JUNIOR KRIPPLEBAUER’S chess match with the law enforcement community had long since become more than a simple intellectual challenge. A relentless worker who had cut an expansive swath of criminal activity across the American landscape, incorporating residential and commercial burglaries, the occasional stickup and bank robbery, plus various cons, ruses, and ploys, Kripplebauer was a one-man crime wave who was driving the nation’s lawmen to distraction and bugging the hell out of Bill Skarbek. No other K&A burglar seemed so industrious, omnipresent, and bothersome to small-town sheriffs and mid-sized police departments from New England to the Gulf Coast. The list of distressed communities requesting information and guidance was endless.
The two men—each in his own way a driven soul—were destined to tangle repeatedly during the seventies. For Junior the decade began in prison, with the expectation that he would soon be back on the street. If that wasn’t reason enough to be optimistic, he had also had the good fortune to meet his future wife and dependable co-conspirator while serving his last year at New Jersey’s Trenton State Penitentiary. Philly’s version of Bonnie and Clyde, Mickie and Junior Kripplebauer would prove a considerable challenge for the FBI and a headache for lawmen everywhere between the Canadian and Mexican borders.
“I was doing time up at Trenton State with Eddie Loney,” recalls Kripplebauer of his time at New Jersey’s oldest state prison, “when one day he gets a letter from this female friend of his who lives in California. She sends a photograph of herself, and Ed comes over to my cell and shows the photo to me. Boy, she was a real honey. The girl was beautiful. Tall, blond hair, blue eyes, a great figure—she was stunning. She reminded me of Linda Evans [a popular television actress] right from the start.
“Eddie saw I was taken with her and began to tell me a few things about her. Her name was Marilynne D’Ulisse, but everybody called her Mickie, and she was working as a casino dealer in Gardenia, California. She was actually a Philly girl who had been married a couple times, once to a cop, and most recently been hooked up with George “Dewey” Duval, a good friend of Loney’s. Eddie explained that besides being a real looker, she was also a tough cookie. Dewey had been arrested in Bucks County for a murder and the cops imprisoned Mickie when she pleaded the fifth. They wanted to use her as leverage against him and kept her locked up for months, but she still refused to talk. They couldn’t intimidate her. She was eventually set free and Dewey beat the case, although the two of them seemed to have split after that. Between her looks and her standup principles, there was no doubt she was my kind of woman.
“Loney suggested I write her, and I did after he informed her I had fallen in love with her photo. He told her I was a real nice guy and she began to write back. We were writing to each other coast to coast for months. She told me about her young son, about her interest in athletics and that she walked or jogged every day, and her love for anything dealing with the outdoors.
“The more I heard, the more I liked her. We stayed in contact all through the spring. As I started to get short on my sentence, I told her she should consider coming back East. She must have found the offer appealing because she did just that—she came back. In fact, the first time we met was when I walked out the door of Trenton State Penitentiary. She came up with Steve [Junior’s lawyer, Stephen LaCheen], who was taking me to Long Island to face a burglary charge up there. She was everything I had hoped, tall, about five-foot-eight, radiant blue eyes, real nice build. She must have brought me luck. Either that or the judge was in a good mood that day, because he sentenced me to time served and cut me loose after making me promise I’d never set foot in Nassau County again.
“We came back to Philly that night and a day or two later rented a house in Cherry Hill for $800 a month. I got money from Ben Greenberg, but knew I’d have to pay him back. Two days after I got out of prison, I told Mickie, ‘Let’s look around,’ and that’s how we started doing production work together. We went house to house in the neighborhood. I’d go up to the front door and knock. If no one answered I’d go in and clean them out. If someone came to the door, I’d tell them I just moved to the area and was lost and would appreciate directions to a street or restaurant or something else in the neighborhood. We’d then go to another area and do the same thing. It always worked; we must have done hundreds of houses in Cherry Hill and the surrounding area.
“Mickie would usually stay in the car and keep watch on things. We lived in Cherry Hill, so we knew the area well. For bigger jobs I put a crew together and Mickie would be the driver. She’d monitor the police scanner, handle communications on the walkie-talkie, and keep her eye out for cops and new targets. She was great; she had no fear, no hesitation. She was better than some of the guys I worked with. And cops rarely suspected a woman driving around a ritzy neighborhood was up to something, whereas a guy doing the same thing would draw some attention.”
On June 5, 1972, two weeks after Mickie and Junior met outside Trenton’s ancient state penitentiary, they drove down to Elkton, Maryland, and were married. Junior, a man about town who had had his share of vivacious, voluptuous women over the years, felt that Marilynne D’Ulisse was the one. She was beautiful, athletic, and principled, at least according to the values of the street. And if that wasn’t enough, she was more than capable of doing a man’s job—second story work.
Despite her wholesome, perky, bright-eyed appearance, Mickie D’Ulisse had a police record stretching back to 1962, when she was first arrested for larceny and shoplifting. But she would advance to graduate school in her association with Kripplebauer. As Junior likes to say, he “fine-tuned her skills.” Both were fearless, restless; they shared an indefatigable work ethic.
“Mickie loved to do houses,” says Junior; “she loved production work. She became competent at every facet of the game, and the action always attracted her. We’d go out to the movies in the evening or be coming back from a Philly or Jersey nightclub, and on the way home you’d see her closely examining each house we passed as we drove down the highway. She’d be wondering, ‘Is anybody home there? Which houses have alarms? What houses appear to have something of value inside?’ By the time we got home she was ready. ‘C’mon,’ she’d say, ‘let’s get our black shirts and do some work.’
“She used to tell me, ‘You know, Junior, most women who come home from work or back from an evening out say, I feel like doing some cooking or baking. All I ever wanna do is put my black shirt and wig on and do some houses.’
“Even when we’d go deer hunting in Clinton and Potter Counties in upstate Pennsylvania, she’d be checking out the hunting lodges and eyeballing the bigger homes in the area. Seeing who had what and what houses were alarmed or not. Mickie was a natural.”
