“She was a good student,” says Junior, proudly. “I showed her how to take houses in the neighborhood that looked like good scores, and eventually she may have ended up doing more of ’em than me. Many times I’d be driving home late at night and pass a nice piece of property showing a red alarm light. The next day I’d go back and check the place out. From a distance the joint may show money but you’ve got to get up close and check out the driveway, the paint job, the drapes and curtains, and furniture to really know for sure. If I figured no one was home, I’d start checking the security system, and before long I’d find the right key and knew I could shut the system off. Usually, if I thought I had the time I’d take the place right then and there. But if I didn’t feel comfortable, I’d just remember which key was the one and decide to come back later that night or the next time I passed the house and the red light was on. Sometimes I even left the key somewhere on the property, under a rock or piece of decorative garden ware and picked it up when I thought the owners were out. Mickie watched me do it at first and then later on would sit in the car and keep her eye out for me. Then, when she felt comfortable enough to go out on her own, she became a convert to the system and started pulling jobs all on her own.
“She was good, there was never any fear. She’d force a door with a screwdriver in a minute, though those with big door bolts would occasionally give her some trouble and I’d have to do it for her. She was as good as any of the guys. Whether it was searching a house, keeping a lookout by the front window, or driving the car, she could handle it. The only thing she didn’t like and didn’t want any part of were the occasional stickups where we’d go in and lay people down. She wasn’t crazy about running into mouthy dogs either, but a lot of guys were equally terrified of entering a home that had a toothy shepherd or Doberman nipping at your heels. Mickie and I both loved animals and had a few of our own, including a big German shepherd, but you can’t let them get in the way of business. I had a technique that always worked. If a dog came at me in a house I used a brute or an L-bar, not to hit the dog, but to break a lamp or light fixture. The explosion would scare the hell out of the dog and he’d go run and hide.
“Maybe it was because I always had her handle the police scanner and the driving that Mickie was so insistent on doing a good bit of second story work on her own or with her girlfriend Maxine. Boy, those two were amazing. She and Maxine grew up together when they were kids and both came to really enjoy second story work. They loved it. They were out all the time and would come back with some pretty good stuff. When they returned home with all this merchandise, you would have thought they were just a couple of upscale suburban housewives coming back from a wild shopping excursion at the mall. Maxine had a couple kids who were slightly older than Mickie’s son, and I’d baby-sit them when the girls went out. When Mickie, I, and the crew were out for the evening, Maxine would baby-sit Mickie’s kid.
“It didn’t take a brain surgeon to know every time she’d come downstairs with her wig on, grab her black jacket out of the closet, and then ask me if a brute was in the car what she was up to. I don’t know if production was her favorite thing to do, but it was right up there.
“And Mickie was a great driver, one of the best. She was an extra element of security. Places like Houston and Durham never saw anything like her. A female driver fronting a crew of burglars was unknown down there. Mickie often traveled with our Yorkie on her lap. Cops, especially in places like North Carolina and Virginia, never suspected a young woman with a little dog on the front seat was a key player in a burglary ring. Yeah, Mickie was something all right. She got away with murder.”
Mickie also accompanied her husband on a number of bank robberies. Junior made sure she never walked into a bank and drew down on the bank guard and tellers (he suspects that she would have done so if he had let her), but she did help in the planning and execution of several bank heists, as well as the getaways. The Glassboro bank job in 1976 was a typical instance.
In his underworld travels, Junior had made friends with an assortment of criminal types. Bank robbers made up a large part of the ensemble. Though a second story man by profession, Junior was always quick to aid a friend with a plan or take part in a score that looked promising. Gene DeLuca and Bull the Greek were bank robbers out of Baltimore who were looking to expand their operations beyond Maryland’s borders and make some big withdrawals from a few well-stocked East Coast financial institutions. Junior had an eye for money and never missed a private residence, business, or banking institution receiving a house call from an armored car. One day while shopping at a mall in Glassboro, New Jersey, he saw numerous bags of money being picked up by an armored car at a bank on the mall parking lot. The quiet, bucolic community bank looked ripe to be picked. He passed the tip on to DeLuca and the Greek, and they went to work setting up a plan. Mickie, never one to be excluded from a good thing or a promising piece of work, was in on the planning and execution.
