Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  The chief of the FBI’s surveillance unit gave the order to disband. But Bill Skarbek was undeterred. “I know they’re going out,” he argued. “At least keep a skeleton crew on overnight. I’m positive they’re about to pull a job.”

  His superior was unmoved. “Look, Bill,” he countered, “we’ve been out here all day. The guys are beat. We’ve sat around and nothing’s happened. Admit it, we just got a bad tip. They’re not going out tonight.”

  “Not tonight,” pleaded Skarbek, “but maybe tomorrow morning. I’m telling you these bastards are getting ready to pull a job. I know it. I’ve been tracking them for years. I know their routine, their habits. Hell, I know some of them better than they know themselves. They’re going out, and if we don’t keep an eye on them we’re going to miss it. And then we’ll be kicking ourselves we gave up too soon.”

  Skarbek got his way, and fortunately his hunch was correct. Wigerman and his partners met at the bar the next morning and after several beers drove off in a car and the van. Three cars filled with FBI agents followed at a comfortable distance. As the caravan headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Skarbek believed the burglars were bound for Ohio or Missouri, two states the K&A Gang had recently been plundering.

  Instead, the burglars turned off the highway in Amish country and drove to a residential neighborhood outside Lancaster, where they left the van in the parking lot of a small shopping center. They then drove the car directly to a large house, from which, minutes later, Wigerman and his friends were observed lugging a large safe. They placed the heavy box in the trunk of the car, where it could easily have been mistaken for a large television. After transferring the safe to the van, they headed back toward the highway.

  The gang hadn’t traveled more than a mile when the word was given to nail them. A wiry, six-foot-three FBI agent, whose flowery silk beach shirt and mop of blond hair made him a ringer for a California surfer dude, pulled his unmarked police car in front of the van and gradually slowed to a halt on a narrow bridge. Before the Philly thieves knew what hit them, a caravan of federal, state, and local authorities, with semiautomatics and shotguns drawn, swooped down on them, made them lie spread-eagled across the roadway, and arrested them. For many Lancaster County residents unaccustomed to such scenes, the “bodies and automobiles... strewn across the roadway” must have looked like a massive car wreck.

  Skarbek and his colleagues were elated. This was a milestone for the FBI’s new antiburglary task force, and the capture was widely played up in the media. Cynics might argue that the triumphant capture of four thieves from Philadelphia was coming 25 years late, and furthermore that there were probably a dozen or two other K&A crews continuing to wreck havoc throughout the country. But it was a signal event for both Skarbek and the burglars, especially the crew chiefs he targeted. For the first time a smart, zealous cop with resources was coming after them. Paraphrasing a famous line about another fanatical lawman uttered by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, it wasn’t long before the Kensington burglars collectively started asking, “Who is this guy?”

  “He was a venomous son-of-a-bitch,” says Junior Kripplebauer. “Boy, he wouldn’t stop. He seemed to be all over the place, and he kept sending reports about me to agents and law enforcement officers all over the country. Hell, anything of value that was stolen or missing between California and Massachusetts was laid at my feet.”

  “That Skarbek was a motherfucker,” echoes Donnie Johnstone. “He was a real son-of-a-bitch. He went after everybody like his life depended on it.”

  “Nobody was more successful than Skarbek,” says Jimmy Dolan, referring to the federal agent’s harassment of the various burglary teams. “Who the fuck is this Skarbek? He was a nut. He said he was going to get us. He took major shots at me. He was relentless.”

  Dolan had more than his fair share of run-ins with Skarbek. Two confrontations, in particular, were classics of aggressive, proactive police work. One involved the use of informants; the other, a well-placed wire.

  “We were doing a job one night at the Oregon Diner [a popular all-night diner in South Philly],” recalls Jimmy Dolan. “We had gotten into the place undetected and were quietly going about our business. We were trying to go through a wall that would lead to where the safe was. A very slight hole had been drilled, and we were about to enlarge it just in case we had to hook up a truck and pull the wall down when one of the guys comes up to me looking concerned and whispers, ‘Jimmy, I think I just heard something drop on the other side of the wall. I think there’s somebody over there.’

