Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  “It all started,” according to Chick, “about three o’clock in the morning when I was driving down Route 70 near the Garden State Race Track. I’m riding along in my Jaguar, and out of the corner of my eye I see Mary Ellen’s car in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn across from the track. I know it’s her brand new Grand Prix because I just got it for her. It had this really beautiful sandalwood color. It was unique; there wasn’t another one like it. Now I’m wondering, what’s she doing out here?

  “I had this friend who owned the bar, the Garden State Grille located in the hotel, so I thought I’d stop in and see if he saw her. He was just closing down the bar for the night, but once I describe her he remembers her right away. She was a beautiful girl, only 19, and that night she was wearing this beautiful hot pink outfit. It was her birthday.

  “‘Yeah, I seen her,’ says my friend. ‘She was in here with Jimmy Castor and they left together. I think Castor was driving his Cadillac.’

  “I start driving around looking for them, and in the parking lot of the Country Squire Inn I spot Castor’s Cadillac. I go over to the motel’s office and tell the clerk I think a buddy of mine is staying here. He’s with a good-looking bimbo in a hot pink outfit. The clerk says he thinks they were staying there but wasn’t sure what room they were in since he hadn’t checked them in. He lets me look at the guest log, but there’s no Castor registered. He was using an alias. I gave the clerk 20 bucks, and he gives me the key to the room he believes they’re in.

  “When I opened the door, they were both in bed naked. The gun was on the bureau. We both went for it. There was a struggle. We start hitting each other with the gun, the lamp, and anything we can get our hands on. Then he got shot and Mary Ellen was shot. I immediately cut out.”

  As he fled the scene, Chick thought his life was over. He had shot his wife and her lover. Visions of life in prison—maybe even the electric chair—filled his head. He had been on the run before (at the time of the shooting he was being sought by authorities in nearby Montgomery County). He knew the routine; he knew what to do.

  “I went back to my house,” says Chick, “and grabbed everything of value. I threw everything in the car and drove up to Allentown. I got a place to stay, bought a new car and a new identity. I also sent Mary Ellen flowers while she was recovering in the hospital. A couple days after she got out of the hospital, she came up to Allentown and started living with me. We were okay for months; then Mary Ellen had a dentist’s appointment back in Philadelphia. I drove her down, and while she was at the dentist’s I thought I’d do a piece of work in the suburbs. I got caught in Cheltenham. They not only had me for the burglary, but for the murder of Castor. Sal Avena set up a plea bargain for me. I pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and we avoided a trial. We argued that it was a straightforward case of self-defense and a crime of passion. The prosecutor went for it. I guess he must have figured it was just one hoodlum killing another hoodlum. I was sentenced to a year and a half in jail.”

  The shooting incident unnerved Goodroe. But it was the realization that he had taken a life and shot his wife that was so unsettling, not the fact he was forced to live like a wild animal on the run. Chick considered himself a burglar, not a killer. He never wanted to physically harm anyone. Having law enforcement authorities pursuing him was no big deal. In fact, Chick did some of his best work as a fugitive and was already being sought by police at the time of the shooting. “I liked being a fugitive,” he says. “You had to be aware of everything. It made you sharper, more awake, more alive.” He compared it to a natural high where all the senses were extra-responsive.

  Not long before the shooting, Chick and Mary Ellen had gone off to Hawaii while local authorities sought him for several burglaries. He called it a “vacation.” For several months the couple lived like celebrities, staying at plush, top-of-the-line resorts, frequenting expensive restaurants and nightclubs, and taking cruises, all of it paid for by credit cards and Chick’s periodic afternoon and evening visits to other people’s homes. It was a wonderful time. The idyllic island getaway would have lasted considerably longer if not for a bit of self-destructive professional bravado—Chick’s insistence on showing Mary Ellen the palatial penthouse of entertainer Don Ho.

