Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  “I’m telling you,” says Jim Moran, “Jackie Johnson must have given a fortune away. He’d be sitting in a bar drinking his beers and reading the newspaper, and people would come in and give him a sob story and he’d end up giving them a 10-, 20-, or 50-dollar bill. Word would get around Kensington that Jack Johnson just made a score the night before, and he was drinking at Kellis’s or the Shamrock or some other place, and all of a sudden you’d have a line of people out there hoping to get a piece of the action. It was like he had his own social work agency. I’m telling you, Jack gave a fortune away.”

  Jimmy Dolan is another one of the usual Sherwood Forest suspects. “Believe it or not,” says Jimmy Laverty, “Dolan regularly gave money to the orphans at St. Vincent’s Orphanage. He’d say ‘Let’s all throw in two, three hundred dollars apiece for the kids.’ And if somebody was in trouble, Dolan would pull out four or five 20-dollar bills and give it to the guy. He’d give it up even though he’d be left with eight dollars in his own pocket.” Such gestures were rewarded.

  “Burglars were admired,” says Jim Moran. “They were getting over” on the system, “but not hurting anybody. And money flowed from them to the community.” This lovable-scoundrel view of the K&A burglars extended well beyond Kensington’s borders. Even the men assigned to apprehend and prosecute them occasionally admit their amusement and begrudging respect. “They had fun; they were a fun-loving bunch of characters,” says former Assistant District Attorney Joel Moldovsky, who established a special departmental unit in the Philadelphia DA’s office to hunt them down and get them off the street. “They were princes of the city.”

  In probably the best testament to Kensington’s romanticized notion of the gang, concerned parents would ask the older, better-known K&A burglars like Effie Burke, Willie Sears, or Hughie Breslin for help with their unmotivated or trouble-prone sons. They wanted their kids to become apprentice burglars, and who better to instruct them than established K&A guys? “I remember fathers, even mothers sometimes, coming up to Effie on the street and asking if he’d do them a favor and take their kid on the next trip,” says Jimmy Laverty. “They’d tell Effie, ‘He’s a good kid. I know he’d work out as a driver or watcher.”’ (Mothers whose sons went into the business often defended their boys’ choice of profession by telling neighbors, “At least they don’t hurt anybody.”)

  In some quarters, in fact, the K&A gang members were celebrities. Starting out as aimless misfits and oddball street urchins with junior high school educations and a bad attitude, they had achieved a certain status or flare that made them objects of interest and speculation—even adulation on occasion. “You’d go in a bar,” recalls Jimmy Laverty, “and get stares from people as if you were a well-known major league ballplayer. People wanted to meet us and tell their friends. We were celebrities.”

  The flashy lifestyle was enough to turn heads. “Guys had money and new cars,” says Laverty. “You’d go to the JR Club under the Frankford El and it looked like a Cadillac showroom. Everybody had a brand new Cadillac back then.”

  Not everyone bought into the idealized perception of sharp-dressing, soft-hearted burglars, working-class heroes, or homegrown Robin Hoods. Some saw the K&A Gang for what they were: thieves. Maybe they were elite burglars, maybe they were top-of-the line second story men, but they were thieves all the same. “They were just crooks,” says Andrew Guckin. Guckin, a long-time Kensington resident and local businessman, witnessed the gang’s growth and eventual demise. He blames the gang for giving the neighborhood a bad name and the press for hyping their escapades. “Kensington was a good solid neighborhood, there were some professionals, and everything could be purchased on Kensington Avenue,” he says. “Most people were stable and hard working, but the press kept on writing about ‘the K&A Gang,’ ‘the K&A Gang,’ ‘the K&A Gang.’ The press built them up more than what they deserved. You never heard about the good people.” For Guckin, all the media accounts of the gang’s exploits were “nothing to be boastful about. I didn’t see where it brought us any pride.”

  As for the gang’s Robin Hood image and Kensington’s lavish production of burglars, Guckin is equally unimpressed. For him, their acts of generosity do not outweigh the harm they did, and, furthermore, he doesn’t believe that Kensington produced any more burglars than any other Philadelphia neighborhood. And yet as burglars go, Guckin flatly states, the K&A Gang was top-shelf: “They were the best. That’s why they attracted so much publicity. Most of us try to be the best we can, and if you’re gonna be a burglar, you may as well try to be the best.”

