Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  “I was brought in to do some burglaries and open safes,” says Kripplebauer of his introduction to the Jewish mob. “It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been asked to do some safes for guys outside Kensington or Philadelphia. I had already done work for a bunch of guys, including some from New York. The New York guys were all mobbed up and did stickups, heists, and bank jobs, but couldn’t do anything involving a safe. They didn’t know anything about it. I did a house with them one time and we found a safe. They got excited for a minute or two, but then realized they didn’t know what to do. They were completely stumped. They wanted to quit and get out, but I told them to cool it for a while. They just sat in amazement and watched me work.

  “The Scolnick crew got to me through Johnny Bernardo, a doorman at the Equator Lounge on 11th Street. Bernardo asked Buddy Brennan, ‘Who do you know who can open safes? I need someone to help a few friends of mine.’ Buddy, a Fairmount boy like myself, gave Bernardo my name and put me in touch with Paul and Rosenberg. They were immediately impressed. I remember early on we were doing the home of a prominent doctor in New York, and we couldn’t find the safe. We had been there for a while and they wanted to give up, but I knew there was money hidden there. And I wasn’t leaving until I found it. I’m going through everything and finally find a little toolbox hidden in a stereo speaker in the doctor’s library. It contained $35,000. Rosenberg was impressed. He told Kenny Paul, ‘That Junior is something, isn’t he? He can smell the money.’

  “I did a good bit of work with them, straight burglaries, scams, walk-ins. The K&A guys didn’t want to work with Rosenberg and Paul because they were using guns. The Kensington guys wanted nothing to do with guns, but it didn’t bother me. I still did a ton of work with them. At least a half-dozen times we targeted prominent citizens and posed as IRS agents. Paul and Rosenberg would knock on the door after the man of the house had left for work, show phony identification to the guy’s wife, and explain that they were investigators for the Internal Revenue Service. If the woman wanted proof, they’d give her the phone number of the IRS headquarters, which was actually a phone booth I’d be standing in down the street. If she called looking for verification, I’d answer in a very official sounding voice, ‘Internal Revenue Department,’ and tell her the two men in her home were ‘sworn government agents investigating a crime’ and she was ‘obligated to cooperate’ with them. It worked every time. We cleaned them out.

  “Sometimes we’d do a commercial operation and a safe wasn’t even involved. We did the Tiffany Wig Shop on Castor Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia. Around 10 o’clock at night me and Allen Rosenberg went through the roof. We used a hatchet and crowbar to cut a hole in the roof and lowered ourselves inside the building. There was a four-room suite loaded with all kinds of wigs. We cleaned them out. We must’ve grabbed over a thousand wigs and hairpieces. They were pretty popular at the time and valued between fifty and a hundred dollars apiece. Wigs were something I usually didn’t go after, it was a specialty item, and you’d have to know somebody who could move them. But Scolnick could sell anything. He had some important, big-time buyers.”

  One of Junior’s more creative escapades with Scolnick’s crew was the notorious PSFS Bank caper of December 1965, when the gang walked off with a cool $100,000 without even drawing a weapon. The highly publicized heist left an array of law enforcement agencies slack-jawed and embarrassed. Innovative, daring, and well-orchestrated, the scam added enormously to Scolnick’s reputation as a “wheeler dealer extraordinaire” and “titanic trickster,” but Kripplebauer claims that much of the hype surrounding that caper—and most of the praise for “Cherry Hill Fats” in general—was undeserved.

  “Scolnick was good at con games,” says Kripplebauer, “but when it came to real criminal shit he was nothing. Rosenberg and Paul figured that bank deal out; they deserve as much credit as Scolnick. The whole thing came about when Sid Brooks couldn’t get his money out of the old Philadelphia Saving Fund Society. That’s what started it all. One day he goes to the bank, but doesn’t realize he’s being followed by the cops. They had been watching him for a while. That’s how they learned about the safe-deposit box. The cops thought the box contained the proceeds of various burglaries and arson jobs he had committed. They looked his name up among the owners of safe-deposit boxes, but there was nothing registered to a Sidney Brooks. He was using an alias. They then got a court order to inspect all those boxes suspected of being his. That’s how they discovered the $100,000. But the government made a big mistake: they left the money in the safe-deposit box and had the IRS put a seal on it.

