What Happened to the Well-Mannered Cat Burglar?

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.”