Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  Not every hardware store bothered to carry the ominous-looking screwdriver, which could easily be mistaken for a relic of the Crusades. However, for one automotive parts shop on Kensington Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s, the #9714 screwdriver was one of the most popular items.

  “We had a run on them back then,” recalls Jay Tipton, who began working at Morris Auto in 1953. “Our regular mechanics who came into the store never bought them, just members of the K&A Gang.” At the time Tipton didn’t know the “articulate, clean-cut” customers who appeared fixated on the unusual tool, but one day in the early sixties a couple of city detectives came into the store to ask about it. “The cops said that burglars were leaving the tools at the scene of the crime and asked if we could identify any of them,” says Tipton. “They had mug shots of people and I did recognize some of them.” Once Eugene Steinberg, the store’s owner, realized how the tools were being used, he told his staff “not to purchase the 9714 any more. It was a good seller,” says Tipton, “but the boss said not to order it any more.”

  In fact, a professional burglar’s bag contained an array of nifty tools and gadgets: gloves, flashlight, short-handled sledgehammer, crowbar, punch, L-shaped pliers, rattail files, sandpaper, and an assortment of chisels and keys. Later, walkie-talkies, police scanners, power drills, and acetylene torches would come into play. But for the 30-odd years the K&A Gang functioned, the brute was a particular favorite. In most cases, it was the first piece of equipment a burglar used on a piece of real estate. Generally, once a road crew had determined that a house was unoccupied, one of the team would go up to the front door and firmly wedge the brute between the lock and the doorframe. Within seconds of leaning on it, he would hear cracking; soon he could see wood splitting as the lock was torn away from both the door and the frame. As Donnie Johnston says, very few “doors could stand up to it.”

  Once inside, the men would assume their positions. As adrenaline coursed through their veins and the anticipation built, the searchers went about their individual assignments. Given a choice, most crew members would have preferred the more glamorous (and usually more rewarding) job of searcher, especially the one who had the honor of hitting the master bedroom. The expectation of discovering a cash-stuffed wallet, an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills, a jewelry box filled with diamond brooches, or a gem-laden necklace would send anyone’s heartbeat racing, let alone a professional thief’s. Each home, each bedroom, each chest of drawers, each jewelry box was a new heart-thumping adventure. As Jimmy Dolan says, “The excitement of it all was tremendous. It was incredible. You never knew what to expect.”

  For the K&A burglar, the master bedroom was the equivalent of King Tut’s tomb or a buccaneer’s buried treasure—all sorts of good things were hidden there. It was where they hoped to make a big score, to get rich. “Ninety percent of the time the money could be found in the master bedroom,” says Laverty. “People are creatures of habit. They love to be near their money—in the closet, the wall safe, in back of a drawer, under the mattress. But almost always in the bedroom.”

  Once on the verge of making the big score, like fortune seekers caught up in the nineteenth-century California Gold Rush, the Irish burglars displayed their individuality, their own personal treasure-hunting styles. Just as some 49ers tunneled deep into the mountains for gold while others sat by a stream and methodically panned for it, some K&A men were heavy-handed and destroyed the homes they rummaged through while others had a more delicate touch and tried to show some consideration for their victim’s property. Jimmy Laverty, for instance, prided himself on being a thoughtful, “meticulous person.” Ninety percent of his victims, he claims, “never even knew their place had been robbed. Most didn’t realize until they looked for a ring or favorite brooch a few days later.”

  Other burglars, he says, were just interested in finding the spoils and getting out with the goods. “Effie pulled drawers open and dumped them on the bed. Everything got thrown, tossed, and trashed when Effie worked. It looked like a cyclone had hit the house. When I went through a place,” says Laverty proudly, “there was never a mess.” Colder-hearted practitioners would argue that the goal was to get as much as you could as quickly as you could. Neither the homeowners nor the cops were giving out merit points for neatness.

