Confessions of a Second Story Man Read online

  While Junior was cleaning out the safe, Bruce Agnew—a handsome six-footer with a prominent Fu Manchu mustache who zealously pursued other people’s money—rapidly went from room to room, searching drawers, cabinets, closets, rugs, beds, anywhere somebody might decide to keep or hide something of value. Maybe there would be a valuable coin collection, a fine piece of silver prominently displayed, or just the little woman’s supermarket money buried in a kitchen drawer and the old man’s football winnings hidden away in an old sock. All were good to go.

  Suddenly, as Junior was admiring a gold and diamond cuff link set from the bedroom safe and Bruce was grabbing valuables for all he was worth, a siren went off. Both momentarily stopped and tried to get a fix on the squawking alarm. Was it coming from the house they were in? Had one of them tripped an alarm? They were all professionals; alarms didn’t rattle them. They were trained to work through such inconveniences. In fact, many of the crews from their hometown neighborhood would work right through the owners’ reappearance in the house they were pillaging. Working thousands of homes over many years breeds such confidence.

  Then, just as suddenly, there was silence. “It’s okay,” yelled Tommy Seher from the front window. “It’s from a house across the street. The people were just testing their alarm. It looks like they’re going out for the evening.”

  “Good,” replied Junior, as he went back to stashing the contents of the safe in a pillowcase. “We’ll do them next.”

  In less than 15 minutes, they had cleaned out the house. Tommy called Mickie on the walkie-talkie and told her to bring the car around; they were done. After loading the swag in the car, Mickie drove the three men across the street and the drill was repeated. Once again, it began with Junior shutting off the alarm. Seher stayed by his post between the front door and window while Kripplebauer and Agnew scavenged the house for valuables. At one point, Junior found a pearl-handled.38-caliber revolver in a nightstand drawer and promptly dumped it into a bathroom toilet tank. They were all unarmed; Junior wasn’t looking for any trouble. Whenever weapons were discovered, they were quickly dispatched or made inoperative. Kripplebauer’s crew was swift but meticulous; little escaped their lightning-quick inspection.

  “People are creatures of habit,” says Kripplebauer, who had been taught all the tricks by the creators of production work. “They hide their most precious possessions in the same place, in the same rooms. Nine out of 10 times the most valuable stuff is hidden somewhere in the master bedroom. They made it easy for us. Even a blind monkey finds a coconut if he’s in the palm trees. Between the cash, silver, and gold, you can end up with a nice payday.”

  Twelve minutes later, Mickie heard Tommy’s excited voice announce on the walkie-talkie that the swag was ready to be picked up. The big Lincoln stealthily pulled into the driveway a minute later. Mickie immediately informed them that just two blocks away were several houses in a row, all displaying red alarm lights. There were lights in a couple of living room windows, but she had passed the houses many times, and all was quiet; she was sure there were no occupants. Homes illuminated with night-lights didn’t fool them. Mickie instinctively knew there was no one home.

  “Sounds good. Let’s go,” was all Junior said as he threw the last of several stuffed pillowcases into the Lincoln’s trunk.

  This was “production work,” residential burglaries performed as if rolled out on an automotive assembly line. The burglars’ hometown contribution to crime was both revolutionary and devastatingly effective. Unlike Philly’s other gifts to the nation, such as American Bandstand, cheese steaks, and a washed-up but sympathetic club fighter named Rocky Balboa, mass production burglaries were terribly frightening. Distraught homeowners and embarrassed law enforcement agencies across the country were routinely left slack-jawed and dumbfounded. It was if a tornado had rolled through a neighborhood, but instead of destroying the infrastructure, it left the homes intact and sucked up everything of value inside.

  “Some of the guys from back home preferred the big estates, but we didn’t like to do a 30-room mansion,” says Kripplebauer of his crew. “It was too big for us. We liked production, house after house after house, rather than one big mansion that would take hours. We’d be in and out of a house in 15 minutes and could do five or six houses a night. We weren’t looking for any trouble. We never carried a weapon on a job. And if we found a gun in the house, we’d hide it. If the owner unexpectedly came home, we didn’t want a problem causing somebody to get hurt. Some other crews might spend all night in one place, but that was dangerous. There was more of a chance of somebody dropping in on you. We were interested in quantity.

