"Again-the Super-Crook! Leader of Auburn Jailbreak Excites Popular Imagination," New York Daily News. August 25, 1929. Page 2.
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By AMA BARKER.
ARTHUR J. BARRY is the new Gerald Chapman.
Thousands in blood money are on his head. While an alarm was sounding all over the country for the leader of the Auburn prison break, a $250,000 jewel robbery in fashionable Beverly, Mass., told the police that Arthur Barry probably was at work.
Since the incredible Chapman was executed on April 6, 1926 in Wethersfield prison, Conn., the public has been without a super-criminal - a prince of thieves who makes honest men gasp at his imagination and daring. That is, until the handsome Barry, "the dinner and ladder" burglar, who robbed some eighty of society's best families without leaving a fingerprint, made his spectacular escape three weeks ago.
This gentleman burglar who played golf and country club bridge by day and specialized in polite jewel robberies by night made good reading two years ago when he confessed to prove his sweetheart innocent. But his career seemed ended when Long Island authorities sent him up for twenty- five years. Even Barry appeared to relinquish his dream of an elegant life on the French Riviera, some day when his store of treas- ure grew big enough.
The Brains, the Plot And the Woman!
"I'll be an old man when I come out," Barry said to a deputy sheriff at the time. He was 28 then.
Like Chapman, Barry does not always get the dubious honor for his crimes. He sometimes reads that another man is the master mind. With Chapman it was George (Dutch) Anderson, with Barry it is James Monahan, alias Boston Billy Williams.
Boston Billy is in Dannemora, doing forty years on evidence Barry, his former partner, turned in against him. If Monahan had escaped from Dannemora during the recent riot there, Barry probably would have delayed the zero for the outbreak at Auburn until the authorities had time to catch Boston Billy again. Because Billy has sworn to kill Barry on sight.
"Monahan was the boss of the show. Make no mistake about that," said Detective-Charles Sheraton, who trapped the Monahan-Barry gang after trailing them for two years.
"But Barry is a real killer, cold and calculating. I might take a chance with Monahan but with Barry, never!"
Monahan may have been the brains of their four years' picking among rich jewel caskets. Warden Edgar L. Jennings gives Barry credit for being the master strategist of the Auburn time of terror when four convicts escaped under cover of smoke from the burning prison shops, fired after the prison arsenal had been raided.
Arthur Barry was the center of this plot, unless the credit goes to Anna Blake. Love, the old proverb has it, will find a way and Barry, like Gerald Chapman before him, holds the idolatrous love of a woman.
Anna Blake is a plump little blonde of uncertain age; the police say she is at least ten years older than Arthur Barry. Barry was moved from Sing-Sing to Auburn because a woman who visited him there was suspected of trying to smuggle arms to him. At Auburn, officials believed a closer watch could be kept. Now information comes to the warden that the tireless Anna did get a gun to her lover, after all. With 5 this gun he subdued a key custodian, shot his way to the outer prison walls and finally got away.
Where Anna Blake is detectives can usually be nearly certain that Arthur Barry is not far away.
They met in Paris five years ago, when young Barry was spending some time on the continent as Arthur Gibson. When they returned to America, they bought a cottage in the smart Lake Ronkonkoma colony on Long Island, where they posed as Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Gibson. Adopting the country club manner, the Gibsons gave an impression of wealth and leisure, while Monahan and Barry dropped in on fashionable Long Island neighbors, often at the dinner hour.
They mounted quickly to the upper floors by means of a folding ladder, which Barry has modestly admitted is his invention. Then while their host and hostess and invited guests dined below stairs the correctly tailored burglars went quickly and quietly about their work.
In the summer of 1926 jewel thieves plucked $19,000 worth of loot from the Greenwich, Conn., estate of Percy A. Rockefeller. Not caring whether he had been robbed by the notorious society burglars or some lesser thieves. Rockefeller determined to have them jailed, no matter what the cost.
That is how the activities of Barry and Monahan happened to be under observation of Burns detectives at the time they called at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse L. Livermore for $100,000 worth of gems about a year later.
On June 15, 1927, Arthur J. Gibson, returning from New York with a woman, walked into the arms of detectives at Lake Ronkonkoma station. His companion had $15,000 worth of jewels in her possession - most of them stones taken from their settings. She gave her name as Mrs. Anna King.
After two days' questioning, Barry offered to make "a clean breast of the whole story" if the police would free Mrs. King. She knew nothing about the Livermore case, he swore. He and Boston Billy Williams committed the robbery, Barry said.
Says the Rich Like to Exaggerate Losses
Barry's fingerprints were checked up at Manhattan police headquarters. Records showed he was wanted in Massachusetts and in Connecticut. His history went back to Bridgeport, Conn., where he was first charged with the murder of Patrolman Peter Wagner, on April 13, 1922.
He contended that a companion did the shooting and was finally charged with assault. Barry was sentenced to three months in jail. After serving all but fifteen days of this time, he made use of a saw smuggled in by friends, and escaped.
The following year, on July 29, with Arthur J. Barry still at large, Sergt. John J. Harrison of the Scarsdale, Westchester county, New York, police, was mysteriously slain within 200 yards of headquarters. As in the case of Patrolman Wagner, Barry named a companion as the slayer - Boston Billy Williams.
Williams, he said, caught hold of the policeman's right hand with one hand and holding a pistol in the other, shot him at close range.
When Williams was captured he described Barry as the killer.
Barry, in the toils of the police after more than four years of uninterrupted second-story work, talked freely about what happened the night they robbed this millionaire and that. Everything but the whereabouts of the loot.
In the first place, he said, even the very rich like to exaggerate their losses. He had many a quiet laugh over his morning papers to see that the people they had relieved of $50,000 worth of gems the evening before, reported losses of $150,000 and upward.
Secondly, Barry complained bitterly, Boston Billy often did the finger work himself and when the time came to divide the loot, Williams held most of it out.
If he was telling the truth about the rich people exaggerating, and about his partner's holding out on him, and he is broke, as he claimed, Arthur Barry very likely got the $250,000 in jewels stolen from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney E. Hutchinson, at Beverly.He probably added $24,500 in cash and jewelry from the home of Richard Weber, wealthy contractor of Whitestone, L. I., to his ready funds.
Because he needed the money to pay the expenses of a long journey. Or, if, as some detectives on the Hutchinson case believe, Barry had $1,000,000 worth of loot buried in Anna Blake's keeping, the ring- leader of the Auburn mutiny probably is not the man who has Mrs. Hutchinson's diamond necklace.
Gerald Chapman vanished just as completely as Barry did when he escaped from Atlanta federal prison in April, 1923. Chapman made fun of the police in their game of hare and hounds for nearly two years. Barry has reason to remember that blood money betrayed Chapman, because rewards for a tip on Arthur's whereabouts total $10,000.
