The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

8

Treasure Island

Gilkey was to be held in jail for two days. Sanders e-mailed bookseller Ed Smith, a possible Gilkey victim:

Subject: Do you know the way to San Jose?

As you know, we got him. But only for 48 hours. We are frantically trying to help the detective with facts to prove a case with the DA on Friday morning.

He’s a lying sumbitch (of course). They always are.

I need to hear from more people.

The next day, more reports of thefts flew in.

As suggested, Munson e-mailed Lane Heldfond of Heldfond Book Gallery a series of photos and asked if she could identify the thief. In addition to having a good memory in general, Heldfond’s recollection of faces is particularly acute. After looking at the six photos, she said one of them looked very close, but that the man’s complexion appeared to be a little ruddier, he had a bit less hair, and his face seemed puffier than the man she remembered. These were subtle differences, but she picked up on them nonetheless.

Munson, impressed by Heldfond’s powers of observation, explained to her why the man looked different. Gilkey had been on medication for alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which makes the skin both reddish and a bit bloated. Not only had she identified him correctly, she had identified how his face, which she had seen for only a minute in 2001, had changed.

Heldfond had nailed it. Now Munson had a positive ID.

On February 1, 2003, Sanders e-mailed ABAA members to relay details of the sting and to let them know that Gilkey had met bail (he had used money from a savings account) and been released. “Whereabouts unknown.”

Immediately, Sanders’s e-mail inbox filled with a flurry of appreciative e-mails. Even if Gilkey had been set free, thanks to Sanders’s efforts, the bookselling community was closer than ever to recovering its books and putting the thief behind bars.

ALTHOUGH THEFT has always been a threat to rare book dealers, in the past century, nothing has made it easier for thieves to sell their ill-gotten goods than the Internet. In all my conversations with Ken Sanders, the only subject that riled him as much as news of a recent theft was eBay. It’s not only hot property that shows up on that website, but fraud of all sorts, he says. Even sellers with honorable intentions don’t necessarily know a first edition from a book club edition—and some don’t even know a first edition from a later edition, as I had learned firsthand. Others know perfectly well, but are out to swindle naive buyers.

“A woman here in the valley called me up,” said Sanders, “and she says, ‘I just purchased an autographed Catcher in the Rye on eBay for fifteen hundred.’ And I stopped her right there. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to see this book, I don’t want you to bring it to my store. It’s no good, it’s a fake. You got taken. Go get your money back.’ You cannot buy any kind of real J. D. Salinger-autographed book for ten times that, let alone The Catcher in the Rye. I tried to point it out to her. I said, ‘Look, why do you think that of the hundreds of sophisticated collectors and booksellers out there, you would be the lucky one?’ It’s one of the most desired and difficult twentieth-century autographs to get—on the most desired book. Of course it’s not the first edition! Because forgers aren’t going to ruin a valuable first edition. They’re going to pick a worthless edition and put the autograph on that.”

One of the reasons people are so ripe for the rip-off, according to Sanders, is what he calls the “Antiques Roadshow/ eBay syndrome.” Due to the television show (where he has since appeared as a rare book expert) and the website, there’s much more awareness of books’ potential value, but buyers aren’t equipped with enough knowledge to guard themselves against fraud.

“People call me up and say, ‘I got a first edition of Gone With the Wind!’” said Sanders. “Well, no they don’t.” (To start, there were more than a hundred first editions printed, each labeled as such, but only those from the very first run with “Published May, 1936” are true first editions. Finding one in collectible condition, especially with a jacket, is next to impossible.) “They don’t know what a first edition is. But they know it means something good, they know it means something valuable. And that’s from watching too many Antiques Roadshows. Mix that with the speed of the Internet and the nine-hundred-pound gorilla that’s eBay—any law enforcement person will tell you eBay is the largest legalized fence in the universe.”

