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Dean Jobb, author of “A Gentleman and a Thief,” discusses his passion for writing about true crime stories and bringing history to life creatively. He focuses on the Jazz Age thief, Arthur Barry, known for daring jewel heists and his gentlemanly demeanor during crimes. Jobb delves into Barry’s heists, interactions with high society, and relationship with his wife, Anna Blake. The lack of sophisticated investigative techniques in that era allowed Barry to outsmart law enforcement, adding a thrilling element to the narrative. The cat-and-mouse game between Barry and Chief Detective Harold King highlights Barry’s antihero persona, making him a character that readers might root for despite his criminal activities.
click here to buy Dean Jobb’s book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Heists of a Jass-Age Thief.
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[0:00]Guys, this is Gary Jenkins. As you all know, you regulars know, I’m a retired intelligence unit detective of the Kansas City Police Department and now a podcaster. And I have a couple of documentary films that deal with the Kansas City Mafia. But today we’re not talking about me. Today we’re talking to Dean Jobe. He wrote a heck of a book. The publicist for the book producer sent me a copy of the book. I don’t read all these guys, as you know, but I do start reading them and I make notes from them. But this one, I started reading it and I loved it. I was hooked. I read the whole thing all the way through. It’s called A Gentleman and a Thief, The Daring Jewel Heist of a Jazz Age Rogue, Arthur Barry. Now, Arthur Barry was a jazz age rogue, if there ever was one. So let me, I’m gonna read you a review before we start talking. A top shelf work of true crime, Job tells Barry’s tale with both rigor and pathos. Painting a tender portrait of a crook who was never fearsome.
[1:02]This is liable to steal the reader’s hearts. That’s from Publishers Weekly, and it is a great book. There’s no doubt about it. So, Dean Jobes, welcome, and start off talking a little bit about your own writing history and how you got onto this story and some background on you, and then we’ll talk about the book. Well, I’m a former journalist, and over the years I’d written books. My beat as a reporter was covering the courts, covering criminal trials and anything going on in the courthouse. And my background was in history, and the two kind of collided in a nice way that I started writing features about old cases in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I live, and just got hooked with the storytelling, the way that true crime can give you a window on the past and dramatic events, interesting storylines. But you can also learn a lot about history. So about 10 years ago, Algonquin Books, my publisher, published Empire of Deception, and it was about a Chicago con man in the 20s, the jazz age. I love the era. Connection to me was when his Ponzi scheme collapsed, he hid out here in Nova Scotia. So I had some local ties to that story.
[2:12]My last book was called The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream about a Victorian era doctor who murdered as many as 10 people, most of them women, in three countries over a 15-year span. And it’s subtitled The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer because that was my focus. I wanted to know how he got away with it, which led me to understand a lot about the horrible plight of women in the Victorian era, the privilege that a doctor could use to avoid suspicion.
[2:44]And a lot about the era and the primitive early detection methods and forensics. So I teach part-time in a master’s program in creative nonfiction, and that’s what I bring to my books. The creative part not being…
[3:01]Making anything up, but the storytelling, creatively recreating scenes, recreating people and places, always faithful to, always well-researched and grounded in research, but really trying to bring history to life. And because of my background in legal coverage, I just gravitate to true crime stories. You sure did bring to life Arthur Berry, There’s no doubt about it. And the Jazz Age and the subculture that he operated in, both the criminal subculture and the subculture of the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of the world, of the very wealthy during this time. And so it just came alive to me. It was like reading a crime novel in a way. It was really, really well written. Well, I’ve described it as Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby, and that’s not really a stretch. Every good croak needs police on his tail, and there’s plenty in this story. But as well, The Great Gatsby was written during Barry’s heyday in the early 20s, and it described mansions and areas and the whole culture of New York’s upper crust on Long Island. In the exact places where Barry was casing mansions, crashing parties to find out where the jewels might be, and then breaking in later to steal what today would be millions and millions of dollars in jewelry.
[4:29]Yeah, it was amazing the amount of jewels that he stole and what it would have been worth. Of course, he got basically maybe 20% of what it was actually worth, which that’s the way a thief is. I mean, then they just go back and steal more. It’s not like they had to invest money into it. So he was truly a second story, man, too, is another thing I noticed about that. We talk about second story, man, this guy, Arthur Barry was a second story, but there’s no doubt about it. Yeah, the term may not be as well known today, but it really, it fit a fellow, Barry Zamo was this. He started out, he’d case a mansion and somebody he figured would have valuables, jewels up in their possession.