  “Me, Teddy Wigerman, Effie Burke, Billy McClurg, all the guys back home had it down to a science. You didn’t even need to be familiar with an area to pull it off successfully. You could go into a state or unfamiliar city and know exactly where to go. We’d come into a town, check out the local paper for homes selling for a half-mil or so. And then cross-reference it with the location of synagogues and top-shelf country clubs, and you were on your way. It worked every time.”

  Before it was all over that cool December evening, they had done a sixth house for good measure. It had been a successful night. In a little less than two hours, they had knocked off a half-dozen houses and walked off with over fifty thousand dollars in rare coins and stamps, cash, furs, silverware, and a few pieces of artwork. As Junior said, “It wasn’t anything to retire on, but it wasn’t bad for our first trip to Cary.” They all agreed it was worth a trip back in the near future. North Carolina’s Research Park Triangle had been good to them over the years. The Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill area had money, serious money. Winston-Salem and Greensboro weren’t bad either, but the Triangle area was a particular favorite. Well-bred old Southern money combined with a burgeoning class of Piedmont industrial executives and the bespectacled eggheads at such academic strongholds as Duke, North Carolina, and North Carolina State generated dozens of upscale communities, plush estates, and lush country clubs. Little surprise that Junior and his friends had become fond of the area. They were not alone. Back home in the rowdy bars of Kensington, everyone spoke favorably of Wake, Forsythe, and Guilford Counties. They even felt compelled to cheer on the Duke Blue Devils and the North Carolina Tar Heels when their games were broadcast on national television. An odd sort of kinship had developed with their unwitting benefactors.

  The evening’s successful scores in Cary deserved a celebration, but it could wait. They didn’t want to press their luck. The real party would take place when they—and the loot—got back home. After a few drinks at the motel’s bar, they returned to their rooms and examined their haul more closely. Most of the stuff looked good and would move quickly, but some of it was junk or too difficult to fence and would be thrown out. They immediately began packing the swag for the trip home. Fur coats were used as suitcase liners to protect the more brittle pieces and ensure that neither the jewelry nor the silverware would rattle noisily.

  No one even contemplated pocketing a fancy bauble or donning a recently procured item when their partners’ backs were turned. It was unacceptable. They understood and abided by the rules. No one was supposed to keep anything for himself or herself; each member would get his or her cut when the entire haul was sold to a fence back in Philadelphia. Members of crews with looser rules or less discipline might cheat their partners and slip a diamond ring or ruby brooch or fancy onyx-handled revolver into a sock or the waistband of their underwear. Crews infected with that kind of larceny would often be paralyzed with recriminations; on rare occasions, team members would be forced to strip naked and endure humiliating body cavity examinations by their crew chief at the end of the night. Not Kripplebauer’s group—Junior wouldn’t stand for either the stealing or the strip searches. In addition, the crew couldn’t afford to draw attention to themselves by wearing an eye-catching piece of jewelry that might be recognized by an observant cop; they were just your average tourists returning from a pleasant wee
kend excursion through the South.

  After a good night’s sleep, the crew members packed their own bags, Kripplebauer paid for the rooms, and they headed north toward Philadelphia early Sunday morning. Once again, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line had proven highly profitable. While Tommy Seher drove up Route 1 towards I-95, Bruce, Junior, and Mickie each held a package or small suitcase. They had to; the Lincoln’s large trunk was stuffed with goods from three nights worth of work. On the way down to Raleigh, they had made their usual stops in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Cary scores, combined with Thursday and Friday nights’ work along Stevenson Road and in Rockville, Maryland, translated into quite a nice haul, but by no means a jackpot. Those usually came when they flew into Raleigh, Greensboro, or Winston-Salem, rented a couple of cars, and worked the area for several days. The accumulated swag from such weeklong ventures would normally fill several steamer trunks or footlockers and have to be shipped back to Philly as airfreight. But despite the relatively modest haul, they were satisfied and couldn’t wait to get home.