I called a computer systems security analyst named Mark Seiden for a less impassioned opinion (all of Sanders’s opinions are impassioned), but he echoed Sanders almost word for word, saying, “eBay is the largest legalized fence of stolen property in the world.” He said that eBay has avoided liability because they are not technically auctioneers, since there is no person hosting, no physical place where the auctions are held. “They say they are a marketplace,” said Seiden. “Period.” But however legal the business is, the fact is that unscrupulous sellers flourish there.

In another conversation with Sanders, I relayed Seiden’s confirmation, which got him fired up again. He told me he sees forgeries on eBay all the time. “I once saw that a guy was selling a John Lennon signature for a dollar,” he said. “So I called the buyer and asked if he had got an appraisal. He tells me, ‘Those rare book dealers wanted to charge me a hundred dollars for an appraisal.’ So I asked him, ‘Why not get one? If it’s real, you’ve got a five-thousand-dollar signature.’ He told me to eat shit and die.”

Sanders told me that several years ago he and his ABAA colleague Ken Lopez met with representatives of eBay, suggesting strategies to combat fraud, to no avail. “Lopez and I, we wasted nine months in negotiations with eBay,” said Sanders. “They never followed a single suggestion. They kept stringing us along, but they never changed one single thing.”

Ironically, one of the reasons people are getting cheated, according to Sanders, is the practice of providing certificates of authenticity.

“When material comes in,” he said, explaining the dealer’s traditional process, “you try to establish its provenance, but in many cases it’s impossible to do, so the trail ends at some point. You just have to look at the material, the situation it comes from, ask people who consider themselves experts, and have them look at it. You try to put as much of the story together as you can. In the end, because of eBay, now everyone wants a certificate of authenticity, but as I point out to people: Who signed this certificate? As far as I’m concerned, no legit book dealer or autograph trader that I’ve ever known in my life would ever offer a certificate of authenticity. That’s a warning bell right there, the mere offering of one. That’s become a popular paradigm on eBay. It’s what’s allowed predators to be so successful and grow so large.”

One of the dealers I met at the New York fair, Dan Gregory, of Between the Covers Books in Merchantville, New Jersey, worries about yet another problem he sees on eBay: fake dust jackets. Gregory is an expert in dust jackets and explained the phenomenon. Given that the cost of a first edition of The Great Gatsby without a dust jacket is $150 and one with can fetch $4,000, there’s great incentive to print one yourself (possible with current technologies and a lot of savvy) or to swap jackets with a less valuable copy of the book.

“If I were a bad guy instead of a good guy, that’s what I’d be doing,” said Gregory, who predicts that in ten or twenty years, when those who have found deals too good to be true on eBay decide to sell their collections, they’ll find that indeed, those deals were too good to be true.

ONE REASON Gilkey had been so difficult to catch was that he was not selling his stolen books on eBay or any other website. And that’s one of the reasons his capture was so satisfying to Sanders. Shortly after he e-mailed his colleagues about Gilkey’s arrest, Sanders went to San Francisco for that memorable California International Antiquarian Book Fair. As is typical for this fair, opening day drew thousands of collectors who, once through the front doors, were busy tracking down books. Even among this crowd of hungry collectors, and with a booth full of gems like the Book of Mormon and Kennedy’s The Strategy of Peace, Sanders still couldn’t keep his mind off Gilkey. For three years, he had kept after his colleagues both to report thefts and to be on the lookout for attempts to resell the stolen material, and nothing had come of it. They’d come so close, but they still hadn’t nailed the “sumbitch,” and not only was Gilkey out on bail, he was now paroled in San Francisco.

Since Sanders and Lopez decided not to post the mug shot or hang wanted posters of Gilkey around the fair (in order not to corrupt the identification process in a potential lineup), they were among only a handful of dealers who might recognize him.

