Book Review: ‘A Gentleman and a Thief,’ by Dean Jobb

A GENTLEMAN AND A THIEF: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, by Dean Jobb

As the rich got richer in the boom years of the 1920s, many of them fled New York City noise for the newly fashionable suburbs. But in these tranquil enclaves, they found something else to keep them up at night: a mysterious jewel thief known only as “the phantom.”

There was an elegant efficiency to the phantom’s methods. He slipped past night watchmen and guard dogs, climbed up trellises and through bedroom windows, and was usually long gone before any alarm could be sounded. Victims were stunned to realize they’d been dining downstairs, or sleeping a few feet away, while he’d ransacked their dresser drawers. He could tell real pearls from fakes. He left minimal evidence of an intrusion, and no fingerprints.

Had any of his victims gotten a proper look at him, they would have seen that the burglar was a dapper dresser with movie-star good looks. Indeed, he was known to gate-crash fancy house parties, where he would introduce himself to guests as “Dr. Gibson” before wandering off to case the joint for future burglaries. His act was so convincing that he once spent a night on the town with the visiting Prince of Wales. The nephew of John D. Rockefeller and the glamorous Lady Edwina Mountbatten were among his victims.

Though he sounds like a screenwriter’s invention, Arthur Barry was real. Life magazine called him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived.” And, as Dean Jobb notes in his delectably entertaining new biography, “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Barry was a triple threat: “a bold impostor, a charming con artist and a master cat burglar rolled into one.”

Barry came from a working-class Irish American family in Worcester, Mass. From his first boss, a retired safecracker, he received some memorable advice: “Be gentlemanly and sincere. It will save you countless inconveniences, and maybe a few trips to the clink.”

Nevertheless, he made his first such trip at age 18. It was for attempted burglary, a conviction that Barry lied about in order to serve — courageously, it seems — in World War I. By the time he returned to America, the postwar celebrations and best (legal) jobs had evaporated.

Over a career that peaked between 1922 and 1927, Jobb concludes that Barry stole jewels with a combined worth of $60 million in today’s dollars. His biggest single payday came after he broke into a six-room suite at the Plaza Hotel — a rare Manhattan job — and made off with jewelry worth a staggering $10 million. The owner was the department-store heiress Jessie Woolworth Donahue, whose prize pearls Barry ended up selling back to her insurance company at a discount. “Anyone who could afford to wear a $100,000 necklace could afford to lose it,” Barry later declared.

He wasn’t the only one who considered the thefts victimless — or deserved. Though Barry’s reign of low-key terror alarmed whole communities in Westchester and Long Island, it enthralled the public.

He began rousing “clients” from their beds at gunpoint and politely asking them to hand over valuables; his suavity became the stuff of legend — especially after he agreed to spare items of sentimental value. When one victim showed signs of fainting, he escorted her into the bathroom and fed her an aspirin.

His 1927 capture and conviction was headline news. Barry spends much of the last third of Jobb’s book in handcuffs, in jail or in hiding. As the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, his daily existence also lost its luster — which is not to say that the story gets boring. Barry helped lead a prison riot and reappeared in the headlines during the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and Jobb, whose fondness for cold chapter-opens matches that of “Law & Order”’s writers, seems incapable of penning a dull moment.

Barry wrote letters to his adoring wife, Anna, while incarcerated. They are the closest thing to a record of his private thoughts, but not terribly revealing. The version of his life story that he later provided was self-serving and incomplete, and he remains an elusive subject.

Unlike the con man Leo Koretz, another 1920s criminal whom Jobb has chronicled, Barry was rarely described in print by those who knew him. And did they really know him? (Anna claimed to have been unaware of her husband’s double life.)

Instead of analyzing this “prince of thieves” psychologically, Jobb examines the culture that celebrated him — noting, for example, how popular fictional characters (even some that Barry claimed he’d never heard of) paved the way for a real-life version.

The mood darkened during the Depression; the next generation of robbers was more prone to brandishing machine guns. By the 1930s, Jobb writes with a dash of tabloid hyperbole, Barry was “a throwback to a time of glitz and excess that now seemed as remote and distant as the Middle Ages.” Readers can decide whether his light touch merited a lighter sentence.

A GENTLEMAN AND A THIEF: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue | By Dean Jobb | Algonquin | 438 pp. | $32.50