Her husband was not blinded by love; Junior’s friends and colleagues were equally impressed with Mickie’s work ethic. In fact, it wasn’t unusual to schedule a night on the town with the Kripplebauers and find yourself, during the course of the evening, in the middle of a burglary. Donnie Johnstone remembers a number of light-hearted evenings that were interrupted by the clarion call of production work.
“Mickie was as good as any guy I ever saw at second story work,” says Johnstone admiringly. “She was really something. Mickie always wanted to work, even on social occasions. I remember double-dating with them and coming back from a club early in the morning, and as we’re driving back to their house Mickie sees a red light on a home alarm system and asks Junior, ‘Do you have the keys in the car?’ Before you know it we’re stopped by the side of the road and Mickie is pulling the Chivas Regal bag [where Junior kept his collection of home alarm keys] out of the car trunk. Yeah, Mickie and Junior were always ready to work. They never tired of it.”
“She was a good student,” says Junior, proudly. “I showed her how to take houses in the neighborhood that looked like good scores, and eventually she may have ended up doing more of ’em than me. Many times I’d be driving home late at night and pass a nice piece of property showing a red alarm light. The next day I’d go back and check the place out. From a distance the joint may show money but you’ve got to get up close and check out the driveway, the paint job, the drapes and curtains, and furniture to really know for sure. If I figured no one was home, I’d start checking the security system, and before long I’d find the right key and knew I could shut the system off. Usually, if I thought I had the time I’d take the place right then and there. But if I didn’t feel comfortable, I’d just remember which key was the one and decide to come back later that night or the next time I passed the house and the red light was on. Sometimes I even left the key somewhere on the property, under a rock or piece of decorative garden ware and picked it up when I thought the owners were out. Mickie watched me do it at first and then later on would sit in the car and keep her eye out for me. Then, when she felt comfortable enough to go out on her own, she became a convert to the system and started pulling jobs all on her own.
“She was good, there was never any fear. She’d force a door with a screwdriver in a minute, though those with big door bolts would occasionally give her some trouble and I’d have to do it for her. She was as good as any of the guys. Whether it was searching a house, keeping a lookout by the front window, or driving the car, she could handle it. The only thing she didn’t like and didn’t want any part of were the occasional stickups where we’d go in and lay people down. She wasn’t crazy about running into mouthy dogs either, but a lot of guys were equally terrified of entering a home that had a toothy shepherd or Doberman nipping at your heels. Mickie and I both loved animals and had a few of our own, including a big German shepherd, but you can’t let them get in the way of business. I had a technique that always worked. If a dog came at me in a house I used a brute or an L-bar, not to hit the dog, but to break a lamp or light fixture. The explosion would scare the hell out of the dog and he’d go run and hide.
“Maybe it was because I always had her handle the police scanner and the driving that Mickie was so insistent on doing a good bit of second story work on her own or with her girlfriend Maxine. Boy, those two were amazing. She and Maxine grew up together when they were kids and both came to really enjoy second story work. They loved it. They were out all the time and would come back with some pretty good stuff. When they returned home with all this merchandise, you would have thought they were just a couple of upscale suburban housewives coming back from a wild shopping excursion at the mall. Maxine had a couple kids who were slightly older than Mickie’s son, and I’d baby-sit them when the girls went out. When Mickie, I, and the crew were out for the evening, Maxine would baby-sit Mickie’s kid.
“It didn’t take a brain surgeon to know every time she’d come downstairs with her wig on, grab her black jacket out of the closet, and then ask me if a brute was in the car what she was up to. I don’t know if production was her favorite thing to do, but it was right up there.
“And Mickie was a great driver, one of the best. She was an extra element of security. Places like Houston and Durham never saw anything like her. A female driver fronting a crew of burglars was unknown down there. Mickie often traveled with our Yorkie on her lap. Cops, especially in places like North Carolina and Virginia, never suspected a young woman with a little dog on the front seat was a key player in a burglary ring. Yeah, Mickie was something all right. She got away with murder.”
Mickie also accompanied her husband on a number of bank robberies. Junior made sure she never walked into a bank and drew down on the bank guard and tellers (he suspects that she would have done so if he had let her), but she did help in the planning and execution of several bank heists, as well as the getaways. The Glassboro bank job in 1976 was a typical instance.
In his underworld travels, Junior had made friends with an assortment of criminal types. Bank robbers made up a large part of the ensemble. Though a second story man by profession, Junior was always quick to aid a friend with a plan or take part in a score that looked promising. Gene DeLuca and Bull the Greek were bank robbers out of Baltimore who were looking to expand their operations beyond Maryland’s borders and make some big withdrawals from a few well-stocked East Coast financial institutions. Junior had an eye for money and never missed a private residence, business, or banking institution receiving a house call from an armored car. One day while shopping at a mall in Glassboro, New Jersey, he saw numerous bags of money being picked up by an armored car at a bank on the mall parking lot. The quiet, bucolic community bank looked ripe to be picked. He passed the tip on to DeLuca and the Greek, and they went to work setting up a plan. Mickie, never one to be excluded from a good thing or a promising piece of work, was in on the planning and execution.
Following that game plan, the Baltimore men entered the bank in workmen’s coveralls while Junior and Mickie kept an eye on things from their own car in the mall parking lot and listened for nearby police activity on a radio scanner. When DeLuca and the Greek exited the bank, bags in hand, Mickie drove her car to a previously designated spot in the mall lot. The Baltimore bank robbers quickly drove up, shed the coveralls, which hid expensive business suits, and ditched the guns and money bags in the trunk of her car. DeLuca and the Greek then drove out of the area to a diner for a late breakfast while Junior and Mickie killed an hour or two food shopping at the mall supermarket while police, sirens wailing, scurried throughout the area looking for the coverall-wearing perpetrators of a local $88,000 bank heist. Later, as she slowly drove her grocery-filled car out of the mall parking lot, Mickie threw a demure smile to a concerned-looking police officer. The cop, who tipped his hat, never suspected that the cute blonde had a couple of.38s and thousands of dollars in cash among her bags of bread, milk, and frozen dinners. Junior never doubted that Mickie, if asked, would have been one of those to enter the bank: “Mickie was ballsy. She would have gone in with them.”