[5:11]And while the family was at dinner, he would find a ladder on the estate or nearby and put it up against the window, sneak in, sneak out, and of the second story. So he became very adept at that. And as time went on, he had to get a little more brazen because sometimes when people were home or weren’t home, they had their jewels on them. So he had to pick his time. And he discovered when people were home safely in bed was the time you could count on the jewels being there. So he would try to sneak into bedrooms and if he if he did confront somebody he was always gentle i mean the newspapers were calling him the gentleman bandit they didn’t know who it was but the this this kindly bandit who would assure people no you know don’t worry i’m only here for the jewels i won’t hurt you and sometimes even ask them how their night out was so he would try to put them at ease so he could go about his real job of finding and taking all the jewels.
[6:10]Really? And that Livermore heist was probably one of the best examples of that. So tell us about the Livermore heist.
[6:17]Well, this is one of his later ones, but it’s in the period. He’s for years looted mansions in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, and then in the Nassau County area of Long Island. And often those houses were empty or people were downstairs. But by 1920, his MO is, he has an accomplice to help him because it’s riskier confronting people in their homes. He’s been shot at. He knows the next time he breaks in, someone could have the drop on him and he could be looking down the barrel of a gun. So he gets a little muscle to help him, but he still has this put people at ease. And in the Livermore case, it started to become the heist from hell because they they figured the jewels were in a safe and livermore who was a wall street a gambler of the highest order and probably thought he could think these two hoods kept saying he couldn’t open the safe and one of the guys goes down the ladder again to get a chisel and a hammer to break the safe open so it means barry’s in the room a long time and he’s putting the the people people at ease. But Dorothea Livermore, the wife, starts thinking, you know, maybe I can play on this guy’s natural goodness. And he’s already taken some jewels, and she actually talks him into giving back a few rings for her and her husband that they said were like these pinky rings were so sentimental value.
[7:45]So he gallantly gave jewels back, which prompted his.
[7:51]His accomplice to say, let’s get out of here while we still got something.
[7:54]And they still did get lots of loot. But it was just this very rightly later claim that any other burglar is going to think this is nuts. But yeah, I did it. It seemed like the right thing to do. I gave back the loot as I was in mid-robber. Really. And another story I found interesting was maybe a little bit earlier in his career when he went out and partied with the Duke of Wales, who was the next king of England. And it was partying in one of these Long Island mansions. And, you know, if you’ve ever driven out in Long Island, I would have gotten New York listeners who probably had driven out. I was there once these huge mansions that sit back away from the road and, you know, with large grounds around them and, you know, right on the ocean and, and it would be easy to sneak up to them and then crawl up the side. Your worry would be if one of the staff happened to walk out or something. So, but, but he, they were having parties and he would infiltrate these parties. So tell us about that, his infiltration of parties. He had many methods. He would read the social pages and get a sense of who was around, who was in Palm Beach.
[8:59]He would figure out who’s rich and where they lived. Some wives, socialites, would appear in photos resplendent in their pearls and jewels. So this would help him and say, there’s a good target. But one of his methods was simply to put a tux on, jump over the wall of an estate, sneak up to the house and suddenly blend into a garden party, grab a cocktail like he belonged.
[9:24]And he was handsome. He knew how to dress. He knew how to feign an upper class accent. He was a working class Irish kid from Worcester, but he pulled it off. Incredibly charming. I mean, he was like a con man in these settings. But what he was doing was mingling and then finding an excuse to wander upstairs. And what he wanted to do was, where’s the master bedroom? Where are the jewels likely to be later? Which rooms should I open the window to unlock the window so I can get in? Is there an alarm system? He’s casing the joint is what he’s doing. But at this one particular party in 1924, the guest of honor was the Prince of Wales. Yes, the future Edward VIII, who was visiting Long Island in a well-publicized party holiday, and Barry bumps into him. And the people around the prince, the prince is saying, you know, he’s so constrained by royal duties, he’d love to see the town. And, Barry, who’s calling himself Dr. Gibson quite grandly, says, well, let’s go to town. I’ll show you around the speakeasies of Midtown Manhattan. And that’s what he does. So he spends this incredible night with the Prince of Wales.
