00:00:00
here's a a book about juniperocera who was the founder of the California missions
00:00:07
to book published in 1787. how much is that one that is eighteen thousand dollars
00:00:15
John Creighton owns a brick row Bookshop in downtown San Francisco just next door
00:00:20
is Alexander McQueen Neiman Marcus and Chanel you'll find his shop on the second floor packed with first editions
00:00:27
and other rare books all told Creighton estimates he's got 1.5 million dollars worth of books in a
00:00:34
shop a few weeks ago Lauren Spore who makes the show with me went to Brick row we got this was over the telephone and a
00:00:44
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
00:00:50
the maracasta bridge I want to put it on my credit card and my father's gonna come in and pick it up so my employee
00:00:57
said we've got an order for the miracasta bridge I'm going to process the credit card and this guy's father is
00:01:02
going to come and pick it up later I said fine on the date Creighton is telling her
00:01:07
about back in 2001 he took a man's credit card number over the phone and charged the sale it went through the
00:01:14
Thomas Hardy book cost twenty five hundred dollars and that afternoon at about three o'clock an older gentleman
00:01:20
came in and said I'm coming to pick up that copy of the mayor of castlebridge for my son I went and got it I gave it
00:01:26
to him and he walked up did you want to see it first or anything uh no it was I I think I asked him if he
00:01:34
wanted a city said no I don't want to see it he seemed as if he he wanted to get out in hurries if he was parked
00:01:39
outside or something like that and had to get back to his car about a month after Creighton sold that
00:01:44
Thomas Hardy book over the phone someone else called who said uh you charge 2 500
00:01:50
plus sales tax I guess it was on my credit card last month and I said well who are you he gave me his name and I
00:01:58
said yes and I looked up the other I said you bought a copy of the mayor castlebridge and I said no that wasn't
00:02:02
me and that's when I knew it was a credit card fraud what happened to Creighton had been
00:02:07
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
00:02:15
credit card number and then a rushed pickup Often by someone who claimed to be the caller's father hundreds of
00:02:21
thousands of dollars in rare books were disappearing and as Lauren found out the booksellers
00:02:27
are mad not just because they want their books back but because this thief keeps
00:02:32
outsmarting them and he seems to be enjoying himself it's like high school all over again where the Nerds try to
00:02:39
tell on the bad kids but no one listens and nothing changes I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
00:02:50
[Music] if you're a rare book dealer in John Creighton's position where someone's
00:02:57
stolen a book from you you can call the police but you'd be hard-pressed to make
00:03:00
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
00:03:07
don't want one of them to unwittingly buy a book that was stolen from you rare book dealers have their own club
00:03:13
the abaa antiquarian booksellers Association of America and part of the organizational structure of the group is
00:03:20
to have a designated Watchdog who keeps up with theft reports and spreads the word
00:03:24
in the late 90s that position had been vacant for a while until a book dealer named Ken Sanders he owns Ken Sanders
00:03:31
rare books in Salt Lake City was asked to step in as security chair I get a giant box of pink sheets from
00:03:39
headquarters in New York and I call them up say what what are they what do I do with them well they're theft reports but
00:03:46
the problem is these sheets had been filled out perhaps six months a year ago and they're just sitting around waiting
00:03:53
for the security chair to to mail them out he made it through that first box of pink sheets and he said this is crazy we
00:04:01
have the internet now let's do this with email and that sounded like a great idea
00:04:05
but in late 1999 early 2000 not everyone was so good with computers and if anyone
00:04:10
was slow to come around to technology it was antiquarian book dealers for a while
00:04:14
my daughter took all the bad keys off my keyboard on my computer at work because
00:04:20
I'd keep accidentally hitting the wrong keys and it would go into the ozone somewhere so she like control and ALT
00:04:27
and she just like popped those keys off the keyboard so I would I couldn't hit them so it took a little while for abaa
00:04:34
members to catch on and join the email list but slowly more and more people were emailing theft reports to Ken and