Following that game plan, the Baltimore men entered the bank in workmen’s coveralls while Junior and Mickie kept an eye on things from their own car in the mall parking lot and listened for nearby police activity on a radio scanner. When DeLuca and the Greek exited the bank, bags in hand, Mickie drove her car to a previously designated spot in the mall lot. The Baltimore bank robbers quickly drove up, shed the coveralls, which hid expensive business suits, and ditched the guns and money bags in the trunk of her car. DeLuca and the Greek then drove out of the area to a diner for a late breakfast while Junior and Mickie killed an hour or two food shopping at the mall supermarket while police, sirens wailing, scurried throughout the area looking for the coverall-wearing perpetrators of a local $88,000 bank heist. Later, as she slowly drove her grocery-filled car out of the mall parking lot, Mickie threw a demure smile to a concerned-looking police officer. The cop, who tipped his hat, never suspected that the cute blonde had a couple of.38s and thousands of dollars in cash among her bags of bread, milk, and frozen dinners. Junior never doubted that Mickie, if asked, would have been one of those to enter the bank: “Mickie was ballsy. She would have gone in with them.”
Mickie and Junior were quite a team, as hundreds of homeowners could have testified. Though they were busy setting up house, buying furniture, and trying to earn a living—by stealing from their Cherry Hill neighbors—Junior continued to work with his regular crew and any others proffering an intriguing and potentially profitable idea. As much as Kripplebauer enjoyed working with Mickie, he was not about to jettison the many other associations and crews he had a history of working with. Some of his associates didn’t like the idea of working with a woman, while some capers were considered too risky to include Mickie. Most of the time he just wanted to be with the boys. His world was filled with bar-room chatter, criminal gossip, and incessant talk of the next big score. Some adventures were well constructed and properly thought out, while others were almost laughable, right out of the grifters’ edition of the Keystone Cops playbook. Typical of these years were a nice score in Bucks County and a convoluted, well-attended escapade in some godforsaken village in the hill country south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“We got a tip about a guy in Bucks County who had once been a big politician,” says Junior. “The guy’s house was supposed to be loaded, both cash and jewelry. It sounded pretty good. Right away I started thinking back to the tax assessor’s house on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough. We had done pretty well there, and that guy was supposed to have worked for the government. I’m thinking to myself, maybe this guy will turn out to be as good.
“Me, Tommy Seher, and Bruce Agnew go up there to take a look at the place. It was a hike from where I was living in Cherry Hill. It was in the country a good ways above Doylestown. It wasn’t anything like the Biddle estate, not nearly as large, but it was still a nice, two story, brick and stone Colonial. We would have taken it that night, but we could see the place was occupied, so we decided we’d come back and hit it another night.
“It wasn’t that easy.
We kept on driving up there with the same result. Me, Tommy, and Bruce must have gone up there nearly a dozen times over the course of two months, but we couldn’t break into the place. There was always somebody home. You could see right through the window, and they always seemed to have company. They were always entertaining folks. Whoever lived there never seemed to leave the house, and they always had an endless stream of guests. I was starting to think it was one of those country inns or bed and breakfasts that were popular in New Hope and along the river in Bucks County. It was looking more and more that we’d have to either forget about it or do a walk-in and lay them all down.
“It’s late in the year now, maybe November or December, and getting cold, and we’re all getting a little tired of running up to this section of Bucks County without anything to show for it. We’re not out to hurt anybody, but this is getting ridiculous. We make another trip up there, and once again the place is occupied. We can see through the window and it’s the same elderly couple. They’re sitting by the fireplace, having one drink after another, and we’re outside freezing our asses off. We look at each other and decide they’re almost unconscious already. Let’s just do it and get it over with.
