The Blue Book Burglar

The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.

_{By Jack Rodolico}

The phone inside the mansion rang relentlessly—five times, twenty, forty—echoing from the spacious kitchen to the bedrooms upstairs. The house was a 5,200-square-foot Georgian Colonial constructed of red brick. It had a pool and a tennis court, and it stood at the end of a long wooded driveway, off a secluded cul-de-sac in Greenwich, Connecticut. The town was the crown jewel of the state’s so-called Gold Coast, a swath of wealthy enclaves where Prescott Bush—father of George H. W.—was buried, where Robert F. Kennedy got married, and where Donald Trump would soon purchase his starter mansion. The owners of the red-brick mansion were a banker and his wife (herself the daughter of another banker) whose wedding had been written up in the New York Times. It was Independence Day 1980, and like many people in their social set, they were vacationing on the South Shore of Long Island.

That’s exactly what the caller was hoping for. As the phone rang again and again, his two accomplices listened outside the home. The caller hung up after fifty rings. The men hiding in the dark were confident that the home was empty, but they took one more precaution to be absolutely sure. Once the ringing stopped, they snipped the phone line clean through, setting off a silent alarm that notified police of a break-in. The men then hid in the trees near the house and waited. A Greenwich patrolman pulled up, surveyed the property, assumed it was a false alarm, and left.

It was time. The two men broke a pane of glass near the back door, entered the mansion, and proceeded to plunder its contents. From a linen closet they took several pillowcases and filled them with approximately 350 pieces of silver: salad forks, fish knives, and bouillon spoons; a pair of grape shears and a cold-meat fork; a baby’s hairbrush and an ashtray; something called a star-footed muffineer. In the master bedroom, they emptied drawers of pearls, a gold watch, and a diamond-and-platinum band. They were thorough, searching cabinets in the library and lowering a pull-down ladder to ransack the attic. They took choice baubles, such as a porcelain umbrella stand and a tea caddy with an ivory finial.

In the living room, the men did something out of the ordinary for most house thieves: They removed a handful of paintings from the walls, but stole just two. These were landscapes by eighteenth-century Dutch and American painters whose names were unlikely to appear in an art history textbook. They were valuable pieces of art, but obscure ones.

Once the thieves had collected what they came for, they exited the house and walked to the end of the driveway. The third accomplice, who had been circling the block in a getaway car since calling the residence, picked them up there, and together they drove off into the night.

When the adjusters at Tiffany & Co. later appraised what had been taken from the mansion, the inventory stretched to five pages. The robbery was valued at more than $100,000, a figure that, when adjusted for inflation, nearly quadruples in today’s dollars—although the art has likely increased tenfold in value.

Greenwich detective Jim Hirsch had become somewhat inured to such crimes when he first heard about the burglary. Home robberies peaked nationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Greenwich, where many houses were essentially poorly guarded museums, attracted talented thieves. There was the Silver Bandit, who snuck into the dining room of a home while its occupants were sleeping to steal antique silver. There was the Dinner Set Gang, who, while the rich entertained in the dining room, tore apart the bedrooms in search of jewelry. These thieves were a “pain in the ass,” Hirsch told me.

It would take Hirsch some time to discern what was exceptional about the crew that pulled off the Independence Day heist. For one, their M.O. was supremely cautious. Even more unusual was that this crew had an eye for quality, be it silver, jewels, antiques, or art. “They knew when they saw something,” said Hirsch. “They knew value.”

Actually, just one of the thieves knew value. And he was not yet done stealing the prized possessions of the East Coast elite. Not even close.

While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.

I came across the Greenwich case in 2017. At the time, I was part of a team producing an investigative podcast about the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Gardner burglary is a case of utmost superlatives. It ranks as the largest property theft in U.S. history, and has been called “the greatest art heist ever.” More than half a billion dollars’ worth of masterpieces were stolen, including Rembrandt’s only seascape. None of them have been recovered, and no one has ever been charged for the crime.

And yet I couldn’t help but wonder: Greatest art heist compared with what?

In searching for an answer, I learned everything I could about art robberies big and small, from the decades before and since the Gardner heist. I interviewed cops and crooks, academics and insurance adjusters. I pulled news clips about museum jobs across the U.S. and Europe. I read papers about organized-crime syndicates looting archaeological sites in Asia and the Middle East. I learned a lot about this rarified corner of the crime world—for instance, that the black market values stolen art at about 10 percent of the legitimate market price, and that authorities are most likely to recover missing pieces at the point of sale, whether that’s a Christie’s auction or a handoff in a hotel room to an undercover cop pretending to be a cash buyer. While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.