00:04:40
he started to notice a pattern every single Bookseller that was defrauded and there were dozens of them provided
00:04:46
another clue another piece of information that allowed me to keep compiling this profile of
00:04:53
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
00:05:02
in Northern California I didn't know where he was the emails also helped Ken Sanders realize something very confusing
00:05:09
which was that as far as anyone could tell none of the stolen books were being resold not in this country and not
00:05:15
abroad they were just gone disappearing Without a Trace you know the police do have better
00:05:23
things they've got a lot of you know Murder and Mayhem and pretty serious stuff to deal with where okay nobody got
00:05:31
hurt here you guys are basically quarreling over a Gertrude Stein first edition huh what's that and it yeah
00:05:40
they're not gonna take it seriously and for the most part they don't by early 2003 Ken says that the thief
00:05:49
had stolen well over a hundred thousand dollars in rare books and showed no sign
00:05:53
of slowing down then this thief called a dealer in South Hadley Massachusetts named Ken Lopez and
00:05:59
asked to buy a 7 500 first edition of The Grapes of Wrath and I said Can string him along don't don't run the
00:06:06
credit card or anything but just pretend that you're you're gonna ship it to him
00:06:11
Ken Lopez and Ken Sanders laid a trap with the help of a third man also named Ken a cop named a detective Kenneth
00:06:19
Munson now retired who despite my strange convoluted trail of stolen books and booksellers involving you know one
00:06:30
two three four states in a jurisdictional nightmare he agreed to do a Stakeout at that San Jose Hilton and
00:06:39
they went there early in that morning and by mid-afternoon a man showed up the man refused to tell the police's name he
00:06:47
said he was picking up the book because someone in San Francisco had offered him
00:06:50
20 bucks to deliver it the police arrested him he had no ID no keys nothing on his person except a crumpled
00:07:00
up prepaid phone card that later was proven to have been used to call Ken Lopez to order the uh
00:07:10
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
00:07:17
was over or that's what he thought um he bailed out the next day and I was pretty mad at detective Munson
00:07:25
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
00:07:31
the system and sure enough for I go I think I believe going back to roughly 1991 he
00:07:39
was in the system for kiting bad checks under his real name which was John Charles Gilkey but we didn't know where
00:07:47
the stolen books were and we didn't know Mr gilkey's personal whereabouts Goki was out on bail for months and Ken
00:07:55
Sanders doubled down on his campaign to make sure that every rare book dealer in
00:07:59
California knew gilkey's name Mo and what he looked like so Mr Gilkey travels to
00:08:05
Los Angeles which ironically is a a violation of his parole he can't leave the county and he has got a set uh for
00:08:16
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
00:08:23
to store they're sending emails out to our Bookseller chat list so we're tracking him in real time if you were
00:08:31
and we're having a ball with him because no one will buy his books or they're deliberately offering him like nothing
00:08:40
for him the books at the time were worth maybe six to eight thousand dollars and
00:08:45
he's becoming frustrated by the minute everywhere he goes but finally under the guise of coming back in an hour or two
00:08:53
while the Bookseller researches the books and determines a good value to give them he casually gets Mr gilkey's
00:09:01
information and Mr Gilkey gives him a name and an address the Bookseller immediately calls and
00:09:11
emails me gives me all this information I'm thinking nah Ken was sure it was a fake address but
00:09:19
he still passed it along to detective Munson just in case and 24 hours later he excitedly calls me up from a borrowed
00:09:27
cell phone because back then the cops didn't even have cell phones and he's inside an apartment on Treasure Island
00:09:36
and that's where Mr gilkey's apartment is and it's full of stolen books Ken begged detective Munson to box them
00:09:44
all up and get them out of there but the warrant was only good for titles that could be specifically named as stolen so
00:09:50
Ken started naming books he went back through every title he'd gotten a report about and sure enough 26 of those stolen
00:09:57
books were in gilkey's apartment including that Thomas Hardy stolen from John Crichton at Brick row
00:10:03
