The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  While Munson waited, Sanders tried to organize his colleagues. In order to convict Gilkey, he e-mailed them, they needed to send any information about recent thefts that matched Gilkey’s MO as soon as possible.

  The responses poured in, but not all were helpful.8 A dealer from New York wrote that she had been approached twice by a man who said that he was buying books for the child of his girlfriend, but because she had found that the shipping addresses had not matched the billing addresses, she had not put the orders through.

  Sanders wrote back: I need details. If he approaches you again, please play along and agree to send the book. Right this minute a motel in California is being staked out by police and he’s expecting The Grapes of Wrath in the morning. If all goes well, he’ll be in jail this time tomorrow. Confidential . . . if we don’t get him, we need to run another sting operation.

  Later that day, Peter Howard, of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, wrote to Sanders about having lost two books in 2000 to a man who had sent his elderly “uncle” in to pick them up.

  Then Erik Heldfond of Heldfond Book Gallery, where Gilkey had stolen two books in 2001, wrote to Sanders that his wife, Lane, had been in the store that day. At the time, she believed she was handing the books to the caller’s cousin. It might be helpful for her to see a photo of guy in custody, as she has a sharp eye and longgggg memory, he wrote. She estimated that he was in his late 20s, early 30s, 5’9”, brown hair, medium build, clean shaven, GAP type attire. She noted that he didn’t speak normally, saying he’d just come from the dentist.

  Ed Smith, of Washington, reminded Sanders that he had lost a Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, near fine in dust jacket, real clean copy and a 1/99 ltd. ed. book by Samuel Beckett titled No Knife bound in leather and with a glassine wrapper in a box (fine condition, as new). Of the sting, he wrote: Great news . . . mums still the word, right?

  Shortly after, Sanders sent an e-mail to the trade, summarizing what they had learned so far and asking dealers who had been victims if they thought they might be able to identify the thief in a photo lineup.

  Gilkey spent the night in the Windham Hotel in San Francisco. The next morning, he emptied his pockets of anything that might identify him, taking only his hotel room key, a phone card, a couple of credit card receipts, and $20 to use for lunch. At around eleven A.M., he boarded the Caltrain for the hourlong ride. Out the window he watched graffiti-smothered industrial buildings speed by, then the back sides of down-and-out neighborhoods, and eventually the palm trees and foreign-car dealerships on the edge of Palo Alto. There, he got off the train and walked two short blocks to the Sheraton.

  Strolling through the parking lot, Gilkey noticed the FedEx truck outside. If the book had not yet been delivered, it would be momentarily. As he approached the front desk, he thought he heard a click and people talking, the way they do on a police radio, but decided it was nothing and ignored it. He was just a few feet away from getting The Grapes of Wrath.

  When Gilkey asked for his package, the hotel clerk went to a back area where they kept the mail. Seconds later, the undercover agents handcuffed him, announcing he was under arrest. They radioed Munson, who was waiting in the parking lot.

  “I’m just coming from San Francisco,” Gilkey explained, “on my way to the Stanford library to do some research.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Munson asked him.

  “A man on Caltrain offered to pay me twenty bucks to pick up a book for him here.”

  Munson doubted the story and thought Gilkey looked “nervous and shifty-eyed,” but he had dealt with significant cases of fraud in which a transient was paid to do a pickup. There was a chance the story was true.

  “Okay, let’s take this a step further,” said one of the officers. “We’re going to unhandcuff you, take you back to the Caltrain station, give you the package—and you go meet the man, point him out to us.”

  “And don’t try to run,” one of the officers warned him. “We’ll be following you.”

  Gilkey considered the warning as he walked to the Caltrain station with a half-dozen police officers following him. Stanford University was about a mile away, and if he made a mad dash for it, he might just lose the cops. What’s the worst thing that can happen? he wondered. I don’t think they will shoot me. But a mile was a long way. As the undercover officers followed him, he secretly chewed up the credit card receipts in his pocket and spat them out. They reached the station, but instead of running, he stalled for time, approaching various people, asking them if they had seen the man he’d told the police about.