So when I read a news story about the thief who had led the crew behind the Greenwich robbery, I wanted to know more. The red-brick mansion burglarized in 1980 was just one hit on a long list of them. Dozens of homes owned by members of America’s moneyed class were raided by the same thief and his crew. They were after art, but not the sort that would draw interest from the press. They wanted lesser-known works, and lots of them—the kinds of pieces that would be relatively easy to sell because the entire world wasn’t looking for them.

Over the course of my reporting, I came to believe that the ringleader of these crimes was in a class by himself. I doubt there’s such a thing as the greatest art thief of all time, but I don’t know of any burglar who worked so hard.

Jim Hirsch admired the titans of finance, politics, business, and industry he was sworn to protect. “Loved ’em,” he said. I interviewed Hirsch in a conference room at a Greenwich hedge fund where he’d taken a job as head of security after retiring from the police force. “Old money is tremendous. New money stinks. They seem to think they’re something special,” Hirsch said.

He told me about a friend of his: Andrew Rockefeller, of the Rockefellers, who passed away a few years ago. “Nicest guy you ever want to meet. Khaki pants, Top-Siders, and a sport shirt.” Hirsch was proud to know Rockefeller and his ilk. “Super, super people who remained friends with you after you left the job,” he said.

So when more than eighty homes in Greenwich were stripped of riches on Hirsch’s watch between 1980 to 1982—and that’s not counting the dozens more that happened in nearby communities—he took it a little personally. “It was embarrassing,” he said.

What the burglars stole was as impressive as who they stole it from. From the home of a political strategist Richard Nixon once included on his “enemies list,” they took a collection of oriental rugs (worth $19,400 at the time) and cracked a safe to find a sizable collection of antique stamps ($60,249). From the palatial estate of a family so rich they gifted a library to Yale University, the thieves stole three Tiffany floor lamps ($31,000). “These are not lamps, these are lamps,” Hirsch told me. “Highly identifiable tempered lampshades. They’re magnificent.”

From an insurance executive, the thieves took a nineteenth-century Swiss music box ($20,000). From a Rockefeller—not Andrew, another one—they took a platinum bracelet embedded with 280 diamonds ($15,300). They broke in to the homes of a pioneering cardiologist, the chairman of the National Audubon Society’s board of directors, and a descendant of an early investor in Thomas Edison’s light bulb. They stole a pair of handheld fans originally owned by an emperor of France ($2,000) and a full-length raccoon-fur coat ($2,000). They stuffed an untold fortune’s worth of silverware into countless pillowcases.

And then there were the paintings. The thieves homed in on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oils, each canvas small enough to fit inside a briefcase. The works had humdrum titles such as A Hawking Party Resting at a Wayside Inn ($2,400), Hunter in Pink Coat on Brown Horse Jumping Fence ($3,000), and H.M.S. Duncannon 120 Guns ($5,000). They were painted by long-dead British, American, and Dutch artists for whom there was a boutique market of small galleries catering to the tastes of the very types of people the art was stolen from. It was uncanny what the thieves recognized as valuable. For instance, from the widow of a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence they stole an 1842 painting by a French artist, a work that had not been on the open market in generations because it was passed down through the family.

Victims of these thefts returned from vacations in Europe, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Virgin Islands to find their homes ransacked—although one police report stated, “The entry was not immediately noticed due to the enormity of the house.” Losing family heirlooms was bad enough, but the violation of privacy and security was something else. “The property’s always insured,” Hirsch told me. “The problem that your home was invaded is a whole different world. There were some people that sold their houses. Some people used to greet you at the door with a baseball bat after that.”

DNA evidence was not yet a forensic tool, which was unfortunate since the thieves left behind plenty of it, often on cigarette butts stubbed out in the course of the robberies. Once, in a guest bathroom, a burglar defecated in the toilet and did not flush.

As the rate of the robberies picked up, from about one per month in 1980 to several per weekend in 1982, police began to notice patterns: the pillowcases used as loot bags, the broad array of high-value spoils, the timing (always after dark and on weekends). “You could take the complainant’s name off any of these burglary reports and exchange it with any other one,” Hirsch once told a newspaper reporter. “They were all identical.” Law enforcement concluded that the burglars cut the phone lines in the homes they targeted to deliberately trigger alarm systems, most likely to watch hapless patrolmen visit and then leave the scene.

Who was buying all the loot from the thieves? The cops figured it was someone with art-world savvy. “A burglar is only as good as his fence,” a detective from Bedford, New York, just across the state line from Greenwich, told a New York Times reporter. “A junkie doesn’t have a good fence—he goes to a pawnbroker. But someone who steals paintings, he has a good fence. You know you’re not dealing with something run-of-the-mill.”

Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.

Two years into the crime wave, investigators were no closer to identifying the burglars, who were more prolific than ever. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1982, they hit five houses in Bedford alone. In Greenwich, they were returning to rob homes they’d previously struck. Police decided to cast a wider net via teletype, a messaging system used by law enforcement around the country, in the hope that someone, somewhere, knew something useful. According to Hirsch, the teletype spelled out the thieves’ methods and asked any department experiencing similar crimes in its jurisdiction to contact the Greenwich police.

The next morning, Hirsch got a call from a cop in Massachusetts who wanted to know: Had he ever heard of a book called the Social Register?

Blue Book members were the richest of the rich, the oldest of old money. Their homes were almost guaranteed to be chock-full of high-value loot.

America’s aristocracy traces its lineage to a time between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century, in the Gilded Age. Think Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Robber barons built obscene fortunes, monopolies lined the pockets of corrupt politicians, and unchecked capitalism opened a permanent chasm between the very rich and everyone else. The upper crust loved to throw opulent balls and banquets, which allowed hosts to show off their money, power, and influence, and prominent socialites kept so-called visiting lists of well-connected friends, acquaintances, and business contacts.

Louis Keller was not part of the new aristocracy, but he recognized a business opportunity in these quasi-private lists. He collected them, consolidated them, and produced a master copy of high society, selling it only to those who’d made the cut. First published in 1886, the Social Register was a thin, elegantly bound book with pumpkin-colored lettering on a black background. When later editions featured a blue cover, it became known as the Blue Book.

The first edition drew exclusively from the social lists of people with homes in Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite vacation destination of the elite. In time there were Blue Books for almost every major U.S. city. A group called the Social Register Association became the gatekeeper of the Blue Book, and it created strict rules for new entries. A person could be listed because of marriage to someone already included in the book, if they were elected president of the United States, or if they were nominated by an existing member. For many years, the Social Register was classist as well as anti-Semitic and racist; excluded Jewish society members in Chicago created their own version of the Blue Book in 1918, and the Social Register did not include a Black member for nearly a century after its creation.

In 1976, the city books were consolidated into a single volume covering high society nationwide. It listed approximately 50,000 names. By the 1980s, being in the book still had low-key cultural cachet, particularly for direct descendants of Gilded Age gentry. Members could flip through the Social Register’s pages to learn the essentials about each other. What school did so-and-so attend? What yacht club did they belong to? Were they related to someone on the Mayflower? And, for the purposes of correspondence, what was their address and telephone number?

While it was difficult to get listed in the Blue Book, it did not take a criminal genius to obtain a copy. “All you gotta do is one burglary in one house, and there they are!” said Roland Anderson, a retired Massachusetts detective who, as far as I could ascertain, was the first person to suspect that the burglars targeting Greenwich, Bedford, and other wealthy East Coast communities were using the Social Register as a hit list.

Anderson spent forty years as a cop in the Boston suburb of Weston, which, during his tenure, was the richest town in Massachusetts. Now 82, “Rolie” Anderson possesses a stunning memory for details about burglars he chased in the 1970s. When I met with him for an interview, he drove me around Weston as if still on patrol. “That one up there was hit,” he said, gesturing toward a single-family home large enough to be a castle. “Think of the dark of night. They entered through a cellar window near the garage. And they cleaned it out.”

When Anderson joined the force, in 1968, home robberies were common but not lucrative; burglars typically struck during the daytime, when victims were at work, stealing televisions and maybe a fistful of jewelry. But in 1978, two years before the Greenwich robberies began, a more ambitious crew commenced working in Weston. “We started to see the oriental rugs rolled up, antique furnishings taken,” Anderson said. “And, in some cases, paintings.” The thieves also cut their targets’ phone lines during robberies. Anderson questioned victims about their affiliations, hoping to figure out why the thieves had singled them out. One of them said, “Well, we are listed in the Social Register.”

Anderson had never heard of it. But thumbing through the book’s pages, he decided that what the thieves were doing made perfect sense. Any big house in Weston was likely to be a decent target for a thief, but Blue Book members were the richest of the rich, the oldest of old money. Their homes were almost guaranteed to be chock-full of high-value loot.

In an era of police work that Anderson calls “the dark ages,” he was particularly effective at shoe-leather investigating. That included combing through teletypes, which were, he said, “the only network we really had among all of us.” Though reading all the messages that came over the transom could be tedious and time-consuming, Anderson and his colleagues still did it “every single day.” That’s how he discovered a slew of identical unsolved robberies in virtually every exclusive Boston suburb, as well as tony communities in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine.