Mickie and Junior were quite a team, as hundreds of homeowners could have testified. Though they were busy setting up house, buying furniture, and trying to earn a living—by stealing from their Cherry Hill neighbors—Junior continued to work with his regular crew and any others proffering an intriguing and potentially profitable idea. As much as Kripplebauer enjoyed working with Mickie, he was not about to jettison the many other associations and crews he had a history of working with. Some of his associates didn’t like the idea of working with a woman, while some capers were considered too risky to include Mickie. Most of the time he just wanted to be with the boys. His world was filled with bar-room chatter, criminal gossip, and incessant talk of the next big score. Some adventures were well constructed and properly thought out, while others were almost laughable, right out of the grifters’ edition of the Keystone Cops playbook. Typical of these years were a nice score in Bucks County and a convoluted, well-attended escapade in some godforsaken village in the hill country south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“We got a tip about a guy in Bucks County who had once been a big politician,” says Junior. “The guy’s house was supposed to be loaded, both cash and jewelry. It sounded pretty good. Right away I started thinking back to the tax assessor’s house on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough. We had done pretty well there, and that guy was supposed to have worked for the government. I’m thinking to myself, maybe this guy will turn out to be as good.
“Me, Tommy Seher, and Bruce Agnew go up there to take a look at the place. It was a hike from where I was living in Cherry Hill. It was in the country a good ways above Doylestown. It wasn’t anything like the Biddle estate, not nearly as large, but it was still a nice, two story, brick and stone Colonial. We would have taken it that night, but we could see the place was occupied, so we decided we’d come back and hit it another night.
“It wasn’t that easy. We kept on driving up there with the same result. Me, Tommy, and Bruce must have gone up there nearly a dozen times over the course of two months, but we couldn’t break into the place. There was always somebody home. You could see right through the window, and they always seemed to have company. They were always entertaining folks. Whoever lived there never seemed to leave the house, and they always had an endless stream of guests. I was starting to think it was one of those country inns or bed and breakfasts that were popular in New Hope and along the river in Bucks County. It was looking more and more that we’d have to either forget about it or do a walk-in and lay them all down.
“It’s late in the year now, maybe November or December, and getting cold, and we’re all getting a little tired of running up to this section of Bucks County without anything to show for it. We’re not out to hurt anybody, but this is getting ridiculous. We make another trip up there, and once again the place is occupied. We can see through the window and it’s the same elderly couple. They’re sitting by the fireplace, having one drink after another, and we’re outside freezing our asses off. We look at each other and decide they’re almost unconscious already. Let’s just do it and get it over with.
“We had the keys to the alarm system, so we shut it down, break in, and surprise them. They’re pretty old and don’t give us any trouble. The old man looks like he’s in his eighties and not in great shape. Instead of lying them down because of their age, we cuffed them to some chairs and started to go through the place. While I’m looking over the safe, Bruce is searching the house for anything of value. He finds a jewelry box and it’s loaded. The woman loved jewelry, and it really looked like good stuff, some real quality pieces.
“I locate the safe, but I’m a little suspicious about it. I thought it might be wired with an alarm, but the woman said it wasn’t. I open it and there’s even more jewelry inside. Lot’s of diamond rings, brooches, necklaces, some really fine pieces. We got out of there pretty quick and when we get back to Philly, I called my man, a jeweler down at Eighth and Sansom. I had been using this guy to fence my stuff for quite some time. He could be counted on to give you a fair deal. And he paid off right away, no bullshit delays. I call him on the phone and say, ‘Do you want to meet me?’
“‘Sure,’ he says.
“‘Bring your stuff,’ I tell him.
“‘Sounds good,’ he replies.
“Even though we had done a lot of business over the years, there was always some doubt. Nobody really trusted anybody. We’d meet at a motel along Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philly. He would bring his scale to weigh the merchandise and I would bring the weights. That’s the way we always worked it. Nobody wanted to get cheated. As soon as I showed him the stuff, you could tell he liked it. There was no junk in the entire batch; they were all quality pieces. He said he wanted the whole thing, so I gave him the stash and he took the package to New York. He sold the whole package up there, and the next day we meet and he gives me $80,000. Considering we normally made a quarter of what the score was actually worth, we must have walked out of the place in Bucks County with over $300,000 in jewelry. I gave the tipper a nice cut, maybe $20,000, and me, Bruce and Tommy whacked up the rest.
“In the meantime I read in the paper that the Bucks County home of a former mayor of Philadelphia and United States senator had been robbed and a good bit of jewelry had been taken. I didn’t even know whose house it was when we did it. All I knew was that it was a politician’s home and it was supposed to be loaded.”
Though Junior and his crew had spent many a cold night casing the Bucks County mansion, the repeated journeys had ultimately proven quite profitable. The guys had walked away with a nice hunk of change. Not all tips were as accurate or excursions as rewarding. One escapade clearly underscored that point as well as illustrating the gang’s occasional capacity for sheer stupidity.
“It was one of the craziest things we ever did,” recalls Kripplebauer. “It was like a traveling vaudeville act that should never have got started in the first place. Instead, the zany scheme was taken on the road and just got worse by the hour. What a crew: there we were, 10 or 12 of us, three carloads on the highway to do a job in some godforsaken southern mining town. It was a damn caravan of drunken second story men going down the turnpike. To this day none of us can believe we actually did it.