[10:42]
The Night with the Prince of Wales
[10:39]And I had to start the book with this because it was just a gift. I mean, it was incredible because it really set the tone for how slick he was. But of course, it’s all leading to, he’ll come back a few nights later and try his luck at the jewels. Yeah, here’s this working class kid from, I guess, the Boston area. But he knew the underculture, underbelly, the seamy underbelly of New York City. And so he brings the Duke of Wales and introduces him around. I can imagine what some of his friends, people that knew him thought, like, how does he do this? Well, his wife later said they went to one of these restaurants or speakeasies and everyone was sort of like looking at Barry and she had no idea why. And even a waiter comes over and says, how’s the prince tonight? And finally fessed up that he’d had this encounter. out or but but it it wasn’t just as a as a patron barry was truly what they called a plunger and that’s the best way to say where that’s playing came from was he plunged into the nightlife of jazz age new york so he’s like nathan detroit a runyon-esque character from guys and dolls he’s he’s playing craps all the time usually losing which means he has to steal more money to to gamble. He probably was probably a gambling addict. He said he enjoyed gambling more than sex.
[12:06]And yeah, he lived that seedy sort of underworld life and knew some pretty bizarre characters, some dangerous, not so dangerous, some other con men. And of course, they, They all, at least on the surface, seemed to not realize what the others were doing. And sure enough, Barry passed himself off as a successful salesman who was pretty good at gambling to explain why he was often flush with cash. And a lot of people seem to have bought into that.
[12:36]Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about his wife. He was Anna Blake. She was the love of his life. And she becomes an integral part of his life because when he gets caught, it, then he breaks out of prison and they lay low for quite a while. So tell us about Anna Blake. She’s kind of an interesting character. She stuck with him because she wasn’t really from the criminal underworld. It didn’t seem like she was in love with the guy. Not at all. And I was really pleased as I did the book that I was able to find out as much as I could about her because she’s kind of a shadowy character. In fact, to the point where surviving family members of Barry’s family who knew him while he was still alive. He lived till 1981.
[13:19]Young nieces and nephews were young at the time. I interviewed them now and they didn’t know he was married. So it was kind of like a forgotten family secret. But he meets Anna Blake, who is a district captain in the Tammany Hall organization. So she’s part political worker, part social worker. She’s on the ground responsible responsible for several blocks of what was then sort of the southern edge of Harlem. And she’s recently widowed. She meets Barry, falls hard for him. And I think truly, she had no idea what he did. Like everyone else, she thought he was just a successful salesman and gambler. But he’s obviously smitten with her because in 1927, after the Livermore or robbery we talked about, he is arrested and Anna’s with him.
[14:11]And worse, he’s made the mistake of giving her a ring he’d stolen. It wasn’t particularly valuable, but it was identified as loot from an earlier robbery.
[14:22]So she was about to be charged as an accessory. And certainly the police and the DA were putting the pressure on using this threat as pressure.
[14:35]
Anna Blake: The Love of His Life
[14:33]So Barry confessed to make sure she walked free. And so gentleman to the end he did a gentlemanly the gallant thing and she you know she talked about how you know this this destroyed her world but she stuck by him as you said and within a couple of years he’s going to break out of prison to be with her and that part of the story again as a writer of of non-fiction you know you want to you can’t you can’t make up things to fill in the gaps, but you keep researching and hoping. And I found seven or eight installment of my story, my life of love and fear with the world’s greatest jewel thief is what it was. It was headlined, but it was Anna Blake’s confessional. It was everything from how they met to what happened when she found out what he really did to their life on the run for years. And a lot of that material I would not have found. And of course, I had her voice. She was telling it firsthand. So yeah, she was a remarkable character. And a very strong woman, endured incredible heartbreak with dignity. And she was reviled in the press. A lot of reporters made it clear they did not believe that she wasn’t an accomplice, but I believe her.
