From their initial entry into the building and for months afterward, “bafflement” best describes the condition of store owners, security company reps, and law enforcement. How was it possible for a jewelry store of that size to be stripped clean in the short time it took police to respond to a burglary alarm? It wasn’t humanly possible. The cops came to the conclusion that the Lee’s Trading Post heist was an inside job. Somebody with a key and ties to Lee emptied the joint and then tripped the alarm on his way out. Either that or the alarm company was in on the crime and froze the alarm until all the goods were pulled out. Outraged at the insinuations, the security firm fired back that it must have been crooked cops who cleaned out the store.
For Kripplebauer’s crew it was sheer delight. They not only walked off with a huge score—a million or two at the very least—they left their adversaries dazed and confused. The Lee Trading Post job had been a brilliant piece of work.
Unable to go back to his fences in Philly, Junior called his moneymen and informed them that he had made a big score and the items were for sale. He sent Dougherty back to Philly with the jewels and had the goods displayed to underworld figures like Johnny Calabrese, who picked out the pieces they wanted and could pay cash for them. The stash brought in well over $600,000—a considerable haul. Junior figured he must have walked out of Lee Trading with over two million dollars in diamonds and gold. It was a nice piece of work.
After each of the participants got an end—Henkel, the tipper, got a 10 percent cut—Junior decided it was time to take a break and get out of Pennsylvania for a while. It would be a good time to go to the West Coast. An old cellmate, Jack Siggson, was living in the L.A. area, and maybe they could put together a couple of big scores. The Lee Trading job had whetted his appetite for jewelry stores, and, thanks to Jake’s technical proficiency, alarms were a minor concern.
Between his cut from Lee’s Trading Post and the other work he and Bruce had been doing in and around Pittsburgh, Junior was flush with cash. He went to California and checked out Los Angeles, Anaheim, and Garden Grove, where “Jack the Jew” was living. He cruised some beautiful areas like Laguna Beach and Newport, but finally settled on an apartment overlooking the ocean in Huntingdon Beach and began touring upscale commercial centers for likely jewelry stores that he, Jake, and Bruce could rip off.
Kripplebauer and Siggson did some second story work out there, but Junior was hampered by the weather and the absence of his regular crew. The climate wasn’t conducive to break-ins: people hung out on their front lawns and porches all evening long.
Things began to look up when Bobby Dougherty came out West to visit Junior at about the same time a tip came in on a possible big score in Palm Springs. A wealthy jewelry salesman had a place on the town’s famous golf course, which was about to host the Bob Hope Classic. The house was said to be loaded; it sounded like a good payday. The plan was simple and it worked perfectly. While thousands of people traversed the course during the contest and Siggson kept watch, Junior turned off the alarm and then he and Dougherty tore through the house in search of jewels and gold. Unfortunately, they found neither. The handful of gems they found were crap, mostly insubstantial stuff that knowledgeable fences would pay little for. Kripplebauer was no Sansom Street gemologist, but over the years he had accumulated some street smarts about the four “C”s. Jewels, especially diamonds, were judged on the basis of their weight (carats), inclusions (clarity), shape (cut), and light reflection (color). After handling millions of dollars worth of gems and negotiating with shady jewelry dealers for so many years, Junior didn’t always need an expert to determine that a stone was flawed because of light leaking out its sides, drab coloring, or an unattractive cut. When your income depended on knowing the merchandise you were selling, it paid to know what was top quality and what was junk.
The few grand they came out of the house with was a sobering reminder that not every hot tip resulted in a windfall.
Though the Palm Springs job had proved a bust, Junior could still afford to take it easy and live the good life. He bought an expensive Olds 98 and decided to break it in by driving up the California, Oregon, and Washington coastline. He had never been to Vancouver, but had heard good things about the Canadian town. The scenic route by the ocean was delightful, as were the grand old hotels and quaint little B&Bs he stayed in. Many times he thought how Mickie would have enjoyed such an excursion, but she was far removed from such pleasures—she was serving time in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Mickie’s incarceration and her separation from her son tore at Junior, even though it was the life they had chosen and they had known the risks involved. Though she had enjoyed the life, she was now “jackpotted,” and Junior blamed himself.