  “I got restless one day,” says Chick, “and was looking over the posh Hawaiian Hilton Hotel. While I’m there, a dry cleaner is making a delivery and I notice the name ‘Don Ho’ on the clothes. Normally I’m looking for Jewish names. However, I figure this is worth a stop. I follow the delivery guy all the way up to the thirtieth floor; it’s the penthouse. Now I know that’s where all the money is. The guy knocks on the door a couple times—no one answers—and then leaves the packages by the door and takes the elevator back down. It’s looking good; nobody is home, and I just happen to have some celluloid with me. I have no problem loiding the door and walk into a huge apartment. There’s an incredible aquarium with some serious fish, a large, sophisticated recording studio, and a tremendous view of the bay and harbor. After admiring the view, I start wandering around the place looking for the master bedroom. I figure this could be a pretty good score. But there are several bedrooms, and while I’m searching I think I hear a noise in one of the rooms. Maybe somebody is home after all, so I immediately get the hell out of there.

  “That evening, Mary Ellen and I are having dinner in the Hilton, and I guess I had a little too much to drink and wanted to show off, ’cause I ask her, ‘How’d you like to see Don Ho’s place in the penthouse? It’s really incredible.’

  “We go up to the penthouse and I knock on the door. No answer. I start to loid the door, but I’m having trouble. It’s not working. This is odd, ’cause I had no trouble earlier in the day. Then I think I see some movement near the bottom of the door and begin to believe somebody on the other side is holding the doorknob. I tell Mary Ellen she’s got to get out of there. I quickly put her on the elevator and send her down to the lobby while I take the stairs down. Believe it or not, I’m down the 30 floors before she is. I quickly leave the building, but when I look back the hotel’s security has grabbed Mary Ellen and begun interrogating her.

  “She tells them she meant no offense; she was just a fan hoping to get a celebrity’s autograph. They then bring down Don Ho’s maid to see if she can identify her. She says the people at the door didn’t look like burglars. She says the couple at the door was well dressed, and the guy had a fancy sports coat on. It’s always fascinated me how people always have this conception of what burglars look like or how they should be dressed. It never squares with reality.

  “The hotel’s security lets Mary Ellen go, but they have our address, and I know our time is up and we better get the hell out of there. We had to get out of Hawaii, but it was three o’clock in the morning, and I had three months of collectibles I had to pack up and get out of our room. We quickly got a room in another hotel and left the next day for Vegas. We stayed there a month.”

  Years later, Goodroe had a startling reminder of his lengthy Hawaiian vacation. “Mary Ellen and I were staying at the Concord up in the Catskills one time,” he says. “I was up there often because it was a great place to relax and work all at the same time. I could take in the shows and entertainment, and also do a bit of work up there. While everyone was in the dining room having dinner, I was breaking into rooms and stealing anything of value I found interesting. It was easy, but none of the other K&A guys could have pulled it off. I looked Jewish and easily passed as just another Jew enjoying himself up there in the Catskills.

  “One night, however, Mary Ellen and I are browsing in one of the hotel’s swanky jewelry stores. There’s a lot of people looking over the display cases, and all of a sudden some guy standing next to us starts yelling, ‘That’s my ring. That’s my ring.’

  “He’s pointing at Mary Ellen’s opal ring, which I had picked up while doing a piece of work in Hawaii. I start to turn red and figure this guy is the real owner of the damn ring and now I’m in big trouble. I’m not sure
what I’m going to do, and Mary Ellen is now starting to get flustered. The guy, who’s well dressed and looks like money, keeps saying, ‘That’s my ring. That’s my ring,’ and then adds, ‘My initials are inside. Look inside the band. My initials, “BH,” are inside the ring.’

  “It turns out this guy was Bernard Hammerman, a well-known jewelry designer, who recognized one of his creations on Mary Ellen’s hand and just wanted to do a little boasting in front of his wife or girlfriend. He scared the hell out of me and made me think that Hawaiian excursion had come back to haunt me.”

