Confessions of a Second Story Man Read online

  In time, some of the victimized communities would learn the identity of the thieves. But discovering who the perpetrators were only added to the law enforcement community’s shock and consternation. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely crew of successful thieves. Far from the urbane, well-educated, super-sophisticated, criminal high-rollers they expected, the thieves reaping windfall profits and wrecking havoc over much of the nation were members of something called the K&A Gang, two-fisted, beer-guzzling, ear-and nose-biting hoodlums from a blue collar, predominantly Irish section of Philadelphia called Kensington.

  Despite their ninth-grade educations and inability to hold down a steady job, this zany collection of urban idiot-savants—basically, a ragtag band of union thugs, street hoods, and academically challenged high school dropouts—stole with impunity despite sophisticated estate or local police department vigilance. Whether they were pilfering a priceless collection of 70 paintings from the Woolworth family estate in Maine, stealing two million dollars worth of rare Russian coins from the Du Pont family compound in Miami, looting the ex-governor’s mansion in North Carolina, or staging repeated forays into the homes of Beverly Hills celebrities, the K&A Gang proved they were the real deal, master burglars par excellence. In fact, as a group, they were unquestionably America’s preeminent second story men, though the term may be a misnomer, since they had the keys to everyone’s front door and usually didn’t have to do any climbing. They could walk right in.

  Their achievements were not lost on a law enforcement community that hunted them for decades—mostly unsuccessfully. “You’ve got to admire them,” says one long-frustrated cop. “They were the best.”

  “They weren’t burglars,” comments another police official. “They were artists.”

  2. “Junior”

  SLOWLY, ENDLESSLY, the plumes of gray smoke and noxious carbon monoxide and sulfur gas belch forth from the earth’s spastic innards and eventually spew out of the backyards, graveyards, and barren roadsides of this long-tormented community. Combine these conditions with the howling winds that leap off nearby Locust Mountain and keep winter temperatures near zero, and no one would be faulted for thinking of Centralia, Pennsylvania, as hell on earth, or a pretty exact replica.

  Centralia is a geological oddity. This aging Appalachian mountaintop community sits astride a raging inferno where temperatures hover around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit as an enormous layer of anthracite coal is gradually consumed. For many born here during the last half-century, the subterranean flames are a painful and embarrassing fact of life.

  Since the early 1960s, when the fires below began to send forth streams of dense fumes, poisonous vapors, and eye-watering smoke, Centralia has been on a deathwatch. Local, state, and federal authorities have spent millions of dollars, closed over two dozen mines, and tried an array of ingenious plans, drilling holes and flooding the burning veins of coal with everything from mud and water to flame-retardant chemical slush. Still, the fires continue to burn. The town has shrunk by over four-fifths as businesses have closed and residents have moved out or died off. Yet from its very beginning in pre–Civil War America, Centralia has watched many of its sturdiest citizens succumb to one of the most dangerous professions in the world—coal mining.

  In the 1840s, when the Locust Run and Coal Ridge collieries opened, Centralia became a haven for hardworking Irish immigrants willing to risk life and limb in oxygen-short, claustrophobic mine shafts for a meager day’s pay. Stoical, hearty, and desperate for work, generations of coal miners endured unimaginable privations in order to provide food and shelter for their families. By the 1930s, however, the market for coal was in steep decline, adding further misery to laid-off miners and their families. As more and more mines were closed and a once-bucolic countryside lay scarred by strip-mining, the young men in and around Centralia were forced to make a decision: hold fast to family tradition and familiar terrain and hope to obtain one of the few remaining jobs in the mines or strike out for new opportunities elsewhere. One native son, Louis James Kripplebauer, Jr., never had a doubt.

  “That shit wasn’t for me,” says Kripplebauer of the prospect of spending the rest of his life working in a 300-foot mine shaft. “Mining was fuckin’ hard work. It was brutal and could really wreck you. I had seen enough of it in my family. I wasn’t gonna be another McGinley or Kripplebauer to die in a mine. My grandfather, Pat McGinley, died in a mine accident, and my father got a black-lung pension. Every day of my life I saw what the mines did to people. It either killed them outright in an accident or put a ton of coal dust in their lungs and killed them off gradually. It was like death on the installment plan.”

