Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  As he entered his twenties, Sears was pulling minor jobs throughout the city and quickly learned that the farther he traveled from his own Kensington neighborhood, the better he did. Initially, he and other local second story men followed the Kensington Avenue businessmen—most of whom were Jewish— back to their homes in Oxford Circle, Rhawnhurst, Bell’s Corner, and other Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods. Having learned the shopkeepers’ home addresses, they would later return and burglarize the properties when they were unoccupied. However, it soon became apparent that an enterprising burglar could do even better by going just a couple of miles further and crossing into Bucks and Montgomery Counties, two of the wealthiest in Pennsylvania. In eastern Montgomery County, for example, the lush communities of Elkins Park, Huntingdon Valley, and Rydal were a fertile field of large, posh estates filled with cash, jewelry, furs, and rare coin collections.

  “We were viewed as the fat lands in the suburbs,” recalls Clark Cutting, former chief of police of Abington Township, who had to contend with Sears and his K&A associates over many years.

  “They were hitting the heck out of Abington,” says Carl Butzloff, a former Jenkintown police chief. “They went through the walls, doors, anything. It looked like they used sledgehammers to knock down the walls. I never saw anything like it.”

  Sears, alone or with a partner, could cross the county line, ransack a large suburban home, and be back in a cozy Kensington bar celebrating another successful score in little more than an hour. And the same bit of larceny could go on night after night. And it often did.

  Though his forays into the “fat lands” were consistently rewarding, success was not guaranteed. In fact, Willie’s repeated successes were making him very unpopular in the area and attracting attention from homeowners and law enforcement authorities. This higher profile had drawbacks. On one occasion, for example, Sears and Herman “Sugar” Cable ran into some particularly astute Abington Township police officers. The episode, covered at length in the media, began when Officers Joseph Dalton and William Wagner spotted an unusually flashy Cadillac parked on the street of a fashionable Rydal neighborhood one wintry evening. Recognizing the license plate as that of a “known burglar,” they ordered the vehicle’s occupants out of the car, but not before one of them was seen throwing something off into the distance. Suspicious, the patrolmen called for backup and had police check homes in the neighborhood. In short order, police discovered the rear door of Mrs. Kathleen Fiege’s home on Baeder Road broken open. The house had been ransacked.

  Herb Mooney, former Abington police chief and the township’s only detective at the time of the crime, remembers their excitement at finally nailing Sears. “They were doing one or two houses a night,” says Mooney. “When we finally got him we scraped dirt and mud off of Willie’s shoes and matched it with the dirt and mud found at the burglarized house.”

  Since Mrs. Fiege was hospitalized at the time, the police brought a relative to inspect the house. It was quickly determined that a diamond ring was missing. Police then returned to the Cadillac and, using flashlights, searched the surrounding terrain on their hands and knees until—just after midnight—they found the ring.

  Adding insult to injury, on top of the prison time he now had to serve, Sears was forced to relinquish his brand new Cadillac to authorities. It seems he owed the Internal Revenue Service $18,678 for “illegal loot” he had procured over the preceding few years.

  Willie’s arrest, the negative publicity, and the loss of his Cadillac were obviously distressing, but it was the life he had chosen and, more important, he was doing well at it—certainly better than the neighborhood guys who had “gone legit” and were still slogging away in a dirty factory somewhere. Unlike them, he was able to purchase fancy cars and expensive suits, attract good-looking women, and buy the house a round of drinks. Getting arrested, though, was definitely a problem. He already had a lengthy string of arrests that covered everything from the discovery of 32 fifths of untaxed whisky in the trunk of his car to a holdup at the point of a gun. The real question for him, however, was how to maximize his return. Considering the risks involved, how could he increase the profit margin? Willie Sears’s answer to this riddle would revolutionize the field of burglary and contribute to a lucrative cottage industry for a generation or two of Kensington crooks. In short, he would do more rather than less, but he would do it in a way that would make even corporate efficiency experts take notice.

