Strange Times 146: Gentleman Burglar

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Today we have twin tales of extremely fancy crime. Ruffle up your plumage on…

May 26, 1921

• 87-year-old pickpocket Harry Williams is arrested and sentenced to six months in the workhouse—his 38th conviction in a legendary life of crime.

• Responding to recent abuses of the Connecticut marriage laws by bigamists, the Speaker of the House of Representatives proposes a constitutional amendment to outlaw polygamy.

• “Don’t be afraid of studying too hard,” a Princeton graduate school dean tells students. “In the last forty years there is only one recorded case of a student here who died of overstudy.”

• Continuing his recovery from his long illness, the legendary tenor Caruso plans to return to Italy Saturday on board the President Wilson. More than one thousand well-wishers have requested pier passes in order to see him off.

• The Weather: Cloudy and somewhat warmer today; Friday, partly cloudy; moderate variable winds.

I always, always, always have time for a well-mannered thief.

I am puzzled by the idea that he would hang on to nearly 100 pawn shop tickets, however. Isn’t the point of pawning stolen goods that you keep the money and let the pawnbroker hang on to the item? Why would you keep something that so blatantly links you to the crime? (I realize the police could have planted them but that seems outlandish even for 1921.) If you have any insight, do share! I promise not to reveal your gentlemanly crimes.

Herbert Cohen, alias Herbert Kovaek, whom the police describe as “a gentleman burglar” with two prison terms behind him, was arrested on the roof of a five-story apartment house at 202 Green Street, Brooklyn, yesterday after a struggle with Captain Daniel J. Carey and Detectives Benzig and Windeburg of the Thirteenth Inspection District.

The officers were attracted to the roof by the screams of Mrs. Fannie Rosner, who said she found the man ransacking her apartment on the third floor of the building and who followed him when he fled to the roof. Mrs. Rosner had left her apartment to buy groceries for breakfast, and says she found the man there when she returned.

The police say nearly 100 tickets from Brooklyn and Manhattan pawnshops were found on the man when he was searched at the Greenpoint Avenue Police Station, and that they expect to connect him with many important hotel room and other burglaries. According to the police, the man admitted that since he was dismissed in 1919, after serving an eight-year sentence for burglary, he was employed at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan as a waiter.

Cohen or Kovaek, according to the police, is always exceptionally well dressed and with the manners and bearing of a gentleman. He is noted among his associates, they say, for several handsome diamonds which he wears in rings and stickpins, and is believed by the police to have posed as a diamond broker. He speaks six languages, and, according to Captain Carey, has escaped capture several times when discovered in apartments and hotel rooms by pleading mistaken location, his manners and bearing lending color to the excuse.

When arraigned in the Bridge Plaza Court, Cohen pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary preferred by Mrs. Rosner, and was held in $5,000 bail for the Grand Jury.

If you’re dragging several cubic feet of colorful bird through the streets of Brooklyn, does that really count as smuggling?

Charged with smuggling nineteen birds of paradise into this country, two members of the crew of the steamer Caphlamet which docked last Monday were arrested yesterday in Brooklyn and held in $1,000 each for examination by U.S. Commissioner McCabe. The prisoners gave their names as Jose Saig and Pelossoro Alvarez.

Customs officer Edwards told the Commissioner that he saw Saig and Alvarez leave fifteen of the birds in a barber shop on lower Fulton Street, Brooklyn, and four in a house a few doors from police headquarters.