So when Gilkey walked through the front door of the fair and immediately felt he was being watched, it may have been in his head. Still, he was determined to find someone who would buy one of the books he had brought because he needed to raise money for an attorney. He drifted from one dealer’s booth to the next, admiring books, asking questions. At one of his favorite stops, the Heritage Book Shop booth, he admired Ayn Rand’s The Fountain-head . He thought that one of the owners, Ben or Lou Weinstein, recognized him because, as he says, “I did business with him,” Gilkey’s euphemism for stealing. “I didn’t take anything from him, though,” he protested. “I had a taxi driver pick it up.”

Gilkey tried to sell Heritage his stolen copy of The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells, but they declined. He wanted at least $1,000, but they offered only $500. He also approached John Crichton of Brick Row Books, who was unaware that this was the man whose father had picked up The Mayor of Casterbridge. At Sumner and Stillman Rare Books, Gilkey ogled a first edition of George Orwell’s 1984, which was priced at about $2,000. At another booth, he was intrigued to learn from a dealer that author Lewis Carroll had invented the dust jacket.¹

Gilkey had read that John Dunning, author of the best-selling Cliff Janeway rare book mystery series that had so inspired him, was speaking, but didn’t see him at the fair. He would have liked to have asked Dunning for his autograph.

Gilkey told me that he did stop by Sanders’s booth. He glanced at a number of titles by Wallace Stegner, whom he had never heard of, and saw books about Mormons, which he had absolutely no interest in, so he didn’t linger. At the time, he had no idea that Sanders was the man who had set his capture in motion.

Despite the heightened awareness of several of the booksellers and Gilkey’s motivations to unload some of his stolen wares, no criminal activity was identified during the three-day fair.² No one reported any books missing, and no one noticed one man’s peddling of suspicious items. It was the next month, on March 25, that Sanders received word that the activity had started up again. Gilkey had surfaced in San Francisco, attempting to buy books with bad checks. Sanders sent another e-mail to ABAA members:

Earlier this afternoon he went to Tom Goldwasser’s shop and attempted to buy several John Kendrick Bangs first editions. Be on lookout! Gilkey is 5’9”, 130 pounds, mid 30s, straight brown hair, rounded shoulders. He is described as soft spoken, clean shaven, casually dressed with windbreaker and cap. While in Goldwasser’s shop today, he was carrying newspapers, including a copy of Art News. He said he had a collection of John Kendrick Bangs. Also, another older man in shop may have been there to distract. He was in his 50s, taller, 6’, grayish hair.

Two days later, Sanders learned from Munson that Gilkey had shown up in court without his attorney. The hearing had to be postponed. Gilkey was set to go to court again, but Munson said it would be six to twelve months before any depositions. Due to standard delays in the court calendar, Gilkey was free for up to another year.

A year of freedom following arrest and the payment of bail. It was a formula for revenge. Even after having been caught, and perhaps because of it, Gilkey was confident he could now do whatever he wanted. The worst was behind him. He was sure that after the year was up, a judge wouldn’t sentence him to more than a few months in prison, and that was nothing, just a blip in his plans. For now, building the collection was what mattered.

Less than a week after Sanders’s e-mail message, on April 1, Cynthia Davis Buffington of Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts wrote to Sanders:

Phone order today for $6500. American Express name: Isser Gottlieb. Conversation felt right, authorization came through. Caller said he wasn’t sure the Oakland shipping address was current card address. Said he’d just moved from Savannah and gave me address there also. Googled ship address: Hilton. Phone area code: san fran . . . I called American Express. They said fraud.

Sanders had Buffington send a dummy package overnight to the address given by the caller. It was delivered to the Hilton Hotel the next morning, but no one showed up to pick it up. Gilkey hadn’t made a reservation under a phony name, either. Munson and his officers had waited outside the hotel from ten A.M. to four P.M.

We’ll just have to wait for the next one, he wrote Sanders.

A couple of weeks later, Sanders got word that Gilkey (who was not using an alias) was in Los Angeles, trying to sell a set of Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne worth $9,500 for a price far below their value, first to William Dailey Rare Books, then to Heritage Book Shop. The books were: When We Were Very Young, 1925; Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926; Now We Are Six, 1927; and The House at Pooh Corner, 1928. Recognizing Gilkey’s name from Sanders’s e-mails, both stores contacted him. Dailey e-mailed that when Gilkey left his shop, he’d climbed into a Nissan with the license plate SHERBET. Sanders alerted the trade.