  All the Kensington burglary crews were conscientious about weapons, however. No one was to carry a gun while doing production work, and a weapon discovered during the course of a job was to be discarded, preferably where no one could find it. “First thing,” says Jimmy Laverty, “I would open the night table drawer, and if I found a gun there, I’d take it and throw it in the toilet tank. You didn’t want the owner coming home and getting to the gun while you’re in there. No one wanted trouble or a shootout.”

  This became a cardinal rule of the gang. “We never carried a gun,” says Donnie Abrams. “If you found one while on a job, then you’d immediately hide it if you had any brains. You’d hide it behind a couch, a toilet, anywhere.” Even a decade later the rule was still in effect. Jimmy Dolan, an Effie Burke recruit in the sixties, says, “It was automatic; you never carried a gun. You do and it opens all kinds of fucking doors; maybe you’ll use it, maybe you’ll just get more fucking time for carrying it. There was no good reason to be carrying a gun. We wanted to make money and enjoy ourselves. We never wanted to hurt anybody. We wanted to spend money, but not get anybody hurt.”

  An additional reason for the gang’s disdain for weapons came from their growing understanding of the nuances of the criminal justice system. Getting caught with a gun meant stiffer penalties. As Jackie Johnson says, “As long as no one got hurt, you were okay and a lawyer could do something for you.” “You didn’t carry a gun because you were fairly sure that no one was home,” brags another burglar. “You could do a hundred burglaries and you’d only get 11 and a half to 23 months back then.”

  The gang’s “no weapon rule” became well known in the law enforcement community and was much appreciated by street cops. Though Philly and suburban police were being run ragged by Kensington’s Irish Mob in the 1950s, they learned that its modus operandi.xcluded any form of violence. “The guys never had a gun,” says John Del Carlino, a city detective who pursued the K&A Gang for over two decades. “They didn’t want to hurt anybody.” In fact, it wasn’t unusual for the first police officers who arrived at a burglarized home to relax and holster their revolvers when they realized it was a K&A job. They knew they were dealing with the cream of the city’s crop of burglars: the place was probably cleaned out, but they could be reasonably sure that no one had been hurt in the process.

  Another tenet of production work that served the gang well over the years was dressing for success. Everyone, whether he was the driver who never left the car or the lookout man stuck by a window, had to be appropriately attired, preferably in a business suit. It was important to blend into the neighborhoods they were pillaging. Normal street clothes or the factory work outfits that were so common in Kensington would have been spectacularly conspicuous in upscale Merion, Scarsdale, and Sag Harbor.

  Burglary garb as projected on cinema screens around the country was similarly disdained. Carole Heidinger recalls the time Effie Burke was about to take a crew on the road and a new man he was breaking in “came dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks like a Hollywood movie.” Effie took one look at the guy and “rolled on the floor laughing.” Real burglars—K&A burglars—were professionals, and looked like professionals.

  “We were always well dressed,” says Jimmy Dolan. “We looked fuckin’ right. We wore business suits and even carried briefcases.” “You never wore dungarees in case you got stopped,” says Georgie Smith. “We wore top-notch suits. I bought expensive Botany 500 suits.” “We always worked in suits and ties,” adds Donnie Johnstone. “We had to look well dressed and respectable.”

  The ploy usually worked. A nattily attired businessman with briefcase in hand was unlikely to draw any attention walking up to a
fashionable home. Why would a casual observer suspect that the well-dressed gentleman at the front door—possibly an insurance salesman or business associate—was actually the point man for an experienced, aggressive criminal organization that had just ripped off the more valuable possessions from a half-dozen families in the neighborhood?

