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

“I’m just coming from San Francisco,” Gilkey explained, “on my way to the Stanford library to do some research.”

“So what are you doing here?” Munson asked him.

“A man on Caltrain offered to pay me twenty bucks to pick up a book for him here.”

Munson doubted the story and thought Gilkey looked “nervous and shifty-eyed,” but he had dealt with significant cases of fraud in which a transient was paid to do a pickup. There was a chance the story was true.

“Okay, let’s take this a step further,” said one of the officers. “We’re going to unhandcuff you, take you back to the Caltrain station, give you the package—and you go meet the man, point him out to us.”

“And don’t try to run,” one of the officers warned him. “We’ll be following you.”

Gilkey considered the warning as he walked to the Caltrain station with a half-dozen police officers following him. Stanford University was about a mile away, and if he made a mad dash for it, he might just lose the cops. What’s the worst thing that can happen? he wondered. I don’t think they will shoot me . But a mile was a long way. As the undercover officers followed him, he secretly chewed up the credit card receipts in his pocket and spat them out. They reached the station, but instead of running, he stalled for time, approaching various people, asking them if they had seen the man he’d told the police about.

Munson asked the people working at Caltrain if there had been a man hanging around who fit Gilkey’s description of him: white male, forty to fifty, white hair, walking with a cane. There had not. After Gilkey had wandered around the station for about thirty minutes, it was pretty clear to the officers that he was lying. They took him in for questioning.

At the police station, Gilkey presented himself as a helpful citizen who had only been trying to assist a man with a cane who couldn’t walk very well. 9While he told the officers his name, he wouldn’t answer other questions, such as where he lived. They took the hotel card key in his pocket, but he wouldn’t tell them which hotel it was from. Munson then discovered that Gilkey, who had actually given them his real name, was on probation.

And then it began to unravel. Gilkey told the police that the man on the train had instructed him, “Just pick up the book that’s waiting for Heath Hawkins,” yet at the counter he had said, “I’m picking up the book for Heather Hawkins.” Heather Hawkins was the name on the credit card.

“So how did you know the name Heather? You told us just Heath,” asked Munson.

“Oh yeah, maybe the guy told me Heather and Heath Hawkins,” said Gilkey.

“You’re lying,” said Munson.

Gilkey, who seemed quite calm at this point, fecklessly stuck with his story, but Munson had a toehold. Then, in Gilkey’s pocket, Munson found a crumpled prepaid phone card, which the telephone company traced to three calls made at 10:11, 10:56, and 11:25 A.M. the previous day. They were all to Ken Lopez, the Massachusetts dealer.

“Oh yeah, I was lying to you then,” said Gilkey, meaning his slip with the name on the credit card, “but I’m not lying to you now.”

He was off to jail.

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 Roadshow s. 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.”