  “Now Sid has got a problem: he can’t get his money out of the bank. What’s he gonna do? He goes to Scolnick and explains his problem. All of us then sat down and had a discussion, what are we gonna do about this hundred grand? How are we gonna get it out of there? It wasn’t just Scolnick—there were a bunch of us trying to figure it out. It was a combination of brains. Everybody was throwing ideas out. Paul said, ‘Let’s just rob the bank. We’ll lay them all down and rob the joint.’ Others came up with other ideas. We met several times and finally came up with a plan and refined it until we all felt comfortable with it.

  “It worked this way. Rosenberg went to the bank a few times and purchased a number of safe-deposit boxes, hoping that one of them would be near the box the IRS had sealed shut. The plan was to cause a diversion in the bank, get ahold of a teller’s keys while people were distracted, and then switch one of the new, empty boxes with the one that held the money and walk out.

  “On the day of the robbery, everything went like clockwork. Rosenberg entered the bank and moved towards the back where the safe-deposit vault was located. Paul followed him in as backup just in case anything went wrong. I then had someone drive me up to the bank’s front door. I got out and threw a large cinderblock through the bank’s plate glass window that faced Cottman Avenue. It sounded like an explosion. I then got the hell out of there, but as we drove off I could hear Kenny Paul yelling inside the bank. He was shouting at the top of his lungs, ‘It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb! It’s a bomb! Everybody get down!’

  “It looked like a prison break. While everybody is either dropping to the floor or panicking and trying to get out of the building, Rosenberg went behind the teller’s desk, got the master key that’s needed to open the safe-deposit boxes, and then went to the vault. He opened Sid Brooks’s box to make sure the money was there, but instead of taking the money and putting the box back and locking it, he must have got nervous, ’cause he took the whole damn box with him. He put the box inside his coat and walked out of the bank while everyone is trying to figure out what all the commotion is about. If he had locked the box, the Feds never would have known the box had been taken from the bank.

  “Afterwards we let Sid walk off with $80,000 ’cause it was his money, and we whacked up the rest between us. I think I came out of it with $1,800, which wasn’t bad for throwing a brick.”

  The PSFS heist greatly contributed to Sylvan Scolnick’s celebrity status and reputation as a master criminal. To serious, working criminals like Junior and his K&A colleagues, however, the tribute was severely tarnished when “Big Cherry” became an informant. Scolnick, Brooks, and the others became government witnesses against each other in an orgy of self-incrimination and mutual destruction. It was a prosecutor’s dream and a nightmare for any self-respecting criminal. No standup guy would rat out his partners, but Scolnick and company dispensed with principle and decided that self-interest was the best course of action.

  Scolnick alone was said to have given prosecutors “2,000 hours of testimony” that supposedly “rocked the criminal world to its foundations.” Junior was not surprised by “the Fat Man’s” willingness to cooperate with authorities; he had Scolnick pegged the first time he laid eyes on him. “I never felt comfortable with Sylvan,” says Kripplebauer of the Jewish behemoth. “The guy was so fuckin’ fat, I knew he wouldn’t be able to do any time. He’d rat me out in a second if t
he government squeezed him and threatened him with any prison time.”

  Kripplebauer somehow avoided being pulled into the feeding frenzy of co-conspirators informing against each other. He was only a fringe player in a few of the Scolnick gang’s projects; Sylvan didn’t know his name, and Paul and Rosenberg refused to give him up, allowing Junior to stay off the prosecutor’s radar screen for the PSFS job and therefore avoid both a jail term and the unwanted notoriety associated with the high-profile bank robbery. This was not an unprecedented incident: Junior did plenty of time in prison, but nothing compared with what he could have served, considering his long and industrious career. Junior was bold, some would say reckless, but he was usually able to stay one step ahead of the law.

