Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  But when they got to their destination, they were all business: the basics of production work kicked in. “We’d get to the neighborhood around supper time, about five or six o’clock at night and go right to the Goldbergs’ and the Silvermans’. We kept a mental note of people going in and going out of their houses. Who turned the lights on and who turned the lights out? We tried to remember everything.”

  Many affluent families unknowingly collaborated with the out-of-town burglars, showcasing their possessions by purchasing expensive home alarm systems that the original members of the K&A crowd learned to circumvent as soon as they came on the market. By the time Chick Goodroe and his cohort arrived on the scene more than a decade later, alarms were more useful to the burglars than to the homeowners.

  “Those small red lights on the front doors,” says Chick, “told us the people had alarms. It was as if they wanted to tell us, ‘I got something to protect.’ You’d be riding down a dark street at night, and all of a sudden you’d see a red light on the doorframe of someone’s house. It was like a lighthouse beacon. You couldn’t miss it. We knew just where to go.”

  Every K&A burglar worth his salt carried a set of one hundred keys, some flat and some round. The flat keys opened most front doors, and the round keys were for the alarms. It took a good burglar less than a minute to turn off the alarm system and open the front door. On those rare occasions when they didn’t have the right key for the front door, they used a wrecking bar or brute to dislodge the lock from the doorframe. “Those wrecking bars and brutes really made a mess,” says Chick. “It really destroyed the doorframes.” Most of the time, however, they had the proper keys, resulting in a stealthy invasion and getaway. “I believe most people didn’t even know I was in their house until much later,” says Goodroe proudly.

  Once inside, the real fun began. “I always wanted to be a searcher,” says Goodroe. “Everybody kept their money in the same places. People are creatures of habit. They’re basically lazy. I could hit a master bedroom in five minutes or less. Guys who took 20 or 30 minutes were retarded.”

  Safes presented little hindrance; in fact, they added to the excitement and heightened the expectation of a big score. “If you ran into a safe,” says Goodroe, “it was basically rip and tear. Very few of us ran around carrying drills and oxygen tanks. Brute force is what we generally used. Wherever you found a seam, you worked on it. Fireboxes were even more common than safes, and they were no problem at all, almost like toys. If you did happen to run in to a big safe, you’d take it home with you and then work on it.”

  If there was an aspect of the business Chick didn’t like, it was lugging the vast array of burglar tools around. “The bag of tools used to kill me,” he says. “It must have weighed 40 pounds or more. You’d be carrying sledgehammers, wrecking bars, punches, gloves, alarm keys, screwdrivers, and flashlights. Christ, it got damn heavy after a while, especially if you were waiting in the woods on a cold night for your driver to pick you up or the cops were chasing you. You were always running in the woods, and it was goddamn cold. You’d miss the pass and you’d have to freeze your nuts off for another 10 minutes waiting for the car to come around again. The worst thing in the world was to be stuck with a bag of goods on the run in a town you had no business being in.”

  After relieving a few homes of their most valuable possessions, the night was declared a success and the crew headed home to examine the proceeds. “Back in Philly, we’d all go over the haul,” says Chick. “Guys would be grabbing a diamond ring, an emerald brooch, or a gold watch and say, ‘I’ll take this piece.’ ‘I’ll take that piece.’ ‘That piece goes to the fence.’ ‘I want that piece.’ All the guys were doing well and having a good time. Everybody had money. You’d go into a bar afterwards and boast, ‘You should see the score we just made.’”

  By the mid-sixties, Chick Goodroe was making a “couple thousand a night” at production work. The pot would vary, however: one night could be a bust; the next, a pretty good score. Moreover, much of the stuff had to be fenced, and it could take a week or two to get paid. But Chick was in no hurry; he enjoyed scrutinizing his nightly hauls. “I would look at the stuff gradually, handle it for days. I’d play with it, examine it, and then decide what I’d keep and what I’d sell. I loved jewelry; I had a hard time parting with it.”

  Some of Chick’s work was planned, and the crew knew they were going on the road for a couple of days. At other times it was a “spur of the moment thing.” Guys would be sharing a few laughs at their favorite drinking establishment and somebody would say, “Let’s take a ride.” Within minutes they could be in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, looking for the better neighborhoods, the Jewish neighborhoods. “I was looking for mezuzahs all the time,” says Goodroe.