  Willie Sears’s game plan was simple. He would adopt a team approach and jack up the number of residential targets on any given evening. Four men in a car would travel to an affluent Philadelphia suburb such as Merion, Rydal, or Yardley, seeking likely marks. When a fashionable home was determined to be unoccupied, three men would get out and the driver would cruise the neighborhood, returning every 10 minutes or so to see if the “swag” and his partners were ready to be collected. Of the three who entered the house, one was stationed by the window as a lookout. The other two searched the house for valuables. With military-like precision, the four-man unit would knock off six, seven, eight houses a night and 20 or more over the course of a weekend. It was a veritable gold mine. As Jimmy Laverty, one of Sears’s early associates, boasts, “We transformed burglary into an assembly line process like the operations of Heinz and Ford.”

  Willie Sears called his program “production work,” and the name stuck. For decades to come, prospective associates of Sears and other Kensington burglars would be phoned at home or furtively asked while sharing a beer at a corner bar, “You wanna do some production work tonight?” Invariably the answer was “Sure, why not?”

  For some Kensington men, the offer of “doing a few houses” and the possibility of a big score was irresistible. “We’d come home with cash, coin collections, expensive jewelry, and 20 to 22 furs,” says Laverty. “It would always be a hell of a haul.”

  Willie Sears’s innovative, systematic approach to burglary incorporated precise timelines and a rigid division of labor. Crew members targeted wealthy neighborhoods, went on the road for three or four days at a time, wore conservative business attire, and avoided weapons or strong-arm tactics. The method paid instant dividends. Crew members were coming back from their jobs with their pockets stuffed with cash, expensive watches, eye-catching tie clips, cuff links, and fancy gold and silver jewelry that they often spread around to the wide-eyed, shapely women cruising the Philly nightclubs. For those in the neighborhood, it was impossible not to notice the windfall of riches and the enticing lifestyle that production work produced.

  Don Abrams was one of the early observers and converts. He was soon dressing expensively and was nicknamed “the Dude” by La La McQuoid because of his penchant for $400 suits. “I saw all these guys with money, new cars, and girls,” recalls Abrams. “I said to myself, I ain’t gonna work for some guy and he makes all the money. So I joined Searsy. He taught me to be a good burglar. I became a second story man. I climbed like a fuckin’ monkey. He taught everybody everything.” It didn’t take long for the Dude’s mother to question his lavish lifestyle. The dramatic change in his attire and attitude surprised and troubled her, as well as the legal predicaments it got him into. On one emotional trip to the penitentiary to visit her son, she pointedly asked him, “Why do you steal? You’re the only one of my sons that steals.” “It’s okay, Mom,” Don reassured her. “I steal from the rich and give to the poor.” “Who’s that?” she asked. “Me,” said the Dude.

  Others began to take notice as well. With fashionable neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and New Hope showing a startling increase in residential and commercial break-ins, city and suburban police departments were baffled, frustrated, and under pressure to catch the perpetrators. “They wore us out,” says Joseph Brophy. A Philadelphia cop for over 35 years and former captain of the Burglary Squad, Brophy had his share of encounters with Sears and his K&A crowd. “Sears was pretty darn slick. He and the gang were well organized. They were damn good burglar
s.” Brophy, who became a cop in 1941, claims that unsophisticated deadbeats and opportunists performed most burglaries before the Kensington crews stepped into it. “Prior to the K&A guys, there was no organization to burglary. Their division-of-labor concept gave each one of them a job, and each one did his part well. It worked.”

  Herb Mooney, the Abington police chief whose lengthy career covered the same time period as Brophy’s, has his own recollections of the K&A Gang. “I had a lot of dealings with those fellows,” says Mooney. “They were professionals. They never carried guns, and I never had a problem [a violent confrontation] with them. They would never talk when we caught them, but I never had a problem with them.” The gang became such a thorn in the side of Abington authorities that Mooney decided to go the extra mile and undertake some serious research. He asked a Philly detective to take him into the city and give him a tour of Kensington; he wanted to see where the burglars came from, learn their local haunts, determine who their members were, and hopefully predict their moves. “I went to K&A,” says Mooney proudly. As for what he learned, Mooney sternly declares, “They knew me and I knew them.”