“The story really begins when a few of us are serving time in the Burg [Holmesburg Prison], and we meet this tall, lanky Johnny Reb character with a heavy southern accent on the block who’s always talking about the big scores he’s been part of and what he plans for the future. The guy’s a real big talker. He then starts yapping about places we should take a look at, operations down South that carry some heavy cash. He tips us off to this little mining community in the mountains right where Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky come together. He said there was a substantial score to be had down there. It was the miners’ payroll and it added up to some pretty hefty bucks, according to him. He said the money usually sat overnight in the company’s payroll office safe just before the men came in for their checks the following morning. He said he always wanted to do the job himself, but he never got around to it. The guy could have been bullshitting us, but if he was telling the truth, it sounded pretty attractive.
“Once we get out of jail we start talking about the potential score this Johnny Reb told us about, but nobody ever did anything about it. We just brought it up once in a while over beers and then dropped it. Over time guys from different crews start to hear about this tip, ’cause just about everything being talked about is overheard at the Shamrock, Marty’s, or any number of other bars we hung at. It was tough keeping a decent score secret any length of time with all the Budweiser and loudmouths around. Eventually, maybe a year or two later, one crew gets serious about going down to West Virginia to check this payroll tip out, but now everybody knows about it and they want in on the deal too. We’re not able to resolve who has first dibs on the score, and somehow we agree that we’ll all do it, which was unprecedented and can pretty much be attributed to a hell of a lot of alcohol. Crews were normally competitive. We’d share men and equipment on occasion, but you wouldn’t see two or three crews working together. It’s not like we were linemen for the electric company.
“It was incredible, three cars, three different crews, and a few extra guys thrown in for good measure. I think it was me, Jackie Johnson, Maury McAdams, Leo Andrews, Billy Blew, Mitchell Prinski, Fingers Hurst, Charlie Murtaugh, Jimmy Riffert, and a couple other guys I can’t remember. It was like a parade of K&A burglars heading to some little nook near Wheeling, West Virginia. We were joking in the car that if the mining company knew so many of us K&A guys were on our way down, they probably would have pleaded with us to stay in Philly and they’d agree to send us the money.
“Well, we get down there after a damn long drive and it’s just as the guy told us, this little mining community in the mountains. It wasn’t even a town; it was a remote little village, if that. It reminded me of where I grew up in the Pennsylvania mountains and why I was so keen on getting the hell out. We drive by the company store that shares space with the payroll office and figure it won’t be that difficult a job as long as the safe isn’t a problem. A couple of us check out the store while the others try to keep a low profile outside. It’s a pretty big store considering the size of the town. It had a lot of appliances, furniture, and other stuff on sale for the company employees while the payroll office sat right in the middle of the store. You couldn’t miss the safe; it was a good-sized one. It was pretty easy to confirm our Holmesburg tipster was right on the money; miners got off work early in the morning, about four or five a.m. and picked up their pay in cash envelopes that were kept in the safe. Christ, it wasn’t even checks, it was cash money, which only made it more attractive.
“The bunch of us drove outside of town and put a plan together. We’d go in the store at one in the morning before it opened and see if we could open the safe without setting off any alarms or using the tanks we had brought with us. All of us had some experience with safes, but I was probably the most knowledgeable, especially using acetylene tanks to burn a safe open. Mitchell agreed to go with me. Billy Blew would be our driver. The other guys would drive around the area in the other two cars, listen in on their walkie-talkies, and try not to get pinched, which would take some luck. All of us were concerned that we must have stuck out like a sore thumb, ’cause these little mining towns weren’t exactly Times Square and loaded with tourists and strangers passing through.
“A little after midnight, me and Mitchell go in through the roof in order to avoid any alarms hooked up to the front or rear doors. We bring the tanks and tarp with us just in case and go into the office and get a good look at the safe. It’s a big, square, double-door job, about five feet by four feet, and had a trip wire attached to it. I disconnected it, but it wasn’t a good sign. Maybe these hillbillies were more sophisticated than I thought. Right off the bat I figure I’m gonna have to burn this baby, but try to back-dial and punch-dial it first to make sure. Just as I feared, no luck.
“We quickly set up our stuff and I start to burn the sucker while Mitchell holds the tarp over my head so no one passing on the street notices anything unusual. It takes me about 15 or 20 minutes to burn the front panel off and a few minutes more to tear out the firewall and get to the levers. I’m finally able to move the bars that lock the door, but when I open the safe there’s no money in there. I can’t find the payroll, just a lot of worthless paper.
“Mitch gets on the walkie-talkie and tells the guys we got a problem, and he and I begin searching the office. We know there’s got to be money there; they’re supposed to be paying the workers in a few hours. We’re going through the desk, file cabinets, everything that’s there, looking for a cash box. Mitch gets on the walkie-talkie again and tells the guys outside what’s going on, when I open an old wooden cabinet and find a three-foot by one-foot niggerhead inside. I could tell it had a pretty thick door and would be a problem. Just as I’m trying to decide whether I should try and burn it open or take it with us, the alarm goes off. The damn cabinet was wired.
“All I can hear is the fuckin’ alarm ringing and thinking I now got a serious beef in the middle of nowhere. These mountain people will kill us when they find out we’re Yankees from up North and were trying to steal their money. I can hear our guys yelling and cursing outside and scrambling to their cars. Me and Mitchell get the hell out of the store, hop in a car with Billy Blew, Jimmy Riffert, and Charlie Murtaugh, and drive out of there with the alarm still ringing in our ears. It’s pitch black out, and we’re driving like madmen along these unpaved mountain roads, and I’m cursing our lousy luck. We hadn’t driven 15 minutes when I realize I’m filthy. I’m covered in metal filings, chips of white plaster, and a lot of safe dust. I can’t help thinking back a few years to an earlier job gone bad in Bucks County where the prosecutor brought in a forensics specialist who testified about all the safe dust we had on us when we were arrested. I figure if the cops stop us I’ve had it; I’m covered in plaster and safe dust. And if I get nailed, everybody in the car with me is going down too.
