Read The Excerpt: A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb
COSDEN AND MOUNTBATTEN
Sands Point, Long Island – 1924
A curtain rustled in the darkness, awakening the man sleeping a few feet away. It sounded like someone had brushed against it, like someone had entered the guest room.
“It was just before daybreak,” he recalled. He listened for a moment, then switched on a light. There was no one there. The man had grown up in stately homes, surrounded by butlers, footmen, valets, and maids. He was accustomed to the discreet, almost imperceptible comings and goings of household staff. Perhaps a servant had ducked into the room, he thought. Or maybe a gust of wind from an open window had ruffled the curtain.
Lord Louis Mountbatten—Royal Navy gunnery officer, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, cousin of the Prince of Wales, guest of oil magnate Joshua Cosden—rolled over and went back to sleep.
Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, had joined the prince’s entourage for his holiday on Long Island in September 1924 and were staying at The Cedars, Cosden’s estate in Sands Point, on the island’s mansion-studded North Shore. The Gold Coast, as it was known, was an architectural mishmash of French châteaux with cone-topped towers, symmetrical Georgian houses, and elegant colonial-style homes perched along the beaches. Each one stood at the heart of a mini kingdom of stables, servants’ quarters, and swaths of landscaped grounds and manicured gardens. The Cosdens’ neighbors were a roll call of New York’s old-money families: Guggenheim, Astor, Vanderbilt, Whitney. The newly built mansion next door, Cloverly Manor, was the home of Vincent Astor, who was just twenty in 1912 when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the Titanic, leaving him an inheritance of $70 million; today, that would make him a billionaire twice over.
The previous summer, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, had rented a house in Great Neck, on the opposite side of Manhasset Bay from Sands Point. And it was there—surrounded, as he put it, by “the consoling proximity of millionaires”—that the writer began formulating the characters and plot for his opus, The Great Gatsby. In the novel, Great Neck would be transformed into West Egg, the site of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby’s ivy-covered château. Sands Point, at the tip of a peninsula jutting into Long Island Sound, would become the more fashionable and exclusive East Egg, where Daisy Buchanan was ensconced in one of its palatia estates. The Cedars could have been a stand-in for the Buchanan mansion.
Like Fitzgerald and his creation Gatsby, Cosden was an upstart without a blue-blood pedigree. Joshua and his wife, Nellie, had gate-crashed the Long Island social scene from Tulsa, where Cosden & Company operated one of the world’s largest refineries. Joshua Seney Cosden had been a clerk at a Baltimore drugstore before he headed west and struck it rich in the Oklahoma oilfields. “Oil gushed up and money showered down,” noted one journalist, but this pithy summation ignored years of setbacks and hard work.
His Long Island neighbors may have been born wealthy, but Cosden—a man so determined he became known as Game Josh—had earned his fortune. He was still seen helping out on drilling rigs or behind the wheel of tanker trucks long after his wildcat wells and refinery had made him a multimillionaire. “No story-book hero ever rose to fame and fortune more spectacularly,” raved the New York Daily News. His Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale and can-do attitude embodied “the spirit of America,” another newspaper suggested. “Without the Cosdens, the men willing to take big risks, ready to fight their way back after every defeat, would not our country become stagnant, backward?” The sixteen-story headquarters he had erected in downtown Tulsa, the city’s first skyscraper, was a monument to his ambition and success.
By 1924, at age forty-three, this “small, dapper, energetic man,” as one columnist described him, had accumulated the trappings of the ultrarich: an eight-room suite at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue; a seventy-room Spanish-style mansion in Palm Beach; an estate in Newport, Rhode Island; a hunting lodge in Canada; a private Pullman car christened the Roamer. His purchase of The Cedars, the former estate of William Bourke Cockran—the congressman and fiery orator who schooled a young Winston Churchill in the arts of politics and public speaking—planted the Cosdens on the doorstep of New York society. It was one of the finest properties on the North Shore, more than three hundred acres of fields and woodland with three-quarters of a mile of water frontage and views of both Manhasset Bay and Hempstead Harbor. Cosden built a mansion amid the towering trees, added a private nine-hole golf course, and docked his steam-powered yacht, Crimper, at the jetty. When he was done, the house and grounds were worth an eye-popping $1.5 million. The New York Daily News dubbed it Castle Petroleum.
