As it turns out, by the late sixties, the vast majority of K&A gang members were doing very little work in the city. They were usually on the road, North Carolina, Massachusetts, western Pennsylvania, and Ohio being more likely venues for their wide-ranging operations than a single residence in Northeast Philadelphia. As one burglar says, “We wrote off Chestnut Hill, the Main Line, and the more affluent suburban neighborhoods. The elite areas around Philadelphia were burnt out, and the cops were becoming more sophisticated. There were rich people in other parts of the country.”
More important, the police knew that few, if any, K&A burglars ever carried a gun on the job. And it was rare for cops to catch one of them at the scene of a burglary, much less taking part in a criminal act that resulted in anything like the human carnage at the Washick residence.
Seeley was viewed as a cowboy, a dangerous, unpredictable hooligan who often bragged, “A walk-in ain’t hard for me. I can hold 20 people at bay.” His partners were inexperienced dupes hoping to make a sizable score and replicate the legendary exploits of the better-known neighborhood thieves. They would pay dearly for their ineptitude: Seeley was killed at the scene, but his confederates would spend the rest of their lives behind bars. John McIntyre (23), Adolph Schwartz (22), and the so-called masterminds of the scheme, Michael Borschell (28) and William Russell (27), would receive life sentences for a burglary gone bad and the cold-blooded murder of a Philadelphia police officer.
THE LURE OF THE GOOD LIFE was strong, and K&A wannabes were everywhere. By the late sixties and early seventies, it was mostly wannabes that Philly cops were running into. The one and only time DelCarlino shot someone in his two dozen years on the force, one of these young, starry-eyed Kensington burglars was involved. “We were getting several calls a day from the same neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia,” says DelCarlino. “Somebody was beating the hell out of Winchester Park and Lexington Park during the daylight hours. The guy was posing as a utility man or city sanitation worker. He was doing five or six houses a day, and we weren’t having any luck at all. He’d wear a gray uniform like a utility worker for the gas company. He’d knock on the door, and if nobody answered and the property appeared empty, he’d break in. My partner and I decided we’d have to try something different, so we started to intercept everybody we saw who regularly traveled through the community: mailmen, UPS deliverymen, newspaper boys, folks walking their dog, anybody who regularly walked the streets of the hardest-hit communities. We told them what was happening, that the guy wore a uniform and might be using a white Ford with temporary tags, and to give us a call if they saw someone who looked suspicious going through the neighborhood.
“It wasn’t long after that that we got a call around noon one day from a mailman. He thought he saw someone who looked suspicious. Henry Coshland and I went out to the neighborhood and quickly spotted the car, a white 1964 Ford, but before we could do anything the car sped off. We chased the guy a short distance when we managed to box him in, but then he took off on foot and the real track meet began. We chased him through alleys and backyards until he reached the edge of Pennypack Park [a large public park that borders Lincoln High School].
“He turned around and shouted at us while holding something black in his hand. It looked like a gun. I had him in my sights and could have shot him in the head, but I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger. The man ran another 50 feet before falling and yelling out, ‘I’ve been hit!’”
The guy turned out to be Danny Weber, a 21-year-old Kensington wannabe, who was just following the traditional career path into burglary. Older, more sophisticated K&A burglars like Hughie Breslin, Jackie Johnson, and Jimmy Laverty would never have considered young Weber a genuine K&A burglar, but the cops did, and so did the media, whose standards were less exacting. Moreover, unlike most K&A burglars, Weber proved incredibly cooperative. In fact, he wouldn’t stop talking.
“After he recovered from the gunshot wound, we took him out with us in a squad car,” says DelCarlino. “We had our reports with us on previous unsolved burglaries in the area. It was incredible. We’d go up and down the streets of Northeast Philly and he’d point to houses and say, ‘I hit that one.’ ‘And that one.’ ‘And that one.’ ‘And that one.’ It went on for hours. There were hundreds of houses. I stopped counting at 400. Weber had tremendous recall and could remember every house he had ever broken into. And every little detail as to what he had taken out of there. I think he got five years or so and ended up doing the same thing for the cops in Jersey and Bucks County. He must have done a couple thousand jobs all over the area.
