That victim, Steven Edwards, said to have been an associate of Mr. DeSimone, was found shot in the back in his Ozone Park apartment. The FBI now believes that Mr. Edwards stole the 1977 black Ford van used in the robbery.
Besides Mr. DeSimone, Mr. Sepe and Mr. Burke’s 21-year-old son, Frank, the FBI also received information implicating a man named Anthony Rodriguez as another gunman in the airport robbery. Mr. Sweeney, the federal agent, said that Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Sepe were seen together a few days after the robbery. The two men had been arrested together before by the state police in a raid of a house used by Mr. Sepe in Mattituck, L.I., where drugs and guns were said to have been found.
The only court-authorized search conducted so far by the agents in their effort to recover the stolen Lufthansa cargo was at that Long Island house. The effort was not successful.
Mr. Carbone now believes that Mr. LiCastri and Mr. Manri joined the four others in entering the cargo building the morning of the robbery. Other authorities, noting that witnesses described six or seven gunmen, said that the elder Mr. Burke may have been among them. Mr. Carbone theorizes that Mr. Manri and Mr. LiCastri were murdered because they were “susceptible to deals”—Mr. LiCastri because he was in the country illegally and Mr. Manri because he was facing trial in a robbery and a truck hijacking.
Mr. Carbone was not sure whether Mr. McMahon, who was found dead in the car with Mr. Manri, had also been involved, or whether he was just unfortunate in having “gone along for the ride.” The bodies were found May 16, the day Mr. Werner was convicted.
“We are now seeking information about a known truck hijacker who provided Manri and that pulled the heist,” said Mr. Carbone. “We’re also looking for a well-known Long Island bookmaker who was associated with both Werner and Krugman and may have knowledge of the details of the robbery.”
Although the police have theorized that Mr. Krugman and Mr. DeSimone were murdered, Mr. Carbone believes that they are still alive, because their bodies have not been found. “Whoever killed the others made no effort to hide the bodies,” he said.
But another murder victim that investigators link to the case—Theresa Ferrara, 27, part owner of a beauty shop in Bellmore, L.I.,—could be identified only through x-rays after her dismembered body was washed ashore near Toms River, N.J., last May 18. Miss Ferrara is said to have previously shared a house in Queens with an associate of Mr. Burke.
In the view of investigators, the huge amount of money stolen is actually a factor in their favor.
“It’s such a large amount that any movement of it would single them out,” Mr. Carbone said. “Already they have had to get other people involved in moving it. The circle of people who have been involved has reached 30 or 35 by now, and the more people there are, the better our chances. It took the Brink’s people five years to solve that case, so we still have four to go. We’re very confident.”
—January 3, 1980
NOTE: The suspected mastermind of the heist, James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, died in 1996 while serving a life sentence for the murder of a drug dealer. More than 35 years after the crime, reputed mobster Vincent Asaro was charged for his participation in the robbery; he was acquitted in 2015. Only one person, a Lufthansa cargo agent described as an inside man, has been convicted in the heist.
BOSTON THIEVES LOOT A MUSEUM OF MASTERPIECES
Dressed as police officers, thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston early this morning and made off with 12 priceless artworks, including paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.
The daring theft, which the museum said was not discovered until the cleaning crew arrived this morning, is believed to be one of the largest in the world, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a museum spokesman.
Corey Cronin, a spokesman for the Gardner Museum, said it was difficult to place an exact value on the stolen paintings because “they were acquired by Mrs. Gardner at the turn of the century” and have never been offered for sale since. But an official of the FBI in Boston said he heard estimates today that the paintings could be worth from $100 million to $200 million.
A Major Dutch Theft
The largest previous known art theft occurred in 1988 when thieves stole three van Goghs from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, with an estimated value of $72 million to $90 million. But the skyrocketing price paid for art in the past few years makes any valuation difficult, experts cautioned today.
Mr. Cronin would not say whether the Gardner Museum, a 15th-century Venetian palace transported to Boston, had insurance on the stolen paintings. It was the first theft at the elegant museum, built around a flowered courtyard, since it opened in 1903.