  Munson asked the people working at Caltrain if there had been a man hanging around who fit Gilkey’s description of him: white male, forty to fifty, white hair, walking with a cane. There had not. After Gilkey had wandered around the station for about thirty minutes, it was pretty clear to the officers that he was lying. They took him in for questioning.

  At the police station, Gilkey presented himself as a helpful citizen who had only been trying to assist a man with a cane who couldn’t walk very well.9 While he told the officers his name, he wouldn’t answer other questions, such as where he lived. They took the hotel card key in his pocket, but he wouldn’t tell them which hotel it was from. Munson then discovered that Gilkey, who had actually given them his real name, was on probation.

  And then it began to unravel. Gilkey told the police that the man on the train had instructed him, “Just pick up the book that’s waiting for Heath Hawkins,” yet at the counter he had said, “I’m picking up the book for Heather Hawkins.” Heather Hawkins was the name on the credit card.

  “So how did you know the name Heather? You told us just Heath,” asked Munson.

  “Oh yeah, maybe the guy told me Heather and Heath Hawkins,” said Gilkey.

  “You’re lying,” said Munson.

  Gilkey, who seemed quite calm at this point, fecklessly stuck with his story, but Munson had a toehold. Then, in Gilkey’s pocket, Munson found a crumpled prepaid phone card, which the telephone company traced to three calls made at 10:11, 10:56, and 11:25 A.M. the previous day. They were all to Ken Lopez, the Massachusetts dealer.

  “Oh yeah, I was lying to you then,” said Gilkey, meaning his slip with the name on the credit card, “but I’m not lying to you now.”

  He was off to jail.

  8

  Treasure Island

  Gilkey was to be held in jail for two days. Sanders e-mailed bookseller Ed Smith, a possible Gilkey victim:

  Subject: Do you know the way to San Jose?

  As you know, we got him. But only for 48 hours. We are frantically trying to help the detective with facts to prove a case with the DA on Friday morning.

  He’s a lying sumbitch (of course). They always are.

  I need to hear from more people.

  The next day, more reports of thefts flew in.

  As suggested, Munson e-mailed Lane Heldfond of Heldfond Book Gallery a series of photos and asked if she could identify the thief. In addition to having a good memory in general, Heldfond’s recollection of faces is particularly acute. After looking at the six photos, she said one of them looked very close, but that the man’s complexion appeared to be a little ruddier, he had a bit less hair, and his face seemed puffier than the man she remembered. These were subtle differences, but she picked up on them nonetheless.

  Munson, impressed by Heldfond’s powers of observation, explained to her why the man looked different. Gilkey had been on medication for alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which makes the skin both reddish and a bit bloated. Not only had she identified him correctly, she had identified how his face, which she had seen for only a minute in 2001, had changed.

  Heldfond had nailed it. Now Munson had a positive ID.

  On February 1, 2003, Sanders e-mailed ABAA members to relay details of the sting and to let them know that Gilkey had met bail (he had used money from a savings account) and been released. “Whereabouts unknown.”

  Immediately, Sanders’s e-mail inbox f
illed with a flurry of appreciative e-mails. Even if Gilkey had been set free, thanks to Sanders’s efforts, the bookselling community was closer than ever to recovering its books and putting the thief behind bars.

  ALTHOUGH THEFT has always been a threat to rare book dealers, in the past century, nothing has made it easier for thieves to sell their ill-gotten goods than the Internet. In all my conversations with Ken Sanders, the only subject that riled him as much as news of a recent theft was eBay. It’s not only hot property that shows up on that website, but fraud of all sorts, he says. Even sellers with honorable intentions don’t necessarily know a first edition from a book club edition—and some don’t even know a first edition from a later edition, as I had learned firsthand. Others know perfectly well, but are out to swindle naive buyers.