“‘If we get stopped, everybody is gonna get convicted,’ I tell the guys in the car. ‘Mitchell and me are covered in safe dust. If our clothes are sent to a forensics lab, they can directly put us with that safe. Even if we’re caught in Chicago or Pittsburgh, they can connect us to that safe. And the longer we’re in this car with you guys, the greater the chance this stuff will get on you.’
“We get into a beef in the car. The guys start giving me an argument. They don’t want us to take the weight. They don’t want to split up. They’ll take their chances, but they never had to face a courtroom grilling over forensic evidence like I did. We don’t know where the other guys got to, everybody cut out when the alarm went off. The other two cars were probably halfway to Philly by now. We, on the other hand, were driving through the night on these desolate roads expecting seven cop cars to come down on us at any moment.
“After a couple of hours we’ve probably traveled 100 miles and come to a real town or sort of one. Something called Bluefield, West Virginia. There’s no doubt in my mind the cops have been notified what’s happened in that little mountain town we just disturbed and will be on the lookout for us. ‘Stop the car,’ I tell them just before we enter Bluefield. ‘We’re getting out.’ They give me an argument, but they know I’m right. Me, Mitchell, and Billy Blew get out of the car and start walking towards town as the sun starts to come up. Riffert and Murtaugh take off in the car and are gonna try and make it back to Philly.
“Bill’s the only one of us in a suit, so he gets us a motel room to hole up in. He then goes to a local laundry, gets his suit cleaned, and then goes out and buys me and Mitchell some new clothes we can wear. Now we got to figure out the best way to get back home. We discover Bluefield has an airport that has flights to Pittsburgh, but Bill’s afraid of planes. He won’t fly. Fortunately, the town also has a train station and we can catch a train to Washington, D.C. We decide to try it, although we know the cops will be on the lookout for us.
“It turned out to be the longest train ride of my life. It was only five hours, but it felt like five days. The train hardly picked up any speed between station stops and the guy driving the thing insisted on stopping at every little village or hamlet that had a newspaper and a toilet. Every time we stopped I expected the state police to come through the doors. All three of us could have used a stiff drink or two, but the train had no food service, nothing. It was like we were on a slow moving desert. It was brutal.
“We finally pull in to Union Station in D.C. and feel like we’re back in the real world, civilization at last. But now we got another problem. The station is packed with people. I mean packed. It’s a mob scene. The station platforms reminded me of Grand Central Station in Manhattan. We’re all wondering, what the hell is going on here? It turns out there’s a large antiwar rally taking place at the Capitol and people are coming in from all over the country protesting our continued presence in Vietnam. The station is loaded with kids in jeans, sandals, tank tops, bandanas around their heads and they’re holding all sorts of protest and antiwar signs. Many of them are smoking pot, and some of them looked like they were on something stronger. There were thousands of them. These long-haired, hippie kids are feeling sort of bold. They’re in their element. You know, security in numbers. Once they see me, Bill, and Mitchell dressed in suits on the train platform, and looking sort of serious, they automatically jump to the conclusion we’re part of some government surveillance operation. They think we’re undercover cops or FBI agents. Can you believe it? We’re just back from a serious beef with some country bumpkins who were looking to nail us to a tree, each of us has a prison record as long as our arm, and these dirty, long-haired kids are calling us “pigs,” spitting at our feet, and telling us to shove Nixon’s war up our ass. It’s crazy. And I can see Mitchell is getting pissed; he’s having a hard time with the bullshit and the verbal harassment.
“‘If one more kid calls me a pig or a stinkin’ FBI agent,’ barks Mitchell, ‘I’m gonna deck him. I’m tellin’ ya, I’m gonna drop kick ‘im right on his ass.’
“That’s all we need to make this debacle complete, I think to myself. A bunch of us Kensington knuckleheads traveled hundreds of miles to do a job in some backwoods hole-in-the-wall, the deal goes bust, the cops are chasing us, we get stranded in some one-horse town, have to take a hundred-year-old train back East, and now get picked up for smacking a long-haired, college kid protesting the war. All because we were mistaken for plainclothes cops.”
Kripplebauer was able to restrain Mitchell Prinski from manhandling any of the youthful demonstrators, and the three broke and exhausted burglars managed to make it back to Philadelphia and Marty’s Bar, where they doused their wounded egos with pints of beer and recounted the details of their grueling excursion to amused bar patrons.
Wild goose chases were inevitable in their line of work. Nothing was guaranteed, but on the whole things were going well. The two and a half years after Junior was released from Trenton State were good ones. He and Mickie were happily married and gainfully employed: production work provided a good living. But the couple was about to plunge into a maelstrom of events from which they would never quite recover. The bitterly cold winter of 1974/75 augured a dramatic shift in the fortunes of the Kripplebauers and their associates.
The decision to head south and avoid the icy grip of winter was a smart one. Everybody agreed. The Kripplebauers, Tommy Seher, and Bruce Agnew had pulled so much swag out of a fancy Houston suburb that they had to dump some of it. The large steamer trunks they had purchased for shipping the loot home were filled to the brim. Silverware had to be flattened, candelabras bent, some fur pieces and loose odds and ends discarded, and the three men labored to lift the trunks into the rental cars for the trip to the airport. Mickie was to fly back to Philadelphia with Tommy and Bruce; Junior had business on the West Coast and would meet the others later.
But it was not to be. Burglary was a dangerous game. The smallest oversight, the slightest sin of omission or commission, could result in a serious beef. As good as they were, arrest and imprisonment were always possibilities. The Houston heist had gone off like clockwork. It was a quick hitter, short and profitable, just the way the crew liked it. There hadn’t been a hint of trouble. Or so they thought. But they had, in fact, made one critical mistake. Junior had told Tommy Seher on their last night in Houston to ditch the unwanted goods in a dumpster on the way to the airport. Instead, Seher had discarded a number of items in their motel’s dumpster early that morning. Unbeknownst to him, Mary Esther Lee, one of the motel’s maids, had been shaking out a dust rag from a third floor balcony. She couldn’t help but notice a guest throwing out a couple of fur pieces, a small jewelry box, silver and crystal candleholders, several pieces of luggage, and a few paintings. “Dumbfounded,” as she later told the police, she immediately informed her supervisor.