  9. Pugilists, Drunks,

  and Misfits

  One of the teams had a sit-down. Somebody knew their business and was talking to the Feds. They had gotten caught with a safe. They had done a doctor’s house and robbed him of $450,000, but somebody close to them had dropped a dime on them.

  They think it may be Terry and finally decide they don’t want Terry to hang around with them any more. Now they got to figure out who’s gonna tell him. John Terry is somebody you don’t really want to fool with. He and his brother Charlie have both been convicted of murder, and they’ve both done a lot of work, if you know what I mean.

  The guys decide to pick straws to see who’s gonna get the job of tellin’ Terry the bad news and Frankie gets the short straw. They meet at the 19th Hole Lounge downtown, and Frankie tells John Terry he’s out, the guys don’t want him to hang around any more. He says some shit is going on, and somebody is talking. He tells Terry to stay away from them.

  Terry gets an attitude right away and tells Frankie, that’s all fucked up and you think I’m a rat. He asks Frankie if he has his shit with him, and Frankie says no. Terry then tells him, the next time I see you, you better have your shit on you.

  Frankie took the threat seriously, ’cause all of a sudden he pulls a gun and shoots John Terry in the head. Customers scatter; the bartender locks the door and goes into a panic. He starts hitting the bourbon, drinking one shot after another. Frankie drags the body to his car and starts driving around looking for a good place to dump the body. In the meantime, the bartender, who’s still knocking back a few, reopens for business. In an hour or so, Frankie comes back to the bar, and he still has the body with him. He says he couldn’t find an alley to dump it in. They prop the body up in the men’s room, have a few more drinks, and try to decide what to do.

  Customers are periodically going to the bathroom, but no one makes a big deal about it. Apparently it’s the type of joint nobody is surprised to see a body propped up on a toilet seat. Eventually, Frankie and the bartender decide to call the police and come up with some phony line about the shooting. In the meantime, a customer comes up and says to the bartender, “Hey, did you know there’s a dead guy in the bathroom?”

  The bartender, who’s from the neighborhood and now pretty well fucked up himself, tells the guy, “Mind your own business, fella. Didn’t you ever see a dead body before?”

  The cops arrive, but right off the bat they’re suspicious. When they examine the body, they notice that rigor mortis has already set in. They know the shooting took place much earlier than Frankie and the bartender claim it did.

  Eventually, the bartender cracked and testified against Frankie. But he was only convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

  —JUNIOR KRIPPLEBAUER

  I’m talking to Bones one day in his office on York Street and he tells me he just picked up a new fighter, a young heavyweight. He says the kid’s got potential, but he only speaks Spanish.

  I say to Bones, “But, Bones, you don’t speak Spanish. How you gonna communicate with this kid? How you gonna teach him anything? You only speak English and he only speaks Spanish.”

  “Whaddya mean?” says Bones. “I speak Spanish.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Let me hear you speak some Spanish. How are you gonna tell this kid to train?”

  “I’m gonna tell him to ‘go runno aroundo the blocko teno timeso.’”

  —JIMMY DOLAN


  They really wanted to do a good thing. Their intentions were good, but as usual things got a little weird. It was like that sometimes.

  Leo Gillis, one of the toughest little monkeys you’d ever want to meet, had just died, and there didn’t seem to be any family around to make any of the funeral arrangements. A couple guys, Harry McCabe and another guy, decided to try and do right by little Leo, so they took his body to a local undertaker for a proper burial. Unfortunately, after the funeral director goes through the list of items to be purchased like a coffin, embalming, Catholic service, and such, he comes up with a big number. The guys are broke, they don’t have any money, and the guy ain’t gonna bury Leo without gettin’ paid.

  McCabe and this other guy then get the brainstorm of raising the money for Leo’s burial. They’ll just go from bar to bar in Kensington, tell guys Leo died and needs burying, and could they chip in 10, 20 bucks to give Leo a decent burial. They figure it won’t be that hard ’cause everybody knew Leo and knew what a standup guy he was all his life. Leo was a real tough guy. He hit so fuckin’ hard. I saw him hit a nigger in Holmesburg; he knocked the guy out for 15 minutes. I thought he killed him.