but there were books in the apartment Ken Sanders hadn't been able to specifically name and those had to be
00:10:08
left behind the next day Goki and detective Munson appeared in court the judge set gokey's
00:10:16
bail much higher this time two hundred thousand dollars which he did not pay he stayed in jail until he was sentenced to
00:10:23
three years in San Quentin felt pretty good about myself that hey I figured this out I'm pretty smart I'm a
00:10:30
detective man I'm the biblio detective I put the guy in San Quentin that's supposed to be the Final Chapter right
00:10:37
well instead it's like the middle or maybe it's back to the beginning because the book thief gets out and he keeps
00:10:45
stealing books so it's like what so everything I did is for Nothing Even though Goki was sentenced to three
00:10:53
years he was quickly paroled then he violated his parole and went back to prison this happened several times so
00:10:59
all told Gilkey was only locked up for about 18 months a writer named Alison Hoover Bartlett
00:11:06
wrote him a letter and asked to interview him he agreed so she went to the prison to meet him and then when he
00:11:12
got out on parole they met at a restaurant in San Francisco She interviewed him face to face about a
00:11:18
dozen times over a period of several years I he just threw me in immediately I was fascinated I didn't understand how
00:11:25
somebody could think this way how they could have done those things um and in every meeting we had was
00:11:32
surprising to me he had one surprise after the other up the sleeve so it might it made for a very interesting
00:11:37
story to report I feel like you're really the only person who got at the heart of why he
00:11:43
does this well I hope so the love of what the ownership of books says about him and
00:11:56
I've heard collectors talk about their collections on the Shelf as a kind of Memoirs that reflects on who they are
00:12:03
and what their interests are and guilty was no different this way and by building a collection of impressive
00:12:09
books um he was building a self a man who he thought would be respected for his taste
00:12:17
and their audition she writes the guilty imagined version of himself as an English gentleman with
00:12:26
a grand Library this is why he hasn't sold the books he's hiding them somewhere for safe
00:12:31
keeping because he needs them to continue to grow his Library [Music] in 2005 Gilkey suggested to Allison
00:12:40
Hoover Bartlett that they go together to a Bookshop he wanted to show her what he
00:12:44
looks for in a rare book and they decided to visit John Creighton's bookstore brick Rowe
00:12:50
it was a morning just like this it was about 10 30 in the morning and I look up and there's this fellow with this woman
00:12:56
looking in my bookcase and I'm kind of startled and I look at him twice and I get up and
00:13:03
I say you're John Gilkey and he looks at me and he keeps talking to her kind of ignoring me and he was telling he's
00:13:09
showing the lady he said I want to look at Nathaniel Hawthorne he kind of started opening up these cases like that
00:13:14
and was your head just exploding I was I was nervous uh I was very upset about this because I consider him kind of a
00:13:23
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
00:13:29
look through things as if he'd never committed any offense at all were you scared he was going to take more books
00:13:34
or that he was there to be an intimidating figure yeah I think it's just sort of an intimidation sure
00:13:39
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
00:13:44
nervy that because that's what's scary Allison Hoover Bartlett first wrote a magazine article and then she expanded
00:13:51
it into a book called The Man Who Loved books too much when it came out in 2009 Gilkey called to congratulator
00:13:58
the book was getting a lot of press New York Times and PR Washington Post and all this made Gilkey happy
00:14:04
you'd think that with all of the exposure the book had gotten Gilkey would want to keep his head down but
00:14:10
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
00:14:16
to get an email in my inbox saying you know Gilkey strikes again this is Garrett Scott a rare book dealer in Ann
00:14:23
Arbor Michigan he's taken over as security chair of the abaa so now he's the one who Fields reports from victims
00:14:30
you know I'll get a report that you know Gilkey has stung somebody for a 75 book in San Francisco you know and
00:14:37
and my day is shot the reports coming in aren't even always about books allegedly
00:14:43
gilkey's been making reservations at small town bnbs with stolen credit card numbers and then showing up and paying
00:14:48