A short while after his partners had departed for the airport, Junior left his room to catch his own flight. As he walked through the motel’s parking lot, he glimpsed a cop and maid talking. It was serious; he wasn’t trying to make time with her. The policeman—tall, broad-shouldered, and in his mid-thirties—began walking in his direction. Junior knew he had a problem.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the officer.
“Could I help you?” replied Junior courteously. He looked at the officer’s name plate. D. W. Cook of the Houston Police Department.
“Are you a resident of the motel?” asked the officer.
“Yes,” said Junior. “I’m just checking out. Is there anything wrong?”
“What room are you in?”
“One forty-three,” said Junior. “Is there a problem?”
The officer gave Kripplebauer, his luggage, and his car a quick once-over. “Where are you from?”
“California,” replied Junior.
“Could I see some identification?”
Kripplebauer handed the officer his California driver’s license. It was issued in the name of Louis Bauer.
As the officer inspected it, he asked, “Are you here alone?”
“No, I’m with my wife,” said Junior.
“Is she in the room now?”
“No,” said Junior. “She’s out shopping.”
“Tell me where she’s at,” said Cook. “I’ll have somebody pick her up.”
“No,” said Junior brusquely. “I can pick her up myself. Look, I’ve got things to do, Officer. I want to leave. Am I under arrest?”
“No, you’re not. But you can’t go yet.”
“Look, Officer, I’ve got business to take care of,” argued Junior. “My wife’s expecting me to pick her up. I haven’t done anything wrong. Here, look in my suitcase if you want to.”
Junior thought he was making some headway. The cop gradually appeared more relaxed. His posture was less rigid and his demeanor less confrontational. Junior kept talking; he was familiar with tight situations. Able to project an impressive display of sincerity at a moment’s notice, Kripplebauer never lost his cool; he was a professional. Of Irish-German extraction and a lapsed Catholic of no great religious conviction, Kripplebauer could convince the Dalai Lama he was a seventeenth-century Tibetan monk preordained to bring peace and harmony to the world. Whatever was necessary to get out of a jam.
Officer Cook looked more puzzled than assertive now, but just when there seemed to be a glimmer of hope his partner drove up in a patrol car. Junior’s heart sank when he got a glimpse of what the other cop was holding in his hands as he exited the police cruiser.
“I found these in the dumpster,” he said, walking up to his partner. He was holding a pair of channel locks, a screwdriver, and a crowbar in one hand and a couple of cashmere sweaters with fur collars in the other. “Looks like genuine mink to me,” he added, stroking the fur with his thumb and glaring at Kripplebauer.
“Did you ever see these before?” asked Officer Cook as he grabbed the crowbar out of his partner’s hand.
“No. Absolutely not,” said Junior angrily. “Did anybody say they saw me with them? Did someone tell you they saw me throw those things in the dumpster?”
Junior was insistent; he was fighting for his life. Cook appeared unsure. Had he nabbed a burglar or an innocent motel patron? Initially, he believed he had caught someone ripping off the motel. But the manager said the items found in the dumpster weren’t his. After a quick check, nothing appeared to be missing from the motel. Perplexed, Officer Cook called the station house and told the captain of the burglary squad that they were holding “a California guy who might be packing burglary tools. What do you want me to do with him?”
“Well, we haven’t had any reports of a burglary at any motels,” said the captain, “but we had a bunch of others over the last few days. Looks like a few places got hit pretty bad.”
He was referring to five burglaries that had been reported in just the last three days and well over a half-million dollars in stolen property. Piney Point, one of the three small towns that made up the Village community and said to be “the richest town in Texas,” had been hit pretty hard. One burglary victim, according to a newspaper report, was “Harry G. Jamail, an executive of an exclusive grocery store chain specializing in gourmet food and crystal.”
“Bring him in,” Cook was told by the more senior officer. “Let’s take a look at him.”
At the station house, a detective went through Junior’s pockets, wallet, and suitcase and found identification cards for a Louis Kripplebauer Jr. out of Philadelphia. That was the final nail in Junior’s coffin. After running the name through the national criminal database, the captain thought he had hit the lottery. Bells, whistles, and sirens were going off. Kripplebauer wasn’t any run-of-the-mill criminal; he was a certified crime wave who had done everything from burglary to brazen stickups and full-blown bank heists. The Houston police had nabbed the real deal.
The captain walked over to the young officer who made the pinch and congratulated him on catching one of the key players in Philly’s infamous K&A Gang. He told Cook he didn’t catch just any old fish; he had caught a Great White.
The captain then turned to Junior with a big smile on his face. “Hello, Mr. Kripplebauer. Welcome to Houston.” His demeanor quickly changing, the captain leaned over Junior and whispered, “I got your fuckin’ ass now, buddy. And I not only have you, I’m gonna get your partners as well. We know you did those houses in the Village, and we’re sure as hell gonna get you for it.”
The Houston authorities leaned on Kripplebauer for the names of his accomplices, their whereabouts, and the location of the stolen goods. Their efforts were futile; Junior was never a big talker. The police had Kripplebauer, but they were at a loss concerning his partners and the loot. The maid at the motel gave them descriptions of Kripplebauer’s friends, but there was no sign of them or the stolen goods. The swag couldn’t have just evaporated; the silver items and rare coins alone would have required several cars or a trailer to haul them away. Junior overheard the detectives saying that a million or more might have been taken.
Knowing that they had to act quickly, they immediately informed the local U.S. Attorney’s Office that something unusual had gone down, that they had picked up a known burglar named Louis Kripplebauer, and that a considerable assortment of valuable goods had been sucked out of a prominent Houston suburb. Guidance from federal agents would be welcome.