  Seizing opportunities was a central tenet of the trade, and Chick missed few. “I was out on a date one night at a Northeast Philadelphia restaurant,” he recalls, “and during the course of the meal I went to the men’s room. I noticed that the manager’s office was right next to the men’s room. I loided the door [celluloid cards were used to beat superficial door locks] and grabbed $5,000 or $6,000 from the desk. It wasn’t planned, it just happened.”

  Conversely, a planned “piece of work” could generate relatively modest returns. For example, the burglary of a Main Line sports figure resulted in $200 in cash, a bowling medal, a gold ring, and 10 silver dollars. Making things worse, Chick was arrested in the apartment and had to put out a few thousand of his own money to retain an attorney.

  Despite such occasional business expenses, Chick was more than pleased with his life. Compared with the majority of Kensington men, slogging away in stifling textile or carpet factories, Chick had attained the American dream. He could sleep till noon, socialize with his friends all night long if he cared to, and afford two new cars every year and any woman he went after. As Goodroe likes to say, “How many guys have made love on a half-dozen fur coats?”

  His trade, though perilous, presented few complications he couldn’t deal with. Chick was a natural. He took to entering other people’s homes and stealing other people’s possessions as a duck takes to water. “When I first started it was the camaraderie,” says Goodroe of his early forays into burglary. “It was like going to a baseball game with friends. It wasn’t like I was really committing a crime. It was a game. Gradually, though, I really started to get into it. I could feel the anticipation, the rush of adrenaline. I couldn’t wait to get out of the car. There was a sense of excitement. What were you gonna find? What were you gonna run into in the house? Would there be jewelry, fat wallets, and expensive artwork? Cash was always nice. Sometimes you felt like a voyeur as you hid in the underbrush, searching for points of entry, looking through windows, and occasionally seeing naked people in their homes.

  “From the very beginning, I never had a problem with nerves. Some guys would get a bad case of the shakes and have to take a shit. Joey Cooper Smith, the tough guy that he was, once had to take a shit right in the middle of the living room. Window men usually got it the worst. They’d just be standing there counting the seconds while looking out the window, looking for the cops or the homeowners. They weren’t going through closets and drawers searching for valuables. For window men, minutes seemed like hours.

  “I, on the other hand, never had a problem. Once I’d open the door of a place I was robbing, I’d make a real fast run through the place to ensure the house was empty. I’d also be making an instant survey of what was in the place. If the bedroom door was closed it could get a bit scary. You didn’t know if somebody was behind that door or not. You never knew what you were gonna run into. The greatest rush, however, was opening a drawer and finding a really good piece of jewelry. It was great. You knew you had a good score.”

  Not every Kensington wannabe took to the craft as easily as Goodroe. Those short on stealth, brains, and nerve gravitated to what they considered an easier payday: walk-ins. Chick didn’t like gunplay or violence, but friends once talked hi
m into taking part in a walk-in. He regretted it from the first moment. “We made good money, but I didn’t like it,” he recalls. “I felt sorry for the person. The guy was scared to death; he was crying. I didn’t like terrorizing anyone and felt guilty. I knew if I did any more walk-ins I’d always be worried somebody would get shot. I never did another one. I knew I was a burglar and a good one. Why the hell did I need to scare the hell out of anyone?”

  One concern that surfaced early and remained throughout Goodroe’s long career was the downside of teamwork. The crew concept was the backbone of production work, but more skeptical, independent players saw definite disadvantages in working with others.

  “The first time I had to split the money,” says Goodroe, “I realized I’d rather work for myself. I hated to share anything. I started doing more work on my own in the afternoon. Anything I got was mine. Besides, I never liked to work at night anyway; it interfered with my social life.” But working with a crew presented additional issues. Basically, in the minds of some, the more players there were, the more problems could arise.