  The North Carolina authorities, on the other hand, were less than enthralled with the situation. Late the previous night and all day Sunday, calls came in to the Cary and Raleigh police departments from distressed and frightened residents whose homes had been burglarized. As on earlier occasions, there were no clues as to who the perpetrators were, where they had come from, or where they had gone. The cops were mystified. Newspaper scribes cataloguing the burglars’ repeated triumphs nicknamed the phantoms the “Hallmark Gang” because of their penchant for stealing only the best jewels and silver bearing high-quality hallmarks and leaving costume jewelry and silver-plated items undisturbed. It was if a team of snooty appraisers from Bailey, Banks and Biddle had gone through the homes and rejected all but their most valuable possessions. And yet a gigantic vacuum cleaner operation directed from the heavens could not have been more efficient.

  Despite public and political pressure to catch the culprits, law enforcement agencies basically threw up their hands. There were no leads; there were no fingerprints; no stolen items eventually turned up; no informant ratted out a partner. Investigators were dead in the water. It had been that way for years. The perpetrators invading North Carolina’s most prominent neighborhoods and breaking into some of the most expensive and highly secured properties in the state were the best thieves they had ever had the misfortune of running into.

  “We had never seen anything like it,” says D. C. Williams, a 13-year veteran of the Raleigh Police Department at the time. Before he could capture the thieves, he had to figure out who they were and how they were accomplishing their raids so successfully. “I had no earthly idea who was doing it. Every other weekend we’d find eight to 10 burglaries in one of our high-rent districts. It went on for years. It was usually great big stuff like silverware, jewelry, and valuable stamp and coin collections. I initially thought it was locals. There was a local family that used to do a lot of burglaries. But this was too big and smooth for them. When they ended up in jail and the burglaries continued, we knew it was other folks, but we had no idea who. The bluebloods of Raleigh were getting hit pretty hard, and the pressure was starting to build. They wanted something done.”

  That’s what happens when titans of industry and high-ranking members of the political establishment walk through their front doors and find their homes ransacked. Mrs. Alice Broughton, for example, the wife of former governor J. Melville Broughton, walked into her Raleigh home at 929 Holt Drive on August 27, 1971, and discovered that every piece of silver she owned had been carted off. The impressive haul included a dozen gold-lined silver goblets and matching wine glasses, sterling bonbon dishes, five sterling egg holders, and 36 silver coffee spoons. More spectacular yet was the handsome silver tea service and matching tray. Though extremely valuable simply because of its silver content, the elaborate tray had sentimental and historical value as well, since it was engraved with the signatures of every member of the chief executive’s cabinet, the state supreme court, and the state house and senate. It had been presented to the governor when he left office in 1945.

  Though it probably provided little consolation, Mrs. Broughton had plenty of company. Many of Raleigh’s finest families had taken a hit. Well-known business leaders, lawyers, physicians, bank presidents, philanthropists, academics, and wealthy heirs—all seemed to have been targeted by the burglars.

  With such august—and well-connected—victims, it is no wonder that Officer Williams felt that he was “carrying a considerable load.” Years passed without an arrest or conviction. “I started working weekends,” says Williams. “I put together surveillance teams that worked in certain neighborhoods. We set up community meetings throughout the area to help educate residents how best to protect their homes. All the safety precautions I could think of were implemented. But nothing worked. The burglars were just too good.”

  Yet Officer Williams and the folks in Raleigh had not cornered the market on residential burglaries—not by a long shot. Other towns and cities across the state felt equally victimized. Greensboro, for one, laid claim to dozens of unsolved burglaries, the vast majority affecting the town’s elite.

  On the evening of March 8, 1975, Benjamin Cone—former Greensboro mayor and heir to the Cone Mills fortune—returned to his home on Country Club Drive from a Tar Heels–Wolfpack basketball game and found it plundered of everything of value. Over $150,000 in jewels and silver had been taken, including a rare Roman coin, a priceless museum piece. It was one of only seven such coins in the world, and the only one not on display in the Louvre.