  As the years passed and Chick spent more time burglarizing houses on his own, he gradually became more interested in rare artifacts and expensive artwork. Cash and jewelry were always welcome, but historical documents, fine sculpture, and paintings became an additional source of profit. This shift in emphasis furthered his education, as the ninth-grade dropout sought to learn the fine points of classical, modern, and abstract art.

  “I was doing a lot of work in the Washington, D.C., area,” says Chick. “I once took a whole art collection from a house in Georgetown. I started to go to the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian on a regular basis to check out the history of the painters and value of certain paintings. As time passed, there seemed to be more money in artifacts, and so I became more interested in ancient bronze statues, delicate sculpture, and quality paintings. I really liked it, but you had to know what you were doing. Some houses would tell you the paintings inside them were of some value. And usually you’d know the work of an old master if you came upon it. But you didn’t want to get cheated, and some fences didn’t even know what you had. Some of these guys may recognize a real Picasso from a print, but most fences wouldn’t know one of the old masters from a subway conductor. That’s where the problem came in. You needed a European connection, someone who knew quality stuff and how to unload it. Someone who knew how to get the most money for what you had.”

  8. Blue Collar Robin Hoods

  Sometimes we’d get a tip that a certain house had some money stashed away, maybe a safe or a secret hiding place where a bundle was supposed to be hidden. I was always nervous about tips; maybe it was a setup and the cops’d be waiting for us. But we did a few when they sounded good. Well, it happened on more than one occasion where we’d break in a house and it immediately looked suspicious. The furniture, the rugs, the wallpaper, everything looked old, drab, and faded. We’d go through the house and there was nothing of value there. Christ, it almost seemed like the owner was a 90-year-old grandmother on welfare or something. After a while, one of us would say, “This place is a bust. The folks livin’ here are poorer than us. Let’s throw ’em a couple bucks and get the hell out of here.” Then each of us would drop a 10-or 20-dollar bill on the kitchen table, walk out, and go to the next house.

  —GEORGE “JUNIOR” SMITH

  We were half of the Robin Hood myth. Yeah, we took from the rich, but we didn’t give it to the poor. We squandered it. Bars loved us. Car agencies loved us. We spent it like fools. There was no sense of value there. We spent money like drunken sailors. Robin Hoods? Nah, we spent the money.—JIMMY DOLAN

  We didn’t want to hurt anyone. We didn’t want to terrorize people. We stole for a living. It was nothing personal.

  —CHARLES “CHICKIE” GOODROE

  IN THE EARLY 1960s, a growing number of young truants, delinquents, and social misfits rejected the notion of earning an honest wage in a Kensington carpet mill, shipyard, or hat factory in favor of the fast life of the streets. The riveting Pottsville drama was still being played out in the daily newspapers. Meanwhile, that alternative neighborhood career option, the K&A burglary crew, gained respect and esteem.

  The gangs’ exploits were well covered in the media and their lavish lifestyle was showcased at corner saloons, but most Kensingtonians went about their business and displayed little if any outward displeasure with the local high school dropouts turned hip, expensively attired men-about-town. Many in Kensington looked at gang members with envy; it was almost as if they “weren’t really criminals.” Some attribute this tolerance to the gang’s “Robin Hood mystique.”

  “They didn’t bother anybody in the neighborhood,” argues Gil Slowe. “You never had no trouble with them,” but, he further cautions, “you didn’t want to give them any trouble either.”

  Slowe’s wife, Ronnie, agrees. “I never saw them as bad guys,” she says. “They were always well behaved around me.” As a teenager in the 1950s, Ronnie served gang members coffee in the local Horn & Hardart’s. She never once had a problem with any of them; in fact, she admits to having had a crush on one. “Effie Burke was very nice to me,” says Ronnie. “He made me feel real comfortable. He never treated me anything but good.”