So he’d figured out the scheme. But who was behind it? Anderson studied the rap sheets of known antiques thieves and their associates, and soon built up a lengthy, almost encyclopedic list of men he believed were capable of pulling off the Social Register robberies. “Rolie Anderson is probably the best detective I’ve ever worked with,” said Arthur Bourque, a former trooper with the Massachusetts State Police’s major crimes unit. “He’s just got a ferocious appetite for background and research.”

On November 19, 1979, Bourque met with Anderson and produced the single oldest law enforcement document I obtained about the Blue Book burglaries. The memo’s subject line reads: “Intelligence regarding antique thefts in Massachusetts received from Det. Rollie [sic] Anderson of the Weston, Mass. P.D.” It includes a list of fifty-eight names, all people Anderson believed were involved in organized antiques theft. But he had no way to know which of them—if any—were using the Blue Book. “They were so adept at what they were doing and how they did it,” Anderson told me.

No sooner had Anderson handed off his list of suspects to the state police than the Social Register robberies in northern New England stopped. Bourque concluded that the thieves suspected law enforcement was onto them. “There was just too much heat going on up here,” he said.

Two years later, in August 1982, Bourque stepped up to the long roll of paper issuing from his office’s teletype machine to inspect what had come in overnight. That’s where he found the notice describing a string of burglaries in Connecticut and New York with a familiar M.O.

Convinced that the thieves Anderson investigated had moved their operations south, Bourque dialed up Jim Hirsch. “Get ahold of this fuckin’ book,” Hirsch remembered Bourque telling him, “because whoever you got in town who’s in that book is a potential target.”

Armed with intelligence from Massachusetts, Greenwich police went into Labor Day weekend 1982 as prepared as they’d ever been to catch the burglars in the act. They suspected that the crew were driving down from Massachusetts to commit their crimes, so patrolmen were directed to look out for cars with Massachusetts plates. Police were confident that the homes of people in the Social Register were at risk. The problem was knowing which ones: Greenwich was home to more Blue Book members than any suburban community in America.

At 1:30 a.m. on Friday, a resident heard banging noises next door at the house of a Blue Book member who was away for the weekend. Police arrived to find the house’s phone line snipped and a window busted; a perpetrator had slashed his arm on the broken glass and fled before entering the home. Then, at 12:04 a.m. on Saturday, a Social Register family reported that they had returned from dinner to find their power and phone lines cut and their home robbed. According to a police memo, “The intruder/s had made entry to a room which can only be described as a vault.” There they filled seventeen pillowcases with sterling silver. While inspecting the outside of the home, cops “heard what they felt to be a large subject running away,” but they were unable to track him through the dark woods. Later, on Saturday night, a third Social Register family returned from vacation to find their home stripped of more than $80,000 in valuables.

Despite law enforcement’s best efforts, the thieves had a good haul to show for the weekend. But it would prove to be their last ride in Greenwich.

The following weekend, at 10:50 on Friday night, a Greenwich cop spotted a white 1982 Plymouth Reliant with Massachusetts plates. There were three men in it, and they were cruising down Round Hill Road, where seven homes had been hit over the previous two years, more than on any other street in town. Police followed the car onto the Merritt Parkway, where it set off eastbound toward Boston, then pulled it over. According to a police memo describing the stop, the men in the Reliant said they were returning from the racetrack at Belmont Park, on Long Island, and were looking for a place to eat.

The driver handed over a license that identified him as Dennis Quinn; the car was a rental, Quinn said, from a company in Cape Cod. The other two men had no identification but gave their surnames as Gallagher and Hogan. Quinn allowed the police to check the car’s trunk. “Nothing was found,” the memo states. “Subjects were allowed to continue on their way.”

The next morning, after Hirsch learned about the traffic stop, he compared the names the men had provided against Rolie Anderson’s list of suspects and found a match: Dennis Quinn, 34, short and slight, with a mop-top haircut and an aquiline nose. Police then found that Quinn had rented a hotel room near Greenwich nearly every weekend that summer.

As for the other two men, one of them was identified as Charles Gallagher, 26, tall and hulking, with a horseshoe mustache. He wasn’t on Anderson’s list, but he had a criminal record—larceny, breaking and entering, stealing government property, assault with a deadly weapon. Police records turned up nothing about the man who called himself Hogan.

So Hirsch went to the expert. He dialed up Anderson and described the unidentified man in the Reliant: five feet ten, paunchy, with blue eyes, shaggy brown hair, and a hooked nose above a chevron mustache. Anderson knew exactly who Hirsch was talking about, but his name wasn’t Hogan. It was Raymond Flynn.

amazingly, they appeared to commit yet another burglary right under the FBI’s nose.

