Criminal - Ex Libris

Episode Date: June 26, 2015

Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of rare books have been disappearing across America since the late 90s, and haven't resurfaced in the marketplace. They've just vanished, never to be seen again. But unlike most thieves, this thief is motivated by something more abstract and romantic than money, which makes him extremely difficult to catch.  Today, we have the story of John Charles Gilkey. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's a book published in 1787. How much is that one? That is $18,000. John Crichton owns Brick Row Bookshop in downtown San Francisco. That is $18,000. he's got $1.5 million worth of books in his shop. A few weeks ago, Lauren Spohr, who makes the show with me, went to Brick Row. We got, this was over the telephone, and a fellow called and he said, I want to buy a book you have listed online. It's by Thomas Hardy. It's the first edition of the Maricasta Bridge. I want to put it on my credit card, and my father's going to come in and pick it up.

So my employee said, we've got's going to come in and pick it up. So my employee said, we've got an order for the Maricasta Bridge. I'm going to process the credit card, and this guy's father's going to come and pick it up later. I said, fine. On the date Crichton is telling her about, back in 2001, he took a man's credit card number over the phone and charged the sale. It went through. The Thomas Hardy book cost $2,500. And that afternoon at about 3 o'clock, an older gentleman came in and said, I'm coming to pick up that copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge for my son. I went and got it.

I gave it to him, and he walked out. Did he want to see it first or anything? No, I think I asked him if he wanted to see it. He said, no, I don't want to see it. He seemed as if he wanted to get out in a hurry as if he was parked outside or something like that and had to get back to his car. About a month after Crichton sold that Thomas Hardy book over the phone, someone else called. He said, you charged $2,500 plus sales tax, I guess it was, on my credit card last month. And I said, well, who are you? And he gave

me his name. And I said, yes. And I looked up the invoice and he said, you bought a copy of the Mayor of Castlebridge. And I said, no, that wasn't me. And that's when I knew it was a credit card fraud. What happened to Crichton had been happening to rare book dealers all over the Bay Area in the late 90s and early 2000s. The exact same scam. A phone call, a credit card number, and then a rushed pickup, often by someone who claimed to be the caller's father. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in rare books were disappearing. And as Lauren found out, the booksellers are mad. Not just because they want their books back, but because this thief keeps outsmarting them. And he seems to be enjoying himself. It's like high school all over again, where the nerds try to tell on the bad kids,

but no one listens, and nothing changes. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. If you're a rare book dealer in John Crichton's position, where someone's stolen a book from you, you can call the police, but you'd be hard-pressed to make them care, because it is just a book, even if it's worth more than my car. You can also tell your colleagues, because you don't want one of them to unwittingly buy a book that was stolen from you. Rare book dealers have their own club, the ABAA, Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. And part of the organizational structure of the group is to have a designated watchdog

who keeps up with theft reports and spreads the word. In the late 90s, that position had been vacant for a while, until a book dealer named Ken Sanders, he owns Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City, was asked to step in as security chair. I get a giant box of pink sheets from headquarters in New York, and I call them up and say, what are they? What do I do with them? Well, they're theft reports. But the problem is, these sheets had been filled out perhaps six months, a year ago,

and they're just sitting around waiting for the security chair to mail them out. He made it through that first box of pink sheets and he said, this is crazy. We have the internet now. Let's do this with email. And that sounded like a great idea. But in late 1999, early 2000, not everyone was so good with computers. And if anyone was slow to come around to technology, it was antiquarian book dealers. For a while, my daughter took all the bad

keys off my keyboard on my computer at work because I'd keep accidentally hitting the wrong keys and it would go into the ozone somewhere. So she like control and alt and she just like popped those keys off the keyboard so I couldn't hit them. So it took a little while for ABAA members to catch on and join the email list. But slowly more and more people were emailing theft reports to Ken, and he started to notice a pattern. Every single bookseller that was defrauded, and there were dozens of them, provided another clue, another piece of information that allowed me to keep compiling this profile of whoever this thief was. I was convinced it was the same thief, but I didn't know who he was.

And other than a sense he was in Northern California, I didn't know where he was. The emails also helped Ken Sanders realize something very confusing, which was that as far as anyone could tell, none of the stolen books were being resold. Not in this country and not abroad. They were just gone, disappearing without a trace. You know, the police do have better things. They've got a lot of, you know, murder and mayhem and pretty serious stuff to deal with where, okay, nobody got hurt here. You guys are basically quarreling over a Gertrude Stein first edition. What's that? And yeah, they're not going to take it seriously. And for the most part, they don't.