  A prime example of his brazen contempt for the odds—not to mention a demonstration of his loyalty to imprisoned comrades—was his critical role in the Graterford breakout of 1975. The largest penal institution in Pennsylvania and one of the toughest, Graterford housed two of the most dangerous felons in the state, Francis Tomlinson and John Dickel. A Kensington boy, Dickel had gravitated to armed robberies and was serving 10 to 20 years for a $50,000 robbery in Lancaster County. Tomlinson was serving a life term for the rape and murder of a 47-year-old Bucks County woman. In addition to being extremely dangerous, both men were considered certified escape artists, Tomlinson having fled the State Correctional Institution at Dallas and Dickel having done the same at Rockview. By combining their extraordinary talents, they were an even greater escape risk, despite being housed in one of the most secure penal facilities in the state.

  It didn’t take the two long to conceive of a plan and move on it. On the evening of October 22, 1975, Tomlinson and Dickel got out of their cellblock, ran across Graterford’s expansive prison yard, and scaled its 30-foot-high wall with a hand-made rope and grappling hook. They were discovered missing the next morning, triggering a massive search. At this point Junior Kripplebauer enters the picture.

  “I got a call from Troy McEntee one morning,” says Kripplebauer. “He said he was in a jam and needed a favor. He told me Tomlinson and Dickel had escaped out of Graterford and it was his job to pick them up, but he couldn’t find them. He said he had been driving all over the back roads that ran through the woods out there in rural Montgomery County, but all he saw were helicopters, state police, and prison guards. He was getting frustrated, afraid of being caught, and wanted someone to go along with him. I said okay and met him out there near the prison. We drove around for quite a while, skirting the prison grounds and trying to avoid the cops, who were all over the place.

  “Troy finally gave up, but I continued riding around the area, looking for any sign of them, any likely place they might be hiding. Occasionally I’d stop and call out, ‘Hey, Gator, you out there? It’s me, Junior.’ “Gator” was John Dickel’s nickname. I’m doing this all over, as close as I can get to the actual prison grounds, but there’s hundreds of acres of farm land out there owned by the correctional system that was used for crop production. It’s tough to cover it all. The cops and state police had to have seen me, but they never pulled me over. They probably thought I was one of them, ’cause I had my German shepherd in the car with me. They must have thought I was an off-duty cop or guard trying to help out.

  “I continued driving around, calling out the names of Dickel and Tomlinson, and then I hear one of them yell out. I had finally found them. I got them in the car and drove to New Jersey and dropped them off at Tommy Seher’s house in Camden.”

  The two escapees proceeded to rob numerous area supermarkets before heading west and pulling similar jobs in California. They were finally captured while trying to rob an armored car in Anaheim. Kripplebauer was never associated with the Graterford escape; Pennsylvania state police mistakenly arrested Tomlinson’s brother, Joseph, for aiding the men in their getaway.

  Junior had dodged another bullet, but his luck was about to turn. Granted, he had served short bits in a number of state and local institutions, but they were minuscule in their psychological and economic impact, considering the riches and excitement he had picked up along the way. From Junior’s standpoint, crime paid. In fact, it paid very well. In future years, although it would continue to pay handsomely, the business expenses would climb considerably. The FBI would become increasingly preoccupied with the activities of the K&A Gang and target them for destruction. One special agent was aiming specifically for Kripplebauer.

  11. The Cops Strike Back

  We were all getting hit a lot. All the cities and towns in New York and New England were getting hit. We knew who they were. It was always the Irish Mob out of Philly.

  —DETECTIVE JIM SMITH, GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

  The K&A guys developed an expertise in stealing. They could steal the teeth out of your mouth and you wouldn’t even know it. They were the best burglars out there.

  —WILLIAM DRUM, SPECIAL AGENT, BUREAU OF ALCOHOL,

  TOBACCO AND FIREARMS

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING Philly cops knew there was something novel, something different about the K&A burglars. They were more industrious, better organized, and considerably more creative than their predecessors. Restless thieves out of Kensington were burglarizing homes in the more prosperous sections of the city at an alarming rate. “They were wearing us out,” retired Philadelphia Police Captain Joseph Brophy recalls of his introduction to the K&A Gang in the early 1950s.

