Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  “These three guys, Southern Rebel rednecks, came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you going to the store tomorrow? Will you get us a carton of Pall Mall and we’ll pay you back on Friday?’ I told ’em no. I won’t do it. I said I was low on cash myself and couldn’t do it. I was civil, but direct. I wasn’t gonna fall for that con. I wanted them to know I was hip to that game and wasn’t gonna play. You were always being tested. Everybody had their eye on you, watching for any weakness. You were always being measured. You had to set people straight from day one, or you were gonna be miserable your entire time there.”

  Gradually, Junior established himself in the 5,000-man institution. He knew a number of inmates from past prison stints and tended to walk with some serious people: Joe Dougherty, another Kensington boy, a huge, lumbering bank robber who had pulled off some dazzling scores, usually by first kidnapping the bank manager the night before the robbery and then holding his family hostage until the goods were delivered; Henry Alemon, a Chicago contract killer who worked for the mob and was said to “have had more hits than the Cubs and White Sox combined”; and Joe Havel, another big-time bank robber and prison escape artist, who was said to have a few bodies to his credit (one a fellow inmate whose head he had cut off). They and Junior walked in the yard, smoked reefer together at night, and tended to watch each other’s backs. Though small in number, they were experienced standup guys who had been around the block a few times and knew the score. It wouldn’t be perceived as a smart move to develop a beef with any one of them, much less all of them.

  In addition, Junior was on good terms with another crew of heavy hitters who tended to be given a wide berth in prison: the Philadelphia branch of the Black Muslims. Killers all, a number of them had been part of an assassination squad recently convicted of wiping out seven Hanafi Muslims—including five children, four by drowning—at the home of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Washington, D.C. Given their well-established reputation for brutality and cut-throat bloodshed, most other Atlanta prisoners made every effort to steer clear of the Philly Muslims. In short, Junior Kripplebauer was connected; he wasn’t someone you wanted to toy with.

  Not too long after Junior arrived at Atlanta, his former partner, Tommy Seher, was brought through the institution. Seher said he was concerned about his mounting legal troubles, the spiraling cost of attorneys, and the prospect of Texas authorities picking him up for the Houston disaster. He expected to be taken down there and charged at any time. Junior tried to buoy Tommy’s spirits, saying they were all in the same boat and encouraging him to make sure Racehorse Haynes accompanied him every step of the way through the Texas legal system. Junior had paid good money—including a good chunk of the Pittsburgh jewelry store score—to acquire the best legal talent the Lone Star State had to offer, and he directed Seher to make sure they got their money’s worth.

  Tommy said that he would and that he wanted Junior to know how sorry he was about the jam he had gotten them all into. “If I had it to do all over again,” said Seher, “I’d cut my legs off before I would throw those suitcases in that Houston dumpster and put you and Mickie in this jackpot.” Junior bit his lip and didn’t reply, but thought to himself he’d have cut Tommy’s head off if it would have prevented his lazy partner from disobeying orders and committing such a stupid blunder. But the damage was done now. They just had to put up the best defense they could and do the time. There was nothing else for standup men to do.

  As Seher had feared, he was soon pulled out of the penitentiary in Georgia and taken to Houston. Kripplebauer, on the other hand, settled in for the long haul at Atlanta. Gradually, his natural creative and entrepreneurial skills began to surface. There was money to be made in such a large prison, but one had to be slick—very slick. Smuggling contraband took a high degree of originality and fearlessness, especially if you planned on moving drugs.

  Although he kept his distance from illicit substances while he was on the street—other than alcohol, of course—inside the joint was another matter. Junior had been deeply sensitized to the damage drugs could do while hanging around with Tommy Lyons in the late fifties. The little jockey’s promising career had been shattered by drug use, and his constant fixation on feeding his addiction was unnerving. Junior grew exhausted just observing his partner’s endless quest for mood-altering junk—morphine, demerol, and dilaudin pills stolen from hundreds of doctor’s bags. Kripplebauer swore he would never let the drug monkey climb onto his back.