He called her every few days to see how she was doing. Mickie was a trooper, a standup broad; she did her time and rarely complained. Junior sent her money and occasionally sent her son some cash as well to help pay the bills. He also had friends like Jimmy Dolan drive up to New York from Philly to visit Mickie and lay a few hundred bucks on the prison commissary books for her. In their cross-continental phone conversations, Junior never mentioned the exhilarating drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and the great towns and wineries he was visiting. He always said he was doing all right, getting by. “I didn’t want to break her balls,” says Junior. “I didn’t want to make her more miserable than she already was.” The only saving grace was the knowledge that she’d be getting out soon.
Though he relished his current freedom, had a large knot of hundreds in his pocket, and was happy he wasn’t behind bars like his wife, he had few illusions that he could sustain such a lifestyle forever. He tried not to think about the various federal and state law enforcement agencies that were after him, but he knew there was a pretty good chance that he would eventually face the same fate as Mickie.
Then, during one of their periodic phone calls, he received a terrible shock. Bruce Agnew, his long-time partner, “had gone bad” and was talking to the Feds. The news that Bruce was negotiating with Skarbek and the FBI leaked out when an assistant U.S. attorney told Joe Bloom, another K&A burglary defendant, that a conflict had come up in his case and he’d have to get a new lawyer. Bloom and Agnew were both being represented by Neil Jokelson in an earlier burglary case. Being told that he would have to get a new lawyer could mean only one thing: “Bruce was looking to talk and was about to become a witness” against him and probably others. Junior quickly checked the information out with friends back in Philly, who confirmed the bad news. Bruce was talking and looking to make a deal.
Junior found the news about Agnew hard to believe, but it wouldn’t be the first or last time a trusted friend and partner had gone south on him. Rats were part of the business. You just tried to keep your distance from them and to be selective about whom you hung out and worked with. The immediate thing to do was to cut his ties and let others know that Bruce was probably an informant. Agnew was still in the Pittsburgh area. Richard Henkel and a few others were in jeopardy and had to be notified.
It was on his drive back from Vancouver that Junior learned about Agnew’s fate. He called Henkel one morning to see how things were going and heard him say, “Don’t worry about that problem. It’s been taken care of.” Junior didn’t have to ask. He knew Bruce was gone. It would be many years before his body was discovered in a shallow grave with two bullet holes in his brain.
Not long after his return to his comfortable Huntingdon Beach pad, Junior started to get edgy. Things didn’t feel right; he was becoming more suspicious. In fact, he should have been more upbeat. Mickie had been released from prison after doing five months, although she was unable to join him on the West Coast because a parole stipulation prohibited her from leaving New Jersey. But something was definitely wrong. Sometimes he thought that he was being tailed, that someone was observing his apartment. One morning, when he and Bobby Dougherty were walking from the apartment to the parking lot, he said, “You know, I got a bad feeling.”<
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“Junior, you’re just imagining things,” said Dougherty.
“No, something’s not right,” replied Junior. “Yesterday, I saw the manager of the apartment house checking out my car. And just in the last few days that helicopter has been buzzing around here. I’m telling you something is up. They’re looking for me.”
“You’re just getting paranoid,” said Dougherty. “No one is looking for you out here.”
Junior was unconvinced. “I’m tellin’ ya, they’re looking for us.”
The two men drove to Jack Siggson’s house in Garden Grove, and once again Junior mentioned the helicopters flying overhead. As usual, Dougherty made a dismissive comment about Junior’s growing paranoia. They left Siggson’s after a short time.
As they walked to the car, suddenly, from out of nowhere, came a raspy shout: “Hold it right there, Junior. Get down on the ground or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”
Kripplebauer turned to see who it was.