  Earlier burglars—with no system or teamwork—had been less methodical and certainly less productive. Now the thieves were moving with military-like precision. It was a new phenomenon, and police were increasingly frustrated. Residential burglaries were escalating in number, homeowners and politicians were livid, and pressure was being exerted on the police to gain control of the situation. In the mid-fifties even the FBI began to take notice. “The FBI worked with us hand in glove for many years,” says Brophy. “Special Agent Dave Walker was in the squad room everyday. The FBI was particularly interested in the criminal intelligence we were gathering and what we discovering regarding major burglaries and truck hijackings.”

  Various initiatives were undertaken, from beefing up existing burglary units to the utilization of sophisticated technology such as wiretaps: “You could do things in those days that you couldn’t do today,” says Brophy. Though the wiretaps were extremely useful, they could just as often prove dangerous. On one occasion, Brophy and his partner were discovered unconscious in a freezing attic in North Philadelphia. While trying to listen in on a burglar’s conversation, “we were overcome by fumes from a space heater we were using,” says Brophy, of the nearly fatal experience. “We often found ourselves in out-of-theway places” when spying, but “when the gang moved, we were on to them.”

  Some taps provided a chuckle or two. Willie Sears, for example, was a central target of Brophy’s intelligence unit. Police carefully charted the comings and goings of production work’s creator, and so, apparently, did his associates. Sears’s colleagues would call his house and ask Dolly, his wife, “Did he leave yet?” If the answer was yes, the caller would quickly reply, “Okay, I’ll be right over.” That there seemed to be little honor among thieves was no surprise to Brophy. Not only did they steal from each other all the time, but “all the other burglars wanted Dolly,” he says. “Everyone wanted to get next to her. No sooner would Sears be out of the house and one of his buddies would be visiting his wife.”

  Though the wiretaps proved useful, it was another departmental innovation that resonated in law enforcement circles for years to come: the publication of a burglar handbook, a nifty three-by-eight-inch photographic dossier of the area’s most troublesome thieves. “I was in the Headquarters Squad [a precursor to today’s intelligence units] in the mid-fifties,” recalls Brophy, “and Richard Doyle, Al Mortimer, Jimmy O’Dare, and myself would sit around and brainstorm about ways to grab these guys. What could we do to get these characters off the street? Then we came up with the idea of a hit list, a list of the most wanted bu
rglars in Philadelphia. The concept was totally original. We just thought it would be a new and helpful twist, and it became my responsibility to keep the book updated.”

  According to Brophy, the “blue books” (named after their blue soft-back covers) had a dramatic impact on their prey. “They helped us put heat on the gang and drive them out of Philly.” (Many K&A gang members scoff at the notion of being driven out of town. The plain truth is, they went where the money was. While affluent Philadelphia area neighborhoods were becoming played out, wealthy communities along the eastern seaboard still represented fertile fields.)

  Simple but effective, the blue books provided beat cops with a handy catalogue—a pocket-sized “Rogues Gallery”—of the Philadelphia’s most persistent and annoying thieves. Members of the K&A Gang dominated its pages. Along with the mug shots of Willie Sears, Effie Burke, John Berkery, Ray Chalmers, Harry Stocker, and a host of others, the book included additional information that the intelligence unit thought might be useful to officers on the street. Home addresses, aliases, physical characteristics, MOs, favorite automobiles, close associates, and favorite hangouts all gradually became part of burglars’ individual profiles.

  The handbooks were an instant hit. Officers walking a beat or in their squad cars could flip open their books and check out any suspicious characters who had crossed their path. As for the gang members, though some were initially delighted to see that they had earned a place in the city’s pantheon of reprobates and mischief-makers, it very soon became apparent that the dubious honor was “pure trouble.”

  “It created more headaches for all of us,” says one media-shy criminal. “It made life miserable for many of us. Any time you or your vehicle were spotted by the cops they would stop you and check to see if you were in the book. Then they’d go through the whole thing. ‘Would you step out of the car, please. Would you mind if we looked in your trunk? Can we look in your glove compartment?’ It just made things more difficult.”