  Somehow McCabe gets ahold of a refrigerated meat truck, wraps Leo’s body in a large blanket, and throws him in the back with all the hams, bacon, and pork chops. Well, they’re ridin’ around Kensington stopping at all the bars and taverns asking for donations to bury old Leo. Now guys are chipping in, throwin’ them five, 10, 20 bucks, and of course McCabe and his buddy are having a few drinks themselves as they reminisce about Leo and what a tough son-of-a-bitch he was all his life. Pound for pound he was one of the toughest guys on the street. This goes on for hours as the guys drive this truck around with Leo’s body in it.

  The money begins to accumulate, but the guys are also startin’ to feel good about this campaign of theirs and start to offer toasts to Leo’s memory and buy a round or two at each of these joints. Realizing they got a long way to go to get up to what the undertaker is gonna charge them, McCabe and his friend start selling some of the meat out of the back of the truck at various streetcorners. They’re selling hams for three, four, five bucks apiece and doing okay at it. Folks were gettin’ a good deal.

  Along the way they start doin’ business with a Greek guy who owns a restaurant or something, and he starts buying a good number of these discounted hams and pork chops. He knows these hams and chops go for a lot more than what Harry is charging him, so he’s really into it.

  While they’re doing business at the back of the truck, he spies this big wrapped package and asks, “What’s that?”

  “Oh, that ain’t nothin’,” says McCabe. “It’s just a side of beef.”

  “Well, how much you want for it?” asks the Greek guy, not knowing he’s making an offer to buy a real stiff, little Leo.

  I don’t know whether the guys thought about it or not, but they sold most of the hams and kept Leo.

  Now they’re still on their mission, but at some point they end up spending more money at these bars than what they’re getting in donations. Toasting Leo, buying rounds, gettin’ drunk, by the end of the night they’re nearly broke again. This goes on for several days, and Leo ain’t any closer to gettin’ buried and they’re still nowhere near what the undertaker is asking. After the third or fourth day, they begin to panic. Leo’s starting to go bad, he’s beginning to decompose in the back of the truck. They now begin wondering with each additional beer what they’re gonna do with this body that’s going bad on them.

  Finally one of ’em gets the swell idea to drive to a cemetery, so off they go in the dead of night with the truck and Leo. It’s late, so they’re wandering around this cemetery in the dark looking for a decent place to dump Leo. Eventually they come across a freshly dug grave. Since it’s unoccupied, they carry Leo out of the truck, stick him in the hole, quickly cover him over with dirt, and get the hell out of there.

  As I said, the guys sincerely wanted to do a good thing, but after more than a few drinks they ended up partyin’ with a stiff. It’s not exactly what they intended on doin’, but things just got a little messed up. It was like that sometimes.

  —JUNIOR KRIPPLEBAUER

  MANY CITIES AND NEIGHBORHOODS HARBOR their share of Runyonesque oddballs, especially of the gangster variety: Boston’s North End, Hell’s Kitchen in New York, Chicago’s Near West Side, the Woodlands district in Cleveland, and San Francisco’s North Beach, to name a few. Philadelphia’s Kensington belongs to that loopy pantheon of working-class ethnic neighborhoods. By anyone’s standard, Kensington was home to an abundance of incredible screwballs.

  Overworked, underpaid, hangover-plagued factory workers trying to scratch out a living. Stressed-out Irish Catholic housewives riding herd over passels of snot-nosed children. Eagle-eyed Jewish proprietors guarding their Kensington Avenue merchandise against freckled-faced nine-year-old thieves. They provide a good beginning. Add on a burgeoning criminal element: lazy, happy-go-lucky, Budweiser-guzzling burglars, zany scam artists, cunning fences, and bold, in-your-face gunmen. The world of Willie Sears, Effie Burke, Jimmy Laverty, and the other production workers was far from dreary. And, as Philadelphia Detective Herbie Rhodes bluntly said, “There were more assholes per square foot in Kensington than anywhere else I ever worked.”