According to Thomas A. Hughes, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, at least two thieves gained entry to the museum by posing as police officers. They were admitted by two security guards, who were then “subdued and restrained,” Mr. Hughes said in a statement. A Boston police spokesman said that the guards were overpowered and then handcuffed, and that the thieves then disabled the museum’s security system.
The theft, which occurred sometime after 1 a.m., was not discovered till the regular cleaning crew arrived at 8 a.m., Mr. Hughes said.
Neither Mr. Cronin nor the FBI would comment on how the thieves stripped the paintings from the museum’s walls or how they transported them after leaving. But a Boston law-enforcement official said the thieves appeared to know precisely what they were looking for.
Among the stolen works were three by Rembrandt, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, A Lady and a Gentleman in Black, and a self-portrait.
Value of the Rembrandts
Mr. Cronin described the Rembrandts as “priceless” and “irreplaceable.”
In addition, the thieves also took a Vermeer called The Concert, which Mr. Cronin said was valuable because it is among only 35 paintings by the artist known to exist.
It was acquired by Mrs. Gardner at an auction in Paris for $6,000, using one of her favorite secret devices to signal a bid: letting drop a handkerchief covering her mouth, according to Cleveland Amory in his book The Proper Bostonians. Mrs. Gardner was the daughter of a wealthy New York dry-goods merchant and the wife of John Lowell Gardner, a son of one of Boston’s last East India merchants who traded tea and opium with China.
The thieves also stole five works by Degas, including La Sortie du Paysage, Cortege aux Environs de Florence, Three Mounted Jockeys and Program for an Artistic Soiree, as well as another painting similar to the Program for an Artistic Soiree. A painting by Manet, Chez Tortoni, was also taken, as was a Chinese bronze beaker dating from the Shang dynasty, from 1200 to 1000 B.C.
Mr. Cronin said no damage had been done to the museum’s other works or to its building and galleries, a favorite with Bostonians since it was opened to the public in 1903 while Mrs. Gardner was still living in an apartment on the top floor. She died in 1924 at the age of 85.
Many of the museum’s works were acquired for Mrs. Gardner by Bernard Berenson. The museum houses 290 paintings and 280 other pieces, including tapestries, ceramics, furniture and documents.
A Delight in Shocking
Mrs. Gardner, popularly known as Mrs. Jack, was a leader of Boston society, but took pleasure in shocking Puritan Boston with her own ways. Instead of drinking tea, she drank beer. Instead of going sleigh-riding, she went walking with a lion named Rex on a leash, according to the account in The Proper Bostonians. Told that everybody in Boston was either a Unitarian or an Episcopalian, she became a Buddhist.
In 1898, soon after her husband died, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was advised by her doctors to take up a hobby. Her hobby turned out to be the erection of a Venetian palace in Boston’s Fenway section. Mrs. Gardner is said to have acquired the palace in Europe and had it shipped back to Boston piece by piece.
When she first opened the building, one guest was her good friend William James, the philosopher. He wrote her afterwards that “the aesthetic perfection of all things … seemed to have a peculiar effect on the company, making them quiet and docile and self-forgetful and kind.”
“It was a very extraordinary and wonderful moral influence,” Mr. James went on. “Quite in the line of a Gospel miracle.”
—March 19, 1990
NOTE: More than 25 years after the heist, none of the artworks have been recovered from what remains the largest art theft in American history.
WILLIE SUTTON, URBANE SCOUNDREL
For years afterward, Willie Sutton would curse himself for squeezing into the BMT subway train at Union Square station just before it rumbled toward Brooklyn that early afternoon in February 1952.
Mr. Sutton, then 52, was America’s most celebrated criminal, a fixture on the FBI’s Most Wanted List ever since he had escaped from a Pennsylvania prison five years earlier. He was a gentleman bandit who robbed scores of banks without firing a shot, sometimes while disguised as a policeman or a telegram messenger. He was a brainy ne’er-do-well who escaped from prison three times, read Schopenhauer for fun and loved to stroll through the roses at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Known variously as the Babe Ruth of Bank Robbers, Willie the Actor and Slick Willie, the Brooklyn native claimed to have stolen $2 million during his 25-year career in robbery.
