A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue
When the Prince of Wales visited New York in 1924, he had no idea that the urbane, well-dressed Dr. Gibson who squired him through Manhattan’s nighttime hot spots one night was the son of immigrant working-class parents. The bigger secret, though: “Dr. Gibson” was really Arthur Barry, one of New York’s most daring and successful jewel thieves. Over the 1920s, Barry hobnobbed with millionaires and socialites, conning his way into high society, before robbing them of jewelry collectively worth almost $60 million today. The press lauded him as a “gentleman thief” and a real-life Raffles. Though notorious, Arthur Barry captivated Jazz Age America.
Dean Jobb writes an immensely readable book that is part biography, part history of the early 20th century. Barry was a product of his time, neatly illustrating the excess, flash, and vice of Jazz Age New York through his crimes and the excess of the glitterati he robbed. It was an era of liminality, when the criminal underworld regularly rubbed elbows with the well-heeled, when law-abiding Americans flouted Prohibition laws, when violence hid within opulence. Engaging and engrossing narrative nonfiction.