  “He’s looking pretty tense and I ask him, ‘Are you sure?’

  “He says, ‘Yeah, I’m sure. I heard something drop. Like a piece of metal hitting the floor. I’m pretty sure somebody is over there.’

  “Now I’m thinking to myself, are we being set up? Is there really somebody over there? There wasn’t supposed to be anybody in that part of the building. We had scoped out the place pretty good. We knew the routine. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody in that room at that time of night. It was always locked and unoccupied.”

  “The seconds are going by, but they feel like minutes, we’re in someplace we shouldn’t be, and I gotta figure out if Skarbek and the Feds or the local cops are waiting for us on the other side of the wall. The wrong decision and this could get pretty ugly. I had to make a quick decision. Do we go through with it and chance the possibility we all get busted? Or do we back out, patch up the wall as best we can, pick up our gear, and get the hell out of there as fast as our legs will carry us?”

  Although they were within a few feet of what they thought would prove a nice score, Jimmy Dolan’s prudent decision was the right call. On the other side of the diner’s flimsy wall was a whole lot of hell. Skarbek had a snitch who had tipped him off that Dolan’s crew would be doing the diner that week. The FBI was just waiting to nab the burglars as they entered the room and approached the safe. The slick but impromptu getaway helped Dolan maintain his record of “never getting burned at the scene of the crime,” but the federal harassment was becoming a pain in the ass. Skarbek himself was becoming a certified nuisance.

  Good, solid criminal intelligence was invaluable for making a case, but for catching the bad guys red-handed, there was nothing better than a well-placed informant. Skarbek and his team of agents bent over backward to coax, encourage, harass, and threaten anyone they thought could provide them with useful information about the K&A crowd. Though the gang had a long and well-earned reputation for being uncooperative, by the 1970s there were some definite chinks in their armor. More aggressive policing, longer sentences, and the insidious psychological effects of drugs had put some holes in the once-unassailable standup ethos. Neighborhood informants were to be had, and Skarbek went after them.

  When rats proved elusive or disobliging, however, the FBI did not rule out placing a listening device in someone’s home, business, clubhouse, or favorite vehicle. The Feds had declared war on the burglars, and they were going to take them out by any means necessary. Once again, Jimmy Dolan was the object of their interest: the Bureau put a listening device on his home phone for 30 days.

  “For the longest time,” says Dolan, “there seemed to be a lot of static on my home phone, and some of the guys were telling me to get it fixed. Others said they thought the phone was bugged and that I should watch what I said when I was on the line. This goes on for a while, until one day a friend of mine comes knocking on my door, but he won’t come in the house. He’s got a frightened look on his face, starts whispering, and waves to me that I should step outside. I’m thinking, what’s come over this guy? Why’s he acting this way? We walk a few steps away from the house into the front yard and he’s looking all around like he’s afraid we’re being spied on. He leans over and whispers to me, ‘Jimmy, I’m on my scanner and short-wave radio the other night and I hear the cops talking about a house they got under surveillance. The more I hear, the more I think it’s your place. T
hey’re describing the house, the bushes in front, the neighborhood just off of Grant Avenue, the comings and goings of this guy they’re watching, and I’m thinking it sounds like your place. Then I hear them mention Ditman Street. Now I know it’s your place. I’m telling you, Jimmy, you better watch yourself. The cops or the FBI have got their eye on you, and they probably got your phone tapped.’

  “After hearing this I finally gotta take the noise on the phone more seriously and call the phone company and tell them to come out and check their equipment. Well, a repairman comes out to my house and starts to take the phone apart. It ain’t long before the guy gets a perplexed look on his face. I can see he’s stumped, so I say to him, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’

  “He doesn’t answer right away. I can see he’s searching for the right words, like he knew he probably shouldn’t be telling me this, but I’m standing right over him, and he finally says, ‘Sorry to tell you this, but I think somebody has put a bug on your phone. I think somebody is tapping your phone.’