  Unforgettable characters could be found gulping down an endless row of beers in the Shamrock, the 197, the JR, the Pleasantville, the Erie Social, Nino’s, Kellis’s, and the many other bars and after-hours clubs that dotted the community. They came in all shapes, sizes, and professions: deeply tanned, weatherbeaten roofers; sneering, cynical cops; average, surly, salt-of-the-earth felons. Occasionally, they were all three. Sometimes it felt as if Kensington had cornered the market on off-beat characters.

  For many Kensingtonians—both inside and outside the criminal arena—the name “Charlie Devlin” has a special ring: sort of like the ringing in your ears after an unexpected blow to the head. A Shakespeare-quoting bully who patrolled Kensington’s bars and back alleys with authoritative regularity, Charlie Devlin was a menacing figure of legendary proportions who could have achieved pugilistic infamy in any city in the country. It was Philadelphia, however, and in particular the beleaguered neighborhood of Kensington, that had the singular misfortune of having to put up with his bloody shenanigans. Other overbearing, pugilistic warriors circulated through Kensington, but there was something special about Charlie. Observing the mayhem-laden landscape he created, one local offers this succinct judgment: “Charlie Devlin was a fuckin’ jerkoff. He was a petty-ass thief who wasn’t good enough to work with the better K&A crews, but I’ll give him this, he was tough as hell.” Many called him “the toughest guy in the city of Philadelphia.”

  Although he was not particularly imposing physically, his penchant for bloody, tooth-jarring, bar-room, back alley, and streetcorner confrontations was renowned throughout the city. A little over six feet tall and well over 200 pounds, Devlin was broad-nosed with dark, heavy eyebrows, deep-set eyes, and a receding hairline. “He was built like a pear, with huge, powerful hips and legs, but narrow shoulders. He looked unimpressive, but he could dance and he could hit.” His capacity to hit was particularly memorable. “He had huge, powerful hands that could punch walls without being damaged,” recalls one cellblock partner. “His hands wouldn’t break no matter what he hit. His fingers were two to three times as large as those on the average hand.”

  A tough street kid, he perfected his intimidating demeanor and boxing skills at “White Hill” (officially the Camp Hill Reformatory), where he was sent in 1948, as a 16-year-old, for “delinquency.” Imprisonment only fed his criminal and antisocial tendencies. During the next decade, Devlin was arrested from one to three times a year for “drunk and disorderly conduct,” “aggravated assault and battery,” and “resisting arrest.” Sprinkled throughout his police file during the fifties were arrests for “larceny,” “burglary,” “gun possession,” and at least one “shooting.”


  Some of his early criminal exploits garnered a good bit of press coverage. In 1954, for example, Devlin and three accomplices were caught burglarizing a neighborhood supermarket. Although local K&A boys Leo Gillis and Maury McAdams were also part of the heist, what made the story noteworthy was the fact that a Philadelphia policeman had been captured with them at the scene. It was quickly determined that the 23-year-old cop had repeatedly served as the burglary ring’s driver and lookout during a series of commercial break-ins and beer hall lootings. Devlin did his time, as usual—a brief respite until he was out on the street and back in the action.

  Though he would continue to dabble in burglary and work semilegitimately as a nightclub bouncer and union enforcer for the next decade and a half, Devlin’s rap sheet expanded. Assault and battery and resisting arrest charges accumulated, like the welts, bruises, and black eyes on the faces of innocent bystanders, neighborhood tough guys, and district police officers. Charlie Devlin was a one-man wrecking crew, a riot waiting to ignite. His menacing reputation pervaded Kensington, and bartenders and club owners had a ringside seat for the nightly bedlam.

  “Charlie Devlin was sick,” recalls Sonny Ford, a long-time neighborhood bartender. “He was a sociopath. He needed people to be subservient to him. He once stabbed a bartender at ‘A’ & Allegheny when he didn’t like what the guy was doing behind the bar.”

  “Charlie was treacherous,” says Gene Pedicord, another bartender who had the misfortune of dealing with Devlin and his shakedown routine at various area bars during the fifties and sixties. “He’d call up and ask who was there. He wanted to know so he could come over and get some money. He traveled from bar to bar in order to get money off of people.” Pedicord, Ford, and others became all too familiar with Devlin’s intimidation of customers and the subsequent loss of business. Not to mention the bloodshed and property destruction. “We’d give him 10, 20 dollars at a time to stay out of the bar,” Pedicord remembers.