“We had the keys to the alarm system, so we shut it down, break in, and surprise them. They’re pretty old and don’t give us any trouble. The old man looks like he’s in his eighties and not in great shape. Instead of lying them down because of their age, we cuffed them to some chairs and started to go through the place. While I’m looking over the safe, Bruce is searching the house for anything of value. He finds a jewelry box and it’s loaded. The woman loved jewelry, and it really looked like good stuff, some real quality pieces.
“I locate the safe, but I’m a little suspicious about it. I thought it might be wired with an alarm, but the woman said it wasn’t. I open it and there’s even more jewelry inside. Lot’s of diamond rings, brooches, necklaces, some really fine pieces. We got out of there pretty quick and when we get back to Philly, I called my man, a jeweler down at Eighth and Sansom. I had been using this guy to fence my stuff for quite some time. He could be counted on to give you a fair deal. And he paid off right away, no bullshit delays. I call him on the phone and say, ‘Do you want to meet me?’
“‘Sure,’ he says.
“‘Bring your stuff,’ I tell him.
“‘Sounds good,’ he replies.
“Even though we had done a lot of business over the years, there was always some doubt. Nobody really trusted anybody. We’d meet at a motel along Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philly. He would bring his scale to weigh the merchandise and I would bring the weights. That’s the way we always worked it. Nobody wanted to get cheated. As soon as I showed him the stuff, you could tell he liked it. There was no junk in the entire batch; they were all quality pieces. He said he wanted the whole thing, so I gave him the stash and he took the package to New York. He sold the whole package up there, and the next day we meet and he gives me $80,000. Considering we normally made a quarter of what the score was actually worth, we must have walked out of the place in Bucks County with over $300,000 in jewelry. I gave the tipper a nice cut, maybe $20,000, and me, Bruce and Tommy whacked up the rest.
“In the meantime I read in the paper that the Bucks County home of a former mayor of Philadelphia and United States senator had been robbed and a good bit of jewelry had been taken. I didn’t even know whose house it was when we did it. All I knew was that it was a politician’s home and it was supposed to be loaded.”
Though Junior and his crew had spent many a cold night casing the Bucks County mansion, the repeated journeys had ultimately proven quite profitable. The guys had walked away with a nice hunk of change. Not all tips were as accurate or excursions as rewarding. One escapade clearly underscored that point as well as illustrating the gang’s occasional capacity for sheer stupidity.
“It was one of the craziest things we ever did,” recalls Kripplebauer. “It was like a traveling vaudeville act that should never have got started in the first place. Instead, the zany scheme was taken on the road and just got worse by the hour. What a crew: there we were, 10 or 12 of us, three carloads on the highway to do a job in some godforsaken southern mining town. It was a damn caravan of drunken second story men going down the turnpike. To this day none of us can believe we actually did it.
“The story really begins when a few of us are serving time in the Burg [Holmesburg Prison], and we meet this tall, lanky Johnny Reb character with a heavy southern accent on the block who’s always talking about the big scores he’s been part of and what he plans for the future. The guy’s a real big talker. He then starts yapping about places we should take a look at, operations down South that carry some heavy cash. He tips us off to this little mining community in the mountains right where Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky come together. He said there was a substantial score to be had down there. It was the miners’ payroll and it added up to some pretty hefty bucks, according to him. He said the money usually sat overnight in the company’s payroll office safe just before the men came in for their checks the following morning. He said he always wanted to do the job himself, but he never got around to it. The guy could have been bullshitting us, but if he was telling the truth, it sounded pretty attractive.