the bill with a check from a closed checking account shopkeepers in those same small towns Jewelers and antique
00:14:54
dealers they report the same they say that they know it's him because his name is printed right there on the
00:15:00
upper left corner of the bad checks John Gilkey he's got open warrants against him but whenever he does get caught and
00:15:07
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
00:15:13
going shopping Garrett Scott says it's like this low-level brush fire that's never going
00:15:18
away you know Ken Ken Sanders forwarded me an email from a woman who said her name was
00:15:25
Natasha who had been a uh said she was a classmate of John gilkey's at San Francisco State and I knew that Gilkey
00:15:32
had gone back to school uh to San Francisco State so this Natasha said that you know she had gotten to be
00:15:39
creeped out by Gilkey and here was a link to John gilkey's pseudonymous Yelp account
00:15:47
where there was a a link to review of a uh of a storage unit in Modesto a lot of
00:15:55
book dealers think that Gilkey has a storage unit in Modesto where he's hiding all of his stolen books along
00:15:59
with prints Maps stamps other fancy Collectibles but the police can't go in and find out without giving a judge a
00:16:06
specific list of items that they think are in there and that hasn't happened so no one knows if the storage space is
00:16:12
even real and so we've got this you know this link to this Yelp review and and of course the woman had to be
00:16:19
named Natasha and not a net or something right I mean and and is it really from this woman named
00:16:25
Natasha or is it Gilkey somehow punking us because you go to the Yelp account and then as you read through there's
00:16:31
like this one star review of Ken Sanders rare books um which which it gives no you know and and
00:16:41
says you know I bought a book from Ken Sanders where books and the pages were funny and they wouldn't let me return it
00:16:46
and and it was just you know how many sort of like weird little fun house mirrors are
00:16:51
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
00:16:58
like I don't know like relishes his collection right right does does he like go do like
00:17:04
sort of a Scrooge McDuck thing and just sort of like go stand among his treasures or does he or does he just
00:17:11
know that they're there put away um and just know that he possesses them even even in a sort of abstract way
00:17:19
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
00:17:26
like invisible he's chosen an invisible one you know right right you know he could he could claim to be a Rockefeller
00:17:31
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
00:17:36
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
00:17:44
that somehow having this invisible Storehouse of books somewhere would would cause him to carry himself in a
00:17:53
different way yeah it is it is strange it you know it is a strange way of attaining some sort
00:18:00
of success I mean I guess it's like the old uh you know the kind of the idea of the lost
00:18:06
dofan you know that you're this uh at heart you're really a sort of a much better richer person than the world
00:18:13
realizes if only the world knew who you really were [Music] we tried long and hard to find John
00:18:25
Gilkey trying phone numbers and email addresses Allison Hoover Bartlett said she hadn't spoken to him since her book
00:18:31
came out in 2009. we couldn't find him and then just as we were finishing up this episode we learned that Gilkey had
00:18:38
been arrested again he's in jail right now without bail for violation of California penal code 470
00:18:45
section D which is a kind of forgery that includes the passing of bad checks Lawrence Spore
00:18:57
criminal is produced by Lauren and me special thanks to Rob Byers Ken Lopez Tim Slover and Sergeant James Jensen
00:19:04
with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Julianne Alexander does our episode art
00:19:09
you can find out more about the show at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show
00:19:16
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
00:19:23
radiotopia from PRX check out all of the shows at radiotopia.fm shows like mortified
00:19:30
august 19 1999. well we're finally in Africa I feel so Awake and Alive it's as if I was born
00:19:39
yesterday and nothing has ever adulterated My Hope or mind August 22nd I'm more frightened than I've ever been
00:19:50
that's mortified go listen radiotopia is made possible with support from the Knight foundation and MailChimp
00:19:56
celebrating creativity chaos and teamwork I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music]