Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  Once more, K&A crews showed their ingenuity. By going to friendly locksmiths or directly to the safe manufacturers such as Mosler and Diebolt (some even used the Library of Congress), they were able to acquire schematics that fit right over the face of the safe door. “The schematics clearly showed the soft spots and specified where to drill,” says Kripplebauer. “Drilling worked a good percentage of the time, but had its drawbacks. It was riskier because it’s noisier and takes longer.”

  If the box appeared too tough or drilling proved unsuccessful, there was one last way to mount an assault: burning the safe open. Burning targeted the same strategic spots as drilling and was just as labor-intensive, if not more so. But it also carried additional security concerns, such as casting an incredible amount of light on the illegal exercise and the very real possibility of starting a fire. Not every burglar could handle an acetylene torch, oxygen tanks, or super-hot burning rods, and many, as Donnie Johnstone readily admits, “didn’t have the knowledge” for such a delicate and dangerous project. Others—whether through bluster or ignorance—tried to emulate their more experienced Kensington colleagues, with often disastrous results. “I burned a safe one time,” says Don “the Dude” Abrams, “and nearly all the money in it.”

  To prevent such a painful outcome, some of the more savvy safe men first burned a hole in the top of the safe and then flooded the contents with water. Wet money could be put in a dryer or hung out to dry; burnt money was gone forever.

  Though there are plenty of boxes that resisted break-ins, there were other times when the gods looked with favor on their inept, stumbling efforts. For example, Jimmy Laverty’s crew “once got a tip about a house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania”—this “old couple that kept a safe filled with cash between their two beds.” The burglars drove upstate to the mountainous coal-mining region one night, successfully entered the home, and immediately tried to punch the safe open, but the box was too tough. They needed to peel the safe but didn’t have the luxury of doing it at the site. They’d have to lug it out of the house and back to Philadelphia—not the easiest of assignments in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and strangers were easily identifiable.

  As Laverty tells the story, he and his associates drop the safe out the second story window, and it lands with a loud thud. Just as they are about to push it toward their car and make a quick getaway, a patrol car slowly pulls into the street, and the officer behind the wheel looks directly at them. The burglars freeze, visions of handcuffs, high-priced attorneys, and cold, damp jail cells shooting through their brains. Then, recalls Laverty, “the cop gives us a friendly wave. So we wave back. And what do you know? He drives away.”

  The burglars’ luck does not end there. As they continue to “push the safe a couple more times end over end, the door flips open.” They quickly empty the safe’s contents on the sidewalk and hightail it back to their favorite Kensington night spots.

  Junior Kripplebauer had a similar stroke of good fortune one night. While burglarizing a large restaurant on Route 1 in southeastern Pennsylvania, Junior and his partners realized they were not going to be able to open the safe. If they wanted the day’s receipts, they would have to take it with them. The safe was so heavy, however, that they lost control of it as it was being eased down a long flight of stairs. It fell noisily to the bottom of the steps, putting holes in several walls and a large dent in the wooden floor, but the door flew open during its jarring decent, and they were now able to pocket the cash and drive off into the night $8,500 richer.

  6. The Pottsville Heist

  Pottsville was a hell of a fuckin’ score.—DON “THE DUDE” ABRAMS

  Pottsville, that was the biggest goddamn thing.—EDWARD FROGGATT

  Rollicking as a roller coaster, boisterous as a pirates’ ball, reeking with ribaldry and as eerily and factually fatal as the cold deadlines of a LeCarre spy thriller. That is the Pottsville burglary. Big, big, big and bad.—LEONARD MCADAMS

  In my 45 years as a policeman, I’ve had some interesting cases—gun battles and everything. But this, this surpasses them all. It’s a movie. That’s what it is, a movie.—DETECTIVE CAPTAIN CLARENCE FERGUSON

  IF THERE WAS a clarion call for criminals, a sawed-off shotgun heard round the world, a signature event of villainous larceny that put the K&A Gang on the map, it was the Pottsville Heist of 1959. The story combined incredible characters, gut-wrenching drama, unpredictable twists and turns, ruthless executions, and spell-binding courtroom testimony. As one newspaper scribe wrote of the mother of all burglaries, “It was the most incredible, the zaniest, the ultra-Hitchcockian and, for a time, the largest cash haul burglary in the history of Pennsylvania.” The half-million-dollar score, the dead bodies, the back-stabbing, and the blockbuster cast of wildly colorful characters made Pottsville the stuff of urban legends. And Kensington burglars had their fingerprints all over it.