  Prison was a different story. Junior dealt drugs whenever and wherever he was incarcerated. Whether it was a county jail in Philly, a tough state prison like Huntingdon in Pennsylvania, or a maximum-security federal penitentiary like Atlanta, Junior always rose to the top of the criminal food chain; he knew how to circumvent institutional impediments and get over on people. His schemes for getting the stuff inside the walls and razor-wire fences of highly contraband-conscious penal facilities were nothing short of ingenious.

  For years—decades, in fact—Kripplebauer smuggled drugs into prisons throughout the country using the most mundane of gimmicks—Philly newspapers and the U.S. Postal Service. Little did the authorities know that daily tabloids were bringing not only local and national news into their institutions, but also substantial quantities of uppers, downers, and anything else a prisoner might want to ingest to speed up or ameliorate the slow and mind-numbing passage of time behind bars.

  Junior learned the newspaper scam from Tommy Lyons, who had learned the rudiments from Noisy Baker, a legendary con at Eastern State Penitentiary. Noisy, whose real name was Jacob Wright, may have thought up the ruse himself or been cut in on the deal by older cell partners during one of his many trips through the Fairmount fortress. Regardless of the originator, the scheme—if smartly executed—was a guaranteed winner. Elegant in its simplicity, it was designed to snooker all those lazy souls who judge a book by its cover. In this case, however, it wasn’t a book, just a Philadelphia newspaper.

  “We were doing time in the Dade County Jail in Miami,” says Kripplebauer of his 1959 incarceration for robbery, “when Tommy showed me a sweet little trick. Back then all newspapers delivered through the mail like the Philadelphia Daily News.ame folded in a plain brown wrapper and stamped with an official newspaper logo on the outside. The prison guards never bothered to inspect the papers, figuring they were clean and had arrived straight from the newspaper’s distribution center. Tommy said we should carefully unwrap the newspapers, make sure the logo seal was undisturbed, and send the brown wrapper back home to one of our friends. They’d then repackage it and send it back to us with some presents inside. Guess what? It worked like a charm. So well, in fact, I was able to run the scam for 30 years. In fact, they may be still using it today. By the time Tommy and me were out of Miami and doing our state bit at Raiford [Florida State Penitentiary], we were hip deep in pills.

  “Each time I got a Philadelphia Daily News.ent to me from home, I’d mail the wrapper back to Tony DiBattista or one of my other friends in Philly. He’d then tape an assortment of pills, maybe 30 to 40 of them, between various pages of the paper. Place the paper in the official wrapper, make sure it looked company-packaged, and mail it back to us fourth-or fifth-class mail. A guard or inmate would come down the corridor each morning handing out the mail, and our stash of drugs would be dropped on our bunk. Every other page in the sports, business, and entertainment sections would come taped with pills: uppers and downers, all sorts of stuff. We were in business. It was that simple.

  “Initially we were just getting bennies [amphetamine pills] sent to us, but we were still making two, three, four dollars a pill. Everything was tough, if not impossible to come by in prison, and getting real drugs inside the joint was quite a coup. Everybody smoked cigarettes and they were the coin of the realm, but drugs were really something special. And getting a few dollars a pill was big money back then. Everybody inside wanted them, but you had to have money.

  “Over the years, the newspaper con continued to work. Just about
every place I was at was dumb to it. Even when the newspaper distribution centers went to plastic wrappers instead of paper or when I was in some tough, level-five federal institutions, I could still pull off the pill scam. For example, at places like Lewisburg and Atlanta there were probably 4,000 to 5,000 inmates, and they were getting maybe 2,000 to 3,000 newspapers each day from around the country. The guards on all the cellblocks were supposed to open the papers and make sure nothing was being smuggled inside, but they were lazy. They just handed them out. They never inspected them. The guards were too stressed, too busy; there wasn’t enough time to do everything. So I got my newspaper and my daily supply of drugs thanks to the newspaper industry and the U.S. mail.”

