Ex Libris | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

here's a a book about juniperocera who was the founder of the California missions
to book published in 1787. how much is that one that is eighteen thousand dollars
John Creighton owns a brick row Bookshop in downtown San Francisco just next door
is Alexander McQueen Neiman Marcus and Chanel you'll find his shop on the second floor packed with first editions
and other rare books all told Creighton estimates he's got 1.5 million dollars worth of books in a
shop a few weeks ago Lauren Spore who makes the show with me went to Brick row we got this was over the telephone and a
fellow called and he said I want to buy a book you have listed online it's by Thomas Hardy it's the first edition of
the maracasta bridge I want to put it on my credit card and my father's gonna come in and pick it up so my employee
said we've got an order for the miracasta bridge I'm going to process the credit card and this guy's father is
going to come and pick it up later I said fine on the date Creighton is telling her
about back in 2001 he took a man's credit card number over the phone and charged the sale it went through the
Thomas Hardy book cost twenty five hundred dollars and that afternoon at about three o'clock an older gentleman
came in and said I'm coming to pick up that copy of the mayor of castlebridge for my son I went and got it I gave it
to him and he walked up did you want to see it first or anything uh no it was I I think I asked him if he
wanted a city said no I don't want to see it he seemed as if he he wanted to get out in hurries if he was parked
outside or something like that and had to get back to his car about a month after Creighton sold that
Thomas Hardy book over the phone someone else called who said uh you charge 2 500
plus sales tax I guess it was on my credit card last month and I said well who are you he gave me his name and I
said yes and I looked up the other I said you bought a copy of the mayor castlebridge and I said no that wasn't
me and that's when I knew it was a credit card fraud what happened to Creighton had been
happening to rare book dealers all over the bay area in the late 90s and early 2000s the exact same scam a phone call a
credit card number and then a rushed pickup Often by someone who claimed to be the caller's father hundreds of
thousands of dollars in rare books were disappearing and as Lauren found out the booksellers
are mad not just because they want their books back but because this thief keeps
outsmarting them and he seems to be enjoying himself it's like high school all over again where the Nerds try to
tell on the bad kids but no one listens and nothing changes I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
[Music] if you're a rare book dealer in John Creighton's position where someone's
stolen a book from you you can call the police but you'd be hard-pressed to make
them care because it is just a book even if it's worth more than my car you can also tell your colleagues because you
don't want one of them to unwittingly buy a book that was stolen from you rare book dealers have their own club
the abaa antiquarian booksellers Association of America and part of the organizational structure of the group is
to have a designated Watchdog who keeps up with theft reports and spreads the word
in the late 90s that position had been vacant for a while until a book dealer named Ken Sanders he owns Ken Sanders
rare books in Salt Lake City was asked to step in as security chair I get a giant box of pink sheets from
headquarters in New York and I call them up say what what are they what do I do with them well they're theft reports but
the problem is these sheets had been filled out perhaps six months a year ago and they're just sitting around waiting
for the security chair to to mail them out he made it through that first box of pink sheets and he said this is crazy we
have the internet now let's do this with email and that sounded like a great idea
but in late 1999 early 2000 not everyone was so good with computers and if anyone
was slow to come around to technology it was antiquarian book dealers for a while
my daughter took all the bad keys off my keyboard on my computer at work because
I'd keep accidentally hitting the wrong keys and it would go into the ozone somewhere so she like control and ALT
and she just like popped those keys off the keyboard so I would I couldn't hit them so it took a little while for abaa
members to catch on and join the email list but slowly more and more people were emailing theft reports to Ken and
he started to notice a pattern every single Bookseller that was defrauded and there were dozens of them provided
another clue another piece of information that allowed me to keep compiling this profile of
whoever this thief was I was convinced it was the same Thief but I didn't know who he was and other than a sense he was
in Northern California I didn't know where he was the emails also helped Ken Sanders realize something very confusing
which was that as far as anyone could tell none of the stolen books were being resold not in this country and not
abroad they were just gone disappearing Without a Trace you know the police do have better
things they've got a lot of you know Murder and Mayhem and pretty serious stuff to deal with where okay nobody got
hurt here you guys are basically quarreling over a Gertrude Stein first edition huh what's that and it yeah
they're not gonna take it seriously and for the most part they don't by early 2003 Ken says that the thief
had stolen well over a hundred thousand dollars in rare books and showed no sign
of slowing down then this thief called a dealer in South Hadley Massachusetts named Ken Lopez and
asked to buy a 7 500 first edition of The Grapes of Wrath and I said Can string him along don't don't run the
credit card or anything but just pretend that you're you're gonna ship it to him
Ken Lopez and Ken Sanders laid a trap with the help of a third man also named Ken a cop named a detective Kenneth
Munson now retired who despite my strange convoluted trail of stolen books and booksellers involving you know one
