We were all getting hit a lot. All the cities and towns in New York and New England were getting hit. We knew who they were. It was always the Irish Mob out of Philly.
—DETECTIVE JIM SMITH, GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT
The K&A guys developed an expertise in stealing. They could steal the teeth out of your mouth and you wouldn’t even know it. They were the best burglars out there.
—WILLIAM DRUM, SPECIAL AGENT, BUREAU OF ALCOHOL,
TOBACCO AND FIREARMS
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING Philly cops knew there was something novel, something different about the K&A burglars. They were more industrious, better organized, and considerably more creative than their predecessors. Restless thieves out of Kensington were burglarizing homes in the more prosperous sections of the city at an alarming rate. “They were wearing us out,” retired Philadelphia Police Captain Joseph Brophy recalls of his introduction to the K&A Gang in the early 1950s.
Earlier burglars—with no system or teamwork—had been less methodical and certainly less productive. Now the thieves were moving with military-like precision. It was a new phenomenon, and police were increasingly frustrated. Residential burglaries were escalating in number, homeowners and politicians were livid, and pressure was being exerted on the police to gain control of the situation. In the mid-fifties even the FBI began to take notice. “The FBI worked with us hand in glove for many years,” says Brophy. “Special Agent Dave Walker was in the squad room everyday. The FBI was particularly interested in the criminal intelligence we were gathering and what we discovering regarding major burglaries and truck hijackings.”
Various initiatives were undertaken, from beefing up existing burglary units to the utilization of sophisticated technology such as wiretaps: “You could do things in those days that you couldn’t do today,” says Brophy. Though the wiretaps were extremely useful, they could just as often prove dangerous. On one occasion, Brophy and his partner were discovered unconscious in a freezing attic in North Philadelphia. While trying to listen in on a burglar’s conversation, “we were overcome by fumes from a space heater we were using,” says Brophy, of the nearly fatal experience. “We often found ourselves in out-of-theway places” when spying, but “when the gang moved, we were on to them.”
Some taps provided a chuckle or two. Willie Sears, for example, was a central target of Brophy’s intelligence unit. Police carefully charted the comings and goings of production work’s creator, and so, apparently, did his associates. Sears’s colleagues would call his house and ask Dolly, his wife, “Did he leave yet?” If the answer was yes, the caller would quickly reply, “Okay, I’ll be right over.” That there seemed to be little honor among thieves was no surprise to Brophy. Not only did they steal from each other all the time, but “all the other burglars wanted Dolly,” he says. “Everyone wanted to get next to her. No sooner would Sears be out of the house and one of his buddies would be visiting his wife.”
Though the wiretaps proved useful, it was another departmental innovation that resonated in law enforcement circles for years to come: the publication of a burglar handbook, a nifty three-by-eight-inch photographic dossier of the area’s most troublesome thieves. “I was in the Headquarters Squad [a precursor to today’s intelligence units] in the mid-fifties,” recalls Brophy, “and Richard Doyle, Al Mortimer, Jimmy O’Dare, and myself would sit around and brainstorm about ways to grab these guys. What could we do to get these characters off the street? Then we came up with the idea of a hit list, a list of the most wanted burglars in Philadelphia. The concept was totally original. We just thought it would be a new and helpful twist, and it became my responsibility to keep the book updated.”
According to Brophy, the “blue books” (named after their blue soft-back covers) had a dramatic impact on their prey. “They helped us put heat on the gang and drive them out of Philly.” (Many K&A gang members scoff at the notion of being driven out of town. The plain truth is, they went where the money was. While affluent Philadelphia area neighborhoods were becoming played out, wealthy communities along the eastern seaboard still represented fertile fields.)
Simple but effective, the blue books provided beat cops with a handy catalogue—a pocket-sized “Rogues Gallery”—of the Philadelphia’s most persistent and annoying thieves. Members of the K&A Gang dominated its pages. Along with the mug shots of Willie Sears, Effie Burke, John Berkery, Ray Chalmers, Harry Stocker, and a host of others, the book included additional information that the intelligence unit thought might be useful to officers on the street. Home addresses, aliases, physical characteristics, MOs, favorite automobiles, close associates, and favorite hangouts all gradually became part of burglars’ individual profiles.
The handbooks were an instant hit. Officers walking a beat or in their squad cars could flip open their books and check out any suspicious characters who had crossed their path. As for the gang members, though some were initially delighted to see that they had earned a place in the city’s pantheon of reprobates and mischief-makers, it very soon became apparent that the dubious honor was “pure trouble.”
“It created more headaches for all of us,” says one media-shy criminal. “It made life miserable for many of us. Any time you or your vehicle were spotted by the cops they would stop you and check to see if you were in the book. Then they’d go through the whole thing. ‘Would you step out of the car, please. Would you mind if we looked in your trunk? Can we look in your glove compartment?’ It just made things more difficult.”
Other thieves were indifferent to the whole business. “By the time the books came along,” says one, “we were doing most of our work outside of Philly. They didn’t have any of the mug shot books, so we didn’t have to worry about it.”
Despite such negative to apathetic reviews, the blue books gradually became a bestseller—especially among the more aggressive East Coast police departments. Desperate for information about the slick operators looting the homes of their most prominent citizens, law enforcement officials sought out the Philly handbook once they learned that it was the K&A Gang that had invaded their turf. Local and state authorities from Maine to Florida began sharing information on the gang’s members, tactics, and potential targets. Small-town law enforcement agencies basically conceded that they were facing a unique and unprecedented criminal onslaught. Though almost all eventually learned it was a resourceful and relentless gang of predominantly Irish thieves out of Philadelphia that was committing the crimes, they were in no position to tackle the perpetrators by themselves. Waltham, Westport, Saratoga Springs, Princeton, and Annapolis could not be expected to do the job alone. Gathering and sharing information, as well as the dissemination of Brophy’s blue books, were critical first steps in law enforcement’s counterattack. Within a short time, and for several decades thereafter, homemade versions of Philly’s Rogue’s Gallery would pop up in communities from Bar Harbor to Fort Lauderdale and as far west as Ohio, Missouri, and Texas.