  Though the infamous and nearly half-century old burglary took place on August 7, 1959, our story actually begins several years earlier when Clyde (Bing) Miller, a wealthy, upstate Pennsylvania owner of strip-mining machines, first glimpsed a super-hot showgirl in the Celebrity Room, a high-end nightclub on South Juniper Street that catered to staid Philadelphia’s few movers and shakers. Her name was Lillian Reis, and Miller couldn’t take his eyes off her. The voluptuous, dark-haired beauty in her mid-twenties was regularly described as “sexy,” “sultry,” and “seductive”—many people compared her to Liz Taylor. She was a twice-married chorus girl with two young children, and struggling to make ends meet on $60 a week. To Bing, she was a Greek goddess.

  “She really made an impression on me,” said Miller in a magazine interview. “She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw. When that chorus came out, you saw her—and only her. What I was spending on her was peanuts.”

  Miller may have thought a “refrigerator, a washing machine, a garbage disposal unit, an air conditioner, a diamond ring, a fur coat, an automobile, a Florida vacation and $200 a week” were peanuts, but few others would. In time, even Miller would start worrying about money, which is how the small mining town of Pottsville comes into the picture. Masked as Gibbsville by John O’Hara in popular novels such as Appointment in Samarra, Pottsville would regularly be in the headlines over much of the next decade as the setting for a real-life melodrama.

  According to Miller’s version of events, he and Lil were talking about her dream of one day buying the Celebrity Room nightclub when he started thinking out loud about a newspaper article on “income tax fraud” and a wealthy business associate of his in Pottsville who was known to keep extremely large sums of cash in a home safe. Miller always maintained that Lil was quick to pick up on the idle comment. Most close observers of the Pottsville saga believe that she was about to pull the plug on her weekly trysts with Bing. His business had gone south, he was running out of money, and Lil expected her social schedule to become very busy. If Miller wanted to continue the liaison, he’d have to come up with some dough.

  The dough he came up with belonged to John B. Rich, a 66-year-old Pennsylvania coal baron who owned the Gilberton Coal Company. Rich, whose real name was Giovanni Battista Recchione, had come to America from Italy in 1906 when he was 14 years old. Penniless and unable to speak a word of English, he took a job as a “breaker-boy,” sifting coal by hand for a couple of dollars a day. Thanks to determination, hard work, and an entrepreneurial spirit, Rich was running his own coal company by the early 1940s. He became a millionaire not long after.

  For Lillian, though, the interesting part of the story was not a lowly immigrant’s extraordinary climb from poverty to great wealth but the old man’s cash. No slouch herself with regard to entrepreneurial endeavors, she turned to one of the Celebrity Room’s numerous patrons who specialized in such logistical problems.

  John Carlyle Berkery was one of many K&A burglars who, when they had just made a score, frequented the center city nightclub. In addition to attractive dancers, it featured performances by known f
unny men like Jack E. Leonard, Lenny Bruce, and Don Rickles and established singers like Buddy Greco, Johnny Mathis, and Ella Fitzgerald. A tall, cherubic-faced man of 29, Berkery had already accumulated a number of arrests. He had a nose for a good tip and a reputation as an up-and-coming practitioner of production work. Lil, the story goes, enlightened him about a certain Pottsville millionaire who could be sitting on as much as a half-million bucks.

  Berkery liked what he heard. According to subsequent court testimony, he brought two additional Kensington second story men—Vincent “Barney” Blaney, 26, and Robert Poulson, 24—to Lil’s house in South Philly on the evening of August 6, 1959, to discuss the job. After a couple of phone calls determined that Rich was out of the country —he was vacationing in Europe— and gave the crew his address on fashionable Mahantongo Street in Pottsville, it was decided that they would drive up to the coal country the very next night. Lillian insisted that Berkery take her tough, well-built boyfriend, Ralph “Junior” Staino, 27, who also worked at the Celebrity Room, to ensure that her interests were protected.

