We know that most meteorites come from the asteroid belt by observing their trajectories as they blaze through the atmosphere—if one extrapolates their orbits back to the farthest point, they almost always originate in the asteroid belt. Scientists believe that from time to time asteroids bump into each other in the belt and knock chunks of material toward the earth. These pieces strike the earth's atmosphere at the rapid clip of up to twenty-five miles per second, and the sudden shock usually causes the missile to explode in a fireball. If the chunk is too small, it merely burns up; if it is too large, it actually punches a hole through the atmosphere and hits the earth with such violence that it blasts a crater and vaporizes. Thus, only intermediate meteorites survive for our collection and study.
EIGHTEEN
Minerals and Gems
Beyond the meteorite exhibits, a doorway leads us into the Hall of Minerals and Gems. This hall contains what is perhaps the single most famous object in the American Museum: the Star of India, a golfball-sized star sapphire donated by]. P. Morgan around the turn of the century. Its history in Ceylon and India stretches back three centuries, although for unknown reasons the history was concealed by the man who actually procured the gem for Morgan.
According to George Harlow, a curator in the Mineral Sciences Department, the Star of India is probably worth on the order of one million dollars or more today. "But because it's unique," he explains, "it's worth whatever someone will pay. We wouldn't know that unless we tried to sell it, and we're not about to do that."
Besides the Star of India, there are several other unique gems in the Museum: the Padparadscha Sapphire from Sri Lanka, a deep orange stone weighing 100 carats, which Harlow feels might be worth even more than the Star of India; the DeLong Star Ruby, the most famous star ruby in the world; and the 629-Carat Patricia Emerald, one of the finest natural emerald crystals ever found.
MURPH THE SURF
Any discussion of the Museum's gem collection must include the single most dramatic event in that collection's history: the great jewel robbery of 1964 At 9:00 A.M. on October 30 of that year, John Hoffman, senior attendant at the American Museum of Natural History, unlocked the heavy metal gate at the entrance to the old Morgan Hall of Gems (since replaced by the present hall). Instead of an orderly row of cases glittering with jewels, he found himself gazing upon a riot of broken glass and empty cases. Worst of all, the heavy glass cases that held the famous Star of India and several other superb gems had jagged holes in them, surrounded by adhesive tape.
When the police arrived and the Museum was able to take inventory, the extent of the loss became clear. In addition to three priceless stars the thieves had stolen an eighty-eight-carat engraved emerald, a huge emerald "easter egg" from seventeenth-century Russia, and a number of smaller emeralds; a 737-carat aquamarine; the fifteen-carat Eagle Diamond, and well over a hundred other rare faceted and natural diamonds. While the newspapers reported the loss at $400,000, Museum officials acknowledged that the true value of the stolen gems was incalculable. The Star of India alone was one of the most extraordinary jewels in the world. A rich blue star sapphire, it weighed 563.35 carats and was the largest such stone in the world. The 116.75-carat Midnight Star was equally remarkable for its deep bluish purple tint; most star sapphires are a gray-blue or light blue color. The DeLong Star Ruby, weighing 100.32 carats, formed the third member of this priceless trio of gems.
Two men (as it later became known) masterminded the robbery: Jack Roland Murphy—better known as Murph the Surf—and Allan Dale Kuhn; a third man, Roger Frederick Clark, drove the getaway car.
Jack Murphy—who captured popular attention like no burglar since—was born in Los Angeles in 1937. His family moved frequently, and in 1957 he left his family's current home in Pittsburgh and headed for Miami Beach. The late fifties and early sixties were the heyday of Miami Beach, the glittery years before the decline set in. The beaches were lined with expensive hotels frequented by the jet set. There was plenty of work, especially for a seemingly charming, athletic young man like Murphy. Murphy became a beachboy. He worked for various hotels, became an expert surfer, and often found employment in stunt diving and water acrobatic shows. A beachboy's salary might be small, but the right type of person could pull down (in 1960 dollars) fifty to a hundred dollars a day in tips. And, of course, with so much loose money floating around, many of them supplemented their income with petty thefts. From his arrest record, it appears that Murphy specialized in jewels.
Murphy carried around business cards that had printed on them "Who Is Captain Kangaroo?" He was in perfect physical condition, and he always dressed impeccably. Pictures of him at the time reveal a strikingly handsome, deeply tanned young man, sporting sunglasses and slicked-back blond hair. Psychiatrists who later examined Murphy testified that he had an IQ of 139. He played the violin beautifully; one psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Gilbert, recalled in a recent interview that one day Murphy came over to his house for an evaluation. Gilbert had two violins, and Murphy asked if they could play together. They chose the Bach Double Concerto, an extremely difficult piece of music. "He played it just beautifully," Gilbert remembered. "He had perfect pitch, beautiful intonation, and a perfect ear." He was also, unfortunately, a brutal murderer and a psychopath as well as a thief.