  Most men on ice for extended periods of time manage life as best they can. Some reminisce about the good times and daydream about the good times they hope to have again, once they get out. Some can’t handle the monotony, the close confinement, the never-ending threats from fellow inmates and guards, and they fall into deep depressions and have to be kept under close watch to prevent suicide attempts. Others cope with the oppressive conditions in various ways, such as throwing themselves into vigorous exercise and becoming fanatical joggers or weight-lifters. And some even blossom despite the iron bars and concrete surroundings. Junior was among the latter. He thrived. His restless, imaginative mind was always working, always looking to get over on the man, always looking for the best escape route, always making an extra dollar or two through some scam. Invariably, he would become one of the most successful prison entrepreneurs wherever the authorities chose to incarcerate him. Just as he was an indefatigable money-earner on the street, he was similarly motivated to make a buck while behind bars. The newspaper con was a staple of Junior’s imprisonment portfolio. Other scams were worthy of an Academy Award for brazenness and creativity. His drug operation at several tough federal institutions was a classic example.

  “I always took notice of the way things worked,” says Kripplebauer modestly. “Each jail has its own culture, unique characteristics, ways of doing things. While I was locked up at a joint, I realized that with the right help and proper game plan some interesting stuff could be pulled off. I kept my eyes and ears open and eventually hooked up with the young clerk in the chaplain’s office. His name was Mark. He was a tall, good-looking kid who was attracting a lot of attention. He was doing his first serious bit in a place like Lewisburg and a lot of the wolves in the joint wanted to cozy up to him bad. He was pretty nervous about the situation ’cause Lewisburg had some hardcore dudes, so I made him a proposition he couldn’t resist. I’d protect him from the wolves, and he’d do a couple favors for me in the prison chapel.

  “I told him I wanted a sticker from one of the boxes that were coming into the chapel. The prison chapel was regularly receiving donations from various religious organizations around the country. Things like books, magazines, and other religious paraphernalia were always being shipped in by concerned groups looking out for the moral welfare of the inmates. It gave me an idea.

  “Well, one day Mark comes up to me with a present. It’s the sticker and brown wrapping paper used by the Maryknoll Sisters out of Baltimore to send shipments of religious items up to the penitentiary. The official emblem of the world-renowned missionaries brought a smile to my face, and in no time at all I had that baby in the mail and on its way up to friends in Philly. They followed my instructions and repackaged another box of goodies for me and the other God-fearing guys at the facility. But instead of the usual Maryknoll goods such as Bibles, old copies of Reader’s Digest,.nd boring Psalm books, there were 30 pounds of grass, meth, cigarettes, and a wide assortment of pills. It was quite a bounty, a pharmaceutical treasure chest. As an added touch they threw in a hunk of provolone cheese and a Genoa salami.

  “Tony drove the box down to Baltimore from Philly and put it in the mail with the Maryknoll sticker on it. When the box arrived at Lewisburg, it didn’t draw a bit of attention from the guards. Religious stuff from the Maryknoll Missionaries and a dozen other groups were coming in all the time. No one paid attention or gave it a second thought. The chaplain, a Catholic priest, went down to the prison mail room, picked up his mail and my box, and brought it back to the chapel storeroom, where there were a dozen or two just like it stacked up along the walls waiting to be opened. These boxes could sit there for months before inmate clerks would get to them and distribute the goods to those few inmates who were really looking to be saved. But this box from Philly had something more valuable than King James Bibles and religious songbooks. My man Mark got to the box and started passing the goods on to me. The place was higher than a kite for a good month. I even had the good sense to have Tony pack a primo bottle of Scotch for Phil Ristelli, the head of one of the New York families, who was in Lewisburg at the time. He appreciated the gesture, which put me in good with him and his Italian crew.

  “The authorities, on the other hand, were livid. They knew something was up, but they were totally dumbfounded as to where all the shit was coming from. They thought there must have been a breakdown in the visiting room or possibly some guards to have gone bad for so much shit to surface.