  “A woman here in the valley called me up,” said Sanders, “and she says, ‘I just purchased an autographed Catcher in the Rye on eBay for fifteen hundred.’ And I stopped her right there. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to see this book, I don’t want you to bring it to my store. It’s no good, it’s a fake. You got taken. Go get your money back.’ You cannot buy any kind of real J. D. Salinger-autographed book for ten times that, let alone The Catcher in the Rye. I tried to point it out to her. I said, ‘Look, why do you think that of the hundreds of sophisticated collectors and booksellers out there, you would be the lucky one?’ It’s one of the most desired and difficult twentieth-century autographs to get—on the most desired book. Of course it’s not the first edition! Because forgers aren’t going to ruin a valuable first edition. They’re going to pick a worthless edition and put the autograph on that.”

  One of the reasons people are so ripe for the rip-off, according to Sanders, is what he calls the “Antiques Roadshow/ eBay syndrome.” Due to the television show (where he has since appeared as a rare book expert) and the website, there’s much more awareness of books’ potential value, but buyers aren’t equipped with enough knowledge to guard themselves against fraud.

  “People call me up and say, ‘I got a first edition of Gone With the Wind!’” said Sanders. “Well, no they don’t.” (To start, there were more than a hundred first editions printed, each labeled as such, but only those from the very first run with “Published May, 1936” are true first editions. Finding one in collectible condition, especially with a jacket, is next to impossible.) “They don’t know what a first edition is. But they know it means something good, they know it means something valuable. And that’s from watching too many Antiques Roadshows. Mix that with the speed of the Internet and the nine-hundred-pound gorilla that’s eBay—any law enforcement person will tell you eBay is the largest legalized fence in the universe.”

  I called a computer systems security analyst named Mark Seiden for a less impassioned opinion (all of Sanders’s opinions are impassioned), but he echoed Sanders almost word for word, saying, “eBay is the largest legalized fence of stolen property in the world.” He said that eBay has avoided liability because they are not technically auctioneers, since there is no person hosting, no physical place where the auctions are held. “They say they are a marketplace,” said Seiden. “Period.” But however legal the business is, the fact is that unscrupulous sellers flourish there.

  In another conversation with Sanders, I relayed Seiden’s confirmation, which got him fired up again. He told me he sees forgeries on eBay all the time. “I once saw that a guy was selling a John Lennon signature for a dollar,” he said. “So I called the buyer and asked if he had got an appraisal. He tells me, ‘Those rare book dealers wanted to charge me a hundred dollars for an appraisal.’ So I asked him, ‘Why not get one? If it’s real, you’ve got a five-thousand-dollar signature.’ He told me to eat shit and die.”

  Sanders told me that several years ago he and his ABAA colleague Ken Lopez met with representatives of eBay, suggesting strategies to combat fraud, to no avail. “Lopez and I, we wasted nine months in negotiations with eBay,” said Sanders. “They never followed a single suggestion. They kept stringing us along, but they never changed one single thing.”

  Ironically, one of the reasons people are getting cheated, according to Sanders, is the practice of providing certificates of authenticity.

  “When material comes in,” he said, explaining the dealer’s traditional process, “you try to establish its provenance, but in many cases it’s impossible to do, so the trail ends at some point. You just have to look at the material, the situation it comes from, ask people who consider themselves experts, and have them look at it. You try to put as much of the story together as you can. In the end, because of eBay, now everyone wants a certificate of authenticity, but as I point out to people: Who signed this certificate? As far as I’m concerned, no legit book dealer or autograph trader that I’ve ever known in my life would ever offer a certificate of authenticity. That’s a warning bell right there, the mere offering of one. That’s become a popular paradigm on eBay. It’s what’s allowed predators to be so successful and grow so large.”

  One of the dealers I met at the New York fair, Dan Gregory, of Between the Covers Books in Merchantville, New Jersey, worries about yet another problem he sees on eBay: fake dust jackets. Gregory is an expert in dust jackets and explained the phenomenon. Given that the cost of a first edition of The Great Gatsby without a dust jacket is $150 and one with can fetch $4,000, there’s great incentive to print one yourself (possible with current technologies and a lot of savvy) or to swap jackets with a less valuable copy of the book.