IF THERE WAS ONE LAW enforcement official who dedicated himself to nailing Kripplebauer and his K&A confederates, who went after the gang with the unswerving passion more commonly associated with religious crusades, it was Bill Skarbek. His commitment to their capture and imprisonment made him something of a legend within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and on the streets of Philadelphia.
A native New Englander, William Skarbek joined the FBI after graduating from law school in Florida. Though becoming one of Hoover’s boys was never a driving ambition, he says, it was “always in the back of my mind.” But Skarbek admits that he “didn’t seriously consider it until a classmate at law school” said he had signed up to become a Special Agent for the FBI. Shortly thereafter, Skarbek wrote “Mr. Hoover a letter” expressing his interest in the Bureau, and one day, while coming off the beach, he was met by a tall, well-dressed stranger. He was an agent from the FBI’s South Florida office, checking up on Mr. Hoover’s new pen pal. Young Skarbek seemed to have the goods.
Preparations for the bar exam precluded his immediate assignment to FBI training school in Virginia, but a last-minute cancellation by another applicant in the following class allowed Skarbek to take one of the 50 slots at Quantico. After 14 weeks of training, the rookie agent was sent to Detroit. It was 1967, just after the Motor City had been torn up by inner-city rioters. Skarbek’s cases ran the gamut from investigating organized crime figures to hunting draft dodgers to making cases against rioters. After a year he was transferred to the Philadelphia office.
Philly had “good cases, there was always a lot to do, and there was the potential of solving lots of cases because the area was so active,” but the young agent was once again stuck with Selective Service work. The Berrigan brothers and a host of other antiwar protestors were active in the area, and draft board break-ins in Media, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, had garnered nationwide publicity and embarrassed the Nixon administration. Gradually, however, Skarbek began to be thrown some traditional organized-crime cases, a welcome but challenging diversion. Jewel thefts, home burglaries, and large-scale fencing operations were big in the area, unusually big. Almost immediately the young agent learned of the voracious criminal appetite of one particular gang of thieves: the Irish Mob out of Kensington. If you were working organized crime on the East Coast—particularly property crime—you were familiar with them.
“The K&A Gang was a special group of guys,” recalls one FBI Special Agent. “They weren’t as organized as the Mafia, but there was no other burglary crew as prolific or as competent. From soup to nuts, they were the best burglars out there.”
“You didn’t have to be on the job long to learn they were the best,” recalls Skarbek. “The K&A Gang had the pedigree. They were definitely the cream of the crop and a fascinating collection of guys. There wasn’t always a lot of sophistication to their work, but they made burglary a serious profession by using street-level common sense, a lot of nerve, and a good bit of ingenuity.”
The FBI wasn’t initially interested in jewel thefts and burglary—they thought they had more important items on their agenda—but the sheer scope of the gang’s exploits put the problem on “the FBI’s radar screen.” As Skarbek recalls, “as soon as I started working cases in the area, I knew that Philadelphia had the most prolific interstate burglars in the country. We knew they were working the whole country. They were going up t
o Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the rest of New England. Then they would go south and west into Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Florida, and Texas. They were all over.
“Their plan was simple and it worked,” says Skarbek matter-of-factly. “They worked in four-man teams—a window man, a driver, and two searchers. They’d hit upscale neighborhoods, mostly Jewish homes. And the Hanukah holiday would be one of their prime periods of work. Jewish people had jewelry, but they didn’t wear it to synagogue. So while the families were praying at synagogue, the burglars were preying on their homes and taking all their money and jewelry.