Money alone could not buy the Cosdens an invitation to mingle with New York’s landed gentry. But the interlopers, it turned out, fit in. “Cosden has all the instincts of the good sport,” noted journalist and author Winifred Van Duzer, “and MRs. Cosden has rare beauty and charm.” A Virginia stud farm and a stable of more than thirty racehorses were the clinchers. Joshua Cosden’s thoroughbreds, including the playfully named Snob II—purchased, it was said, for the outlandish sum of $100,000—competed at Belmont Park, the gathering place for Long Island’s equestrian set. “Any millionaire can drive a limousine,” Van Duzer explained, “but it takes a thoroughbred to ride a thoroughbred.” A cartoon published in 1922 depicted Cosden, clad in a top hat, tails, and woolly chaps, galloping into the midst of a cocktail party, with Nellie riding at his side.
Besides, the Cosdens could play the ultimate social trump card: they hobnobbed with royalty.
~~~~~~~~~
Mountbatten—Dickie, as he was known to family and friends—was as likable and ambitious as Game Josh. He was tall and lanky, with a long, narrow face, a mop of hair, and the wide smile of a man who realized how lucky he was. Born on the grounds of Windsor Castle and on the periphery of the royal family, he had been drawn into the Prince of Wales’s orbit in 1920; when he accompanied Edward on a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Official visits to India and Japan followed in 1921 and 1922, cementing their friendship. Mountbatten was six years younger than the prince, but his maturity and inclination to take charge made him a trusted royal chaperone. The prince described him as “a dear boy” and “the closest friend possible,” while Mountbatten considered the future king to be “a marvellous person” and “the best friend I’ve ever had.” Edward detested his role as king-in-waiting. “How I loathe my job,” he complained to his private secretary before embarking on the globe-circling tours. When his mood turned sullen and he needed to vent about his “rotten” family and his “rotten life,” Mountbatten offered a sympathetic ear.
In the midst of the tour of India, the prince’s young wingman had become engaged to Edwina Ashley, the daughter of a member of Parliament. She could boast of royal connections of her own. Her grandfather Sir Ernest Cassel, a wealthy banker, had been a financial advisor to Edward VII, and the king had been her godfather. When Cassel died in 1921, she inherited £2 million—just shy of $120 million today—and became, at nineteen, one of the richest women in England. Her hair made a defiant sweep across her forehead and was cropped to fall just short of her dimpled chin. She was smart, elegant, and like her fiancé, astonishingly mature and confident for her age. “She blazed in London society,” wrote one of Mountbatten’s biographers, “with a fierce brilliance which alarmed some and dazzled almost all.” Among the most dazzled was Mountbatten.
The couple were the perfect traveling companions for the royal visitor to America. The Mountbattens, after their marriage in 1922—Eric, naturally, had been the best man—had embarked on a ten-week honeymoon tour of the United States. In New York, they were in the stands for baseball games, shook hands with Babe Ruth, and attended the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. They viewed the Grand Canyon, stayed at the Hollywood home of actor Douglas Fairbanks, and even had cameos in a Charlie Chaplin film. The press had been as fascinated with these near royals—the “close relation of the King of England” and “the richest heiress in the world,” the Washington Herald called them—as the horde of journalists that was now obsessed with the prince.
“No one living enjoys less privacy,” the New York Times observed on the eve of the 1924 royal holiday. “The Prince of Wales is as much a topic of conversation at breakfast as is the weather.” A boatload of more than seventy journalists was waiting with cameras and questions when his liner steamed into New York Harbor.
One name kept cropping up in the reams of press coverage: Cosden. Edward played an afternoon round of golf on the oilman’s private course. He dined with Joshua and Nellie soon after arriving on Long Island. He was spotted boarding Crimper for a cruise with the Cosdens’ guests, the Mountbattens. “The Cosdens,” reported Washington, DC’s Evening Star, “probably have entertained the prince in a quiet way more than any others.” He spent almost as much time at the Cosdens’, by one account, as
he did at the estate of industrialist James Burden, his temporary home a dozen miles away.
Arthur Barry would have recognized the Cosden name. The couple were listed in the Social Register. Their names and doings were a staple of the newspaper society pages he scoured for leads on wealthy potential “clients.” The New-York Tribune and the New York Herald told him when they were at Sands Point, when they held court in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, when they boarded the Roamer to spend the winter in Palm Beach.