  On the way up to Pottsville, the four men stopped in a Reading hardware store to pick up a few odds and ends—brute, hacksaw, screwdrivers, and hatchet. They arrived in the small mining town well after nightfall. After assuring themselves that the house was vacant, they entered and quickly discovered a flimsy safe in the basement. While Staino kept watch at a first floor front window, Berkery, Blaney, and Poulson battered the safe door open. It is said that they “almost fainted” when they discovered a wall of money staring them in the face: “money stacked in bundles of $10,000; $20,000; and $50,000. The money was in $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills.”

  Unprepared for such a haul, they started grabbing pillowcases from all over the house and eagerly stuffed the cash into every container they could find. Suddenly they heard a loud siren that seemed to blare through the entire neighborhood. “Here come the cops,” one of the men yelled. The four burglars scattered, some with bags of money, some without, and all in a panic, struggling to be the first out of the house. But when they exited the kitchen door and hit the back lawn, they realized that no cops were chasing them—the wailing siren was merely a nightly curfew warning for teenagers. The crew re-entered the Rich home and cleaned out the safe, except for what was later estimated to be $1.5 million worth of bonds and other valuable papers on the safe’s bottom shelf.

  The four returned to Philadelphia giddy with excitement. Back at Staino’s West Philadelphia apartment at 42nd and Spruce Streets, they emptied the bags of money on his bed and counted the proceeds. None of the Kensington men was a mathematical genius, and they were well up into six figures, a numerical neighborhood they were totally unfamiliar with. Each time they reached the rarified air of $350,000, they got light-headed, lost track of the count, and had to begin again. Police would later determine the haul to be about $478,000, an unprecedented, astronomical score by the standards of the day.

  By prearrangement there was to be a four-way split, with Lillian getting everything over a hundred grand (the sum they had expected to find), since she had put the operation together. Poulson and Blaney each took a $25,000 cut and an extra $1,200 or so in “pin money.” Berkery was said to have walked off with $100,000. Bing Miller, the original finger man, was given $7,000 for the profitable tip.

  Within hours, certainly within days, word filtered through Kensington tap-rooms and rug factories that some neighborhood guys had come into some serious money. “Bobby Poulson called me up and said we’re going down the shore,” said Don “the Dude” Abrams. “He had $30,000 in his basement, his share of the score. He took about $5,000 and we went down to Atlantic City and had a party. We got so fuckin’ drunk we ended up sleeping on the beach.”

  Throwing caution to the wind, the group began a major infusion into the area’s economy. Lincolns and Cadillacs were purchased. Berkery bought a suburban New Jersey home, and Lillian put money down on the Celebrity Room.

  Back in Pottsville, John Rich had returned from his vacation to find his house burgled, his safe looted, and no idea who to blame. Curiously, Rich claimed to be missing only $3,500 in cash and $17,000 in jewelry, hardly an earth-shattering crime. Who would connect the relatively minor burglary on Mahantongo Street and some unexpected extravagance in Philadelphia? That ignominious or heroic role—depending upon your ethical vantage point—would be left to the brother of one of the criminal actors.

  It was now February of 1960—a good six months after the burglary—and Richie Blaney, Vince’s younger brother, had just completed his fifth week at Eastern State Penitentiary for a probation violation. He wasn’t liking it one little bit. A Kensington thief and a graduate of the Willie Sears School of Burglary, Richie had also developed a not-so-secret sideline as an informant. Accounts of his duplicity were not hard to come by.

  “I came home to my mother’s place one night,” recalls Jackie Johnson, “and the cops are goin’ through the house. Somebody had tipped them off, and they’re looking all through the place. Then I see Richie Blaney there and ask my mother, what’s he doing here? She said, ‘He came in with the cops and showed me a badge like the others.’ I told her he ain’t no cop. He’s from the neighborhood. I told him to get the fuck out of the house. But that’s what he was doing at the time, making pretend he was a cop.”