For example, one helpful Maryland state trooper sent a memo concerning information gathered by a high-ranking state trooper in Delaware to a third colleague in the New Jersey state police: “I am writing you in regards to... the K&A burglary gang. We experienced approximately a year and a half ago a series of eleven burglaries in two fashionable sections of Salisbury. They occurred between November 1968 and March 1969 on four separate weekends, usually on Saturday evenings, hitting two or three homes in the early evening hours. In each case culprits would gain entrance to the home by prying a sliding glass door apparently with a small screwdriver. Once inside someone would pull any curtains in the front of the house and turn a chair around facing out as a lookout. A side or rear window would be opened as an escape route and any firearms would be hidden as a precaution. General ransacking in the homes resulted in fine jewelry, silverware, coin collections, and furs taken. They would pass over the poor quality items and silver plate as well as older furs. In several cases liquor was taken and some food was consumed on the premises. It is felt in most cases they were dropped off and picked up by an additional member of the gang. On the evening of September 12, 1970 we experienced two identical burglaries in the same sections. The MO is alike in every detail and we have no doubt the same group is involved.”
Such missives became commonplace in small-town law enforcement offices during the sixties and seventies, and woe to the police chief who was out of the loop or dismissive of the warnings. Most took the notices seriously—especially if they had been victimized in preceding years. A Greenwich, Connecticut, police official ordered “all detective division commanders in Fairfield County” to be on the lookout for the K&A Gang. He informed his people that the gang was composed of “approximately fifty persons[,]... operates out of Philadelphia[,]” and “was positively known to have been in Greenwich, Easton, and Wilton, Connecticut, and Rye, Harrison, Scarsdale, and New Rochelle, New York.”
Police intelligence eventually became surprisingly accurate. After being hit so often, local law enforcement agencies not only learned the nuances of production work but also the names of its more aggressive practitioners. For example, one intelligence report describing the “K&A Gang’s method of operations” said “members of this gang operate in groups of three or four men. They leave Philadelphia, and if operating some distance from there, may be gone for several days. They stay in motels and during the summer season and will pick out one having a swimming pool, if available. They may or may not register under their correct names. Two cars are generally taken to the first location and one will return to Philadelphia with the loot immediately after the crime or if this is not done, furs and other identifiable objects will be sent to Philadelphia by other means.
“Generally, only one car is driven to the scene of the crime. One man remains in the car and cruises around the area. The other two or three men enter the house, usually by the back door using a large screwdriver to force the door. Upon entering the house, blinds may or may not be drawn, closet lights are extinguished by breaking or unscrewing the bulb, and the refrigerator cord disconnected. One man acts as a lookout and the other men ransack the house, dumping bureau, dresser, and desk drawers. In many cases, pillowcases and sheets have been used to carry away the loot. The lookout man stations himself in the rear or front of the house, depending on the most advantageous position, and will drink beverages or eat food while so engaged. Upon completing the search, one man leaves the premises and signals the outside man, or if a radio is being used, this method is employed, who then returns and picks up the rest of the gang. If the outside man is stopped or followed by police, the other men will flee the house, steal a car, and meet at a prearranged location.”
Occasionally, the police reports would veer dramatically off the mark, as did one stating that K&A gang members “are known to carry weapons and should be considered armed and dangerous.” Most experienced cops knew that the gang rarely, if ever, carried weapons. Generally, though, the intelligence gathered was accurate and perceptive, as in one report that observed: “subjects have been arrested many times and experience has revealed that questioning of these subjects is useless.”
Information on individual gang members was equally on target. For example, one Connecticut intelligence report describes “James J. Dolan” as a “white male, 32, 5'10", 185 lbs. Hazel eyes, brown hair, medium build, 1345 E. Columbia Ave. Philadelphia, Pa. (Mother’s address). He has his vehicles listed at this address. He buys a new Eldorado Cadillac every year, Penna. Registration JJD-7. Presently has a 1969 Cadillac, turquoise. He had an apartment next to the Chapel-croft Apts. 9629 Bustleton Ave. Philadelphia, but is now living with a woman at Academy Road, Philadelphia, address unknown.”
One state trooper who received and disseminated scores of reports on the K&A Gang over the years was Richard Richroath of the New Jersey state police. “They were quick and very efficient,” recalls Richroath, a 27-year veteran of the force. “They’d enter a house quickly, rake it, and be gone in three minutes. They would come in a community and knock off several houses in no time at all and seven or eight over the course of a weekend.” Richroath says the gang “picked on the more exclusive communities like Colt’s Neck that had many impressive horse farms and communities with estate type of homes.” The result was not unexpected. “Influential citizens became upset. They were really getting concerned and local politicians started to pressure us to provide better protection in those communities.” Though more manpower and resources were enlisted in the fight, Richroath regretfully admits that they “never had any success in shutting down the K&A Gang.” His only consolation was a general impression that Connecticut was being victimized even worse than New Jersey.