“The way the gang members had it set up, there was almost no jeopardy to their operations. They were slick and their operation was based on comparatively little risk. They worked from eight p.m. to one a.m. in the morning, knew when people weren’t home, and were smart enough not to carry any weapons. They almost never got arrested. Schmucks get caught. Professionals like the K&A guys didn’t get caught. That’s what made them so good, because for the longest time no one knew who they were. And on those rare occasions when they did get caught, they never ratted on their partners and were able to hire the best attorneys, who got them out on bail. Then they’d jump bail, not show up for trial, and the local prosecutors wouldn’t pursue them with extradition proceedings because no weapons were confiscated and no one had been hurt. It was just a simple burglary charge.”
Skarbek was on the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Goods detail only a short time before it became “painfully obvious the only way to make a dent in their operation was to catch them in the act and with the stolen stuff on them.” It would require a major effort—in fact, a national campaign.
“Law enforcement offices at the federal, state, and local levels would have to be incorporated,” says Skarbek, who vigorously lobbied his superiors in the Bureau for a full-court press on the burglars. “Initially, the other federal offices had trouble believing what we were telling them. I said if we were going to get these guys it would require better intelligence, increased resources, and far more manpower. The burglars and their fences would have to be targeted. Philly had become known up and down the East Coast as one of the top burglary and fencing operations in the United States. It was right up there with New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. The word on the street was that the K&A guys stole whatever they wanted, sold it to Jewelers’ Row or up in New York if the items were particularly hot or pricey. K&A Gang operations became known to all of us because of the notoriety of the jobs, the value of the goods stolen, and the uniqueness of the pieces.”
Items that were stolen in one part of the country and discovered in another had often traveled through the Philadelphia area. For example, a well-known “$85,000 brooch that was stolen from a Chicago jewelry show and recovered on Redondo Drive in Hollywood was traced back to a Philadelphia, New Hope, and New York City fencing operation.”
“We kept hearing the same names: Neil Ward, John Berkery, Kripplebauer, Wigerman, Dolan. We knew guys like Effie Burke were working all across the country, but we could never get him. Burke was like the pinnacle, a teacher of the craft. And we just kept missing Berkery. He was considered the main nexus between the Northeast Irish mobsters and the Mafia. Neil Ward was said to have the keys to every hotel room along the East Coast. He concentrated on jewelry salesmen. Kripplebauer’s group seemed to work with impunity from Massachusetts to Texas.”
The more time Bill Skarbek spent on the burglary detail, the more frustrated he became. A bunch of high school dropouts and blue collar lunkheads were ripping the hell out of wealthy neighborhoods from Maine to Florida, and cops, and even the FBI, were clueless.
To further complicate the problem, the Philly police seemed to have adopted a minimalist approach in their pursuit of the Kensington-based burglary ring. Skarbek and his fellow agents didn’t consider “the local cops all that active” under Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, and there were rumors of a “hell of a lot of corruption” in the department. For a while there, claims Skarbek, “we didn’t get involved with the local police unless it was absolutely necessary.” Of course, the more time Junior Kripplebauer, Billy McClurg, Jimmy Dolan, Chick Goodroe, and the other burglary crews spent on the road, the better it was for most Philadelphians, including the cops. They could all rest easy whenever the local version of the Huns and Mongols were out of town pillaging some other folks.
Although Skarbek was supposed to focus on crime in the Philadelphia area, he didn’t have that luxury. He was too busy fielding inquiries and distress calls from perturbed law enforcement officers across the country, all trying to solve a rash of high-end home burglaries: a beleaguered cop in Raleigh, North Carolina; a frustrated state police official in North Jersey; a perplexed Special Agent in Westport, Connecticut. Philly’s Irish Mob seemed to be everywhere. Skarbek grew increasingly exasperated as he explained to small-town sheriff’s departments the gang’s history, methodology, and membership.
The more time he spent on them, the more determined he became to bring them down. Though he marveled at their ability to establish a “national network of professional burglars and fences around the country” and their knowledge of “wealthy out-of-state areas where they had legal contacts who knew the system and got them out on bail” (and thus into other people’s homes) in a matter of hours, he was dedicated to ending their reign of thievery.