When the call came in to the Philadelphia office, Bill Skarbek knew just what to do. He got on the phone with the Houston police and told them they had nailed one of the key members of the K&A Gang, the nation’s premier band of residential and commercial burglars. It was a landmark—K&A guys weren’t normally caught at the scene of the crime—but there was no time to celebrate. They had to work quickly if they were going to nab Kripplebauer’s accomplices and get the stolen items back.
“According to what they told me,” recalls Skarbek, “Texas got ripped a new asshole by Kripplebauer’s crew. I told them to go to all of Houston’s major transportation centers and check on shipments to Philadelphia. I explained to them these guys were slick and not to expect to find any of the missing items in their possession. They were probably shipping the stolen goods back to Philly in foot-lockers, and I’d be on the lookout for anything coming into Philly from Houston.”
Skarbek had his agents call all the freight carriers in Philadelphia and told them to be on the lookout for any shipments coming in from Houston. When Tommy Seher, Bruce Agnew, and Marilynne Kripplebauer deplaned at Philadelphia International Airport, they were promptly arrested and aggressively questioned. Their interrogations proved as fruitless as Junior’s. Just about the time an airfreight receipt in the name of George Kuni was found on Tommy Seher, however, Skarbek received an urgent call from Eastern Airlines: four footlockers had just been unloaded. The heavy lockers had been shipped from Houston.
Just before midnight, Skarbek and two other agents seized the footlockers and took them back to the FBI offices in Philadelphia. They were opened the next morning. Inside was over $500,000 in jewelry, furs, coins, stamps, and silver. As they inspected the stolen items, the bounty seemed to fill the entire office. Jack Frels, an assistant district attorney from Houston who flew to Philadelphia to assist with the inventory, was amazed by the haul. “It just knocked your eyes out,” said Frels.
The authorities now had the burglars and the goods; the Houston caper was a nicely tied package.
Back in Houston, Junior was charged with being a habitual offender and breaking into an uninhabited dwelling at night. Convictions on both counts added up to a life sentence in Texas. The cops gave Junior one telephone call, and he contacted Steve LaCheen, his attorney in Philadelphia. He told Steve he was in a serious pickle and needed the name of a good lawyer in Texas. Steve told him he’d have to make some inquiries, but he told Junior it was important to get someone immediately to fend off additional charges and ensure that his rights weren’t violated. Texas justice was swift and harsh.
Junior handed the phone to the police captain, who spoke cordially with the prominent Philadelphia attorney. After a brief discussion, the captain recommended Larry Hurst, a former Houston police officer now practicing criminal law. With LaCheen’s assent, Hurst was hired to represent Kripplebauer.
The initial meeting between lawyer and client was typical Junior. Kripplebauer was still in the police district lockup, mulling over his lousy luck and his chances of getting out of his current predicament. The first thing he asked for when Hurst introduced himself was a cigarette.
“Sorry,” said Hurst, “I’m not allowed to bring cigarettes into the jailhouse. It’s the rules.” This response did not engender confidence in his client.
“For Christ sakes,” replied Junior, “if you can’t even get me a damn cigarette, you sure as hell can’t do for me what I really need done.”
The message evidently got through, for Hurst immediately turned, left the interview area, and exited the building. A few minutes later he returned holding a brown paper package and handed it to Kripplebauer. It contained a carton of Kools Menthol. Now the two were on the same page.
Not long after, Kripplebauer was transferred to the old Harris County Jail, a foul-smelling, overcrowded facility that Junior, an eminently qualified judge, considered a “horrendous, terrible joint.” Torn mattresses and other makeshift beds were strewn everywhere. Inmate housing areas had migrated into the dining hall, the exercise bullpen, the corridors—the place was a stinking, noisy, wall-to-wall pigsty. Junior was brought in chained to several other prisoners, but something quickly distinguished him from the other newcomers entering the institution, and it wasn’t the Philadelphian’s habitual no-nonsense demeanor. Kripplebauer was a celebrity.
“I hadn’t taken more than a few steps in the joint,” he says, “when some of the inmates started yelling, ‘That’s him! That’s him! That’s the guy on TV.’ They were raising an incredible racket. All through the jail, wherever I went. You woulda thought I was Napoleon or Grant after Vicksburg. I finally got to an area where they had a television on the wall and I realized what all the hoopla was about. There I was on the news. Reports were being broadcast throughout Texas that I had pulled off some of the largest and shrewdest burglaries Houston had ever seen. We were supposed to have walked off with millions. There were some TV accounts saying it was a $5 to $10 million heist.”
Kripplebauer was instantly anointed a serious player, a heavy-hitter, someone who deserved a wide berth.
“A guy walks up to me, an inmate,” says Junior, “and points to the television and says, ‘Is that you up there?’
“I said, ‘Yeah, but I woulda looked a lot better if I’d’ve known the cameras were on me.’”
Between the media coverage and the rare and valuable carton of cigarettes in his hand, Kripplebauer was a star. When a guard escorted the famous burglar to his bunk, an unappetizing slot in a trash-littered corner of a crowded cell, another inmate (the one who had inquired if that was Junior on TV) came up to the guard and said, “No, not there. He’s taking that one.” He pointed to a much better bunk that was off the floor, but already occupied. With the prison guard looking on, the inmate ordered a fellow prisoner to find a new home. Junior Kripplebauer was moving in.
Over the next few days Junior was introduced to the more serious dudes in the jail. Junior’s case intrigued them. It wasn’t often that Yankee gangsters came through the Lone Star State wrecking such havoc. They cautioned him that the “habitual criminal tag” could draw a “life bit.” If he had the cash, they suggested that he hire the best attorney he could. The name of Richard “Racehorse” Haynes kept being dropped.
“Short, classy, and in his mid-fifties,” Racehorse Haynes was currently “the man” in Texas legal circles. He was in the midst of a highly publicized murder case involving T. Cullen Davis, a well-known and eccentric millionaire. Racehorse didn’t normally handle burglaries, but when burglars were able to come up with a $125,000 retainer fee he was more than happy to call them clients.