“Down, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your goddamn head off,” said a man in a suit as he moved closer, his finger on the trigger of a shotgun.
“Kiss my ass, jerkoff,” replied Junior, trying to gauge his chances of escape.
“Down or you’re dead,” said the man with the gun.
“Junior, we better do as he says,” advised Dougherty.
Kripplebauer raised his hands but refused to go down. He was weighing his chances for a break while trying to determine whether the man with the shotgun was alone. Both questions were answered in a moment. Just as the shotgun-toting agent ordered Junior down for the fourth time, additional officers seemed to come out of nowhere.
As Junior bent down on one knee, about two dozen agents came rushing toward him, handguns and rifles all aimed directly at him. He was forced to his stomach, arms and legs spread-eagled on the ground. Two agents grabbed his ankles while two others stood on his hands.
“Get off my hands, motherfucker,” Junior screamed at them. “Get off my hands.”
They eventually did, but only after the FBI agents had thoroughly checked him for weapons.
Kripplebauer was taken to the Orange County Jail, where he proved uncooperative and refused to sign extradition papers. After three days he was transferred to the Los Angeles County Jail. Once again he was met with an awesome display of television equipment and a flotilla of news reporters.
“I said to myself,” recalls Junior, “this can’t be for me. I haven’t even done anything of significance out here. I don’t warrant this kind of coverage.”
He was right. The media had staked out the county jail hoping to get some live shots of Christopher Boyce, a handsome young spy who had just been caught selling top-secret Defense Department codes to the Soviets. Boyce, who inspired the movie The Falcon and the Snowman,.as a fish out of water in the prison. Even for Junior, relieved not to be the center of media attention, the L.A. County Jail was a “madhouse.” Thousands of loud, combative black inmates, the Nazi-like L.A. County sheriffs screaming, “Shoulders against the wall, shoulders against the wall”—it made the jail in Houston seem like the Ritz-Carlton. Junior was repeatedly taken to court for extradition proceedings and repeatedly refused to sign the papers. He wasn’t interested in helping the man. Nor was he in any hurry to go to a federal penitentiary.
On one of his bus trips to court, he was placed next to Boyce, the accused spy and instant media celebrity. They were the only white inmates on the sheriff’s van. Boyce thought he had a natural ally in the tall, well-built prisoner with the funny last name, but he was wrong.
“Boyce asked me for a cigarette while we were being taken to court,” says Kripplebauer. “I looked at him and told him to kiss my ass. I said, ‘If you want a cigarette, get it off the Russians.’ He didn’t say a thing the rest of the way to the courthouse. He knew the score. He knew I’d break his jaw if he talked to me again. Look, I’d rob anybody, but I’d never betray the country. No way. I didn’t have many scruples, but I had some.”
Eventually, worn down by the jail’s zoolike atmosphere, Kripplebauer said, “I’ll sign—just get me the hell out of here” and agreed to extradition proceedings. He was shipped back to the Detention Center in Philadelphia and pled “not guilty” before Judge Huyett, despite having been on the run and despite being captured with $25,000 in his possession, some of it in counterfeit bills. Huyett had little time for this prodigal burglar. He hit Kripplebauer with an additional four years for the escape and had him immediately taken to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.
Just prior to his transfer to Lewisburg, Junior had a brief visit with Mickie at the Philadelphia Detention Center. Unable to embrace each other, they talked through a Plexiglas and steel partition and joked about their lousy luck. Their lives had been topsy-turvy since the Houston debacle: when she was incarcerated Junior was out; now that she was out, Junior was behind bars. The young married couple was no longer living high on the hog in Cherry Hill and cruising through fashionable nearby neighborhoods looking for red alarm lights. They joked and tried to reassure each other that the situation was bound to improve. But it didn’t. It would only get worse.
Junior prepared himself for a long stay at the tough level-five institution in north-central Pennsylvania, but it was not to be. Early one morning, less than a month into his sentence, Junior was awakened in his bunk by a correctional officer prodding him with a broom handle.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” shouted Kripplebauer at the guard.