In the 1940s and 1950s, New York newspapers were filled with lurid photographs of crime victims splayed on the sidewalk. But crime levels were low, and flamboyant gangsters, like Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel, fascinated rather than repulsed the citizenry.
“Crime was less prevalent but the criminals were more glamorous,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University and president of the New-York Historical Society. In the tense, high-crime decades that followed, that image was largely lost. No one ever had a warm feeling toward David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam.
But Mr. Sutton, with his pencil-thin mustache and well-tailored suits, enjoyed near folk-hero status in that era. Young boys idolized him. One year, a group of them chanted his name during the St. Patrick’s Day parade. He was beloved by the tabloids, too. When asked why he robbed banks, he famously replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” It didn’t matter that he said he never uttered the phrase—or that the “Field Marshal of Crime” wasn’t such a master criminal, ultimately spending nearly half his life behind bars.
Fifty years ago tomorrow, Mr. Sutton’s career came to an end with that 10-cent subway ride. As his train pulled into the DeKalb Avenue station in Brooklyn, a chubby-cheeked 24-year-old named Arnold Schuster boarded for the short trip to his Borough Park home.
By the time the subway reached the next stop, Pacific Street, the young man realized he was standing near the master thief.
Willie Sutton, the gentleman bandit, entering a courtroom.
Mr. Sutton, who was living in a $6-a-week room on Dean Street, exited the station, and Mr. Schuster followed. While the bank robber fiddled with a dead battery in his gray 1951 Chevrolet sedan, Mr. Schuster flagged down two patrolmen, Donald Shea and Joseph McClellan. “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy,” he said. “But I just saw Willie Sutton. He’s right around the corner fixing a car.”
The officers approached Mr. Sutton and asked to see his registration, which listed his identity as Charles Gordon. “Thank you, Mr. Gordon,” one of them said, satisfied. They returned to the station house, a few blocks away on Bergen Street, thinking they had nearly made the arrest of their careers. The two described what had just transpired to Det. Louis Weiner, who suggested taking another look at Mr. Gordon.
Det. Weiner approached Mr. Sutton and asked to see his license and registration. “Would you mind coming back to the station with me so we can check on this license a little further to make sure it’s genuine?” the third-grade detective asked.
“Sure,” Mr. Sutton said, in the tone of someone who had nothing to hide.
At headquarters, it didn’t take long before the police knew they had their man. “OK, fellas,” the fugitive said. “I’m Willie Sutton.” Det. Weiner, who is retired and living in Southern California, later called him the nicest crook he ever locked up.
Word of the arrest spread quickly. Reporters flocked to the Brooklyn precinct house, where Mr. Sutton and the three proud officers were paraded in front of the flashing cameras.
A joyous Police Commissioner George P. Monaghan hugged the three officers and crowed to the assembled press: “Well, we’ve got Willie. We’ve got Willie Sutton.” Mr. Monaghan immediately promoted each of the men to first-grade detective.
Forgotten in the hullabaloo was one Arnold Schuster. Hearing of the arrest, he immediately called the police station, but was unable to speak to anyone about his role. He hired a lawyer, in the hopes of obtaining the $70,000 reward that had been reported in the newspapers. It later turned out there was no such prize.
Within a few days, the police conceded they had made a mistake in not crediting Mr. Schuster, although the officers were permitted to retain their promotions. Mr. Schuster, with his fresh-faced innocence, then emerged as the story’s newest hero.
He gleefully told reporters how he had studied an FBI flier on Mr. Sutton that had been sent to his father’s Borough Park clothing store, where he worked. He spoke of how Mr. Sutton bowed his head when he stared at him on the subway, arousing his suspicions. Mr. Schuster’s tales were transmitted nationally by the new medium of television, making him an instant celebrity.