Their expensive jewelry also made the news. Nellie Cosden sported a ring mounted with a large, lustrous black pearl that a newspaper feature on the jewels of the rich and famous described as one of the finest in the world. But even this exquisite piece was no match for the famous Fletcher pearls.
Isaac Dudley Fletcher, a New York manufacturer and art collector who made a fortune from selling coal by-products, spent ten years collecting pearls of identical size and color before presenting the completed strand to his wife. Like the Cosdens’ black pearl, it was judged to be among the finest examples of a perfectly matched pearl necklace in the world. The necklace had been sold off as two strands, each fetching $600,000—the equivalent, a century later, of more than $9 million—and Joshua Cosden had bought one for his wife. Photographs of Nellie Cosden wearing the magnificent pearls appeared in the newspapers, making a bold statement of the couple’s
wealth and status.
Lady Mountbatten, too, was rarely photographed without at least one strand of expensive pearls dangling from her neck. She insisted on bringing most of her jewelry along when she traveled, even after a burglar swiped some of her collection during a stay at a summer house on the Isle of Wight. Her jewels, noted a biographer, were “a comfort and reassurance.” And they made the Cosden estate an even more appealing target for a jewel
thief who was adept at mingling in high society. The stage was set for one of the boldest and richest heists of Barry’s career.
~~~~~~~~~
Arthur Barry parked his Cadillac at the edge of the estate’s grounds. It was about four o’clock in the morning, but lights still blazed in the Cosden mansion. He would later learn from the newspapers that the couple, along with the Mountbattens and their traveling companion, Jean Norton, had just returned from a dance at an estate on the opposite side of Hempstead Bay. After about an hour, the house went dark
He retraced his steps of a few nights earlier, stealing across the grounds to the house and climbing a rose trellis to reach a porch roof. It was a warm night, and he quickly found an open window. He knew the upstairs layout from his scouting mission the night he befriended the prince. The Cosdens’ five-room bedroom suite was on the west side of the house. Nellie Cosden had taken off the jewelry she had worn to the party before retiring,
and had left it on the top of a dressing table. Barry slipped the pieces into his pockets.
He moved next door to the Mountbattens’ room and scooped up the jewelry that Lady Mountbatten had tossed onto a tray at her bedside. He spotted a wallet, but before he could grab it Lord Mountbatten stirred. Barry ducked behind a window drape just as the bedroom light was switched on. When the room again went dark, and he was certain the couple was asleep, he crept back to the main hallway.
His foray into the Cosdens’ suite had been rewarded with the black pearl ring, diamond pins, and ruby bracelets, worth a total of $130,000. Lady Mountbatten’s jewels—three rings glittering with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, plus a platinum bracelet set with more than thirty square-cut rubies—added $42,000 to his haul. The wallet that eluded his grasp, the newspapers later revealed, had been stuffed with $8,000 in
banknotes. Barry knew there must be more jewelry in the house, including the priceless Fletcher pearls, but the narrow escape told him it was time to leave.
Within a half hour, he was back in Manhattan. By noon the next day, he had fenced every piece. If he had to settle for 10 percent of the gems’ value, his $17,000 cut would have been worth more than a quarter of a million dollars today.
The Cosdens and their guests were still asleep at eleven o’clock the next morning, September 9, when Joshua Cosden’s valet noticed a pearl shirt stud was missing. A search revealed that other pieces had been stolen. The Cosdens and Mountbattens notified their insurers. Private detectives scoured the estate for clues and questioned the household staff. A watchman who had been stationed downstairs during the night insisted
he had not seen or heard anything. The servants, who slept in a separate building, denied any involvement.
The Cosdens, desperate to avoid embarrassment and scandal, tried to keep the theft secret. The news broke the following day, however, sharing the front page on September 10 with reports on the life sentences handed to the infamous Chicago thrill killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The heady combination of an enterprising crook, ultrarich victims, and a link to the biggest newsmaker of them all—the Prince of Wales—made the story impossible to resist. The Daily News published a photograph of
Nellie Cosden posing with her famous pearl necklace in happier times. Baltimore’s Evening Sun breathlessly reported that the burglar had targeted “two of the wealthiest families of the United States and England.” Barry’s raid soon made headlines around the world, from Rotterdam to Shanghai. In London, editors of the big Fleet Street dailies offered readers the lowdown on the “Mountbatten Gem Mystery” and “Lady Louis’ Loss.” Behind the scenes, an outraged British businessman, who lived in the United States, wrote to Downing Street to wag a finger at the prince and his entourage for fraternizing with “social outcasts and parvenus.”