  “Richie was following me for days,” says John L. McManus of his own runins with Blaney, “so I finally picked up a tire iron and told him I was gonna break his goddamn head. He told the cops I threatened him and they put the word out to beat me on sight. And they did, they got me good and put me the hospital at Moko [Moyamensing Prison, now demolished]. The nurse called the FBI and they came in and took pictures of me. They wanted me to sign some stuff and testify, but I won’t rat. Not even on them.”

  Though being a snitch for the man didn’t improve his reputation in the community, chubby, moon-faced Richie believed that his cooperation in a few sensitive areas had gotten him out of several scrapes. And he now desperately wanted out of Eastern. He sent word from his jail cell that he had information about an unsolved crime—a big score that included some neighborhood guys and Lillian Reis. The message landed on the desk of Captain Clarence J. Ferguson, Philly’s version of J. Edgar Hoover.

  By the time of Pottsville, Clarence Ferguson was in his sixties, had over four decades on the police force, and was a law enforcement institution in the City of Brotherly Love. Commander of an infamous 40-man unit called the Special Investigations Squad, he wore a dated porkpie hat, had a stable of snitches he kept out of jail, and had carte blanche authority to investigate any person or crime he found of interest. Blaney’s incredible tale piqued his curiosity; he had heard stories of some big spending by a few K&A guys. And it was well known that Lillian had just purchased the Celebrity Room and was putting more enthusiasm than usual into her favorite refrain, “Drink it up, boys.”

  Richie recounted for Ferguson how his brother Vince and Bobby Poulson had arrived at his house the night of the burglary. They were beside themselves with excitement and proudly showed off their take from the caper—thousands of dollars in cash. He explained how they hid Vince’s share in his kitchen oven and went out to celebrate. More important, he went on to enumerate a number of key elements of the crime that had the ring of authenticity. Over the next several weeks and months, Blaney would be ushered in and out of Eastern’s formidable front gate as if it were a revolving door to a supermarket rather than a state penitentiary. He had become “Ferguson’s number one informant,” indispensable to the old man’s intelligence-gathering system.

  After conferring with Lieutenant Jesse Stanton and Sergeant Roy Wellendorf of the Pennsylvania State Police, Ferguson started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. They quickly agreed that there might be a connection between the Rich heist and the unlikely big spenders in Philly. Looking for a key link to confirm Blaney’s account, they theorized that the gang’s tipster was none other than Lillian’s sugar daddy, Bing Miller, now
a sick man and no longer a high-roller. They tracked him down to a small Jersey fishing village where, broke and suffering from cancer, he managed a motel and restaurant. Brought back to Philadelphia for questioning on April 2, 1960, within a few hours he had confessed to being the finger man for the Rich job. The next day police arrested Reis, Staino, and Poulson. Vincent Blaney and John Berkery were arrested within the week. Poulson and Blaney signed confessions “within seven hours.” If authorities thought they had put this baby to sleep, however, they were sadly mistaken. In fact, the bizarre story was just beginning.

  OUT ON BAIL AND AWAITING TRIAL, the defendants might have decided to become models of propriety and stay out of the newspaper headlines, but not this crowd. Moral rectitude was and would remain an alien concept. In July 1960, for example, Lil and Junior got into a brouhaha with a young woman at an Atlantic City nightclub that resulted in punches being thrown, unflattering newspaper coverage, and additional courtroom appearances.

  “I was just walking to the ladies’ room at the Escort Bar,” recalls Virginia Chiucarelli, who was just 24 at the time of the incident. “I didn’t know Ralph Staino from a bucket of beets. He offered me a job at the bar, but I said I had a good job and started walking away and then somebody goosed me. The only one who could have done it was Ralph. I hit him and then he hit me back. I hit him again and then he really started to punch me.

  “People started to yell, ‘Ralph, you’re such a big man, but you can’t knock out that 112-pound girl.’ I ended up with a slight concussion, a broken nose, and a missing tooth. He sure made a mess out of me. They had to take me to the hospital.”

  Things turned much grimmer that summer. Within days of the Chiucarelli incident, members of the Pottsville team started to turn up in distressed condition.