  The son of a German-American miner and an Irish-American mother, Louis James Kripplebauer, Jr., had every intention of escaping this miserable coal-cracker existence. Born in 1936 in Upper Byrnesville, a small hillside community on the outskirts of Centralia, Lou Kripplebauer—“Junior” to family and friends—never felt compelled to follow his father, grandfather, and peers into the mines. Neither the hard labor nor the meager rewards suited him. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life covered in black soot, coughing up dark, bloody phlegm, and counting his pennies.

  Like many other families in the region, the Kripplebauers were desperately poor and always struggling to make ends meet. Though they and the Rileys, Sweeneys, Frugales, and Spelises and hundreds of others mined coal all day, they rarely had enough money to purchase coal for their own needs. The result was twofold: an intense and universal hatred for the company and a never-ending search for coal. Like most other children in the Appalachian hills, young Junior was assigned to gather as much coal as he could.

  “We were always looking for coal. It was endless. Even during the summer, I’d be out there picking coal,” says Kripplebauer. “Everybody picked coal. You’d need to grab it and stockpile it in your backyard ’cause you’d never have enough to get you through the winter. The winter months were brutally cold up there in the mountains. Having coal was a necessity. You couldn’t afford to buy it. It cost too much. I was 10 or 11 years old, and all the kids in the area would watch them strip-mine the fields with these huge shovels and drag lines. When they weren’t looking, me and the other kids would run out there and scoop up as many chunks of coal as we could. We’d stuff it in our pockets, carry it in our arms, and take it home and put it in the shed. Sometimes we sold it to other families that needed it. The company used to hire Pinkertons to keep us from picking up the scraps. Even pea-and nut-sized coal, which was of no value to the company, was important to us. You would have thought they were nuggets of gold the way we hoarded them. But Pinkertons would chase us off. If they caught us, they’d make us empty our pockets and tell us next time they’re taking us in. They’d even come around and look in our backyards. They were always checking to see what we had. Just snooping around for the company.

  “Even when we weren’t out looking for coal, you’d still have the job of cracking it so it would fit in your furnace. I loved to play baseball with my friends and was pretty good. We were always looking to get a good game up, but my mother would often tell me, ‘Junior, don’t make no plans today. We’re gonna crack coal.’ I hated it. We’d be out in the backyard cracking large chunks of coal for hours. All you needed was a flat rock and a claw hammer. It didn’t really require a lot of strength, but it was important to know the right technique. If you didn’t know where to find the vein, it would take forever. It was a filthy job.”

  As Kripplebauer got older, his distaste for the company, the coal fields, and his parents’ penny-pinching lifestyle only increased. His resentment was intensified by frequent trips to Philadelphia as a teenager. After losing her husband to the mines, his grandmother eventually fled the mountains and moved to a working-class section of the city called Fairmount. Junior would often visit her, especially during the summer when school was out. City life was more to his liking. Everything was different, better, grander, and the colors were so much brighter. The air was cle
aner, the buildings were taller, the cars were newer and of greater variety. And there was so much to do. There were dozens of movie theaters, huge department stores, and the opportunity to watch Robin Roberts, Del Ennis, Puddin’ Head Jones, and the rest of the Phillies team play baseball at Shibe Park. It all presented such a stark contrast to his grim existence back home. And, best of all, in Philadelphia there were no ugly strip mines, no faces covered in coal dust, no persistent, hacking coughs, and no Pinkerton agents watching your every move. He realized far earlier than most of his friends that his days in Centralia were numbered.

  “My friends never went to Philadelphia,” says Kripplebauer of the kids he grew up with in rural, upstate Pennsylvania. “They didn’t know anybody in the city. It was like a foreign country to them. For them, going to Philly would be like us going to Paris or Rome, a totally different world. Although many of them were intrigued by city life and amazed by all there was to do and see in the big city, many others were scared to death of the place. They feared the niggers in Philly. Many of them thought there were one hundred thousand niggers between Centralia and Philly who were gonna rape and kill their wives. Not me, though; I had been there. That’s where I wanted to be.