  “If I were a bad guy instead of a good guy, that’s what I’d be doing,” said Gregory, who predicts that in ten or twenty years, when those who have found deals too good to be true on eBay decide to sell their collections, they’ll find that indeed, those deals were too good to be true.

  ONE REASON Gilkey had been so difficult to catch was that he was not selling his stolen books on eBay or any other website. And that’s one of the reasons his capture was so satisfying to Sanders. Shortly after he e-mailed his colleagues about Gilkey’s arrest, Sanders went to San Francisco for that memorable California International Antiquarian Book Fair. As is typical for this fair, opening day drew thousands of collectors who, once through the front doors, were busy tracking down books. Even among this crowd of hungry collectors, and with a booth full of gems like the Book of Mormon and Kennedy’s The Strategy of Peace, Sanders still couldn’t keep his mind off Gilkey. For three years, he had kept after his colleagues both to report thefts and to be on the lookout for attempts to resell the stolen material, and nothing had come of it. They’d come so close, but they still hadn’t nailed the “sumbitch,” and not only was Gilkey out on bail, he was now paroled in San Francisco.

  Since Sanders and Lopez decided not to post the mug shot or hang wanted posters of Gilkey around the fair (in order not to corrupt the identification process in a potential lineup), they were among only a handful of dealers who might recognize him.

  So when Gilkey walked through the front door of the fair and immediately felt he was being watched, it may have been in his head. Still, he was determined to find someone who would buy one of the books he had brought because he needed to raise money for an attorney. He drifted from one dealer’s booth to the next, admiring books, asking questions. At one of his favorite stops, the Heritage Book Shop booth, he admired Ayn Rand’s The Fountain-head . He thought that one of the owners, Ben or Lou Weinstein, recognized him because, as he says, “I did business with him,” Gilkey’s euphemism for stealing. “I didn’t take anything from him, though,” he protested. “I had a taxi driver pick it up.”

  Gilkey tried to sell Heritage his stolen copy of The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells, but they declined. He wanted at least $1,000, but they offered only $500. He also approached John Crichton of Brick Row Books, who was unaware that this was the man whose father had picked up The Mayor of Casterbridge. At Sumner and Stillman Rare Books, Gilkey ogled a first edition of George Orwell’s 1984, which was priced at about $2,000. At another booth, he was intrigued
to learn from a dealer that author Lewis Carroll had invented the dust jacket.1

  Gilkey had read that John Dunning, author of the best-selling Cliff Janeway rare book mystery series that had so inspired him, was speaking, but didn’t see him at the fair. He would have liked to have asked Dunning for his autograph.

  Gilkey told me that he did stop by Sanders’s booth. He glanced at a number of titles by Wallace Stegner, whom he had never heard of, and saw books about Mormons, which he had absolutely no interest in, so he didn’t linger. At the time, he had no idea that Sanders was the man who had set his capture in motion.

  Despite the heightened awareness of several of the booksellers and Gilkey’s motivations to unload some of his stolen wares, no criminal activity was identified during the three-day fair.2 No one reported any books missing, and no one noticed one man’s peddling of suspicious items. It was the next month, on March 25, that Sanders received word that the activity had started up again. Gilkey had surfaced in San Francisco, attempting to buy books with bad checks. Sanders sent another e-mail to ABAA members:

  Earlier this afternoon he went to Tom Goldwasser’s shop and attempted to buy several John Kendrick Bangs first editions. Be on lookout! Gilkey is 5’9”, 130 pounds, mid 30s, straight brown hair, rounded shoulders. He is described as soft spoken, clean shaven, casually dressed with windbreaker and cap. While in Goldwasser’s shop today, he was carrying newspapers, including a copy of Art News. He said he had a collection of John Kendrick Bangs. Also, another older man in shop may have been there to distract. He was in his 50s, taller, 6’, grayish hair.

  Two days later, Sanders learned from Munson that Gilkey had shown up in court without his attorney. The hearing had to be postponed. Gilkey was set to go to court again, but Munson said it would be six to twelve months before any depositions. Due to standard delays in the court calendar, Gilkey was free for up to another year.