In September of 1964, the three men, Murphy, Kuhn, and Clark—who all lived in Miami Beach—decided to visit New York City to see the World's Fair. According to an account of the robbery written by Kuhn for True magazine, entitled "How We Stole the Star of India," they arrived in the city on September 19, 1964, and checked into a sixty-dollar-a-day suite of rooms at the Stanhope Hotel.*57 During the next few days they attended a movie called Topkapi, which had just been released. This film was about a jewel robbery at the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.
The plot of this movie contains striking similarities to the Museum theft. The prosecutor later alleged that this film had actually inspired the burglary, something the robbers never admitted. Later, by the way, Murphy himself became the subject of a movie, Murph the Surf, starring Robert Conrad in the role of Kuhn. They also visited the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and—finally—the American Museum of Natural History.
Kuhn wrote in the article:
From previous burglaries, I knew as soon as I entered the J. P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals the first time on September 30 that it would be fairly simple to rob if there were anything worth taking. Little did I know just how much surrounded us. When we first saw the three big "stars" no one said a word. We just stood and stared. Then, as if it was timed, we all looked at each other as if to say—how much is this worth? Can it be done?
The three men checked out of the Stanhope (after spending about $2,000 there) and rented a large apartment on West 86th Street. Here they began planning the theft. "Jack said it couldn't be done," Kuhn wrote. "I said it could and Roger wasn't sure." They decided to case the Museum first. They spent the following week wandering about the Museum, looking for exits and alarms, noting the routines of the guards, and spotting possible escape routes. They usually made two visits a day, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, after the guards had been changed. After ten days, they felt ready for a nighttime reconnaissance of the Museum—a dry run of the burglary.
With Clark driving their white Cadillac, the three men circled the Museum, scanning the structure's granite façade and looking for a route up. After parking and scouting around, they climbed onto a small roof along the 77th Street side of the Museum and edged out onto a ledge that ran along the second floor. On the corner of the building they encountered an area of rough-cut granite, which they were able to scale up as far as the fourth floor—the level of the Gem Hall—and a windowsill. To their surprise, Kuhn wrote, the window was unlocked.
Inside the Museum, the silence was deafening. It didn't take me long to discover that the window we had used wouldn't do because I was still outside the big iron gate across the entrance to the gem room. Next tim
e, we'd have to use another window....
While I waited I flashed my small light around through the gate into the gem room. It caught a jewel. It shined. I flashed it over some of the other cases and pretty soon I could barely keep myself from saying the hell with it and smashing the lock on the gate, grabbing what I could and running out.
Kuhn waited, hidden behind a case, and timed two rounds of the guard. The guard came at 9:17 and then again at 9:45—thirty minutes between rounds. As soon as the guard left, Kuhn went back to the window, where Murphy was waiting. Ten minutes later they were back in the Cadillac, on the way to their apartment.
The next day they returned to the Museum (dressed in suits like young executives) to see if their visit had been discovered. Everything seemed normal. This time they noticed a ledge running along part of the fourth floor inside a Museum courtyard, and—incredibly enough—a steel ladder or fire escape running up to the ledge. They managed to find their way to the courtyard through an employees' exit. "The man in charge," Kuhn wrote, "asked what we were doing there and Jack replied, 'Looking for a way out.' I laughed to myself thinking the correct answer should have been 'Looking for a way in.'"
The setup couldn't have been better. The ladder was on the inside of the Museum, where they could ascend with little fear of discovery. It led to a wide, long ledge running under the fourth-floor windows. The entire area was concealed from the street.
Murphy had scraped and bruised his knees during the reconnaissance climb up the Museum, so they decided the jewels could wait for two weeks while he recovered. They piled into the Cadillac and left for Montreal that afternoon. "Gradually Jack's knees began to heal," Kuhn wrote, "and sure enough in no time we were out dancing and raising hell like our regular selves."
They returned to New York in late October, having worked out their plans and picked their tools. In various stores in the city they bought two small walkie-talkies with earphones, two glass-cutters, two flashlights, two pairs of sneakers (which they smeared with black shoe polish), two pairs of tight, dark pants, dark shirts, black socks, and black leather gloves, a screwdriver, two masks (in case they had to make a run for it past guards and out the building), two rolls of three-quarter-inch adhesive tape, and 125 feet of Manila rope. They also bought several sheets of glass to practice their glass-cutting, and were soon able to cut a hole in a vertical piece of glass nearly every time.
Finally they were ready. All that was necessary now was a rainy night, to cut down on the possibility of being seen (professional cat burglars know that people don't look up when it's raining.) When the morning of Thursday, October 29, came around and the weather report predicted possible showers, they chose that evening for the crime.