After years of playing cat and mouse with the Blue Book thieves, law enforcement finally had information they could work with, and in the waning weeks of the summer of 1982, a rare collaboration began. A dozen local police departments from York, Maine, down to Long Island worked with state police from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut to funnel intelligence to the FBI, which committed three dozen agents from six field offices to the investigation. The expansive team engaged in round-the-clock surveillance—including unmarked cars and fixed-wing aircraft—of Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher, who were now officially known as the Social Register gang.

Eager to shut down the burglary operation, the FBI came up with a two-step plan: First observe Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher robbing a home. Then follow the suspects to their fence. Step two was crucial. “It all revolves around their fence. And in some cases, like artwork, there’s probably only one real fence who can get rid of it, maybe two,” Bourque told me. “You can have twenty-five different burglary operations and one or two fences.”

Law enforcement tracked the Reliant the men had been driving to a rental company near Flynn’s home on Cape Cod. There they learned that the men often rented the same car. By the time the suspects rented it again and drove to the North Shore of Long Island—Great Gatsby territory, where Blue Book homes had been intermittently struck since 1980—the FBI had equipped it with a tracking device. According to a law enforcement memo, the suspects cased homes in Oyster Bay, Mill Neck, and Laurel Hollow, all towns “of Social Register caliber.” Three times, Quinn dropped off Flynn and Gallagher in ritzy neighborhoods. Though agents did not observe a robbery, they suspected that one had occurred because when the suspects convened at a Ramada Inn later that night, “they were observed to be carrying clothing, possibly attempting to conceal any contraband.”

The next morning, Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher drove to a Western Union in Queens and picked up $1,500, which the FBI hypothesized had been wired to them by their fence as an advance on whatever they’d stolen the previous night. The suspects then proceeded to the Belmont Park racetrack. After gambling, they drove to Providence, Rhode Island, where they stopped for Chinese food. There, according to a police memo, the “suspects became involved in an argument between themselves and Gallagher walked out.” Flynn and Quinn hopped into the Plymouth and caught up with Gallagher as he ascended an entrance ramp to the highway. “Gallagher got into the car and a fistfight ensued,” the memo states. As the men threw punches inside the parked Plymouth, the FBI tail was forced to continue onto the highway to avoid being spotted. “Suspects then backed down the ramp,” the memo notes, “and FBI lost the car.”

The next weekend, the FBI were on their heels when Flynn, Quinn, and Gallagher drove the Plymouth to a Holiday Inn in Princeton, New Jersey. FBI agents booked the room next to the suspects as well as the room above, and from a surveillance van in the hotel’s parking lot, they snapped tight-framed black-and-white photographs: Quinn placing a call from a phone booth. Gallagher scratching his ass while pointing at a parked Corvette. Flynn, more than once, seeming to look directly into the camera. “Suspects were overheard to say that they only had six dollars among themselves,” reads a law enforcement memo.

Agents observed the men casing five Social Register homes in a single neighborhood on Saturday night. On Sunday night, undercover law enforcement followed the men back to the same area, where, amazingly, the crew appeared to commit yet another burglary right under the FBI’s nose. “When the suspects returned to the motel,” a memo states, “they were observed to be carrying a large box.” This time agents were able to confirm that a robbery had occurred: Someone had just stolen $25,000 worth of silver, jewelry, and three yellow pillowcases from the Princeton home of a great-great-great-grandson of President Martin Van Buren.

The next morning, the suspects picked up more cash from the Western Union in Queens and again drove to the racetrack. As they gambled, something happened that gave the FBI an advantage. “While the car was at the track parking lot, it sustained a flat tire,” a memo reads. There is no evidence that the FBI was responsible for the flat, but it was certainly a fortuitous development. When the thieves returned to the vehicle and opened the trunk to look for tools to change the tire, a photographer in the FBI’s surveillance van was perfectly positioned to see what was inside—including a yellow pillowcase. It was the kind of evidence law enforcement had been looking for.

Now all the agents had to do was follow the burglars to their fence. But when the thieves slammed the Reliant’s trunk shut, according to a memo, “the FBI [tracking] device fell from the car and was discovered by the suspects.” The men left the racetrack “very wary of any tails.”

Fence or no fence, the FBI was not about to lose the suspects again. Agents swarmed the car and arrested the Social Register gang on the Throgs Neck Bridge connecting Queens to the Bronx. Inside the Reliant, in addition to yellow pillowcases full of silver, agents found road atlases for the Northeast with various locations circled; hand-written lists of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of 917 people listed in the Social Register; and a 1975 edition of the Blue Book for New York City and its wealthy suburbs.