Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can
A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue
By Dean Jobb

He was an accomplished con artist, a prince of thieves, a folk hero of Jazz Age New York. Audacious, charming, a gentleman with gentle manners who stood apart from the criminal riffraff. Impeccably dressed, he crashed society parties so he could assess future victims and memorize the layouts of homes. Like a phantom, he entered the bedrooms of his targets in their country mansions while they dined downstairs with guests, or when they slept mere feet away. He could distinguish real pearls and diamonds from fakes and never left fingerprints.

Adopting the role of “Dr. Gibson,” Arthur Barry targeted the uber-rich: bankers, investors, industrialists. He robbed Jessie Woolworth Donahue, heiress to the Woolworth fortune; Percy Rockefeller, among the richest men in the world; Lady Edwina Mountbatten, a member of the British royal family; Oklahoma oil tycoon Joshua Cosden; and executives of major corporations like General Motors, American Can, and Standard Oil. He even managed to circumvent the security detail accompanying the visiting Prince of Wales and take him on a guided tour of New York’s speakeasies.

In his prime, from the early 1920s to 1927, he stole jewellery worth an estimated $60-million in today’s currency. His attitude was simple: “Anyone who can afford to wear a $100,000 necklace can afford to lose it,” which reflected his knowledge that insurance would cover the losses. (In some cases, he even anonymously sold jewels back to insurance companies.) One society lady, who encountered him in the darkness of her bedroom and was treated solicitously, later said, “I know he’s terrible but isn’t he charming?” Life magazine called him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived.”

The book is A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue and it’s not a stretch to describe its author, Dean Jobb, as Canada’s Erik Larson. Both write complex, best-selling historical nonfiction and are masters of pacing and the art of reconstruction. Where Larson’s work ranges from true crime to the sinking of the Lusitania to the life of Winston Churchill during World War II, Jobb’s specialty is true crime, specifically stories that fell under the radar. As he puts it, “hidden gems from the attics of history, loaded with drama and insight and with plenty to tell us about the past and the present.” [Full disclosure: Dean is a colleague of mine in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College.]

In his most recent books, Jobb explored just that. Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation (2015), introduced readers to Leo Koretz, a Ponzi-scheme conman who bilked hundreds of people out of millions in the 1920s. The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (2021), retraced the investigation and eventual arrest of Canadian serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who poisoned as many as ten people in the U.S., Canada, and England in the late 19^th century.

Even at the time, a “gentleman thief” like Arthur Barry was a popular stock character in fiction. In 1898, A. J. Raffles, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, was a cultured crook, the subject of multiple novels and, later, theatrical productions, radio plays, and movies and TV shows. (One detective called Barry the “dinner-time Raffles.”) Beginning in 1905, French author Maurice Leblanc published a series of short stories featuring a gentleman thief named Arsène Lupin, who became the hero of stage plays, films, TV shows, and comic book adaptations. Leslie Charteris introduced Simon Templar (“The Saint”) in 1928. In a series of short stories and novels over three decades, the suave, unflappable Templar, dressed in Savile Row suits, operated both outside and within the law.

But the real thing is so much more attractive to the news media, then and now. In Barry’s case, the elusive thief even competed for coverage with a major event like Charles Lindbergh’s historic longest solo transatlantic flight.

One might think the book would grind to a halt when Barry was arrested in 1927, tried and convicted, and sent to Sing Sing—he was later transferred to Auburn, a prison near Syracuse—to serve a 25-year sentence. But factor in a romance and a spectacular jail break.

In 1924, Barry met Anna Blake, a political organizer more than a decade older than Barry. When her husband died, they married and Blake would later insist she hadn’t known her husband’s frequent absences were unrelated to what she understood was his job as a self-employed salesman and successful gambler. (It seems a little hard to believe that she never suspected something was unusual about his secretive life and wealth.) She remained loyal to him after his arrest, and he confessed to dozens of burglaries to ensure she wouldn’t be charged as an accomplice.

While in prison, he learned that Blake had cancer and decided he had to escape to be with her. In 1929, he helped instigate a blood-soaked riot that allowed him and two others to escape the prison as bullets flew. (Meanwhile, as Auburn burned, two inmates died and more than a dozen were wounded, and five guards and four firefighters were wounded.) Recovering from a bullet wound with Blake in the safety of an apartment she had rented in New York, he lightened his hair and grew a toothbrush moustache (it hadn’t yet fallen out of favour because of the association with Adolph Hitler). Although he kept out of sight, he was suspected of every jewel heist that hit the news and even thought to have been involved in what the media called “the crime of the century,” the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son.

In 1932, having moved to a farmhouse in rural New Jersey, Barry was finally arrested again, convicted of escaping custody, and returned to Auburn with seven years tacked onto his remaining prison term. About the short time they had together, Anna Blake said, “We knew it could not last, but oh how we cherished those precious three years.” The cancer finally killed her in 1940 while Barry was incarcerated in the notoriously overcrowded Attica prison. Nine years later, he was freed to enter a world he wouldn’t recognize, one of television, rockets, and fear of a civilization-ending atomic war. He would end his life as a waiter in a Massachusetts diner, earning fifty dollars a week. Like a coda to this yarn, he was profiled in magazines, became the subject of a biography published in 1961, and appeared on TV where he was interviewed by celebrity journalist Mike Wallace and was a guest on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show.”

Jobb’s gift is his talent as a researcher and his ability to turn historical facts into a propulsive work of creative nonfiction. With relatively little known about Barry aside from some letters, gushy media reports, and the biography (more of a hagiography), Jobb fills the blanks with mostly engaging details about the birth of celebrity culture, how criminal investigations were handled in the 1920s and ‘30s (clumsily), and the evolution of prison reform. But Jobb never lets the narrative drift too far from his charming rascal of a protagonist.