Detective Jimmy Smith of the Greenwich, Connecticut, Police Department remembers the era and the K&A Gang well. “We had a lot of house burglaries in Greenwich back in the sixties and early seventies,” says Smith. “We were all getting hit a lot, all the cities and towns in New England and New York. We soon learned who was doing the jobs. It was the Irish Mob out of Philly. I think we slowed them down once we finally found out who they were and how they operated. We set up a task force in different towns and neighborhoods in New England and New York. We got to know what to look for, what type of communities they worked in and followed them around in unmarked cars to harass and keep track of them.” Smith said their efforts hindered the burglars, but it “never nailed or convicted any of them. The gang was too quick and experienced. They refused to talk even when we got hold of them.”
Despite what occasionally seemed like painfully slow progress, a number of East Coast communities were making some headway. The widespread distribution of blue books, improved intelligence gathering, and proactive policing had an impact. Not surprisingly, the burglars were some of the first to notice. “The blue books and some of the other things the cops did had an effect,” says Jimmy Dolan. “The cops weren’t dopes. They learned the routine. Cops would pull you over, look at our faces, and then turn to the blue books. All it now took was a car stop. You could be up in Connecticut or Massachusetts and your ID says Pennsylvania. You look legitimate; you’re well-dressed. But then the book comes out. After a while, extreme paranoia sets in. You wanted to go to a place where the books didn’t exist and the cops were unconscious. It was always a game of chess with those guys.”
“THEY WERE CENTRAL CHARACTERS in our operations back then,” says John Lanzidelle, who joined the Philadelphia Police Department in the mid-1950s and worked Major Crimes as a detective during the sixties and seventies. “They did a hell of a lot of work and kept us busy. A lot of those K&A guys were pretty smart. They all knew one another and shared information. They learned from each other—such as how to use burning rods to open safes—and were usually more experienced than the other guys we had to deal with.”
Over the years Lanzidelle worked everything from simple burglaries to homicides and met some of the most despised and celebrated people in the news. He refers to his time on the police force as his “college education,” but in a subject that few other schools of higher learning offered. “I had a ringside seat to the greatest show on earth,” he says of those exciting years. The K&A Gang played a prominent role in that long-running spectacle.
“They were pretty personable guys. I never had a bad time with any of them,” says Lanzidelle. “They were good guys. You didn’t fall in love with them, but you wouldn’t mind having a drink with them. You could kid and joke with them. Most of them had a good sense of humor and knew what the score was. And they wouldn’t try to beat you over the head if you ran into them in a bar.” Not that Kensington crowd were a bunch of softies. “There were some bad freakin’ guys in that crowd,” he says. “Guys you wouldn’t want to mess with.” But, he admits, there was also a charming audacity about them that made the K&A crowd something truly special.
Residential and commercial burglaries in Philadelphia during the fifties, sixties, and seventies weren’t the exclusive preserve of the K&A Gang, but there was a distinctive quality about their work. Their burglaries tended to be bolder in scope, more inventive in their planning, and far more numerous than those of the others practicing theft as a livelihood. In other words, they were more accomplished, more professional; in some cases their work approached true artistry, demonstrating a real flare for originality, critical thinking, and problem solving. Other efforts recalled the original amateur hour.
John DelCarlino, a Philly police detective who worked Major Crimes through most of the sixties and seventies, spent 17 of his 27 years on the force chasing K&A’s industrious second story men. It didn’t take him long to become a grudging admirer of their work. “Those K&A guys were slick, sharp thieves,” says DelCarlino. “They had common sense, but many of them lived in a dream world. They’d hit homes after dusk, do the burglaries, and then live like kings for a week. They would party 24 hours a day with beautiful girls, buy all sorts of clothes, and booze it up pretty good. And then when they were broke again, they’d go back out and pull some more jobs.
“They’d come up with fascinating, imaginative ways to get what they wanted. For example, they developed a really innovative scheme to get ahold of some of those expensive diamonds and gems down at Jewelers’ Row in center city Philadelphia. They’d send a couple guys down to Eighth and Sansom Streets and watch the jewelry salesmen go from store to store as they sold their stock of quality diamonds. They weren’t stickup men who were going to blast their way into a well-protected shop or shoot it out with policemen who patrolled the street. They were more sophisticated than that. They’d watch, listen, and learn who had what and who traveled where. In no time at all they came up with a pretty good plan. They took careful notice of the license plates of the cars these jewelry salesmen were driving and then called a crooked cop they had in their employ. They’d give the cop the tag numbers, and he’d give them the home addresses of the salesmen.
“Later that evening they’d go to the salesman’s house and steal his car. They knew a lot of these guys didn’t even bother to take their stash of goods into the house with them at night. Most salesmen had their car trunks wired with alarms and felt comfortable leaving the inventory in the car. The K&A guys would hot-shot the car, drive it to a garage at Memphis and East Ontario Streets in Kensington, and then go to work on the car. They knew the trunk was wired, but the fender probably wasn’t, so they’d cut the metal fender, then reach in and take the sample jewelry cases. The K&A guys would then fence the stuff with reputedly legitimate jewelers. This went on dozens of times. They made a bundle using that can-opener trick, sometimes in the salesman’s own driveway.
“It went on for over a year before one of our snitches gave us a call. That’s how we discovered the operation in the first place. An informant tipped us off. A rat that sometimes gave us information called up John Ryan, one of our detectives in Major Crimes, and told him about a stash of hot jewels that could be found down at Nick Sama’s place at 15th and Snyder Avenues in South Philadelphia. We hit Sama’s jewelry store and found a dozen cases of jewelry he said wasn’t his. We had a big press conference with all the jewelry laid out on a table. There were hundreds of rings, brooches, earrings, and bracelets. It was an incredible amount of stuff. We estimated there were 35 jewelry salesmen in Philadelphia alone that were knocked off in this fashion in just one year. They had a pretty good run until we shut ’em down.”