  The information garnered from such forays had little impact on the suburban crime rate. It wouldn’t be until later in the decade, when the K&A Gang took their larcenous campaign on the road, spending a week or more at a time in North Jersey, New York, New England, and the Carolinas, that Philly’s suburbs could breathe a sigh of relief. In the meantime, Sears continued to perfect his craft and manage his rewarding enterprise.

  According to Jimmy Laverty, Sears was the first to recognize the importance of the calendar and the impact of seasonal changes on the success or failure of a residential burglary. “Sears started doing burglaries at five p.m., and most of the work was from October to May,” says Laverty. “Jobs were pulled when it was dark outside.” Consequently, many burglars worked four, five, and even six nights a week right through the winter. In fact, Laverty says, the burglars’ work ethic was so strong that “no one celebrated New Year’s Eve. We were all working production.” Such diligence enabled many of them to live the good life and take the summers off. Unless, of course, someone at Kellis’s, Marty’s, or the Bubble Club leaned over and whispered, “You wanna do some production work tonight? I gotta good tip.”

  Unfortunately for his partners over the years, Willie Sears’s creative instincts called for some unusual work rules. One of the more infamous was strip-searching each member of his crew after a successful night’s work so that no one could hold back on the take. Bizarre scenes like four or five nude men anxiously counting the night’s proceeds around a poker table were not uncommon. Don “the Dude” Abrams was subjected to this humiliating and recurring practice.

  “He stripped me balls naked,” complains Abrams. “After a score we’d go back to somebody’s house or apartment and check out the take. But we’d first have to strip. I mean everything. He’d make us spread our cheeks, look in our ears and mouth. It was like a goddamn medical exam. He’d then go through the pockets and cuffs of our clothes lookin’ for any hidden money or jewelry. Christ, it was awful.”

  The Dude and many others put up with it, though. Sears was “the king of the burglars,” the creator of the scam that was making them all rich. More important, the burly Sears was six-one, 220 pounds, and, as Abrams says, “a tough son-ofa-bitch, one of the toughest in the neighborhood.” The beatings he dished out were memorable. Some considered him a “dirty fighter,” a consummate street fighter who’d “kick you right in the teeth” if he felt it was warranted. Compared with some of the neighborhood bullies, however, “Sears was a gentleman,” says Abrams. “He didn’t start fights, but he could end them pretty quick. He could also hang in there with the best of them if he had to. I saw him fight for three hours one time. They’d fight for a while, break for coffee, and then go right back at it again.” The bottom line was clear; you didn’t want to tangle with Willie Sears.

  On one occasion, however, a frustrated Donny Abrams took a chance. He had had enough of Willie Sears and his dictatorial ways. “He’d stay in the car and the other guys would do the house. We were doing all the work. He got lazy.” More important, says Abrams, his boss was cheating on the take: “He was beating the balls off me. He’d cut his mother if he could get away with it.”

  The routine was growing old, fast. Tired of being stripped naked every night while Sears cheated him, Donny Abrams thought of an ingenious way to strike back. He’d try to beat Willie Sears at his own game. “I carefully sliced the lapels of my shirt so there’d be room to slip something in there,” he says. “Well, one night we’re doin’ a joint, and I come across a bunch of wallets in a drawer and they’re stuffed with cash. Several wallets had four and five hundred dollars in each. So I shove 10 one hundred dollar bills in the lapel of my shirt and turn the rest in. Later, when we strip and Willie goes through our clothes and pockets, he doesn’t find anything. He never thought to check out my shirt collar and lapels.”