  “There were always beefs when you had three or four guys working together. I remember one occasion we were working in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. It was me, Bosak, Foerster, and it’s dark as hell out there in the desert; you couldn’t see a goddamn thing. We finally break into this big house, and while we’re searching the place the guys get into a beef over something. There was always some bullshit between guys. It gets pretty ugly, and Bosak says, ‘Fuck it. I’m getting the hell out of here.’ He runs out of the house into the darkness, but right smack into a 10-foot-tall cactus. Bosak got nailed pretty good and we ended up pulling a bunch of cactus thorns out of him. It must have been some kind of poisonous cactus ’cause the wounds got infected right away and we had to take him to the hospital. But how were we supposed to know? We were Kensington boys; what did we know about the desert and cactus?

  “Stupid stuff like that was always possible when you worked with a crew. If I worked on my own, however, there was less bullshit. And if I got caught, it was on me. I didn’t have to worry about anybody else.”

  Working with a crew could lead to some serious problems, especially if one of the guys got caught and couldn’t take the weight. Most K&A guys were notoriously uncooperative; even when squeezed by police, they wouldn’t even think about ratting on a partner. A few, however, buckled under a severe police grilling and the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence. Some of the guys who were toughest physically couldn’t handle incarceration.

  Joey Cooper Smith was like that. A pulverizing street fighter with considerable ring experience and “arms like sledge hammers”—he once put Hurricane Carter on the canvas—he hated prison; he just couldn’t take it. He was one of the first to break out of the Philadelphia Detention Center shortly after it opened, and he committed the unpardonable sin, according to standup guys, of ratting out his partners. In fact, in his desperation to avoid doing time, Cooper Smith would occasionally inform on those who weren’t his partners.

  “Cooper Smith was a piece of shit,” says Goodroe. “He was so self-absorbed, all he cared about was himself. Guys were intimidated by his toughness. Older guys wouldn’t work with him because of his reputation, but younger kids breaking into the business were still influenced by him and would work with him. Joe ratted on me in 1965. He gave me four cases I really didn’t do. I was sold out by him. And my lawyers didn’t help. They were putzes. I ended up getting 16 months to 10 years for stuff I didn’t even do.”

  For many in Kensington, such a betrayal warranted severe retribution, but Chick refrained. “I was never a violent type of guy,” he says (though his reputation for nonviolence would be dramatically altered less than a half-dozen years later).

  Chick was further sensitized to the drawbacks of working with partners by the death of La La McQuoid during a botched burglary in Florida. In late June 1965, an elite K&A crew broke into the “swanky home” of Mrs. Lucille Ferree in Fort Lauderdale. The gang had been tipped to a stash of expensive jewelry. What they found was a deadly trap that resulted in the shotgun murder of James L. McQuoid and Danny Gundaker’s being shot in the face and shoulder.

  According to news accounts, the FBI had received a tip that the K&A Gang was going down to Florida to do a piece of work. The Bureau’s informant was right on the money. After a two-day stakeout at 2409 East Las Alos Boulevard, police welcomed the Philly burglars with a hefty dose of lead. After the gun-smoke cleared, bloodied and mangled bodies lay strewn on the thick pile carpet as gloating officers stood over them. The event captured headlines around the country. When Captain Joseph Brophy of the Philadelphia Police Department was asked by his Fort Lauderdale counterparts to help identify the participants, he tersely replied, “They’re all from the K&A Gang and they’re all top men in the field. Their field is burglary.”

  La La McQuoid, just 36 years old, went back to the early days of the gang and was one of its best-liked and most respected members. His death at the hands of the police—his friends referred to it as an “assassination” or “execution”— shocked many in the burglary community. K&A Gang members never carried weapons on the job. Lying in wait and shooting them down like dogs was uncalled for: they considered it the moral equivalent of premeditated murder.

  For Chick Goodroe, the Fort Lauderdale incident sent a sobering message: partners talk. Somebody in the gang, he reasoned, had shot his mouth off— maybe in a bar, maybe to a disgruntled wife, maybe to a friendly police officer— and now La La was dead, Gundaker was fighting for his life in a Florida hospital, and two more were in prison. The idea of working alone was becoming more attractive all the time.

  In the following years, Goodroe found himself spending more and more of his time burglarizing homes by himself. He would still occasionally work with a crew of friends at night, but his afternoons were increasingly spent in Philadelphia’s affluent suburbs. The change had immediate dividends. “Working by myself,” he says, “was more profitable.” No longer would he have to share what he had stolen, and working alone ended his fear of being turned in by a partner. More than any other member of the K&A Gang, Chickie Goodroe flourished as a solitary worker.