Not all of the Kensington burglars Lanzidelle and DelCarlino arrested were as inventive and elusive as those who made life miserable for the diamond merchants on Jewelers’ Row. Some thieves could be downright infantile in their approach; others substituted mindless bravado for brains. The results could be disastrous for all concerned. One infamous heist, for example, cost two people their lives, one of them a Philadelphia police officer.
“We were sitting down at our office at the Roundhouse [Police Administration Building] at Eighth and Race when Captain Bartley came in around mid-morning,” recalled DelCarlino of the 1968 felony-homicide. “Every morning he’d hand us a slew of jobs from the night before that we had to check out. K&A guys had usually done more than their fair share of them. This time Bartley ordered us to ‘get up to the Northeast. It’s a bad one.’
“When we finally got up to Verree and Welsh Road, the place was crawling with cops. Homicide was there. Stakeout was there. High-ranking police officials were there. Even a few of our guys in Major Crimes were already there. Within a short time the police commissioner, district attorney, and the media would be there too. It was intense. It always is when a cop is killed on duty.
“A patrolman, William Lackman, responding to a burglary-in-progress call, was shot in the throat as he entered the home of Dr. Frank Washick. The shooter, John Seeley, was then gunned down by police as he tried to flee the doctor’s home. The perps had just been taken away when we got there. Seeley’s body, though, still lay strewn on the front lawn. But they missed one of the burglars. My partner found him hiding in the second floor closet as we went through the house. The guy had crapped his pants he was so scared. We were up there all day and then sent out to interview the neighbors, look up associates of the perpetrators, and find out anything we could about what had just gone down. We went to Kensington and started tracking down all the K&A guys. They all knew each other. It was a lot of legwork, but there was nothing of value.”
Officer Lackman, an 11-year veteran of the force, was known as “a good hearted” soul who was “full of life” and “never had a nasty word for anybody,” according to the newspaper reports. He left a young wife and a four-year-old daughter. His killer, John Seeley, 31, was out on bail for killing another policeman a year earlier. As a troubled youth, Seeley had been declared a “slow learner” and sent to a special school, preventing him from going on to high school, where he had dreamed of playing varsity football. Disillusioned and resentful, he turned to crime, building a record of nine arrests dating back to 1953. The most serious charge, the murder of a policeman, had occurred just 14 months earlier on August 6, 1967, when Seeley arrived at the home of his estranged wife and found Officer Herman J. Dietrich asleep in her bed. He killed the young officer, pistol-whipped his wife, forced her to help him dump the patrolman’s naked body in an empty lot, and was nevertheless allowed to go free on $15,000 bail.
The highly publicized murder of a policeman during a burglary gone bad gave further adverse publicity to K&A burglars, but it was a misnomer. Some of the burglars involved in the Washick bust may have been from Kensington, but they weren’t K&A burglars, at least according to actual K&A gang members. “Seeley was a rogue, a dangerous mutt,” says one burglar. “He had a bad reputation. I seen him around once or twice in bars we hung at. He’d come in lookin’ for work with any of the crews, but none of our guys would have ever picked him up. He might have done a few burglaries, but he wasn’t really a burglar. He was trouble.”
When pressed, even the police acknowledge that Seeley’s crew were K&A imposters, impersonating their more sophisticated elders in the hopes of nailing an easy score and building a reputation. They had received a tip that Dr. Washick owned a $50,000 coin collection, but they were amateur screwups posing as veteran highwaymen. “They were Kensington wannabes,” says DelCarlino. “They weren’t the real deal.” There is little doubt in the minds of experienced officers like DelCarlino that if serious second story men out of Kensington had done the job, there would have been no weapons, no deaths, and no coin collection. They would have picked the place clean.
As it turns out, by the late sixties, the vast majority of K&A gang members were doing very little work in the city. They were usually on the road, North Carolina, Massachusetts, western Pennsylvania, and Ohio being more likely venues for their wide-ranging operations than a single residence in Northeast Philadelphia. As one burglar says, “We wrote off Chestnut Hill, the Main Line, and the more affluent suburban neighborhoods. The elite areas around Philadelphia were burnt out, and the cops were becoming more sophisticated. There were rich people in other parts of the country.”
More important, the police knew that few, if any, K&A burglars ever carried a gun on the job. And it was rare for cops to catch one of them at the scene of a burglary, much less taking part in a criminal act that resulted in anything like the human carnage at the Washick residence.
Seeley was viewed as a cowboy, a dangerous, unpredictable hooligan who often bragged, “A walk-in ain’t hard for me. I can hold 20 people at bay.” His partners were inexperienced dupes hoping to make a sizable score and replicate the legendary exploits of the better-known neighborhood thieves. They would pay dearly for their ineptitude: Seeley was killed at the scene, but his confederates would spend the rest of their lives behind bars. John McIntyre (23), Adolph Schwartz (22), and the so-called masterminds of the scheme, Michael Borschell (28) and William Russell (27), would receive life sentences for a burglary gone bad and the cold-blooded murder of a Philadelphia police officer.
THE LURE OF THE GOOD LIFE was strong, and K&A wannabes were everywhere. By the late sixties and early seventies, it was mostly wannabes that Philly cops were running into. The one and only time DelCarlino shot someone in his two dozen years on the force, one of these young, starry-eyed Kensington burglars was involved. “We were getting several calls a day from the same neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia,” says DelCarlino. “Somebody was beating the hell out of Winchester Park and Lexington Park during the daylight hours. The guy was posing as a utility man or city sanitation worker. He was doing five or six houses a day, and we weren’t having any luck at all. He’d wear a gray uniform like a utility worker for the gas company. He’d knock on the door, and if nobody answered and the property appeared empty, he’d break in. My partner and I decided we’d have to try something different, so we started to intercept everybody we saw who regularly traveled through the community: mailmen, UPS deliverymen, newspaper boys, folks walking their dog, anybody who regularly walked the streets of the hardest-hit communities. We told them what was happening, that the guy wore a uniform and might be using a white Ford with temporary tags, and to give us a call if they saw someone who looked suspicious going through the neighborhood.