  Other Greensboro residents claiming injury and calling for action included Ralph C. Price, former president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company; Joseph M. Bryan, chairman of the board of Jefferson Pilot Broadcasting Corporation; and Wilbur L. Carter, president of Southern Life Insurance Company. At least three Greensboro families had the unenviable distinction of having been hit twice by the so-called Hallmark Gang.

  Winston-Salem shed few tears for the folks in Raleigh and Greensboro; the quaint southern town was in the midst of its own burglary crisis. Once again, affluent sections of town with beefed-up security patrols were the targets of the elusive burglars, who managed to escape even when caught in the act. For example, they paid a surprise visit to the home of Zachary T. Reynolds, heir to the Reynolds Tobacco fortune, on the evening of August 8, 1971. Ms. Dorothy Dean (soon to be Mrs. Reynolds) was staying alone at the residence when she saw an unfamiliar car pull into the driveway. Standing behind a curtain, she could see three men and a woman in it. The white female came to the door and rang the doorbell, but Ms. Dean, feeling uneasy about the quartet, did not answer. She then saw the woman return to the car and watched them drive to the rear of the residence. When Ms. Dean saw the car depart with only the unknown woman inside, she hurriedly called police and reported prowlers in the area.

  When authorities arrived, they discovered that the residence had been broken into and an enormous collection of guns strewn across the lawn. Evidently the burglars were attempting to steal Mr. Reynolds’ sizable gun collection when the police arrived and scared them off. Although they appeared on the scene in the middle of the heist and established roadblocks throughout the area, the police were unable to catch the perpetrators. The thieves had disappeared as quickly as they had emerged. All that was left was a suitcase filled with an array of sophisticated burglary tools and two walkie-talkies. Though Winston-Salem police had few, if any, leads, they knew they weren’t dealing with amateurs. These were no local kids out to score a few bucks to buy alcohol and drugs. They were up against true professionals who had the know-how, moxie, and experience to knock off some of the most important manor houses in the area.

  The Raleigh, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem police departments—and the state of North Carolina in general—were not the only ones expressing frustration and an increasing sense of helplessness. In fact, the Tar Heel State had gotten off rather easy and was fairly
low on the burglars’ preference list. Most members of the burglary ring preferred to head north and west rather than south. And most states took even longer and suffered many millions of dollars more in damage before they even began to get a handle on who was ransacking their towns and cities.

  Kripplebauer, D’Ulisse, Agnew, and Seher were the tip of the iceberg. Teams of Philadelphia burglars had worked New England and the Middle Atlantic states for decades before the state of North Carolina began noticing an outbreak of burglaries within its borders. There were lots of embarrassed police departments; the North Carolina experience was far from unique. Law enforcement folks in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ohio, New York, Maryland, Missouri, Florida, Texas, and a dozen or more other states around the nation shared that powerless, vulnerable feeling.

  Eventually, the problem grew so large that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to establish a special unit on the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. Too many state and local law enforcement agencies across the country were left dumbstruck and impotent; someone had to take over and coordinate a well-designed counterattack that was national in scope and blessed with the funds and resources to take down such a secretive and longstanding criminal organization.

  “We didn’t know what to tell them at first,” says FBI Special Agent William Skarbek, referring to the many burglary-infested cities and towns across the nation. “We in the Bureau knew that this particular Philly burglary ring had the pedigree, that they were the best. We knew they were working here and working there. We were getting reports from Missouri, Florida, Virginia, all over the place, but we didn’t know what to tell them.

  “We’d be getting little pieces of information about a job they’d pull in St. Louis, Tampa, Raleigh, Westport, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They were working the whole country. Finally, we just got on the phone and started telling these various policing agencies, ‘Hey, here’s what you need to do. Here’s what you need to look for. Here’s their MO: they work in teams with drivers, lookouts, and searchers; they’ll switch cars when they’re doing a job; and they use walkietalkies and other sophisticated communication equipment. They’re like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”’