By early 2003, Ken says that the thief had stolen well over $100,000 in rare books and showed no sign of slowing down. Then this thief called a dealer in South Hadley, Massachusetts named Ken Lopez and asked to buy a $7,500 first edition of The Grapes of Wrath. And I said, Ken, string him along. Don't run the credit card or anything, but just pretend that you're going to ship it to him. Ken Lopez and Ken Sanders laid a trap with the help of a third man, also named Ken. A cop named Detective Kenneth Munson, now retired, who, despite my strange, convoluted trail of stolen books and booksellers involving, you know, one, two, three, four states in a jurisdictional nightmare, he agreed to do a stakeout at that San Jose Hilton. And they went there early in that morning, and by mid-afternoon, a man showed up.

The man refused to tell the police his name. He said he was picking up the book because someone in San Francisco had offered him 20 bucks to deliver it. The police arrested him. He had no ID, no keys, nothing on his person except a crumpled up prepaid phone card that later was proven to have been used to call Ken Lopez to order the stolen book in the first place. A year and a half of work had finally paid off and Ken Sanders had caught his thief. It was over. Or that's what he thought. He bailed out the next day. And I was pretty mad at Detective Munson. You let him loose? You don't even know who he is? And he says, relax, we've got his fingerprints. I'm sure this guy's in the system. And sure enough, I believe going back to roughly 1991, he was in the system for kiting bad checks under his real name,

which was John Charles Gilkey. But we didn't know where the stolen books were and we didn't know Mr. Gilkey's personal whereabouts. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story,

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Gilkey was out on bail for months, and Ken Sanders doubled down on his campaign to make sure that every rare book dealer in California knew Gilkey's name, M.O., and what he looked like. So Mr. Gilkey travels to Los Angeles, which ironically is a violation of his parole. He can't leave the county. And he has got a set of four, the four original A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh first edition books, and he's trying to peddle them. And as he goes from store to store, they're sending emails out to our bookseller chat list. So we're tracking him in real time, if you were. And we're having a ball with him because no one will buy his books or they're deliberately offering him like nothing for him. The books at the time were worth maybe $6,000 to $8,000. And he's becoming frustrated by the minute everywhere he goes. But finally, under the guise of coming back in an hour or two while the bookseller researches the books and determines a good value to give them, he casually gets Mr. Gilkey's information.

And Mr. Gilkey gives him a name and an address. The bookseller immediately calls and emails me, gives me all this information. I'm thinking, nah. Ken was sure it was a fake address, but he still passed it along to Detective Munson, just in case. And 24 hours later, he excitedly calls me up from a borrowed cell phone, because back then the cops didn't even have cell phones.

And he's inside an apartment on Treasure Island, and that's where Mr. Gilkey's apartment is, and it's full of stolen books. Ken begged Detective Munson to box them all up and get them out of there. But the warrant was only good for titles that could be specifically named as stolen. So Ken started naming books. He went back through every title he'd gotten a report about, and sure enough, 26 of those stolen books were in Gilkey's apartment, including that Thomas Hardy stolen from John Crichton at Brick Row. But there were books in the apartment Ken Sanders hadn't been able to specifically name, and those had to be left behind.

The next day, Gilkey and Detective Munson appeared in court. The judge set Gilkey's bail much higher this time, $200,000, which he did not pay. He stayed in jail until he was sentenced to three years in San Quentin. I felt pretty good about myself that, hey, I figured this out. I'm pretty smart. I'm a detective, man. I'm the biblio-detective. I put the guy in San Quentin. That's supposed to be the final chapter, right? Well, instead it's like the middle, or maybe it's back to the beginning,

because the book thief gets out and he keeps stealing books. So it's like, so everything I did is for nothing? Even though Gilkey was sentenced to three years, he was quickly paroled. Then he violated his parole and went back to prison. This happened several times. So all told, Gilkey was only locked up for about 18 months. A writer named Allison Hoover Bartlett wrote him a letter and asked to interview him. He agreed, so she went to the prison to meet him. And then when he got out on parole, they met at a restaurant in San Francisco. She interviewed him face-to-face about a dozen times over a period of several years. He just drew me in immediately. I was fascinated.

I didn't understand how somebody could think this way, how they could have done those things. And every meeting we had was surprising to me. He had one surprise after the other up his sleeve. So it made for a very interesting story to report. I feel like you're really the only person who got at the heart of why he does this. Well, I hope so. He was very open about it. He has a love of books, but he also has a love of what the ownership of books says about him.

I've heard collectors talk about their collections on the shelf as a kind of memoir that reflects on who they are and what their interests are, and Gilkey was no different this way. By building a collection of impressive books, he was building a self, a man who he thought would be respected for his taste and erudition. She writes that Gilkey imagined a version of himself as an English gentleman with a grand library. This is why he hasn't sold the books.