“I gotta see some skin, fella,” said the guard. “I’m taking count and you’re all covered up. I gotta see some skin.”
Unimpressed with such institutional practices, Kripplebauer shouted back, “Listen, asshole, you keep poking me with that stick and you’ll see plenty of skin.”
The guard and inmate went at it for some time until additional guards arrived, took Junior out of his cell, placed him in the hole, and charged him with “conduct that disrupts, threatening a staff member and interfering with the taking of count.” Seeing him as a “major crime figure, a captain in the K&A Gang,” and a troublemaker they could do without, Lewisburg authorities put Junior on a prison bus in June 1977 and shipped him south to another infamous level-five institution: Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. On his arrival at the old facility—which was having its own problems with violent skirmishes between prison gangs and inmate-guard confrontations—Junior was immediately taken to a sit-down with the assistant warden.
“Listen up, Kripplebauer,” said the official sternly. “We know about that shit you started up at Lewisburg. We don’t like troublemakers around here. You talk like that to one of my correctional officers and we’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. We’ll tune your ass up but good. You hear me?”
“Listen, that business at Lewisburg wasn’t my fault,” replied Junior. “As long as the guards don’t go poking me with a stick at 4:15 in the morning there won’t be any problems out of me.” Junior meant what he said, at least for a time.
One of the first inmates Junior met at Atlanta was Alan Reid, the national leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. Reid came over to Junior’s cell one morning shortly after his arrival, introduced himself, and asked if Junior had a package for him. He did: articles of clothing that a Lewisburg prisoner had asked him to take with him to Atlanta. Junior had no idea the clothing was for a significant and feared player in the federal prison system’s most violent white-supremacist organization. Reid was the model of cordiality and asked if Junior would like to join his group. The Kripplebauer name denoted German origins, a favorable signpost for Aryan recruiters. Junior, however, respectfully declined. He was a seasoned con who knew that the early days in a new penal facility were a critical testing period. He’d keep his distance from all but former friends and acquaintances. Besides, Junior wasn’t into the Aryan line; some of his best friends behind bars over the years were Jews, Hispanics, and blacks.
Reid was not offended by the rejection. In fact, he supplied Kripplebau
er with a piece of jailhouse advice. “He asked me if I planned on going out to the yard that night,” recalls Junior. “I said yeah, I probably would. He then asked if I planned on going early or late. I said I wasn’t sure, but probably late.’ His demeanor took a serious turn and he looked me square in the eyes and said it’d be better if I went late. He then walked away. I took his advice, but a bunch of us never got exercise that night. They shut down the joint during the first yard out. There was a fatal stabbing in the exercise yard. Vinnie Pappa, a New York Mafioso, was shanked repeatedly in the yard. The Aryans had been paid to take him out.”
Atlanta was going through a particularly violent period when Kripplebauer arrived at the institution. Stabbings and gang violence were everyday events. Life was cheap; even guards were at risk. You didn’t have to throw caution to the wind in order to find yourself in a world of shit. Talking to the wrong people, dissing the wrong people, offending one of the many gangs that menacingly prowled the cellblocks, could get you hurt.
“I was told of an incident that occurred just before I got there that described the mood of the place pretty well,” says Kripplebauer. “A guy was brought in the joint about eight o’clock at night, and when he was spotted he was immediately recognized as an informer. Guys were calling him a rat on the cellblock, and it looked like he was going to have to be taken to a protective custody unit where they kept all the rats, child molesters, and other examples of human waste. But the authorities were too slow; by 10 the next morning he was dead.”
A couple of members of the Dixie Mafia, one of the largest gangs in the institution, approached Kripplebauer early on requesting a favor. They wanted him to buy them some items at the prison commissary. They claimed to be short of cash at the time, but said money was expected to be put on the books any day. Junior would get paid back. He had seen the con worked dozens of times over the years, and he was too savvy to be played, but he wasn’t out to make enemies during his first days in the institution.
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 29