  Gil and Ronnie Slowe’s almost affectionate view of the local burglary ring is not unique in Kensington. Residents did not feel threatened by the local thieves; some even thought they had a certain happy-go-lucky charm. “I don’t know of them hurting anybody,” says Mary Kober. Although she would often see K&A gang members driving their brand new, colorful Cadillac convertibles and big Lincoln Town Cars through the streets, or hanging out in neighborhood restaurants and bars, usually attired in expensive suits and shoes, “they were just... the K&A burglars,” nothing to be angry or alarmed about.

  Today, Jack Dempsey views the guys as Kensington’s version of South Philly’s “goodfellows” or “wiseguys.” Instead of Italians with slicked-back hair and sharkskin suits, you had tough, hard-nosed, ruddy-faced Irishmen whose behavior could probably be chalked up to “immaturity, attention deficit, and bipolar” disorder. “But who knew of that stuff back then?” asks Dempsey. “They were crazy and always raising hell, but they didn’t really bother anybody.” And besides: “They’d always help you out if you needed money.” As a kid in the late forties who earned a few bucks shining shoes in local restaurants and pool halls, Dempsey knew them as “exciting characters” and “great tippers. For a 10-cent shine, they’d give you a half-dollar or dollar tip.”

  Joseph Edelman, a businessman whose drinking establishment is just a few feet from the busy intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, recalls the burglars as local “Robin Hoods” and “gentleman thieves.” He considered most of them “pretty classy guys” who followed their own “code of honor.” And as misguided as that code may have been, they were not without a social conscience, for, as Edelman says, they “helped a few people out.” “They threw their money around,” he admits, on parties and drinking binges, but they also showed sympathy for distressed neighbors and shoved “one hundred dollar bills on people” in a time of need.

  Two factors allowed Kensington people to look favorably on the gangs. First, a community that sent “more kids to jail than college” viewed property crime as less wicked than violent, personal crime. And, second, the well-known gang members “weren’t plundering anything in the neighborhood.” “A lot of them were nice guys,” recalls Bob McClernand, who went to school with future gang members and competed against a few of them on the athletic field. They were guys with “a good sense of humor,” and many were “willing to lend you money if you were in a jam.”

  Maybe Brother Hugh McGuire of the Christian Brothers religious order sums up the community attitude best: “They weren’t really criminals.” His fond assessment was not shared by their victims or the police, but it was not unique in the community. The Kensington burglars who broke the hearts and destroyed the sense of security of homeowners from Bar Harbor to Miami, and drove East Coast law enforcement authorities to distraction, basically left most Kensington businessmen and residents alone.

  “They never bothered a soul around here,” says Paul Melione. A neighborhood barber for over 50 years, Melione took note of things from his storefront window on Allegheny Avenue and insists, “There were no burglaries around K&A. We had petty thieves around here, but none of the real burglars worked around here.” In fact, he recalls, the gang would often act as peacekeepers
. “They told folks to behave around here or they’d suffer severe consequences.” Melione thought most of the gang members were decent guys; some were “gentlemen” who chose burglary as a profession only because “they didn’t want to work” a regular nine-to-five factory job.

  It is probably the drunken spending sprees and the generosity of individual gang members that Kensington residents remember best. “They were pretty loose with their money,” recalls Joseph DiLeo, a Kensington Avenue bar owner, and they could put on quite a party. “If you needed money they’d give it to you,” says Ed Froggatt, who grew up and went to school with many of the K&A guys. “Everybody trusted them. They were very generous, good, down-to-earth guys who could be a lot of fun.” One day they would be “playing games against a wall with one hundred dollar bills,” he recalls, and the next day “you’d see them in a club and they’d ask you for some change for a beer. They were broke.” And then “the next time you’d see them on the street or in a bar, they’d give you 10 or 15 dollars” to pay you back for that 10-cent glass of beer you bought them.

  “They gave money away,” says Paul Melione. “They gave waitresses hundred-dollar tips. If you were a neighbor and facing hard times you could always go to them for help.” Hence what Melione calls their “Robin Hood reputation.”