“Once we get out of jail we start talking about the potential score this Johnny Reb told us about, but nobody ever did anything about it. We just brought it up once in a while over beers and then dropped it. Over time guys from different crews start to hear about this tip, ’cause just about everything being talked about is overheard at the Shamrock, Marty’s, or any number of other bars we hung at. It was tough keeping a decent score secret any length of time with all the Budweiser and loudmouths around. Eventually, maybe a year or two later, one crew gets serious about going down to West Virginia to check this payroll tip out, but now everybody knows about it and they want in on the deal too. We’re not able to resolve who has first dibs on the score, and somehow we agree that we’ll all do it, which was unprecedented and can pretty much be attributed to a hell of a lot of alcohol. Crews were normally competitive. We’d share men and equipment on occasion, but you wouldn’t see two or three crews working together. It’s not like we were linemen for the electric company.
“It was incredible, three cars, three different crews, and a few extra guys thrown in for good measure. I think it was me, Jackie Johnson, Maury McAdams, Leo Andrews, Billy Blew, Mitchell Prinski, Fingers Hurst, Charlie Murtaugh, Jimmy Riffert, and a couple other guys I can’t remember. It was like a parade of K&A burglars heading to some little nook near Wheeling, West Virginia. We were joking in the car that if the mining company knew so many of us K&A guys were on our way down, they probably would have pleaded with us to stay in Philly and they’d agree to send us the money.
“Well, we get down there after a damn long drive and it’s just as the guy told us, this little mining community in the mountains. It wasn’t even a town; it was a remote little village, if that. It reminded me of where I grew up in the Pennsylvania mountains and why I was so keen on getting the hell out. We drive by the company store that shares space with the payroll office and figure it won’t be that difficult a job as long as the safe isn’t a problem. A couple of us check out the store while the others try to keep a low profile outside. It’s a pretty big store considering the size of the town. It had a lot of appliances, furniture, and other stuff on sale for the company employees while the payroll office sat right in the middle of the store. You couldn’t miss the safe; it was a good-sized one. It was pretty easy to confirm our Holmesburg tipster was right on the money; miners got off work early in the morning, about four or five a.m. and picked up their pay in cash envelopes that were kept in the safe. Christ, it wasn’t even checks, it was cash money, which only made it more attractive.
“The bunch of us drove outside of town and put a plan together. We’d go in the store at one in the morning before it opened and see if we could open the safe without setting off a
ny alarms or using the tanks we had brought with us. All of us had some experience with safes, but I was probably the most knowledgeable, especially using acetylene tanks to burn a safe open. Mitchell agreed to go with me. Billy Blew would be our driver. The other guys would drive around the area in the other two cars, listen in on their walkie-talkies, and try not to get pinched, which would take some luck. All of us were concerned that we must have stuck out like a sore thumb, ’cause these little mining towns weren’t exactly Times Square and loaded with tourists and strangers passing through.
“A little after midnight, me and Mitchell go in through the roof in order to avoid any alarms hooked up to the front or rear doors. We bring the tanks and tarp with us just in case and go into the office and get a good look at the safe. It’s a big, square, double-door job, about five feet by four feet, and had a trip wire attached to it. I disconnected it, but it wasn’t a good sign. Maybe these hillbillies were more sophisticated than I thought. Right off the bat I figure I’m gonna have to burn this baby, but try to back-dial and punch-dial it first to make sure. Just as I feared, no luck.
“We quickly set up our stuff and I start to burn the sucker while Mitchell holds the tarp over my head so no one passing on the street notices anything unusual. It takes me about 15 or 20 minutes to burn the front panel off and a few minutes more to tear out the firewall and get to the levers. I’m finally able to move the bars that lock the door, but when I open the safe there’s no money in there. I can’t find the payroll, just a lot of worthless paper.
“Mitch gets on the walkie-talkie and tells the guys we got a problem, and he and I begin searching the office. We know there’s got to be money there; they’re supposed to be paying the workers in a few hours. We’re going through the desk, file cabinets, everything that’s there, looking for a cash box. Mitch gets on the walkie-talkie again and tells the guys outside what’s going on, when I open an old wooden cabinet and find a three-foot by one-foot niggerhead inside. I could tell it had a pretty thick door and would be a problem. Just as I’m trying to decide whether I should try and burn it open or take it with us, the alarm goes off. The damn cabinet was wired.
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 26