  “I’d go to the stores in downtown Philly and walk around bug-eyed. There was just so much to do and see. And all that stuff in the department store windows you wanted to have. Gimbel’s, John Wanamaker’s, and Lit Brothers had everything imaginable and it all looked so good. For a kid from the mountains, the whole place looked like candy. You wanted it all. That’s why I started to steal in Centralia—so I’d have money when my parents took me on trips to Philly.”

  Back home during the school year, his desire for money and hatred for the collieries and their oppressive working conditions led him to participate in periodic coal heists and burglaries. The company store was a favorite target. Junior and his equally disillusioned friends would steal a company dump truck after filling it with coal. The 20 bucks they received for their efforts wasn’t going to make any of them rich, but as Lou always said, it was the thought that counted.

  “As a kid we’d sneak on the company grounds at night,” he recalls, “and steal cast iron pipes and raid their stockpiles of coal. We were only 12 or 13 years old and scooped up anything we could carry and sell. The local junkyards would buy anything. Nobody seemed to care where it came from. Crime was acceptable as long as it was against the company. As we got older, we were a little bolder, stealing trucks, breaking into the company storeroom. No one thought anything of it. Everybody seemed to agree it was okay to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, as long as the company owned it. All of us up there originally came from impoverished areas of Europe and shared the attitude that you don’t tell the cops anything. No one would ever tell an official anything. You avoided officials at all cost.”

  Increasingly disenchanted with school, his boring home life, and his prospects in a dying mining town, Kripplebauer quit school in his senior year, said goodbye to Centralia, and signed up for a four-year hitch in the Navy. Anything was better than staying in his dead-end hometown. A chance encounter on the street one afternoon crystallized his desire to get out.

  “My buddy Jimmy Spelise, who was a year older than me, went to work in the mines after he got out of high school,” Junior remembers. “When he came home at three o’clock after a shift in the mines, he was so dirty I didn’t even recognize him. I was coming home from school one day and passed him on the street. We were right in front of his house. I didn’t even know who he was. I walked right by him. He was covered in coal dust from head to foot. His teeth, nose, and ears were caked with it. All I could really see of the guy were his eyes, and they were bloodshot. He was just another filthy miner to me. I’m tellin’ you, I walked right by him and would have kept on goin’ if he hadn’t called my name. We both laughed at the time, but inside I was sick. I knew my friend’s life was basically over. I figured he was gonna end up like my grandfather or my old man, wrecked. His life was over and he was just 18. No, I wasn’t going down the same way. None of that fucking shit for me. Not by a long shot.”

  Rushed through boot camp because of the Korean War, the 17-year-old was shipped off to the Far East and assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge..or two months Junior was part of a squad of young men who handled the carrier’s dangerous catapult system and arresting gear. He also maneuvered planes above and below deck before and after their bombing runs. Though the work was dangerous and backbreaking, at least Junior and the other boatswain’s mates were breathing fresh air, not swallowing handfuls of coal dust while burrowing deep inside the earth’s dyspeptic bowels.

  With the signing of the armistice in June 1953, Junior was reassigned state-side: first to Oklahoma for naval air technical training in hydraulics and then to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. It was in his adopted hometown that he got his first taste of prison. On a lark, Kripplebauer joined two Navy buddies and took off across country for their home in Nebraska. Displaying the daring, devil-may-care attitude that would characterize much of his life, Junior realized there would be harsh consequences for going AWOL, but he didn’t care.

  “I had no fear,” he says. “I was young and dumb. I told myself I’d deal with that when I got back.”