“It wasn’t long after that that we got a call around noon one day from a mailman. He thought he saw someone who looked suspicious. Henry Coshland and I went out to the neighborhood and quickly spotted the car, a white 1964 Ford, but before we could do anything the car sped off. We chased the guy a short distance when we managed to box him in, but then he took off on foot and the real track meet began. We chased him through alleys and backyards until he reached the edge of Pennypack Park [a large public park that borders Lincoln High School].
“He turned around and shouted at us while holding something black in his hand. It looked like a gun. I had him in my sights and could have shot him in the head, but I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger. The man ran another 50 feet before falling and yelling out, ‘I’ve been hit!’”
The guy turned out to be Danny Weber, a 21-year-old Kensington wannabe, who was just following the traditional career path into burglary. Older, more sophisticated K&A burglars like Hughie Breslin, Jackie Johnson, and Jimmy Laverty would never have considered young Weber a genuine K&A burglar, but the cops did, and so did the media, whose standards were less exacting. Moreover, unlike most K&A burglars, Weber proved incredibly cooperative. In fact, he wouldn’t stop talking.
“After he recovered from the gunshot wound, we took him out with us in a squad car,” says DelCarlino. “We had our reports with us on previous unsolved burglaries in the area. It was incredible. We’d go up and down the streets of Northeast Philly and he’d point to houses and say, ‘I hit that one.’ ‘And that one.’ ‘And that one.’ ‘And that one.’ It went on for hours. There were hundreds of houses. I stopped counting at 400. Weber had tremendous recall and could remember every house he had ever broken into. And every little detail as to what he had taken out of there. I think he got five years or so and ended up doing the same thing for the cops in Jersey and Bucks County. He must have done a couple thousand jobs all over the area.
IF THERE WAS ONE LAW enforcement official who dedicated himself to nailing Kripplebauer and his K&A confederates, who went after the gang with the unswerving passion more commonly associated with religious crusades, it was Bill Skarbek. His commitment to their capture and imprisonment made him something of a legend within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and on the streets of Philadelphia.
A native New Englander, William Skarbek joined the FBI after graduating from law school in Florida. Though becoming one of Hoover’s boys was never a driving ambition, he says, it was “always in the back of my mind.” But Skarbek admits that he “didn’t seriously consider it until a classmate at law school” said he had signed up to become a Special Agent for the FBI. Shortly thereafter, Skarbek wrote “Mr. Hoover a letter” expressing his interest in the Bureau, and one day, while coming off the beach, he was met by a tall, well-dressed stranger. He was an agent from the FBI’s South Florida office, checking up on Mr. Hoover’s new pen pal. Young Skarbek seemed to have the goods.
Preparations for the bar exam precluded his immediate assignment to FBI training school in Virginia, but a last-minute cancellation by another applicant in the following class allowed Skarbek to take one of the 50 slots at Quantico. After 14 weeks of training, the rookie agent was sent to Detroit. It was 1967, just after the Motor City had been torn up by inner-city rioters. Skarbek’s cases ran the gamut from investigating organized crime figures to hunting draft dodgers to making cases against rioters. After a year he was transferred to the Philadelphia office.
Philly had “good cases, there was always a lot to do, and there was the potential of solving lots of cases because the area was so active,” but the young agent was once again stuck with Selective Service work. The Berrigan brothers and a host of other antiwar protestors were active in the area, and draft board break-ins in Media, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, had garnered nationwide publicity and embarrassed the Nixon administration. Gradually, however, Skarbek began to be thrown some traditional organized-crime cases, a welcome but challenging diversion. Jewel thefts, home burglaries, and large-scale fencing operations were big in the area, unusually big. Almost immediately the young agent learned of the voracious criminal appetite of one particular gang of thieves: the Irish Mob out of Kensington. If you were working organized crime on the East Coast—particularly property crime—you were familiar with them.
“The K&A Gang was a special group of guys,” recalls one FBI Special Agent. “They weren’t as organized as the Mafia, but there was no other burglary crew as prolific or as competent. From soup to nuts, they were the best burglars out there.”
“You didn’t have to be on the job long to learn they were the best,” recalls Skarbek. “The K&A Gang had the pedigree. They were definitely the cream of the crop and a fascinating collection of guys. There wasn’t always a lot of sophistication to their work, but they made burglary a serious profession by using street-level common sense, a lot of nerve, and a good bit of ingenuity.”
The FBI wasn’t initially interested in jewel thefts and burglary—they thought they had more important items on their agenda—but the sheer scope of the gang’s exploits put the problem on “the FBI’s radar screen.” As Skarbek recalls, “as soon as I started working cases in the area, I knew that Philadelphia had the most prolific interstate burglars in the country. We knew they were working the whole country. They were going up to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the rest of New England. Then they would go south and west into Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Florida, and Texas. They were all over.
“Their plan was simple and it worked,” says Skarbek matter-of-factly. “They worked in four-man teams—a window man, a driver, and two searchers. They’d hit upscale neighborhoods, mostly Jewish homes. And the Hanukah holiday would be one of their prime periods of work. Jewish people had jewelry, but they didn’t wear it to synagogue. So while the families were praying at synagogue, the burglars were preying on their homes and taking all their money and jewelry.