But not everyone was impressed. The Schuster family received 12 harassing letters and so many threatening phone calls that their number was changed.
Then, on March 8, while he was walking near his home in Borough Park, Mr. Schuster was murdered, shot once in each eye and twice in the groin. The viciousness of the crime shocked the city and sparked a widespread manhunt for the killer.
“This sinks me,” Mr. Sutton said of the killing, which he claimed he knew nothing about.
No one was ever arrested for the crime, although several suspects, including a longtime accomplice of Mr. Sutton, were identified. Mafia legend has it that the mob boss Albert Anastasia took one look at Mr. Schuster crowing about his achievement on television and ordered the hit simply because he hated the sight of a rat.
Mr. Sutton was convicted of robbing a Queens bank and was released from Attica in 1969 after a series of appeals. He died in 1980.
He always claimed to be heartbroken over the murder. “Arnold Schuster haunts me,” he wrote in his 1976 autobiography, Where the Money Was. “Throughout my career I had plotted and planned my jobs to make sure that I would not have to hurt anybody, and now, after it was over and I was sitting in jail, a good-looking, promising young man had been killed because of me. The laughter of the gods.”
—February 17, 2002
FBI BRINGS A FRESH SET OF EYES TO A ’71 PLANE HIJACKING MYSTERY
It is considered one of the great unsolved mysteries of American crime: how a seemingly quiet man in his 40s hijacked an airliner somewhere between Seattle and Reno in November 1971, then parachuted in his loafers and trench coat, making off with $200,000 in cash.
Who was he? Did he survive? After all these years, federal authorities say they still do not know, and the case lingers and vexes and fascinates as the only unsolved airplane hijacking in United States history. “It’s a mystery, frankly,” agency officials said in a December news release issued periodically to update old cases.
But now, with the advantage of technologies unavailable decades ago and with newfound attention from an agent on the West Coast, the FBI has announced that the cold case is officially hot again—and the search is on for the parachuter who called himself Dan, and sometimes D. B. Cooper.
FBI artist sketches of D. B. Cooper.
And, for the first time, the FBI is providing pictures and information on the Cooper case to the public on its Web site. The agency hopes that pictures like the one of Mr. Cooper’s black tie, which he removed before jumping, will prompt a memory, or that someone will offer fresh insight into what happened to all that cash, some of which was scattered in the wilderness and found by a young boy in 1980.
“This case is 36 years old, it’s beyond its expiration date, but I asked for the case because I was intrigued with it,” said Larry Carr, a federal agent based in Seattle who was four when the hijacking occurred. “I remember as a child reading about it and wondering what had happened. It’s surreal that after 36 years here I am, the only investigator left. I wanted to take a shot at solving it.”
Since the case was turned over to him six months ago, Mr. Carr has come up with a new way of seeing the incident: as a bank robbery that just happened to be on an airplane. The fresh perspective led to new investigating techniques.
“The classic way we solve bank robberies is with the public,” Mr. Carr said. “Everything we know—pictures, descriptions, m.o., everything. We put it all out there.”
Now, with the information made public, he said, “maybe someone will say: My uncle who disappeared in 1971—he could have been Cooper.”
Included in the newly released information are updated insights on Mr. Cooper that the FBI feels are accurate: he was not an expert sky diver, he had no help on the ground, he was about six feet tall and 175 pounds, with brown eyes.
The description came from separate accounts given by attendants on the hijacked flight, Northwest Airlines 305, that left Portland, Ore., bound for Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971. After takeoff, Mr. Cooper handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills, the FBI says. Upon the plane’s landing in Seattle, Mr. Cooper exchanged all 36 passengers for the ransom, but continued to hold several crewmembers on the plane with him as, on his orders, it took off again, this time on a flight to Mexico City.
Around 8 that night, Mr. Cooper jumped out of the back of the plane as it was flying somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev. It later landed safely.
The FBI opened an investigation while the airplane was still in flight, but despite years of work and the consideration of hundreds of suspects, Mr. Cooper seems to have disappeared into the night.