  Kripplebauer returned to Philadelphia after a couple of months. He received a swift court martial and was sentenced to 30 days in the brig. Incarceration was not the sobering jolt it should have been. “Most of the guys in the brig were marines from all parts of the country on their way back from Korea,” says Junior of his war-weary cellmates. “They had seen it all and didn’t give a shit about anything. The guards were also marines. They didn’t put up with a lot of shit, and the whole thing could have been an ordeal, but when they learned I was a neighborhood guy like them and lived in Fairmount, they gave me preferential treatment. My people in upstate Pennsylvania were tough. Remember, they were used to close quarters, long hours, and difficult conditions. We put up with a lot of shit. Prison wasn’t all that bad considering what I was used to.”

  After his 30 days were up, Junior was transferred to Annapolis, where he continued to maneuver aircraft for takeoffs and landings. This time, however, he was lifting seaplanes in and out of the Chesapeake and its calm tributaries, not the roiling seas of the South Pacific. He also played catcher on the naval base’s better-than-average baseball team. The squad regularly traveled up and down the East Coast playing other military teams in places like Aberdeen, Maryland; Cherry Point, North Carolina; and Washington, D.C. Whatever the location, Kripplebauer’s athletic ability and leadership were clearly evident, and more often than not he ran the team. The squad wasn’t championship caliber, but opponents quickly learned that the masked player with the take-charge attitude guarding home plate wasn’t someone you tried to steal a base on. Two hundred pounds and a few inches over six feet tall, the former coal cracker from Pennsylvania mining country was hardy, still growing, and unaccustomed to backing down. Physical confrontations with Kripplebauer weren’t a walk in the park, as a few naval base and bar-room combatants quickly found out. As Junior recalls, “I never took any shit off of anybody.”

  When Kripplebauer turned 21 in 1956, he was discharged from the Navy and took a job as a welder for a couple of years at a shipyard at Sparrows Point, Maryland, near Baltimore. During the week he worked on large oil tankers; on weekends he headed back to Philadelphia and the Fairmount neighborhood, where his parents and sister had recently moved to join his elderly grandmother. Fairmount is an old working-class neighborhood cuddled up against the Schuylkill River on its western border and the row houses of North Philadelphia and bustling center city Philadelphia to its north and south respectively. Its most famous landmark was the looming presence of Eastern State Penitentiary, a huge, menacing 125-year-old fortress with 35-foot high walls and battlements more suitable for feudal lords and crossbows than for the Bible-toting Quaker social reformers who conceived of and constructed it. Many of the institution’s inhab
itants were from the surrounding Fairmount area, leading to some interesting exchanges between those on opposite sides of the wall.

  “As soon as I started hanging in some of the bars in the area,” says Kripplebauer, “I began hearing the stories about what went on and thought it was pretty incredible. There was a lot of sympathy for the guys locked up inside Eastern’s walls. Neighborhood guys, for example, used to get old tennis balls or softballs and cut them in half. They’d then fill them with bennies or some other type of drug, and then stitch, glue, or patch them back up and throw them over the walls while inmates were in the exercise yard playing ball. It went on all the time. Sometimes prison guards would be in on the deal and they’d pick the balls up and deliver them to certain guys on the block. It was a well-known practice in the area. A lot of stuff like that used to go on.”

  Another longstanding custom was savoring a few cold beers upon release. The neighborhood’s many cozy shot-and-beer joints were magnets for recently released prisoners. As soon as a prisoner served out his sentence and received his walking papers, he’d step through the prison’s huge front door on Fairmount Avenue and hit the first taproom he spied. Years of inactivity on the cellblock and severe dietary restrictions produced quite a thirst—for action, as well as food and drink.

  “There were a lot of criminals in Fairmount,” says Kripplebauer. “The corner bars were popular hangouts for local hoodlums and those guys who just got out of Eastern. They’d come right to the bar for a drink after they walked out of the joint. These guys were away for so long they were ready to do anything. Between the beer and the freedom, they became pretty delirious. All somebody had to do was make them an offer and they were game. Just hearing a plan being discussed amongst guys at the bar would juice them up and they’d want in on it. Somebody would lay a tip down about a potential score, and half the bar was ready to walk out the door. I’m telling you, they were ready.