“The way the gang members had it set up, there was almost no jeopardy to their operations. They were slick and their operation was based on comparatively little risk. They worked from eight p.m. to one a.m. in the morning, knew when people weren’t home, and were smart enough not to carry any weapons. They almost never got arrested. Schmucks get caught. Professionals like the K&A guys didn’t get caught. That’s what made them so good, because for the longest time no one knew who they were. And on those rare occasions when they did get caught, they never ratted on their partners and were able to hire the best attorneys, who got them out on bail. Then they’d jump bail, not show up for trial, and the local prosecutors wouldn’t pursue them with extradition proceedings because no weapons were confiscated and no one had been hurt. It was just a simple burglary charge.”
Skarbek was on the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Goods detail only a short time before it became “painfully obvious the only way to make a dent in their operation was to catch them in the act and with the stolen stuff on them.” It would require a major effort—in fact, a national campaign.
“Law enforcement offices at the federal, state, and local levels would have to be incorporated,” says Skarbek, who vigorously lobbied his superiors in the Bureau for a full-court press on the burglars. “Initially, the other federal offices had trouble believing what we were telling them. I said if we were going to get these guys it would require better intelligence, increased resources, and far more manpower. The burglars and their fences would have to be targeted. Philly had become known up and down the East Coast as one of the top burglary and fencing operations in the United States. It was right up there with New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. The word on the street was that the K&A guys stole whatever they wanted, sold it to Jewelers’ Row or up in New York if the items were particularly hot or pricey. K&A Gang operations became known to all of us because of the notoriety of the jobs, the value of the goods stolen, and the uniqueness of the pieces.”
Items that were stolen in one part of the country and discovered in another had often traveled through the Philadelphia area. For example, a well-known “$85,000 brooch that was stolen from a Chicago jewelry show and recovered on Redondo Drive in Hollywood was traced back to a Philadelphia, New Hope, and New York City fencing operation.”
“We kept hearing the same names: Neil Ward, John Berkery, Kripplebauer, Wigerman, Dolan. We knew guys like Effie Burke were working all across the country, but we could never get him. Burke was like the pinnacle, a teacher of the craft. And we just kept missing Berkery. He was considered the main nexus between the Northeast Irish mobsters and the Mafia. Neil Ward was said to have the keys to every hotel room along the East Coast. He concentrated on jewelry salesmen. Kripplebauer’s group seemed to work with impunity from Massachusetts to Texas.”
The more time Bill Skarbek spent on the burglary detail, the more frustrated he became. A bunch of high school dropouts and blue collar lunkheads were ripping the hell out of wealthy neighborhoods from Maine to Florida, and cops, and even the FBI, were clueless.
To further complicate the problem, the Philly police seemed to have adopted a minimalist approach in their pursuit of the Kensington-based burglary ring. Skarbek and his fellow agents didn’t consider “the local cops all that active” under Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, and there were rumors of a “hell of a lot of corruption” in the department. For a while there, claims Skarbek, “we didn’t get involved with the local police unless it was absolutely necessary.” Of course, the more time Junior Kripplebauer, Billy McClurg, Jimmy Dolan, Chick Goodroe, and the other burglary crews spent on the road, the better it was for most Philadelphians, including the cops. They could all rest easy whenever the local version of the Huns and Mongols were out of town pillaging some other folks.
Although Skarbek was supposed to focus on crime in the Philadelphia area, he didn’t have that luxury. He was too busy fielding inquiries and distress calls from perturbed law enforcement officers across the country, all trying to solve a rash of high-end home burglaries: a beleaguered cop in Raleigh, North Carolina; a frustrated state police official in North Jersey; a perplexed Special Agent in Westport, Connecticut. Philly’s Irish Mob seemed to be everywhere. Skarbek grew increasingly exasperated as he explained to small-town sheriff’s departments the gang’s history, methodology, and membership.
The more time he spent on them, the more determined he became to bring them down. Though he marveled at their ability to establish a “national network of professional burglars and fences around the country” and their knowledge of “wealthy out-of-state areas where they had legal contacts who knew the system and got them out on bail” (and thus into other people’s homes) in a matter of hours, he was dedicated to ending their reign of thievery.
After considerable lobbying by Skarbek and others, combined with a deluge of citizen complaints and official requests for assistance, the FBI’s national office established Operation Top Thief, a vigorous and expansive program to take down the Philly burglars. More agents were assigned; surveillance was stepped up, including the use of fixed-wing aircraft; regional meetings with law enforcement officials were increased; and the cultivation of informants was strongly encouraged.
Even with the intensive approach, triumphs by the federal agents were few and far between. The burglars weren’t about to give up their brutes, alarm keys, and affluent lifestyles for something called Operation Top Thief. Never that impressed with cops in the first place, they weren’t about to roll over for J. Edgar Hoover and his army of conservative, clean-cut agents. They felt they had proprietary rights on production work. No federal cops were going to take away their lucrative careers.
Skarbek’s team of agents went about their business methodically. They held more information-gathering meetings with local authorities, placed a priority on tracking down leads, stepped up surveillance of the burglars and their fences, installed more wiretaps, and routinely disseminated intelligence to police agencies across the country. Most of the work was uninteresting, mundane—drudgery on the installment plan. But it was well known in law enforcement circles that such boring, time-consuming routines often paid big dividends.
A perfect example was Bill Skarbek’s conversation with a young salesman for a U-Haul truck rental agency. By doing their homework, Skarbek and his colleagues pulled off one of the first and most successful takedowns of a K&A burglary crew.