Dailey forwarded the address Gilkey had given them on Gateview Court to Sanders. Anyone in San Francisco, please comment on address, e-mailed Sanders, even though he assumed it was bogus.

Several people replied, and Sanders learned from Munson that the address was on Treasure Island, a man-made swath of land that sits in the middle of the bay between San Francisco and Oakland. A WPA project from the 1930s, the island was built with mud dredged from the Sacramento Delta, and its name was inspired by the gold that may have been buried in the soil. San Francisco’s first airport was on Treasure Island, as were a military base and the site of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, but many of its buildings are now empty. Nowadays, much of the island seems like a ghost town surrounded by water and the silhouettes of San Francisco, Marin County, and the East Bay. Few people live there.

That a book thief might be living—and possibly hiding his stash—on Treasure Island seemed storybook perfect, not only because it is the name of a famous, oft-collected book (exceptional first editions can go for over $30,000) but also because it’s so evocative of the treasure hunt that book collecting often is.

Sanders thought it unlikely that Gilkey would have given anyone his correct address, but dutifully called Munson with it anyway.

“I hate to waste your time,” he said. “I doubt this is any good.”

Arnold Herr, a bookseller in L.A., was in fact reading Sanders’s latest alert concerning Gilkey’s attempts to sell the A. A. Milne books, when he looked up to see a man who resembled the photo of Gilkey. It was as if the bookseller had conjured the thief just by thinking about him. But there he was, approaching the counter. Herr steeled himself.³

“Nice shop you have here,” said Gilkey. “I’ve got these four Winnie-the-Pooh books. Very nice condition. Any chance you’re interested in buying them?”

Herr looked at the books, stalling for time. “Uh, I think I have a customer who may be interested,” he said. “Why don’t you call me in an hour or so, after I’ve had a chance to talk to her.”

“Well,” said Gilkey, “I’m checking out of my hotel at one or two o’clock, so I really need to take care of this soon.”

No sooner had Gilkey spoken those words than they were reported to Sanders.

At Sanders’s suggestion, Herr then called Dailey, who said there was no way to prove that the books were stolen. Herr then reached Gilkey at the Hyatt in West Hollywood, and Gilkey assured him he was still eager to sell. Herr told him that the potential customer was out of town for the weekend, but that he could reach her Monday. Gilkey gave Herr his cell phone number.

Twelve minutes later, Sanders received an e-mail from George Houle of Houle Books in L.A., saying that Gilkey had just left his shop with the Milne he had tried to sell. Gilkey had told Houle he was waiting for a taxi, but Houle watched him get into a dark car with no plates. Houle couldn’t see the driver. The car had been parked a block away, even though there was plenty of parking in front of the store.

Sanders informed the ABAA of Gilkey’s recent activities, noting that he was described as wearing a blue Caesars Palace jacket and tan trousers. He then suggested that Southern California dealers set up a phone tree to alert those who didn’t have access to the ABAA e-mail list.

Late that night, at nearly eleven, Malcolm Bell from Book-fellows Fine and Rare Books, a non-ABAA bookseller who had received an alert by phone, wrote to Sanders:

Unfortunately, I got info too late. Gilkey was here 4:00 Saturday, offering four Pooh’s for $2000. I had no interest. His manner was pleasant and he was chatty. He appeared to me to be collector. He looked at our stock. Asked my wife to open science fiction case. He selected two: Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, first edition $100, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian first edition $200.

He paid with check, presenting a passport and license number for ID . We will deposit check on Monday with little hope of it going through. He had a small rolling case and made mention of traveling by plane.

The next morning, Bell e-mailed Sanders: We’ve applied for ABAA membership.