  Despite the crews’ fealty to the tenets of production work, however, they were studiously opposed to any more rules or regulations than necessary and rejected the notion of modeling themselves after the other ethnic crime faction in town—the Mafia. In fact, the ever-growing number of Kensington burglary teams were nothing more than a loose confederation of mostly Irish, blue collar, high school dropouts who looked at production work as a career alternative to life as a roofer, factory worker, or cop. There was never any interest in building a rigid, hierarchical outfit as the Italians had done. Kensington Irishmen hated bosses. Installing an all-powerful Angelo Bruno–type figurehead as the capo di tutti capi.“boss of all bosses”) of the K&A Gang would have been nearly impossible. There were crew chiefs like Willie Sears, Effie Burke, John Berkery, and Junior Kripplebauer who knew the score and had lots of experience, but an elaborate chain of command with a single overlord was against their nature. They weren’t interested in constructing a strict, paramilitary-type operation where orders were given and followed to the letter. K&A men were more free-flowing and democratic. Each crew member had a vote and could veto a job if he chose to. Freedom and organizational fluidity appealed to their carefree, relaxed work ethic. If the Mafia was the model for the traditional organized crime operation, Kensington second story men were quite content to represent disorganized crime.

  “WE’D WATCH THOSE MOVIES where a guy wearing a stethoscope was trying to open a safe and we’d just laugh. We knew it was ridiculous. Those of us doin’ the real thing on a daily basis knew it was bullshit. It was Hollywood’s version of reality. Somebody out there started that crap about burglars using stethoscopes and they never changed it. We just laughed.”

  Donnie Johnstone’s scorn for the Hollywood safecracker gingerly turning the combination lock as he listens for mechanical levers and shifting pins is fairly representative. If a K&A burglar ever handled a physician’s stethoscope, it was only because he had just rifled a doctor’s home and lifted the diagnostic device as a toy for one of his children. The thieves were searching for cash, coin collections, jewelry, and furs. The discovery of a safe in a commercial or residential property only whetted their appetites. The goal was to get into it as quickly as possible. Stethoscopes were of no value to high school dropouts attacking a ponderous, 5,000-pound safe. Their game plan rested more on muscle and persistence than on faint sounds detected with supersensitive medical instruments. For real, everyday safecrackers, a sturdy chisel, a star punch, a #9714 screwdriver, and a short-handled sledgehammer went a whole lot further than any flimsy listening device.

  According to Jimmy Dolan, Hollywood’s stealthy, ear-to-the-safe burglar was dated at best and total baloney at worst. It was the “early safes from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s that you could hear a tumbler drop,” says Dolan, “but the precision safes made in later years made it near impossible to hear or detect anything. You would need space-age equipment.” Dolan learned the business from the best street burglars in the country, and if they had anything in hand, it was a pair of work gloves and a brute. They’d also have a severe backache from hauling the heavy steel and concrete box to a friendly garage or deserted field where they could really get at it.

  Traditionally, burglars with a specialty in cracking safes were called “yeggs” or “yeggmen,” a nineteenth-century term of disputed origin that is all but forgotten today. Some etymologists attribute the word to the name of the first burglar to use nitroglycerin on a safe. Others claim it is of gypsy, Chinese, or German derivation, referring to “chief thief,” “beggar,” or “hunter,” respectively. Many yeggmen, posing as either hobos or sophisticated dandies, rode the rails during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and specialized in robbing banks in remote but wealthy western towns. Safecracking methodologies varied. Some yeggs used cumbersome but relatively silent jackscrews to crack open a safe, while others gravitated to the dicier proposition of blowing a safe with dynamite or nitro. Though the latter would usually get the job done, the volatile mixture of table salt, sodium bicarbonate, distilled water, glycerin, and nitric and sulfuric acids could ignite unexpectedly and blow off one’s hands and face.

  According to experienced members of the K&A Gang, there were only so many practical ways to open a safe, and none of them incorporated the use of delicate medical equipment or unstable chemical compounds. A construction worker’s tool kit or a demolition man’s arsenal of gadgets was considerably closer to what Kensington “safe men” actually used. In reality, there were five tried and proven ways to crack a safe. Each had its proponents, but most burglars generally followed the same familiar drill: start with the quickest and easiest method and move through the list until they got what they wanted.