Skarbek had become so familiar with the K&A Gang and their tactics that he could have formed his own crew. As he says, he started to think like them and was able to “put together their pattern of activity and knew when they were going to do something.” He figured out that on many of the gang’s out-of-town runs they used trucks and vans to haul away the stolen merchandise. Most of the time the vehicles appeared to have been rented from local distributors in Philadelphia. Skarbek began to visit van rental agencies throughout the city. He discreetly explained what was happening, distributed photographs of the key players, and requested the clerks’ assistance. It was tedious, unsatisfying work.
One day a van rental agent called and said, “Your boy was in this morning.” Skarbek was elated; it was if he had hit the lottery. The news that Ted Wigerman had just rented a van was all he needed to hear. The Wigerman takedown is one of the best illustrations of Operation Top Thief in action.
Ted Wigerman, one of the K&A Gang’s most industrious crew chiefs, was tall and squirrelly faced, with a receding hairline and a nose for an easy score. That warm midsummer afternoon in 1976, he tossed back another pint glass of Budweiser, joking and slapping the backs of the usual collection of barflies at Jumbo’s as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Tired mill hands, heavily muscled roofers, and a few hard-edged regulars attired in flashy sharkskin suits shared drinks, macho boasts, and age-old neighborhood war stories as the strong stench of beer permeated the air and a pounding Rolling Stones song played in the background. Neither Wigerman nor his well-dressed colleagues—Michael Lee Andrews, Frankie Brewer, and Frank Zappacasta—displayed the slightest interest in the passage of time, even though they were already behind schedule on a big heist hundreds of miles away. They cherished their rye shots and beer chasers. Even the prospect of a fat, cash-stuffed safe couldn’t pull them away.
Special Agent Bill Skarbek, along with a dozen other FBI agents, had been waiting for hours for the Irish mobsters to finish their beers and hit the road. After more than a year of painstaking but fruitless effort, the FBI’s new task force on the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property had finally received a solid tip, and now they had the seedy taproom under surveillance.
As the hours slowly passed, the increasingly restless federal agents sat in their sweltering cars, trying to blend into the blue collar community. Finally, just after nine o’clock that evening, Ted Wigerman, bold and bloated, staggered out of the bar. But he left alone. Moreover, neither he nor any of the other members of the gang approached the van. The agents thought they had been made once again, their stakeout blown.
Not until the next day did they realize that bypassing the van wasn’t a clever ploy; it simply reflected the flip side of the gang’s culture. The sophisticated burglars were also a bunch of thuggish louts who would get so tanked up in a bar that they would wind up playing darts with meat cleavers or start a bare-knuckle brawl, forgetting the jobs they were supposed to pull.
The chief of the FBI’s surveillance unit gave the order to disband. But Bill Skarbek was undeterred. “I know they’re going out,” he argued. “At least keep a skeleton crew on overnight. I’m positive they’re about to pull a job.”
His superior was unmoved. “Look, Bill,” he countered, “we’ve been out here all day. The guys are beat. We’ve sat around and nothing’s happened. Admit it, we just got a bad tip. They’re not going out tonight.”
“Not tonight,” pleaded Skarbek, “but maybe tomorrow morning. I’m telling you these bastards are getting ready to pull a job. I know it. I’ve been tracking them for years. I know their routine, their habits. Hell, I know some of them better than they know themselves. They’re going out, and if we don’t keep an eye on them we’re going to miss it. And then we’ll be kicking ourselves we gave up too soon.”
Skarbek got his way, and fortunately his hunch was correct. Wigerman and his partners met at the bar the next morning and after several beers drove off in a car and the van. Three cars filled with FBI agents followed at a comfortable distance. As the caravan headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Skarbek believed the burglars were bound for Ohio or Missouri, two states the K&A Gang had recently been plundering.
Instead, the burglars turned off the highway in Amish country and drove to a residential neighborhood outside Lancaster, where they left the van in the parking lot of a small shopping center. They then drove the car directly to a large house, from which, minutes later, Wigerman and his friends were observed lugging a large safe. They placed the heavy box in the trunk of the car, where it could easily have been mistaken for a large television. After transferring the safe to the van, they headed back toward the highway.
The gang hadn’t traveled more than a mile when the word was given to nail them. A wiry, six-foot-three FBI agent, whose flowery silk beach shirt and mop of blond hair made him a ringer for a California surfer dude, pulled his unmarked police car in front of the van and gradually slowed to a halt on a narrow bridge. Before the Philly thieves knew what hit them, a caravan of federal, state, and local authorities, with semiautomatics and shotguns drawn, swooped down on them, made them lie spread-eagled across the roadway, and arrested them. For many Lancaster County residents unaccustomed to such scenes, the “bodies and automobiles... strewn across the roadway” must have looked like a massive car wreck.
Skarbek and his colleagues were elated. This was a milestone for the FBI’s new antiburglary task force, and the capture was widely played up in the media. Cynics might argue that the triumphant capture of four thieves from Philadelphia was coming 25 years late, and furthermore that there were probably a dozen or two other K&A crews continuing to wreck havoc throughout the country. But it was a signal event for both Skarbek and the burglars, especially the crew chiefs he targeted. For the first time a smart, zealous cop with resources was coming after them. Paraphrasing a famous line about another fanatical lawman uttered by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, it wasn’t long before the Kensington burglars collectively started asking, “Who is this guy?”
“He was a venomous son-of-a-bitch,” says Junior Kripplebauer. “Boy, he wouldn’t stop. He seemed to be all over the place, and he kept sending reports about me to agents and law enforcement officers all over the country. Hell, anything of value that was stolen or missing between California and Massachusetts was laid at my feet.”
“That Skarbek was a motherfucker,” echoes Donnie Johnstone. “He was a real son-of-a-bitch. He went after everybody like his life depended on it.”