A FEW DAYS LATER, on April 21, Detective Ken Munson struck gold. Search warrant in hand, he decided to investigate the Treasure Island address Gilkey had provided. Munson rang the bell, but no one answered. He used a key he had obtained from the apartment’s management office, and as soon as he opened the door, he knew he was in the right place. The address was indeed Gilkey’s, and every surface was covered in books. Moving through the dreary, government-subsidized three-bedroom apartment, Munson and his three accompanying officers found books in the kitchen, on the bookshelf, in the bedroom, on counters, on dining room chairs. Some of the oldest items were an illuminated leaf from a Book of Hours, circa 1480, encased in a plastic sleeve; a land deed from 1831; and a signature of Andrew Jackson. Along with the books were coin collections, stamps, documents, baseball cards, posters, and autographed photographs. There were also books, advertisements, and articles throughout the apartment related to these items and their value. The officers found what appeared to be shopping lists of book titles and authors. They also found receipts for hotels, and cards and papers with the names of auction houses and bookstores, several of which Munson recognized as having been victims of fraud within the past three years. Receipts for various hotels and travel documents were also among the goods. It appeared that both John Gilkey and his father, Walter Gilkey, were living in the apartment, and in John’s bedroom they found a manila envelope with Saks Fifth Avenue credit receipts and pieces of paper with credit card holders, credit card numbers, and expiration dates handwritten on them.⁴

Munson took out his cell phone and, from John Gilkey’s living room, placed a call to Ken Sanders.

Sanders couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to jump on a plane, but he got Munson to describe the scene inside Gilkey’s apartment.

“Can’t you just box it all up, haul it off, and sort out the ownership later?” Sanders pleaded.

Munson explained that nothing could be removed without information indicating it was indeed stolen. Standing in front of a bookcase filled with what looked like valuable books, he asked Sanders for the names of any books he was sure were stolen.

Sanders scrambled to his computer for the theft reports and worked as fast as he could. “Is there an On the Road by Jack Kerouac?” he asked.

Munson said yes.

“Grab it!” said Sanders. “What about a Mayor of Casterbridge ?”

“Yes.”

“And Lord Jim?”

“Yes.”

And so it went. With Sanders’s help, Munson was able to identify twenty-six stolen books in Gilkey’s apartment that day. Sanders felt especially happy that the “trilogy of Kens” was able to recover L.A. bookseller Malcolm Bell’s books, only three days after Gilkey had taken them. “That’s got to be a record,” said Sanders. But with no further proof of theft, the majority of the books were left behind.

Later that day, Gilkey returned to his apartment. As he approached the building, he noticed that the lid of one of his garbage cans had been removed and that the contents were strewn over the sidewalk. He had a hunch the police had been there. When he entered the apartment, he knew. He had given in to the temptation of keeping his books around him, indulging in their presence rather than hiding them in a storage facility he rented, and it was now his undoing.

The next day, Sanders e-mailed the trade.It’s with great pleasure to report that the San Jose high tech crimes unit raided Gilkey’s apartment on Treasure Island. . . . I urgently need anyone who’s lost a book from Gilkey or one of his aliases to contact me immediately!

The apt is a treasure trove of allegedly stolen books the detectives are packing up right now. Also autographs, coins, movie posters . . . Gilkey is still at large, expected to be arrested in near future.

Sanders closed the e-mail with his usual warning: Govern Yourselves Accordingly.

Over the next two days, Sanders’s e-mail inbox was flooded with titles of stolen books and their identifying marks (torn pages, inscriptions, stains, etc.) from dealers around the country. There were also more e-mails from appreciative dealers. Florence Shay, of Chicago, wrote to the long-bearded Sanders: You’re the equal of Poirot, even though the facial hair is arranged differently.

On April 24, Gilkey arrived in court for another hearing. When the judge heard from police what he had been up to in Los Angeles and San Francisco, his bail was raised to $200,000.