After considerable lobbying by Skarbek and others, combined with a deluge of citizen complaints and official requests for assistance, the FBI’s national office established Operation Top Thief, a vigorous and expansive program to take down the Philly burglars. More agents were assigned; surveillance was stepped up, including the use of fixed-wing aircraft; regional meetings with law enforcement officials were increased; and the cultivation of informants was strongly encouraged.
Even with the intensive approach, triumphs by the federal agents were few and far between. The burglars weren’t about to give up their brutes, alarm keys, and affluent lifestyles for something called Operation Top Thief. Never that impressed with cops in the first place, they weren’t about to roll over for J. Edgar Hoover and his army of conservative, clean-cut agents. They felt they had proprietary rights on production work. No federal cops were going to take away their lucrative careers.
Skarbek’s team of agents went about their business methodically. They held more information-gathering meetings with local authorities, placed a priority on tracking down leads, stepped up surveillance of the burglars and their fences, installed more wiretaps, and routinely disseminated intelligence to police agencies across the country. Most of the work was uninteresting, mundane—drudgery on the installment plan. But it was well known in law enforcement circles that such boring, time-consuming routines often paid big dividends.
A perfect example was Bill Skarbek’s conversation with a young salesman for a U-Haul truck rental agency. By doing their homework, Skarbek and his colleagues pulled off one of the first and most successful takedowns of a K&A burglary crew.
Skarbek had become so familiar with the K&A Gang and their tactics that he could have formed his own crew. As he says, he started to think like them and was able to “put together their pattern of activity and knew when they were going to do something.” He figured out that on many of the gang’s out-of-town runs they used trucks and vans to haul away the stolen merchandise. Most of the time the vehicles appeared to have been rented from local distributors in Philadelphia. Skarbek began to visit van rental agencies throughout the city. He discreetly explained what was happening, distributed photographs of the key players, and requested the clerks’ assistance. It was tedious, unsatisfying work.
One day a van rental agent called and said, “Your boy was in this morning.” Skarbek was elated; it was if he had hit the lottery. The news that Ted Wigerman had just rented a van was all he needed to hear. The Wigerman takedown is one of the best illustrations of Operation Top Thief in action.
Ted Wigerman, one of the K&A Gang’s most industrious cr
ew chiefs, was tall and squirrelly faced, with a receding hairline and a nose for an easy score. That warm midsummer afternoon in 1976, he tossed back another pint glass of Budweiser, joking and slapping the backs of the usual collection of barflies at Jumbo’s as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Tired mill hands, heavily muscled roofers, and a few hard-edged regulars attired in flashy sharkskin suits shared drinks, macho boasts, and age-old neighborhood war stories as the strong stench of beer permeated the air and a pounding Rolling Stones song played in the background. Neither Wigerman nor his well-dressed colleagues—Michael Lee Andrews, Frankie Brewer, and Frank Zappacasta—displayed the slightest interest in the passage of time, even though they were already behind schedule on a big heist hundreds of miles away. They cherished their rye shots and beer chasers. Even the prospect of a fat, cash-stuffed safe couldn’t pull them away.
Special Agent Bill Skarbek, along with a dozen other FBI agents, had been waiting for hours for the Irish mobsters to finish their beers and hit the road. After more than a year of painstaking but fruitless effort, the FBI’s new task force on the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property had finally received a solid tip, and now they had the seedy taproom under surveillance.
As the hours slowly passed, the increasingly restless federal agents sat in their sweltering cars, trying to blend into the blue collar community. Finally, just after nine o’clock that evening, Ted Wigerman, bold and bloated, staggered out of the bar. But he left alone. Moreover, neither he nor any of the other members of the gang approached the van. The agents thought they had been made once again, their stakeout blown.
Not until the next day did they realize that bypassing the van wasn’t a clever ploy; it simply reflected the flip side of the gang’s culture. The sophisticated burglars were also a bunch of thuggish louts who would get so tanked up in a bar that they would wind up playing darts with meat cleavers or start a bare-knuckle brawl, forgetting the jobs they were supposed to pull.
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 24