“Nobody was more successful than Skarbek,” says Jimmy Dolan, referring to the federal agent’s harassment of the various burglary teams. “Who the fuck is this Skarbek? He was a nut. He said he was going to get us. He took major shots at me. He was relentless.”
Dolan had more than his fair share of run-ins with Skarbek. Two confrontations, in particular, were classics of aggressive, proactive police work. One involved the use of informants; the other, a well-placed wire.
“We were doing a job one night at the Oregon Diner [a popular all-night diner in South Philly],” recalls Jimmy Dolan. “We had gotten into the place undetected and were quietly going about our business. We were trying to go through a wall that would lead to where the safe was. A very slight hole had been drilled, and we were about to enlarge it just in case we had to hook up a truck and pull the wall down when one of the guys comes up to me looking concerned and whispers, ‘Jimmy, I think I just heard something drop on the other side of the wall. I think there’s somebody over there.’
“He’s looking pretty tense and I ask him, ‘Are you sure?’
“He says, ‘Yeah, I’m sure. I heard something drop. Like a piece of metal hitting the floor. I’m pretty sure somebody is over there.’
“Now I’m thinking to myself, are we being set up? Is there really somebody over there? There wasn’t supposed to be anybody in that part of the building. We had scoped out the place pretty good. We knew the routine. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody in that room at that time of night. It was always locked and unoccupied.”
“The seconds are going by, but they feel like minutes, we’re in someplace we shouldn’t be, and I gotta figure out if Skarbek and the Feds or the local cops are waiting for us on the other side of the wall. The wrong decision and this could get pretty ugly. I had to make a quick decision. Do we go through with it and chance the possibility we all get busted? Or do we back out, patch up the wall as best we can, pick up our gear, and get the hell out of there as fast as our legs will carry us?”
Although they were within a few feet of what they thought would prove a nice score, Jimmy Dolan’s prudent decision was the right call. On the other side of the diner’s flimsy wall was a whole lot of hell. Skarbek had a snitch who had tipped him off that Dolan’s crew would be doing the diner that week. The FBI was just waiting to nab the burglars as they entered the room and approached the safe. The slick but impromptu getaway helped Dolan maintain his record of “never getting burned at the scene of the crime,” but the federal harassment was becoming a pain in the ass. Skarbek himself was becoming a certified nuisance.
Good, solid criminal intelligence was invaluable for making a case, but for catching the bad guys red-handed, there was nothing better than a well-placed informant. Skarbek and his team of agents bent over backward to coax, encourage, harass, and threaten anyone they thought could provide them with useful information about the K&A crowd. Though the gang had a long and well-earned reputation for being uncooperative, by the 1970s there were some definite chinks in their armor. More aggressive policing, longer sentences, and the insidious psychological effects of drugs had put some holes in the once-unassailable standup ethos. Neighborhood informants were to be had, and Skarbek went after them.
When rats proved elusive or disobliging, however, the FBI did not rule out placing a listening device in someone’s home, business, clubhouse, or favorite vehicle. The Feds had declared war on the burglars, and they were going to take them out by any means necessary. Once again, Jimmy Dolan was the object of their interest: the Bureau put a listening device on his home phone for 30 days.
“For the longest time,” says Dolan, “there seemed to be a lot of static on my home phone, and some of the guys were telling me to get it fixed. Others said they thought the phone was bugged and that I should watch what I said when I was on the line. This goes on for a while, until one day a friend of mine comes knocking on my door, but he won’t come in the house. He’s got a frightened look on his face, starts whispering, and waves to me that I should step outside. I’m thinking, what’s come over this guy? Why’s he acting this way? We walk a few steps away from the house into the front yard and he’s looking all around like he’s afraid we’re being spied on. He leans over and whispers to me, ‘Jimmy, I’m on my scanner and short-wave radio the other night and I hear the cops talking about a house they got under surveillance. The more I hear, the more I think it’s your place. They’re describing the house, the bushes in front, the neighborhood just off of Grant Avenue, the comings and goings of this guy they’re watching, and I’m thinking it sounds like your place. Then I hear them mention Ditman Street. Now I know it’s your place. I’m telling you, Jimmy, you better watch yourself. The cops or the FBI have got their eye on you, and they probably got your phone tapped.’
“After hearing this I finally gotta take the noise on the phone more seriously and call the phone company and tell them to come out and check their equipment. Well, a repairman comes out to my house and starts to take the phone apart. It ain’t long before the guy gets a perplexed look on his face. I can see he’s stumped, so I say to him, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’
“He doesn’t answer right away. I can see he’s searching for the right words, like he knew he probably shouldn’t be telling me this, but I’m standing right over him, and he finally says, ‘Sorry to tell you this, but I think somebody has put a bug on your phone. I think somebody is tapping your phone.’
“I can’t fuckin’ believe it. I’m really pissed. I figure it’s gotta be that goddamn Skarbek and the FBI. The son-of-a-bitch breaks into my house and places a tap on my phone. I get the phone repairman to take the bugging device out of my phone and hustle downtown to my lawyer’s office. I walk into Bobby Simone’s office, go right by the secretary, and walk right into Simone’s private office, where he’s meeting with a few clients. I’m yelling and screaming about the FBI and this nut Skarbek, and Bobby asks me, ‘What’s that you got in your hand?’ I hold the gadget up and tell them all, ‘This is the goddamn bug I just pulled out of my phone. Those bastards tapped my phone.’ You’ve never seen a bunch of guys run so fast in your life.”
Jimmy Dolan always enjoyed the intellectual challenge of doing battle with the cops. It was a chess game he was pretty good at, and he usually won. But now the game was becoming more serious, and the competition was decidedly more advanced. Dolan began to lose his fascination for the game. It wasn’t fun any more playing every match against Bobby Fischer.