[15:55]Interesting. Another thing is, you know, cops at the time were not the most professional and he didn’t have the scientific advances. Of course, there’s no cameras, there’s no DNA, none of that. And a sophisticated criminal like this can pretty easily duck most policemen, especially back then and most law enforcement. Now, they started hiring private detectives to go after people,
[16:23]
The Great Retrievers: Private Detectives on His Trail
[16:21]Some are former cops, I think. And so tell us about, there was a pretty interesting characters of those private detectives. Tell us a little bit about those private dicks that would chase after him. The private detectives, the insurance companies would often hire private detectives because they were looking to, well, recover jewels if they could. So if someone could find out who did it, they might get the jewels back. There became sort of an underground, less than honest way of doing this is if you could pay, if you could find the crooks and pay them, say, the 10 or 20% they get from a fence, you could get the jewels back and you don’t have to pay out any more money. So instead of paying the full $750,000 to replace jewelry insured to that level, you might pay $75,000.
[17:09]So Noel Scaffa is one of the private detectives who was actually, he was nicknamed the great retriever because he was so good at retrieving jewels. And Barry dealt with him in one of his big heists. And for a jewel thief like Barry, well, this is great because he doesn’t have to fence the jewels. He doesn’t have to worry about getting them out of settings or whatever. He’s got a guy who’ll just pay him, basically act like a fence good. Another private detective, well, the Burns Detective Agency was put on Barry’s tail by Percy Rockefeller, nephew of J.D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil fame because Barry robbed his place and again they didn’t know exactly who they were looking for but they were on his case but Barry’s biggest nemesis became in the private detective world was Val O’Farrell who was a very shady character in the 20s a former New York policeman let go for shady dealings I found a lot of material in FBI file on him that made it clear that the licensing authorities in New York were desperate to pull his license, but they couldn’t quite pin anything on him. But Val O’Farrell becomes important in a couple of ways. He is instrumental in Barry’s arrest through some of his contacts, and then when Barry’s on the run.
[18:37]He accuses Barry. In 1932, Barry was hiding out in New Jersey. And the crime celeb of that year, of course, in New Jersey, was the Lindbergh kidnapping. So with Barry on the lam, and the newspapers every once in a while when there’s a major jewel heist, they’d say, must be the work Arthur Barry.
[19:01]Now, he’s not. He’s not pulling these crimes, but his name is out there again. So, Val O’Farrell just weaves this thing and says, well, the kidnapper went to the second floor, used a ladder, wasn’t heard. That’s Barry Zemo. Now, Barry never kidnapped anybody, let alone a kid. He was a jewel thief. But this stuck. And actually, when Barry was finally caught, he was treated like a serious suspect. And this was before Bruno Hoppen was eventually arrested and put on trial for that crime. So, so yeah, private detectives were always in the background here, but Barry’s biggest nemesis was a guy named Harold King who was chief of detective in Nassau County. And he was a really progressive cop and he was under a lot of pressure from a lot of rich people to stop these, these, this marauder. And I mean, other than a brief shootout, he never really got close to him until 1927 when he finally, by luck, there was a tip-off and Barry fell into his hands. Well, that’s quite a story. I tell you what, Dean, I really enjoyed this story
[20:12]
Wrapping Up with Dean Jobe
[20:09]and I enjoyed having you on, talking to you in person. It was a great book, guys. A Gentleman and a Thief, the Durian Jewel Heist of a Jazz Egg Rogue named Arthur Barry.
[20:20]So you might want to take a look at that. He truly was a second story, man. I really appreciate you coming on the the show, Dean. Okay. Well, thank you. Look, I appreciate the chance to talk about them. If there’s any other little story you want to tell, feel free.
[20:36]No, I just hope readers, I hope realize we haven’t given it all away. There’s lots here to unlock. But I was really drawn to him because he’s an antihero. He’s a bad guy. Yeah, but he never hurt any of his victims. I mean, he invaded their privacy, maybe shattered their security. But these were people who could afford jewels and probably had them insured. And that means I think readers can’t help at times, a lot of times, rooting for him. you know, and as he, as he one-ups the, the rich and powerful and famous. Really? I believe. Well, guys check this book out and don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website, get that hotline number. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go see our friend, former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano is now a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. There’s a hotline on his website and like, and subscribe and come back, tell your friends about the show. And one more time, Dean Joe. Thank you. Thank you.