At 8:00 P.M., Clark dropped Murphy and Kuhn off near the Museum. The plan was for Clark to circle the Museum periodically while the other two stole the gems. Murphy and Kuhn ducked into some bushes on Museum grounds; when all seemed clear, they climbed an eight-foot fence that surrounded the Museum courtyard and ran, crouching, to the bottom of the ladder. Since the fourth-floor ledge didn't go around as far as the windows of the Gem Hall, they had to ascend to the fifth floor, where they tied a rope to a pillar and swung down to a fourth-floor ledge outside a Gem Hall window. "It was 8:30," wrote Kuhn, "in between the night guard's rounds. I heaved. The window opened six inches. I wanted to yell for joy."
They hid in the darkened hall, waiting for the guard to go by on his rounds. When he had passed, they began work on the cases.
The first cut was made on the comer of the case housing all the diamonds. The glass cutter made a "screeeeeee" noise similar to chalk on a blackboard. It sounded loud.... We stopped to listen. No one came running in, we heard no excited voices, so I began to scoop up everything through the hole. I passed everything to Jack and he wrapped each piece individually in tissue so it would not be damaged when they banged against each other in the bag.
Then our first problem. I realized I could reach only so far through the hole in the glass. While Jack continued wrapping I scouted around and in a janitor's cabinet I found a squeegee. It was perfect. With it, I reached into the case to scoop the pieces I could not reach before. Some were old cut diamonds, new cuts, uncut, and a small collection of color diamonds that were fairly rare and lovely.
Checking my watch, it showed 9:07 so we waited until the watchman came again.... We started for the case of emeralds. Again there was a wide assortment.... [After cutting] I reached into the case and came out with a round, shallow emerald weighing thirty carats, full of flaws, but sellable. I brought out engraved emeralds that must have been hundreds of years old. Not too valuable. As fast as I handed them to Jack he was wrapping them in tissue paper. Now I had all the emeralds. Two huge aquamarine stones, one weighing over 800 carats [actually 400 carats] and the other weighing over 1,000 carats [737 carats], were all that remained. I took those, too. It had taken only ten minutes for all this so we went to the next case which held the Star of India, the Midnight Star Sapphire, and the Delong Star Ruby....
First I tied a piece of short string to the glass-cutter, then by holding the other end to the pane of glass I made the string taut and started to cut. It made a nearly perfect circle.
While Jack taped the area around the hole with the adhesive, I cut in the same way on the glass in front of the Midnight Star. Both holes were about eight inches in diameter. Jack began taping the glass almost as fast as I cut the holes and in time they were all cut, taped and ready to tap, but it was again nearing time for the watchman again. We sat in silence, trying to hold our breathing....
The click of the punch clock and the rattling of the gate echoed through the gem room, then the guard hurried away to punch another clock beyond the door. We gave him a full five minutes to get away, then we went to the cases again. I whispered to Jack, "It's going to make a hell of a noise, but here goes."
I whacked the glass with the steel-handled screwdriver. It sounded like a drum, trembled, but didn't even crack. I hadn't hit it hard enough. We listened a second. No noise. Then I took careful aim and clobbered it this time. That was the most noise yet. It literally rang through the halls of the Museum. Still, no one apparently heard it. Jack and I went to the window, looked out to see if it was still clear. It looked all right....
Jack's small flashlight was steady on the Star of India, and it appeared more brilliant and full of fire than it ever had in the daytime. The star was dead in the center of the stone and the legs of the star were long and extended to the bottom of it. Around the base was a gum substance that the stone sat on. Probably to keep it steady in case someone jarred the case.
I hadn't picked the stone up, yet all of a sudden I experienced a wave of panic. Where was the alarm? I hesitated, then grabbed the Star and pulled it up away from the gum. Then I saw it. A needle. When I [had] lifted the stone the needle came up. There's the alarm. We didn't hear anything so we figured it was a silent alarm. But we both knew we had to get the hell out of there.
What they didn't know was that the alarm battery had gone dead—no alarm went off at all. But Murphy and Kuhn figured they had about five minutes to get clear of the building. While Murphy smashed the cases holding the Midnight Star and the DeLong Ruby, Kuhn grabbed the rope and swung out of the window. Murphy followed immediately after. Kuhn untied the rope and let it drop into the courtyard, and they clambered down a fire escape with their tools, then down the steel ladder. In five minutes they were out on Columbus Avenue, where they split up and took separate cabs.
Back in the apartment on 86th Street, they quickly stripped off their clothes and stuffed them, with their tools, into a pillowcase. Meanwhile, Clark, who had been circling the Museum block in the white Caddy, wondering where they were, arrived back at the apartment. "Where the hell have you two been," Kuhn reported him as saying, "and what are you doing running around naked?" But when he saw the three large stones, unwrapped, on the coffee table, "he let out a howl and we all laughed and began jumping around. Jack yelled, 'You sai
d we could do it, Allan, and here it is!' He jumped on the couch like he was surfing," holding the Star of India to his forehead. They waited several hours, listening to the radio for a news bulletin about the robbery, but when nothing was reported they went to sleep. At seven-thirty the next morning they awoke and eagerly switched on the radio, but still there was no news of the robbery.
Dinosaurs in the Attic Page 28