Review: A Gentleman and a Thief is a rollicking real-life heist story | Canada Voices

• Title: A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue
• Author: Dean Jobb
• Genre: True Crime
• Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
• Pages: 448

The archetype of the “gentleman thief”– the criminal, that is, who carries out his activities not with violence, but with charm, sophistication, panache and a tailor-made code of conduct – has dwelled mostly in the fictional realm via characters like Arsène Lupin, Raffles, Simon Templar, Danny Ocean, and Thomas Crown.

Curiously, many of the real-life gentleman thieves committed their crimes in France. Such as Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole more than 200 artworks from European museums, which he hoarded for his own private appreciation; or Victor Lustig, best known for selling the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers in the 1920s; or Albert Spaggiari, mastermind behind the 1976 Société Générale bank heist in Nice who escaped custody by jumping from a judge’s office window.

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A notable non-francophone example of the breed is American Arthur Barry – “the greatest jewel thief that ever lived,” per Life magazine – who, throughout the 1920s, unnerved (“terrorized” seems too strong a word for someone as polite, well-dressed and non-violent as Barry was) wealthy enclaves around Long Island and Westchester County, New York, with his daring and stealthy home invasions.

In his rollicking new book, A Gentleman and a Thief, Nova Scotia-based author Dean Jobb, mostly recently, of the award-winning The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, sums Barry up as “a bold imposter, a charming con artist and a master cat burglar rolled into one.”

Barry’s victims – Rockefellers, bankers, industrialists and tycoons of all stripes – were at the pinnacle of their age of excess. He stole from a Woolworth fortune heiress (the equivalent, today, of $10-million in pearls), and from the wife of the Prince of Wales’ cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten.

His distinct MO involved first choosing a target from the newspaper society pages. He’d then proceed to case their joint – “joint” in this case being the massive, double-digit-roomed marble-clad piles in which they invariably lived – by slipping in through a second-storey window to acquaint himself with its layout prior to the actual theft. He did this while clad in dapper suits, fedoras and gloves.

Barry’s habit of accessing homes with a ladder while his quarries were having a meal downstairs resulted in his various monikers. He was called the Dinner Thief, the Ladder Burglar, the Phantom and the American Raffles – the latter a reference to the fictional British character, a star cricketer who used his refined manner and ease with the upper classes to relieve them of their precious gems.

Other times, he’d boldly infiltrate a garden party by springing, fully be-tuxed, from a nearby bush, then mingling with guests before wandering upstairs on a reconnaissance mission. Though born into a close-knit working-class Irish-immigrant family, Barry’s ability to mimic the Harvard accents he overheard growing up in Massachusetts, along with his impeccable appearance and manners, reassured the elites he mingled with that he was one of their own.

The heist Barry considered his greatest brought him face to face with his victims: the financier Jesse Livermore and his wife, Dorothea. When the latter told Barry that some of the jewellery he’d just pocketed had sentimental value, he cemented his genteel reputation by returning it to her (while, it must be said, still keeping thousands of dollars’ worth of other trinkets). “I know he’s terrible,” she would later say. “But isn’t he charming?”

The Livermore “masterpiece,” as Barry called it, would paradoxically lead to a 19-year incarceration from which – motivated by his desire to care for his wife, Anna, who’d just been diagnosed with cancer – he naturally managed to escape. His three years on the lam were spent eking out a modest, seemingly upright existence in suburban and rural New Jersey.

That idyll came to an abrupt and improbable end though, when he became a prime suspect in the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Barry, speculation went, was one of the few people capable of stealing the millionaire’s son from his room. (Never mind that he’d only ever stolen jewellery.)

Whether it’s political and social events or the weather, Jobb is a consummate scene-setter and context-provider, making this a book about more than just the stylish thief who furnishes its through line. He touches on class, the Depression and New Deal, the mood and excesses of an America recently out of war and giddily awash in money, and the prison reform movement.

To wit, the rebuilt Auburn prison that Barry would return to following his escape was bore little resemblance to the dungeon-like place he’d escaped from, it having been decided, in the interim, that prisoners might have a better chance of reform if they were given things like toilets, windows and vegetables.

It’s the nuance of his character as much as the audacity of his crimes that makes Barry such a worthy subject. As Jobb shows, Barry didn’t lack for a moral compass. While a member of the U.S. medical corps in the First World War, he put himself in harm’s way often enough to be recommended for the army’s second-highest bravery decoration. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he spearheaded, while in prison, the sale of war bonds to support overseas troops. He loved his wife enough to confess all his crimes so she wouldn’t be implicated in them.

And from the vantage point of this new age of excess we live in, it’s easy enough to understand Barry’s own justification for his actions: “Anyone who could afford to wear a $100,000 necklace,” he reasoned, “could afford to lose it.”

Two other recent New York-set true crime tales

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, Margalit Fox (Random House, 336 pages) Had Arthur Barry lived 30 years earlier, he might well have sold the proceeds of his crimes to Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, a German-Jewish immigrant who, in the late 1880s, arranged the fencing of reams of stolen luxury goods from her HQ on New York’s Lower East Side through her own network of criminals. When the law caught onto her, Mandelbaum fled briefly to Toronto, then to nearby Hamilton, where her capture by police while in possession of jewels, which would be valued today at about US$1-million, prompted this diss from the Hamilton Spectator: “The Toronto idea of hunting for criminals is something that the average mind cannot readily grasp.”

The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld, Dan Slater (Little, Brown and Company, 432 pages) The events of Slater’s book take place right after those of Fox’s, and slightly before Jobb’s, during Prohibition, in the so-called Progressive Era of late-19th to early-20th century New York. At the time, mobsters were led by Arnold Roth­stein – famous for allegedly fixing the 1919 World Series, and for his mentoring of mob figures Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano – who ruled New York’s hardscrabble Lower East Side. Parallel to Rothstein’s colourful exploits, the book details the creation of an all-Jewish vigilante group (the “incorruptibles” of the title) by uptown German Jews who, spurred by concern over rising anti-immigrant sentiment owing to the crimes of their Eastern European co-religionists, attempted to tamp it all down.