“If he’s alive today, he’d be about 85 years old,” Mr. Carr said. “Maybe one day I’ll be sitting at my desk and I’ll get a call from an old man who says, ‘You’re not going to believe this story.”’
—January 2, 2008
GRAYING THIEVES AND A RECORD HEIST UNDONE IN LONDON
On Friday nights for three years, they met over pints at the Castle, a pub in Islington, in North London. The four men were getting on in years, but they were not there just to talk about retirement or the aches and pains of aging.
Experienced thieves with long criminal records, they had something far more pressing in mind: an audacious, career-topping heist they boasted the world would never forget.
The operation, meticulously plotted—with the help, the police would later learn, of the book Forensics for Dummies—was finally set in motion the Thursday before Easter this year, as Brian Reader, the ruddy-faced ringleader whom the others called “the Master,” boarded the No. 96 bus near his home in Dartford, Kent.
Mr. Reader, 76, swiped his free travel pass for seniors and began the 80-minute journey to Hatton Garden, for centuries the center of London’s jewelry trade. By early evening, Mr. Reader reached an inconspicuous, seven-floor building on the handsome, manicured street. A plaque outside read: Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd.
The rest of his crew was there, dressed as building workers: John Collins, also known as Kenny, 75; Daniel Jones, 60; and Terrence Perkins, 67. Mr. Reader wore a yellow hard hat and a fluorescent jacket with the word “Gas” on the back. His distinctive striped socks were later captured by surveillance cameras.
In a case that prosecutors have called the largest burglary ever in England, the four men have pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal up to $30 million in gold, jewelry and gems. Prosecutors say they used high-powered, diamond-tipped drills over the long Easter weekend to bore an 18-inch hole through a concrete wall in a basement vault at the safe deposit company and then made off with the loot.
Those four are now in prison awaiting sentencing, and may face 10 years behind bars. Four other men are standing trial on suspicion of involvement, and have denied the charges.
As details of the burglary have emerged, many have been left wondering how four aging and sometimes bungling robbers managed to break into a high-security vault in the center of London—protected by reinforced concrete, iron gates and a motion-triggered alarm system—and get away with loot-filled wheeled plastic garbage bins. Had they not violated one of the first laws in the criminal handbook and boasted about the caper, they might never have been caught.
“This offense was to be the largest burglary in English legal history,” the prosecutor Philip Evans told Woolwich Crown Court. “These four ringleaders and organizers of this conspiracy, although senior in years, brought with them a great deal of experience.”
With his lined face, baggy eyes and cunning, Mr. Reader, the gang’s elder statesman, had a notable criminal record.
In 1983, after six armed men in balaclavas stole gold, cash and jewelry from a warehouse at Heathrow Airport in another celebrated heist, prosecutors say Mr. Reader teamed up with a Kent crime boss to help launder around $40 million in gold. He was sentenced in 1986 to nine years in prison for handling stolen bullion. Until recently, he was living in a sprawling mansion in Dartford.
Mr. Perkins was sentenced to 22 years in jail for his involvement in another notorious 1983 robbery in which a gang with sawed-off shotguns stole about $7.5 million in cash from the vaults at the London headquarters of Security Express, a security company.
At Hatton Garden, despite their expertise and the gang’s extensive planning, not everything went according to plan.
On the evening of April 2, Mr. Reader and the rest of the gang were greeted at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit by a red-haired man known as “Basil” who, investigators say, apparently opened the fire escape door and let the others in. The man has never been identified and remains at large.
Several men got out of a white van and unloaded bags, tools and two garbage bins, taking them in on the fire escape and down the stairs, Mr. Evans told the jury. The men communicated by walkie-talkie.
Once inside the building, they disabled the elevator, left an “out of order” sign, sent the elevator to the second floor, and shimmied down the elevator shaft to the basement, busting through a metal barrier. They cut a telephone cable jutting out of an alarm box as well as electrical wires, disabling an iron gate protecting the vault.