  “And they stayed pissed, ’cause the place remained high for months. Mark and I hooked up the scheme so that it ran for months. We brought in another eight boxes of goodies this way, each weighing between 25 to 35 pounds. I had so many different drugs, cigarettes, and other goodies coming in I was beginning to think I was the proprietor of an outlet store for SmithKline and R. J. Reynolds. It was quite a franchise. Hell, I had as much stuff as some neighborhood pharmacies.”

  In order to fully appreciate the monetary windfall the Maryknoll Sisters sticker scheme brought in, consider the income earned from one minuscule segment of the booty. Rexall nasal inhalers were a hot item in prison. The more inventive inmates had discovered that the cotton swabs inside the inhalers were laced with enough amphetamines to generate a quick high. Some men broke the inhalers open, put a piece of the cotton in their coffee, and stayed awake for days. Banned by the prison authorities, the inhalers drew premium dollars. Ever the shrewd entrepreneur, Junior would crack open his cache of inhalers, encase the cotton swabs in wax paper or plastic wrap, and carefully slice each one into numerous smaller units. Junior made a buck a slice, or $25 from one Rexall inhaler.

  The marijuana stash was doled out on a small wooden ice cream spoon. One spoon was worth $10, or whatever the customer had of equivalent value. Some men traded commissary slips for reefer. Two spoons of reefer could get you a $25 commissary order. Though prohibited by the authorities, most prisoners had money for a cash sale. Money was usually smuggled in during contact visits with friends and relatives. Guys on the block were always looking for change of $100 bills. It generally cost $10 to break a hundred. Junior says a person “could make a good living just breaking hundreds.”

  While most prisoners lamented their predicament and fought off chronic boredom, fear, and depression as best they could, Junior was becoming the Jay Gould of the barbed-wire set.

  Many prisoners took notice. Some of them Junior definitely preferred not to deal with. Prison gangs, lethal by any definition, were both admiring and envious of his various operations. They were generally willing to do anything to get a piece of someone else’s action, but they never moved on the well-respected Philly burglar. Junior was “good people,” no wimp, and he had a lot of friends.

  14. Courtrooms and Prisons

  KRIPPLEBAUER WAS DOING HIS TIME, staying out of trouble—at least not getting caught—when a brief phone conversation with folks back home on June 21, 1979, threw everything into turmoil. It heralded another frenetic chapter in his war with law enforcement and added another item to his already impressive criminal portfolio: that of prison escape artist.

  “Phone calls were hard to make at Atlanta,” says Kripplebauer. “Maybe you’d get five minutes once a month. They were just plain difficult to acquire. Well, here I am on one of those rare occasions, I’m making a call
on a Friday night, and looking to get some good news from back home and look what I get—the Feds have arrested Mickie. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. I was furious. She just got out of prison and was trying to keep her nose clean when they bang her again. I had called Dottie Cavenaugh, a girl from Jersey I had started to see while Mickie and I were apart, and she says, ‘Did you hear? Did somebody tell you? Is that why you’re calling?’

  “‘Hear what?’ I say to her. ‘I haven’t heard a thing. What the hell are you talking about?’

  “‘They arrested Mickie,’ said Dottie.

  “‘They what?.

  “She went on to tell me that the cops came to Mickie’s house with a search warrant and went through her place. She said Tommy Seher had flipped and started cooperating with the government. Not in Texas, but in North Carolina. He told the authorities that he had done a lot of work in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro over the years with Mickie and me, and there was a lot of stolen property in Mickie’s place in New Jersey. She was arrested and taken to the Camden County Jail. The government wanted to take her back to New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, but Mickie was fighting extradition. She had even cut her wrists with a razor in order to delay the extradition hearing. The more I heard, the angrier I got. It was all based on Tommy’s statement that we had done work down there in North Carolina and supposedly substantiated by some crystal ashtrays they found in Mickie’s that belonged to a rich woman in North Carolina whose house had been burgled. Dottie said some cop named Larry Davis from North Carolina and an FBI agent called Skarbek were with the Jersey cops when they went through the house.