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Johnny Burke begins our story as an 18-year-old orphaned, homeless and delinquent youth roaming the hard-scrabble streets of Philadelphia’s factory-filled, blue-collar Kensington neighborhood, struggling to survive during the decade following the end of WWII.
Burke’s milieu is the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, Kensington’s main intersection, or K&A, as the locals have dubbed it; it is also the time of the genesis of what would later become known to press and police alike as the “K&A Gang”, originally a group of disaffected war vets and reform-school graduates, mostly of Irish-American descent, who would rise from street-fighting and stealing car batteries to become some of the most prosperous and proficient professional jewel thieves in America, plundering affluent suburbs from Maine to Florida and the Mid-and-Southwest of copious amounts of diamonds, furs, silver-ware, bearer bonds, and cash, for well over a decade.
Burke’s mentor and surrogate big brother at K&A is Billy “Willie” Sears, a rock-jawed, iron-fisted street battler, and leader of the group. As their fortunes advance and eventually diverge, Burke begins a decade-long cat-and-mouse game with a crooked and ringwise old detective captain, Clarence J. Ferguson. By the time it ends, it’s open to argument who emerges the winner. But Burke survives. The Blaney brothers, Barney and Richie, have been also part of the group at K&A and Burke has been friendly with Barney since grade school, but eventually becomes a bitter enemy of Richie, a known police informer who robs a girl Burke is friendly with.
Burke early on falls in love with and marries teenage sweetheart, Rose, a good Catholic girl who keeps their home life on the straight and narrow; Sears’ wife, the flashy platinum-blonde Dolly provides a humorous counterpoint to the proper Rose and inexplicably they become friends when the boys buy houses a few doors from each other in Kensington: one day Rose and Dolly are having tea in Rose’s kitchen when Dolly, a look of extreme distress on her face, exclaims, “Jesus! I’ve got to get home and make Bill’s dinner! He’ll be late for work!” When Dolly hurries out the door, Rose breaks up in laughter since Bill’s only work is burglary!
Eventually, the Sears’s move to the South Jersey seashore, having bought a cocktail lounge, The Tropics, nearby; the Burkes move to a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia and Burke gets involved in the Philly night-club scene and in loansharking. Along the way, he meets the flamboyant and gorgeous Jewish ex-chorus girl Lillian Reis, who operates a club nearby.
The Blaney brothers are arrested for a burglary in Philadelphia in 1959 and Richie is jailed for parole violation and held in quarantine at the monolithic Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Some of the guys he put inside are just waiting for him to come into the general population. Richie panics and sends for his handler, Ferguson. He spins the publicity-hungry Ferguson a tale of an alleged half-million dollar burglary at the home of a rags-to-riches Sicilian millionaire, a Pottsville, PA coal operator named appropriately John B. Rich, but nee Giovanni Baptiste Recchione. Richie Blaney identifies the perpetrators as his old enemy Burke, Lillian Reis, her boyfriend Ralph Staino, his brother, Barney, and another Kensington nobody.
The pairing of his two worst enemies, Ferguson and Richie Blaney, creates a perfect storm for Burke to deal with. The press goes into a feeding frenzy due to the glamorous and photogenic Reis and the size of the alleged ‘score’. A major story appears on her and the case in both The Saturday Evening Post and for two Sundays running in the New York Daily News’ Sunday Justice Stories series, among many others. Burke is caught up in this maelstrom.