Then they began the arduous task of drilling through the vault’s wall, reinforced with concrete—a skill they had perfected by watching clips online. Shortly after 12:21 a.m. on April 3, Alok Bavishi, whose family owns the safety-deposit company, received a call that the intruder alarm had been triggered. He testified that his concerns were initially tempered by the fact that a previous alarm had been triggered by an insect.
Kelvin Stockwell, a security guard at the building, arrived nearly an hour later. After examining the front door and peering through the letterbox of the fire escape door, he told the jury he decided that the building was secure and left.
The police were also notified of the alarm, but no response was deemed necessary. Meanwhile, the thieves were in the basement, breaking into the vault. But the gang’s luck proved short-lived. When they finally breached the wall against which the metal cabinet holding the safe-deposit boxes was standing, they were stopped because the cabinet was bolted to the ceiling and floor, and they could not dislodge it.
They left around 8 a.m., empty-handed. But they returned two days later, on Mr. Perkins’s 67th birthday. On their second attempt, after a trip to the hardware store, the men managed to dislodge the cabinet, though Mr. Reader was not there to enjoy the moment, having apparently lost his nerve.
The men ransacked 73 safe deposit boxes, filling several bags and two large trash bins with jewels, gold, precious stones and cash. Prosecutors said the men struggled to carry the loot up the stairs to a fire escape. Mr. Collins, the lookout, was waiting nearby in the van. At 6:40 a.m. they sped away.
Another two days went by before the theft was discovered. Pictures of the gaping holes drilled through the wall were soon splashed in Britain’s papers. Angry safe-deposit box owners, some of them uninsured, lashed out at the police and at the safety-deposit company for their perceived incompetence.
Mirza Baig, a jewelry dealer, said he had lost everything. “I don’t have a penny’s worth of stones left with me because they were all in the safe deposit—the safest place you can imagine,” he told ITV News.
For several days the men reveled in the heist, but the police were closing in. The men had been identified from hours of surveillance footage, and electronic bugs, which had been placed in two of their cars, picked up their boasts, in cockney rhyming slang.
“The biggest cash robbery in history,” Mr. Jones can be heard crowing in recordings played in court, “that’s what they are saying.”
The men continued to meet at the Castle, a traditional pub that serves heaping plates of bangers and mash. The police filmed them with hidden cameras and used lip readers to figure out what they were saying.
After the robbery, they argued over how to split the proceeds and launder the jewels, prosecutors say. Mr. Perkins was overheard saying he planned to melt down some of his gold. “That could be my pension,” he said.
The men stashed some of the gold and jewels in their homes, behind baseboards and kitchen cabinets. On May 19, 45 days after the burglary, 200 police officers swept in as Mr. Jones and Mr. Collins were transferring some of the jewels to the home of Mr. Perkins’s daughter. The police raided 12 addresses in North London and arrested seven suspects.
At Mr. Reader’s house, the police discovered a diamond tester and a book on the diamond underworld. At the home of Mr. Perkins’s daughter, they found vast quantities of sapphires and diamonds, and a brown leather bag stuffed with watches. Heat-resistant porcelain pots and tongs used for smelting gold were discovered hidden in a washing machine.
After his arrest, Mr. Jones agreed to show prosecutors where he had hidden one bag of loot, under the gravestone of a relative.
Mr. Jones wrote to a Sky News reporter from his jail cell, saying he had notified the police of the stash to “make amends to my loved ones and show I’m trying to change,” and added, “It seems a bit late in my life, but I’m trying.”
The police subsequently discovered that he had failed to mention a much larger haul from the Hatton Garden burglary at the same cemetery.
Hatton Safe Deposit has been forced into liquidation, and the building’s new owner said he was considering turning the vault into a museum devoted to the heist.
The police have struggled to identify thousands of identical-looking chains and gems that have been recovered. Many millions of pounds worth of the loot still has not been found, prosecutors say, and at least some had probably been melted down, laundered or hidden before the arrests.
—December 13, 2015