  Donny was elated: he had gotten over on Willie Sears; he had beaten the master thief. Unfortunately, Donny couldn’t rejoice alone; he had to share his triumph with others. Eventually, word got back to Sears. The next time they met was on a busy Kensington streetcorner. Willie, his nostrils flaring, the veins in his neck bulging, angrily stepped up to Abrams, grabbed his shirt in his large fists, and tore the lapels and collar right off. He cursed him out and let him know that if he pulled such a stunt again, there would be hell to pay. Don the Dude got the message. He started working with other crews and eventually organized a crew of his own.

  OF THE MANY YOUNG MEN in Kensington who learned the burglary trade under the able tutelage of Willie Sears, Effie Burke is arguably the most professional, prolific, and respected. Revered by most of his former associates, Burke is thought by some to have burglarized more homes in America than any other single member of Philadelphia’s old Irish Mob. Jackie Johnson, one of Burke’s former crew members, proudly boasts, “I guarantee you Effie was in more houses than the next five guys combined.” Jimmy Dolan, another Burke associate, agrees, “Effie should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most burglaries committed.” “No question about it,” adds Georgie Smith, “Effie burgled more homes than anybody.” Such boasts are striking, not only for the magnitude of the claim, but for the knowledgeable and generally hard-to-impress participants making them: each and every member of the K&A Gang had broken into hundreds of houses across the country.

  One of six children born to Steven Burkowski and the former Mary McFadden, Francis Edward Burkowski was a typical youth in pre-war Kensington. He displayed little interest in either school or work. The initials of his first and middle names became “Effie,” and his last name also underwent some modification. His mother, an ethnicity-conscious Kensington Irish Catholic, was apparently less than enthralled with her husband’s Polish heritage and eventually shortened the family name to the more acceptable and Irish-sounding “Burke.”

  Having dropped out of North Catholic High School in 1941, Effie Burke knocked around with some equally misguided youths and not surprisingly got himself into some serious trouble. In 1942, for example, he was arrested twice for auto theft. The second episode, in October of that year, garnered newspaper headlines. Effie, already on parole for auto larceny, stole an automobile, took it for a joyride, and then decided to pass two motorcycle policemen at high speed on Roosevelt Boulevard. When he failed to heed their order to pull over, what the newspapers called a “wild chase” proceeded up the 12-lane highway until Burke turned off at Comly Avenue. The pursuit finally ended when Burke failed to negotiate another turn at 50 miles an hour and crashed into a lamppost, snapping it off at the base. Sixteen-year-old Effie was charged with larceny, operating an automobile without the owner’s consent, and driving without an operator’s license or an owner’s card. The joyride resulted in his imprisonment at White Hill.

  In order to head off additional delinquency charges and more jail time, young Effie enlisted
in the military but was immediately discharged when his age was discovered. When he turned 18, he enlisted once again and eventually saw combat in France and Germany. Discharged a second time at the end of the war, Effie Burke returned home to Kensington still lacking any enthusiasm for either work or an education. Though he was employed on the Pennsylvania Railroad for a short time, the work was uninspiring, difficult, and low paying. Street life, on the other hand, was far more exciting, less demanding physically, and, on good days, considerably more profitable.

  In the late forties and early fifties, a number of Kensington crooks specialized in pilfering and cashing stolen checks. Effie, now in his mid-twenties, was attracted to the action and easy money. Joining other local grifters, he began breaking into neighborhood businesses, swiping company checks, and cashing them under various guises throughout the city. In 1952, for example, Effie, joined a floating collection of locals, including Michael Rispo, Donald Hetrick, Harry Stocker, and Thomas McGonagle, who broke into the East Thompson Terminal Corporation, the Culp Manufacturing Corporation, the Alliance Roofing and Installing Company, and the Bell Market, among other businesses. Once in possession of the company checks, they used a variety of ruses—sometimes assisted by an attractive 18-year-old girl from Buffalo, New York—to pass them. Four such burglary/check kiting schemes in 1952 alone resulted in Effie’s arrest. In one embarrassing episode, he and his partner, Harry Stocker, were discovered hiding in bed together as the police closed in. Both men were buried under the covers— Effie undressed and Stocker fully clothed—when police broke into the room.