The lead investigator, Manhattan private eye Gerard Luisi, tried to
downplay the burglary as a minor crime. “There isn’t any master criminal mixed up in this,” he told the reporters staking out the Cosden estate. “Only a little petty larceny matter, committed by an average crook.” The prince’s visit, he claimed, had “little or no bearing on the robbery.”
No one believed him. There were reports that a gang of international thieves was shadowing the prince on his travels, waiting for a chance to plunder the people he met. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle hit the bull’s-eye, suggesting the break-in was the work of “a gentleman Raffles . . . a suave, well-dressed individual of insinuating manner” who “circulates among society folk.” So did the New York Times. “Outsiders are known to have visited social functions held in the Prince’s honor,” it reported. “An experienced thief familiar with the workings of society would have no difficulty in entering the homes of wealthy persons.”
The theft was not reported to the police. Frederick Snow, chief of the force in nearby Port Washington, tried to investigate, but the Cosdens refused to cooperate. So when the couple asked him to send officers to the estate to keep the press at bay, he got even by dispatching a lone patrolman to stand guard.
The Scotland Yard detectives and state troopers surrounding the prince stepped up security. The night after the theft, when race-car and yachting enthusiast William K. Vanderbilt entertained the royal visitor, attendees were screened at the gates to his Long Island estate. “Not a jewel was lost,” one newspaper noted wryly. “Not a pearl disappeared from a matronly bosom.” Among the guests were Nellie Cosden and the Mountbattens, fresh from a round of golf and, as far as a reporter for the Daily News could tell, “apparently unruffled” over the burglary and the lost gems.
Luisi’s investigation stalled. He claimed his men had unearthed a “substantial clue,” but no suspect was named and no arrest was made. Theories that the crime had been an inside job, with one of the servants guiding the burglar to the gems, were floated and discounted. Reports that the $600,000 Fletcher pearls had been stowed in an unlocked drawer of Nellie Cosden’s dresser suggested the thief was an amateur and an opportunist. To other observers, the fact the burglar had taken only gems within
easy reach and not rifled through drawers and cabinets—and risked being discovered—seemed like the work of an experienced professional.
A week after the break-in, the Cosdens finally met with the local police. The couple claimed they had seen no need to make an official report, since the jewels were insured and the insurers were investigating, and the burglary faded from the headlines.
In November, Lloyd’s of London and another insurance company paid the Cosdens and Mountbattens a total of $125,000, covering the bulk of their losses. “The trackers of criminals on two continents, America and Europe,” claimed one news report, “have conducted a fruitless search for the gems.”
Posing as the dashing Dr. Gibson to crash one of the Cosdens’ parties, taking the heir to the British throne on a tour of Manhattan’s nightlife, and the rich haul of jewels, Barry later boasted, marked “the very pinnacle of my success as a gentleman burglar.” The truth was, however, that he was just getting started.
Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby meets the hit Netflix series Lupin in this captivating true-crime caper. A skilled con artist and perhaps one of the most charming, audacious burglars in history, Arthur Barry slipped in and out of the bedrooms of New York’s wealthiest residents, even as his victims slept only inches away. He befriended luminaries such as the Prince of Wales and Harry Houdini and became a folk hero, touted in the press as “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” and an “Aristocrat of Crime.” In a span of seven years, Barry stole diamonds, pearls, and other gems worth almost $60 million today. Among his victims were a Rockefeller, an heiress to the Woolworth department store fortune, an oil magnate, Wall Street bigwigs, a top executive of automotive giant General Motors, and a famous polo player. A Gentleman and a Thief is also a love story. Barry confessed to dozens of burglaries to protect his wife, Anna Blake (and was the prime suspect in scores of others). Sentenced to a twenty-five year term, he staged a dramatic prison break when Anna became seriously ill so they could be together for a few more years as fugitives. With dozens of historic images, A Gentleman and a Thief is page-turning, escapist, and sparkling with insight into our fascination with jewel heists and the suave, clever criminals who pull them off.
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