The question of Gilkey’s partner, or partners, continued to goad the Kens. There was the driver of the car with the SHERBET license plates, and the older man who had been seen during several pickups. Gilkey usually said his father or brother or uncle or nephew would pick up the books, but how many of them were there? Were they really family members, or were they simply partners in crime? Sanders wrote to the ABAA members: Munson’s doing a photo lineup with Crichton.

That day, Munson checked the registration for the SHERBET car that Gilkey had been seen in. It belonged to Janet Colman, a woman in the movie poster business who owned Hollywood Poster Exchange. Not long after, through further investigating, Munson determined that the Ice Cream Lady, as Sanders called her, was innocent. Gilkey had sold a poster to her, and she had offered to drive him around. There was no connection between her and the thefts.

There was plenty of evidence to support the case against Gilkey, however. Munson found that every credit card holder whose number was used by Gilkey had been a customer at Saks, and that the phone numbers he gave various dealers matched the hotels where he had stayed or had the books delivered. At the Radisson Hotel in Brisbane, his telephone charges included calls to Lion Heart Autographs, Butterfield & Butterfield Auctioneers, R&R Enterprises (an auction house), and University Stamp Company (another auction house).

On April 30, Sanders wrote to Lopez that Gilkey was set to go to court the next week to be assigned a public defender— that is, if he couldn’t make bail or afford his own attorney. Munson hoped he would have a public defender, because there was a greater chance Gilkey would accept a plea bargain of three years. If not, he would be headed to a jury trial.

The next day, Munson and another officer went to Brick Row in San Francisco and showed owner Crichton six photos, one at a time. Gilkey’s father, Walter, was Photo 2 (his driver’s license photo). Crichton looked at each and said he believed that Walter was one of the first three photos, and when Munson showed him the photos again, he wasn’t sure but narrowed it down to Photo 2 or Photo 3. On the last viewing, Crichton correctly identified the man who had picked up The Mayor of Casterbridge as Photo 2. Munson now had another positive ID. In his police reports, he added Gilkey’s father’s name. Walter had previously been charged only with possession of stolen property, but was now charged with his son’s alleged crimes as well: “(S) John Gilkey and (S) Walter Gilkey should be charged with 182 PC—Conspiracy, 487 PC—Grand Theft, 530.5 PC—Identity Theft, 484 (g) PC—Theft of Access Card and 496 PC—Possession of Stolen Property.”

From early July through September, Munson kept Sanders abreast of Gilkey’s case. Gilkey did not opt for a public defender, and for the first several weeks, he repeatedly hired new attorneys, then fired them, delaying the process.⁵ Finally, the deputy attorney general said he would listen to anything Gilkey had to say, but that he still had to plead guilty and accept a sentence of three years. If he did not accept this arrangement, the court would file the additional ten to twelve felonies, including those involving his father. Remembering that two years earlier his attorney had suggested he might benefit from a psychiatric evaluation, Gilkey tried that tack again, but the judge wasn’t going for it, so he pleaded guilty. He also told the judge he wanted to appeal the decision, a tactic he thought would enable him to stay even longer in county jail, which was much more comfortable than state prison. The judge would hear nothing of it. She sent him to San Quentin.

Almost exactly a year after the sting, on February 24, 2004, Munson e-mailed Sanders to notify him that Gilkey had been shipped to state prison. So while he appeals, wrote Munson, he can do it from somewhere not as pleasant as the county jail.

So it was in San Quentin State Prison that Gilkey lived twenty-three hours a day in a cell,⁶ imagining ways to win an appeal. Even if he were to lose it, he knew he would probably serve only half of his three-year sentence. Still, eighteen months seemed, as he put it, “an awfully long time to be behind bars for liking books.” He spent those months sleeping most of the day so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his fellow inmates, and lying awake at night, thinking about how unjust the world was and how deserving he was of a better life and more rare books. It was the point in a repeating cycle he’d lived through many times, yet it was no less powerful for its frequency. If anything, its repetition fomented a deep desire, once again, for getting even.