  “I can’t fuckin’ believe it. I’m really pissed. I figure it’s gotta be that goddamn Skarbek and the FBI. The son-of-a-bitch breaks into my house and places a tap on my phone. I get the phone repairman to take the bugging device out of my phone and hustle downtown to my lawyer’s office. I walk into Bobby Simone’s office, go right by the secretary, and walk right into Simone’s private office, where he’s meeting with a few clients. I’m yelling and screaming about the FBI and this nut Skarbek, and Bobby asks me, ‘What’s that you got in your hand?’ I hold the gadget up and tell them all, ‘This is the goddamn bug I just pulled out of my phone. Those bastards tapped my phone.’ You’ve never seen a bunch of guys run so fast in your life.”

  Jimmy Dolan always enjoyed the intellectual challenge of doing battle with the cops. It was a chess game he was pretty good at, and he usually won. But now the game was becoming more serious, and the competition was decidedly more advanced. Dolan began to lose his fascination for the game. It wasn’t fun any more playing every match against Bobby Fischer.

  12. Philly’s Bonnie and Clyde

  JUNIOR KRIPPLEBAUER’S chess match with the law enforcement community had long since become more than a simple intellectual challenge. A relentless worker who had cut an expansive swath of criminal activity across the American landscape, incorporating residential and commercial burglaries, the occasional stickup and bank robbery, plus various cons, ruses, and ploys, Kripplebauer was a one-man crime wave who was driving the nation’s lawmen to distraction and bugging the hell out of Bill Skarbek. No other K&A burglar seemed so industrious, omnipresent, and bothersome to small-town sheriffs and mid-sized police departments from New England to the Gulf Coast. The list of distressed communities requesting information and guidance was endless.

  The two men—each in his own way a driven soul—were destined to tangle repeatedly during the seventies. For Junior the decade began in prison, with the expectation that he would soon be back on the street. If that wasn’t reason enough to be optimistic, he had also had the good fortune to meet his future wife and dependable co-conspirator while serving his last year at New Jersey’s Trenton State Penitentiary. Philly’s version of Bonnie and Clyde, Mickie and Junior Kripplebauer would prove a considerable challenge for the FBI and a headache for lawmen everywhere between the Canadian and Mexican borders.

  “I was doing time up at Trenton State with Eddie Loney,” recalls Kripplebauer of his time at New Jersey’s oldest state prison, “when one day he gets a letter from this female friend of his who lives in California. She sends a photograph of herself, and Ed comes over to my cell and shows the photo to me. Boy, she was a real honey. The girl was beautiful. Tall, blond hair, blue eyes, a great figure—she was stunning. She reminded me of Linda Evans [a popular television actress] right from the start.

  “Eddie saw I was taken with her and began to tell me a few things about her. Her name was Marilynne D’Ulisse, but everybody called her Mickie, and she was working as a casino dealer in Gardenia, California. She was actually a Philly girl who had been married a couple times, once to a cop, and most recently been hooked up with George “Dewey” Duval, a good friend of Loney’s. Eddie explained that besides being a real looker, she was also a tough cookie. Dewey had been arrested in Bucks County for a murder and the cops imprisoned Mickie when she pleaded the fifth. They wanted to use her as leverage against him and kept her locked up for months, but she still refused to talk. They couldn’t intimidate her. She was eventually set free and Dewey beat the case, although the two of them seemed to have split after that. Between her looks and her standup principles, there was no doubt she was my kind of woman.

  “Loney suggested I write her, and I did after he informed her I had fallen in love with her photo. He told her I was a real nice guy and she began to write back. We were writing to each other coast to coast for months. She told me about her young son, about her interest in athletics and that she walked or jogged every day, and her love for anything dealing with the outdoors.