Haynes and Hurst were able to get Kripplebauer’s bail reduced to $75,000. It wasn’t easy, given the court’s distaste for Yankees who came South to invade the homes and plunder the savings of righteous Texas citizens. The injustice of it all was amplified by what was happening up North. Kripplebauer’s confederates— Bruce Agnew, Tommy Seher, and Mickie —were cut loose with little more than a wink and a nod. Once they hired Steve LaCheen and Neil Jokelson to represent them, the court set bail for the trio at the eminently reasonable sum of $1,000 a person.
According to Junior, “The Texas authorities went crazy when they heard the incredibly low bail that was given up in Philly. They started screaming, ‘They rob our homes, steal our money, pay off those corrupt judges up there, and get out of jail for next to nothing. They’re all connected to the Mafia up there.’”
Jimmy Dolan arranged for a Miami bail bondsman to post bail for Kripplebauer, and after a month’s stay in that filthy hellhole of a county jail, Junior left the great state of Texas and flew home. His wife and friends met him at the airport, and a wild party ensued at the Stadium Hilton Hotel in South Philadelphia. But the good feelings didn’t last. Less than a month later the FBI, led by Bill Skarbek, came knocking at the Kripplebauers’ Cherry Hill home. The federal government also wanted a shot at the larcenous quartet. Junior and Mickie were placed under arrest, taken to Philadelphia, and charged with aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of stolen property for the Houston heist. Though bail was a relatively modest $3,500 per burglar, Skarbek’s surly attitude signaled a far more ominous threat: the Bureau’s determination to take Junior and his crew out of circulation.
Recognizing the severity of the situation, Junior lined up some of Philly’s best legal minds as defense attorneys, including Steve LaCheen, Bobby Simone, and Dennis Eisman. All were crafty, experienced, and usually victorious. They were also expensive. It was a testament to Junior’s reputation as a moneymaker and his uncommon work ethic that such high-priced legal talent would come on board. Once the federal case was added on to his Texas troubles, which required periodic trips to Houston for scheduled arraignment hearings, Junior was shoulder deep in a costly legal quagmire. Around-the-clock production work would be needed to pay for it.
The cost was secondary, however. Junior’s real concern was Mickie. He didn’t want her to go to jail. He related his fear to Bruce and Tommy, and there was no disagreement. If things seemed to be going badly in Federal District Court, they would try to cut a deal that would keep Mickie out of jail.
The Feds brought in their own stable of heavy hitters. Jeffery Miller and Joseph Fioravanti were “ruthless, cut-throat prosecutors” who rarely lost a case. At first the defendants thought they’d get “most of the charges thrown out.” Instead, they “got banged on everything.” Every pretrial maneuver was denied; every courtroom stratagem was defeated. Judge Daniel Huyett began to look as if he was on the prosecution’s payroll. Despite some impressive legal argumentation and innovative tactical gambits by the defense, Junior had been in enough courtrooms to read the signs: “We were going to lose.”
After discussing the situation and their options with his co-defendants and their attorneys, Junior decided they should see if they could “work a deal.” Reluctant, but in agreement, they each pled guilty. Junior received seven and a half years; Bruce and Tommy, five years each. Mickie was given five years probation and sentenced to do two years at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Even their best efforts didn’t save her from doing time in prison. Judge Huyett, surprisingly, then gave the defendants 30 to 60 days to straighten out their personal and business affairs before reporting to prison. It was not an unusual courtesy in nonviolent cases such as the Houston job, but the judge’s postsentencing latitude presented the newly convicted crew members with a window of opportunity that good second story men couldn’t pass up.
Junior had no intention of reporting anywhere, much less a federal prison. “Fuck that bullshit,” he remembers thinking. “As soon as I report the Feds will try and take me down to Texas so that they can try me for the same shit. They want to bury me. Hell, no, I wasn’t reporting anywhere.”
Kripplebauer, the only member of the crew to be hit (so far) with state charges in Texas, was prepared to go on the run. The prospect of life as a fugitive was vastly more appealing than years, possibly decades, behind bars in a series of unforgiving federal and state penitentiaries. Junior had always been about freedom. If he had wanted to be in a grim, stifling environment, he could have stayed in the dreary coal mines of upstate Pennsylvania. Though his prospective time behind bars looked less onerous, Bruce Agnew agreed to bolt as well, and go on the lam with Kripplebauer. They planned to live off the fat of the land, and if anybody could do it, Kripplebauer and Agnew could. Opportunistic, brazen, and resourceful, they were urban survivors. In fact, Junior had always prepared for such an eventuality.
“I knew I had to find a safe place to keep my money,” says Kripplebauer. “Just in case I had to get out of town quick. There’d be times when I’d have a good bit of cash or some valuable jewelry, and the cops and Skarbek were always likely to come through the front door at any time and vacuum the place. I couldn’t keep it in a bank, and there was little chance I’d be safe leaving it with a friend or relative. I finally decided on the perfect hiding place—a local graveyard. I went to a very old cemetery on the northern edge of Cherry Hill, called Colestown. I went to a remote section of the graveyard that was near a rarely used parking lot and was hidden by an ivy-covered fence. I found a headstone that looked like it hadn’t had any visitors in quite a long time and dislodged it so that I could dig a good-sized hole beneath it that would hold one of those large metal milk containers. I then got a thick plank of wood, put a couple of inches of turf over it and replaced the grave marker. It worked perfectly. I’d visit the grave at night every so often when I wanted to make a deposit or withdrawal. I must have kept anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000 in that steel cylinder over the years. I kept an assortment of guns in there, too, just in case.”
About a month before they expected Skarbek and company to come and pick them up, Kripplebauer and Agnew lit out. It was a momentous decision for both men. For Bruce it was the beginning of the end. As for Junior, it would be many years before he was a free man back in the Philadelphia area, and it was also, for all practical purposes, the end of his marriage to Mickie.