  “Back-dialing would be the first thing you’d try when you came upon a safe in a home or business you were burglarizing,” says Junior Kripplebauer, one of the better K&A box men. It “only worked 10 percent of the time,” but it was well worth the modest amount of time and effort invested. Very simply, a burglar would slowly turn the dial on the safe’s locking mechanism in a counterclockwise direction as he gently applied pressure to the door handle. If the last person to use the safe had closed the safe door but hadn’t turned the dial past zero, there was a chance, albeit a small one, that the locking mechanism had not been triggered and the safe remained unlocked. For back-dialing to be successful, one thing was required that a burglar didn’t carry in his bag of tricks: the cooperation of the last person who used the safe.

  Such carelessness—and it occurred in both private residences and large business establishments—was the best gift a crew could receive. “People left the dial on the last number of their combination and it would just open up when you pulled the handle,” says a grateful Donnie Johnstone. He and Kripplebauer admit that when that happened—which was “very seldom”—the burglars felt that the last person who had used the safe deserved a cut of the proceeds.

  Punch-dialing required substantially more time and energy, but was still one of the easier ways to crack a locked safe. The burglars would use a star or center punch and a short-handled sledgehammer to drive the safe’s dialing mechanism back into the box. If done properly, according to Kripplebauer, “the tumblers would be knocked loose and everything would fall to the bottom of the safe, allowing the bars that lock the door to move. Once the bars were free to move, you could open the door.” If the safe was well made or the punch-dialing was done haphazardly, it was possible to botch the job. But for a good burglar who knew his stuff, says Kripplebauer, punch-dialing would do the trick at least 50 percent of the time.

  If it was determined that the safe’s locking mechanism was too sound or punching it proved unsuccessful, the job then called for an exhausting, all-out wrestling match, better known in the trade as “ripping,” “peeling,” and “tearing” the safe apart. Peeling a safe was a physically demanding, time-consuming process—one that was more safely done in the friendly confines of a deserted warehouse or in a desolate country field (cemeteries, junkyards, and abandoned train tracks were also favorite workplaces). Taking an hour or more to rip a safe apart in its accustomed home was a risky proposition, although it was known to happen. Moving several hundred pounds or several tons of steel and concrete was no easy assignment. Many a victim’s home, and many a burglar’s back and automobile, were wrecked in the process.

  The first step in tearing a safe open was “putting a crimp or dent in a corner of the box between the door and the frame. A chisel would then be hammered into the indentation,” and, as Donnie Johnstone says, “you’d keep banging until you got a bite.” Once a good bite was established, the burglars would continue along the seam, vigorously pounding chisel
s into the breach with “hammers and hatchets” and widening the gaps. Soon, according to Kripplebauer, “you would hear a pop, pop, pop sound; the popping sounds of rivets breaking and cracking.” Burglars could now dig their brutes into the fissure, “lay back on the bar and listen to what sounded like balloons popping.”

  By “banging chisels in every six inches, busting the rivets, and bending the steel cover back,” according to the burglars, you’d actually be “peeling” the safe apart. Once that was accomplished, a sledgehammer and brute would be used to smash and break apart the thick concrete insulation that lines all large safes. After 45 minutes to an hour of frenetic digging, chipping, and banging, everyone involved was covered in sweat, grime, white flecks of “firebrick” (a plaster cast used to insulate the safe’s contents against fire), chunks of concrete, and minute slivers of steel, but the job had been completed. The box was open and the contents theirs.

  Though just about all Kensington burglars employed in production work were practitioners of back-dialing, punch-dialing, and peeling a safe, only the more elite teams contained crew members who specialized in the last two safe-cracking methods: drilling and burning. Drilling a safe entailed “high-speed battery-or electric-powered drills with a variety of expensive diamond or carbon tips.” The real secret, however, was not the equipment, but knowing where on a box to drill. An inexperienced, unsophisticated novice could exhaust himself turning a metal box into a block of Swiss cheese and still not get near the safe’s contents.

  In the absence of a helpful diagram, a hole would generally be drilled between the dial and the handle. When the hole was large and deep enough, the burglars would chop through the firebrick and concrete insulation to get to the pins and slide-bars connecting the lock, handle, and doorframe. Once again they’d use the drill to sever the exposed rods and bars and hope the door could now be opened without the combination. It didn’t hurt, however, to have a little inside assistance.