  “The more I heard, the more I liked her. We stayed in contact all through the spring. As I started to get short on my sentence, I told her she should consider coming back East. She must have found the offer appealing because she did just that—she came back. In fact, the first time we met was when I walked out the door of Trenton State Penitentiary. She came up with Steve [Junior’s lawyer, Stephen LaCheen], who was taking me to Long Island to face a burglary charge up there. She was everything I had hoped, tall, about five-foot-eight, radiant blue eyes, real nice build. She must have brought me luck. Either that or the judge was in a good mood that day, because he sentenced me to time served and cut me loose after making me promise I’d never set foot in Nassau County again.

  “We came back to Philly that night and a day or two later rented a house in Cherry Hill for $800 a month. I got money from Ben Greenberg, but knew I’d have to pay him back. Two days after I got out of prison, I told Mickie, ‘Let’s look around,’ and that’s how we started doing production work together. We went house to house in the neighborhood. I’d go up to the front door and knock. If no one answered I’d go in and clean them out. If someone came to the door, I’d tell them I just moved to the area and was lost and would appreciate directions to a street or restaurant or something else in the neighborhood. We’d then go to another area and do the same thing. It always worked; we must have done hundreds of houses in Cherry Hill and the surrounding area.

  “Mickie would usually stay in the car and keep watch on things. We lived in Cherry Hill, so we knew the area well. For bigger jobs I put a crew together and Mickie would be the driver. She’d monitor the police scanner, handle communications on the walkie-talkie, and keep her eye out for cops and new targets. She was great; she had no fear, no hesitation. She was better than some of the guys I worked with. And cops rarely suspected a woman driving around a ritzy neighborhood was up to something, whereas a guy doing the same thing would draw some attention.”

  On June 5, 1972, two weeks after Mickie and Junior met outside Trenton’s ancient state penitentiary, they drove down to Elkton, Maryland, and were married. Junior, a man about town who had had his share of vivacious, voluptuous women over the years, felt that Marilynne D’Ulisse was the one. She was beautiful, athletic, and principled, at least according to the values of the street. And if that wasn’t enough, she was more than capable of doing a man’s job—second story work.

  Despite her wholesome, perky, bright-eyed appearance, Mickie D’Ulisse had a police record stretching back to 1962, when she was first arrested for larceny and shoplifting. But she would advance to graduate school in her association with Kripplebauer. As Junior likes to say, he “fine-tuned her skills.” Both were fearless, restless; they shared an indefatigable work ethic.

  “Mickie loved to do houses,” says Junior; “she loved production work. She became competent at every facet of the game, and the action always attracted her. We’d go out to the movies in the evening or be coming ba
ck from a Philly or Jersey nightclub, and on the way home you’d see her closely examining each house we passed as we drove down the highway. She’d be wondering, ‘Is anybody home there? Which houses have alarms? What houses appear to have something of value inside?’ By the time we got home she was ready. ‘C’mon,’ she’d say, ‘let’s get our black shirts and do some work.’

  “She used to tell me, ‘You know, Junior, most women who come home from work or back from an evening out say, I feel like doing some cooking or baking. All I ever wanna do is put my black shirt and wig on and do some houses.’

  “Even when we’d go deer hunting in Clinton and Potter Counties in upstate Pennsylvania, she’d be checking out the hunting lodges and eyeballing the bigger homes in the area. Seeing who had what and what houses were alarmed or not. Mickie was a natural.”

  Her husband was not blinded by love; Junior’s friends and colleagues were equally impressed with Mickie’s work ethic. In fact, it wasn’t unusual to schedule a night on the town with the Kripplebauers and find yourself, during the course of the evening, in the middle of a burglary. Donnie Johnstone remembers a number of light-hearted evenings that were interrupted by the clarion call of production work.

  “Mickie was as good as any guy I ever saw at second story work,” says Johnstone admiringly. “She was really something. Mickie always wanted to work, even on social occasions. I remember double-dating with them and coming back from a club early in the morning, and as we’re driving back to their house Mickie sees a red light on a home alarm system and asks Junior, ‘Do you have the keys in the car?’ Before you know it we’re stopped by the side of the road and Mickie is pulling the Chivas Regal bag [where Junior kept his collection of home alarm keys] out of the car trunk. Yeah, Mickie and Junior were always ready to work. They never tired of it.”