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

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. 5Finally, 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, 6imagining 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.

9

Brick Row

Acouple of months after Gilkey’s 2005 release from prison, I met him in front of 49 Geary Street, a building that houses several art galleries and rare book stores in San Francisco. It was a September morning and he wore a bright white sweatshirt, pleated khakis, his beige leather sneakers, and the PGA baseball cap. He held a folder, on top of which lay a handwritten, numbered list, his to-do list for the day.