He's hiding them somewhere for safekeeping, because he needs them to continue to grow his library. In 2005, Gilkey suggested to Alison Hoover Bartlett that they go together to a bookshop. He wanted to show her what he looks for in a rare book, and they decided to visit John Crichton's bookstore, Brick Row. It was a morning just like this. It was about 1030 in the morning. And I look up and there's this fellow with this woman looking in my bookcase. And I'm kind of startled. And I look at

him twice and I get up and I say, you're John Gilkey. And he looks at me and he keeps talking to her and kind of ignoring me. And he was telling, he was showing the lady, he said, I want to look at Nathaniel Hawthorne. He kind of started opening up these cases like that. And was your head just exploding? I was, I was nervous. I was very upset about this because I consider him kind of a scary guy. I mean, he's someone who stole from me. And here he comes back walking in the shop as if he has some right to look through things as if he'd never committed any offense at all. Were you scared he was going to take more books or that he was there to be an intimidating figure? Yeah, I think it's just sort of an intimidation. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And I wasn't worried about him taking any books. I mean, it takes a lot of nerve.

It takes, he's very nervy. That, because that's what's scary. Alison Hoover Bartlett first wrote a magazine article and then she expanded it into a book called The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. When it came out in 2009, Gilkey called to congratulate her. The book was getting a lot of press, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, and all of this made Gilkey happy.

You'd think that with all of the exposure the book had gotten, Gilkey would want to keep his head down. But he's done the opposite. I mean, it would be nice for me to get up one morning and know that I wasn't going to get an email in my inbox saying, you know, Gilkey strikes again. This is Garrett Scott, a rare book dealer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He's taken over as security chair of the ABAA, so now he's the one who fields reports from victims. You know, I'll get a report that, you know, Gilkey has stung somebody for a $75 book in San Francisco, you know, and my day is shot.

The reports coming in aren't even always about books. Allegedly, Gilkey's been making reservations at small-town B&Bs with stolen credit card numbers, and then showing up and paying the bill with a check from a closed checking account. Shopkeepers in those same small towns, jewelers and antique dealers, they report the same. They say that they know it's him because his name is printed right there on the upper left corner of the bad checks,

John Gilkey. He's got open warrants against him, but whenever he does get caught and sent to prison, it's only for two or three months at a time. And then he's out, back in the world. And by all accounts, going shopping. Garrett Scott says it's like this low-level brush fire that's never going away. You know, Ken Sanders forwarded me an email from a woman who said her name was Natasha,

who had been a, said she was a classmate of John Gilkey's at San Francisco State. And I knew that Gilkey had gone back to school at San Francisco State. So this Natasha said that, you know, she had gotten to be creeped out by Gilkey. And here was a link to John Gilkey's pseudonymous Yelp account where there was a link to review of a storage unit in Modesto. A lot of book dealers think that Gilkey has a storage unit in Modesto, where he's hiding all of his stolen books, along with prints, maps, stamps, other fancy collectibles. But the police can't go in and find out without giving a judge a specific list of items that they think are in there. And that hasn't happened. So no one knows if the storage space is even real. And so we've got this, you

know, this link to this Yelp review. And of course, the woman had to be named Natasha and not Annette or something, right? I mean, and is it really from this woman named Natasha? Or is it Gilkey somehow punking us? Because you go to the Yelp account, and then as you read through, there's like this one-star review of Ken Sanders' rare books, which it gives no, you know, and says, you know, I bought a book from Ken Sanders' rare books, and the pages were funny, and they wouldn't let me return it. And it was just, you know, how many sort of like weird little funhouse mirrors are reflecting back here and and who's sort of who's sort of getting whom do you think he goes to his storage space and like i don't know like relishes his collection right right does does does he like go do like sort of a scrooge mcduck thing and just

sort of like go stand among his treasures or does he or does he just know that they're there put away um and just know that he possesses them even even in a sort of abstract way it's so funny too because there's so many of all the ways to impersonate a rich person he's chosen like the it's like invisible he's chosen an invisible one you know right right you know he could he could claim to be a rockefeller i mean that's that's always the easiest way to become a you know taken for a rich person you just you know you're at the cost of a blue blazer and and uh and a fake accent but it's it's um you know why yeah that idea that that somehow having this invisible storehouse of books somewhere would would cause him to carry himself in a different way.

Yeah, it is strange. It is a strange way of attaining some sort of success. I mean, I guess it's like the old, you know, the kind of the idea of the lost Dauphin, you know, that you're this at heart. You're really a sort of a much better, richer person than the world realizes. If only the world knew who you really were. We tried long and hard to find John Gilkey, trying phone numbers and email addresses. Alison Hoover Bartlett said she hadn't spoken to him since her book came out in 2009.

We couldn't find him, and then, just as we were finishing up this episode, we learned that Gilkey had been arrested again. He's in jail right now, without bail, for violation of California Penal Code 470 Section D, which is a kind of forgery that includes the passing of bad checks. Lauren Spohr. Criminal is produced by Lauren and me. Special thanks to Rob Byers, Ken Lopez, Tim Slover, and Sergeant James Jensen with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.

Julianne Alexander does our episode art. You can find out more about the show at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. If you like what we're doing, please go to iTunes and write us a review. It means a lot. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Check out all of the shows at radiotopia.fm. Shows like Mortified. August 19, 1999.

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