  “I was good,” says Goodroe. “I could open a door without the key faster than the owner could with a key. Attitude was also a major factor. You couldn’t afford to get ruffled. You had to be able to handle yourself in all sorts of circumstances. I was doing a house one time and the owners walk in while I’m searching the place. I tell them, ‘It’s all fixed’ as I walk out. They looked at me and said, ‘Thank you.’

  “And I could work daytime and the other guys couldn’t. Because I was half-Jewish, I looked like I belonged. Nobody questioned me being in a Jewish neighborhood. I could park my car on the street and walk right up to the front door and knock on it. If no one answered, I’d walk around the house to determine if anybody was home and the best point of entry. There was always a protected spot where no one could see me. I also focused on stuff I could grab. I didn’t worry about breaking open a safe. It took too long, and some you just couldn’t open. I’d leave my house at 11a.m. and be home by 2:30 in the afternoon. Sometimes I’d just do one house, and sometimes I’d do two or three. I made $7,000 from one house one time. I left my place at 11a.m. and was back by 12:15p.m. The door to the house was open, and I found gold coins in an attaché case. It was so easy, I went back again a couple weeks later.”

  On occasion, however, Chick wished he had brought a partner or two along, at least for the heavy lifting. “I was doing a piece of work in South Jersey,” he recalls. “The house was in a wooded area down by the shore, and on the second floor I find a safe. I figure it’s loaded. I didn’t have any tools with me and not a lot of time, so I decide to take the damn thing home with me and work on it. It must have weighed several hundred pounds, and I’m breaking my back dragging this thing through the house. I finally get it outside and somehow manage to lift it up and into the trunk of my car, but I can’t cl
ose the trunk. The safe’s too big and bulky. I tie the trunk down as best I could so it doesn’t flap open on the road and drive off.

  “What I don’t know, though, is that somebody had seen me doing all this stuff and called the police. They immediately set up roadblocks in the area, and after I stop to re-tie the knot holding the trunk down, I drive right into one. The cop stops me and asks, ‘What do you have in the trunk?’

  “I start to make small talk with the guy and slowly get out and walk to the back of the car. I’m hoping I can talk my way out of it, but the cop is persistent and wants me to open the trunk. He keeps on asking me, ‘What’s in the trunk? What do you have in the trunk?’

  “I slowly start to walk to the front of the car. While he’s trying to get a better look inside the trunk, I jump behind the wheel and pull out like I’m entered in the Indy 500. I’m about 30 yards away and the cop starts shooting at me. Bullets are hitting the car, I’m weaving all over the road, and I lose control. I drive off the road and crash into a tree somewhere in the middle of the Pine Barrens.

  “I’m all banged up, but I manage to crawl out of the car and drag myself deep into the woods before the cop can catch up to me. I soon hear the sirens of more cop cars pulling into the area and eventually search dogs that are brought in to track me down, but it was so wet out there it must have confused the dogs. I laid out there in the brush, woods, and sand for two days. When I didn’t hear any more searchers or barking dogs, I made my way to the shore and into Atlantic City. I must have looked like a derelict who had just been beaten up in a fight, ’cause I was all banged up from the crash and crawling through the woods for two days.”

  Although Goodroe avoided the police dragnet in the South Jersey Pine Barrens, the cops eventually got their man. The wrecked car—containing several bullet holes and the stolen safe—was traced back to him, and he was promptly given a new case. Through the good lawyering of Steve LaCheen, Goodroe rarely did time in prison, and when he did the sentences were manageable, especially considering the amount of burglary he was doing—solitary ventures in the afternoon, production work with a crew of partners in the evening. Burglary convictions normally resulted in relatively short prison terms, and in the 1950s and ’60s more serious crimes could also draw a light sentence. No better example of this exists than the shooting of Chick’s wife, Mary Ellen, and his friend and burglary partner Jimmy Castor. The May 1972 double shooting, which resulted in Castor’s death and the serious wounding of Mary Ellen, could have put Goodroe away for life, but he was back on the streets in a little more than a year.