two three four states in a jurisdictional nightmare he agreed to do a Stakeout at that San Jose Hilton and
they went there early in that morning and by mid-afternoon a man showed up the man refused to tell the police's name he
said he was picking up the book because someone in San Francisco had offered him
20 bucks to deliver it the police arrested him he had no ID no keys nothing on his person except a crumpled
up prepaid phone card that later was proven to have been used to call Ken Lopez to order the uh
stolen book in the first place a year and a half of work had finally paid off and Ken Sanders had caught his Thief it
was over or that's what he thought um he bailed out the next day and I was pretty mad at detective Munson
you let him loose you don't even know who he is and he says relax we've got his fingerprints I'm sure this guy's in
the system and sure enough for I go I think I believe going back to roughly 1991 he
was in the system for kiting bad checks under his real name which was John Charles Gilkey but we didn't know where
the stolen books were and we didn't know Mr gilkey's personal whereabouts Goki was out on bail for months and Ken
Sanders doubled down on his campaign to make sure that every rare book dealer in
California knew gilkey's name Mo and what he looked like so Mr Gilkey travels to
Los Angeles which ironically is a a violation of his parole he can't leave the county and he has got a set uh for
the four original A.A Milne Winnie the Pooh first edition books and he's trying to Peddle them and as he goes from store
to store they're sending emails out to our Bookseller chat list so we're tracking him in real time if you were
and we're having a ball with him because no one will buy his books or they're deliberately offering him like nothing
for him the books at the time were worth maybe six to eight thousand dollars and
he's becoming frustrated by the minute everywhere he goes but finally under the guise of coming back in an hour or two
while the Bookseller researches the books and determines a good value to give them he casually gets Mr gilkey's
information and Mr Gilkey gives him a name and an address the Bookseller immediately calls and
emails me gives me all this information I'm thinking nah Ken was sure it was a fake address but
he still passed it along to detective Munson just in case and 24 hours later he excitedly calls me up from a borrowed
cell phone because back then the cops didn't even have cell phones and he's inside an apartment on Treasure Island
and that's where Mr gilkey's apartment is and it's full of stolen books Ken begged detective Munson to box them
all up and get them out of there but the warrant was only good for titles that could be specifically named as stolen so
Ken started naming books he went back through every title he'd gotten a report about and sure enough 26 of those stolen
books were in gilkey's apartment including that Thomas Hardy stolen from John Crichton at Brick row
but there were books in the apartment Ken Sanders hadn't been able to specifically name and those had to be
left behind the next day Goki and detective Munson appeared in court the judge set gokey's
bail much higher this time two hundred thousand dollars which he did not pay he stayed in jail until he was sentenced to
three years in San Quentin felt pretty good about myself that hey I figured this out I'm pretty smart I'm a
detective man I'm the biblio detective I put the guy in San Quentin that's supposed to be the Final Chapter right
well instead it's like the middle or maybe it's back to the beginning because the book thief gets out and he keeps
stealing books so it's like what so everything I did is for Nothing Even though Goki was sentenced to three
years he was quickly paroled then he violated his parole and went back to prison this happened several times so
all told Gilkey was only locked up for about 18 months a writer named Alison Hoover Bartlett
wrote him a letter and asked to interview him he agreed so she went to the prison to meet him and then when he
got out on parole they met at a restaurant in San Francisco She interviewed him face to face about a
dozen times over a period of several years I he just threw me in immediately I was fascinated I didn't understand how
somebody could think this way how they could have done those things um and in every meeting we had was
surprising to me he had one surprise after the other up the sleeve so it might it made for a very interesting
story to report I feel like you're really the only person who got at the heart of why he
does this well I hope so the love of what the ownership of books says about him and
I've heard collectors talk about their collections on the Shelf as a kind of Memoirs that reflects on who they are
and what their interests are and guilty was no different this way and by building a collection of impressive
books um he was building a self a man who he thought would be respected for his taste
and their audition she writes the guilty imagined version of himself as an English gentleman with
a grand Library this is why he hasn't sold the books he's hiding them somewhere for safe
keeping because he needs them to continue to grow his Library [Music] in 2005 Gilkey suggested to Allison
Hoover Bartlett that they go together to a Bookshop he wanted to show her what he
looks for in a rare book and they decided to visit John Creighton's bookstore brick Rowe
it was a morning just like this it was about 10 30 in the morning and I look up and there's this fellow with this woman
looking in my bookcase and I'm kind of startled and I look at him twice and I get up and
I say you're John Gilkey and he looks at me and he keeps talking to her kind of ignoring me and he was telling he's
showing the lady he said I want to look at Nathaniel Hawthorne he kind of started opening up these cases like that
and was your head just exploding I was I was nervous uh I was very upset about this because I consider him kind of a
scary guy I mean he's someone who stole from me and here he comes back walking in the shop as if he has some right to
look through things as if he'd never committed any offense at all were you scared he was going to take more books
or that he was there to be an intimidating figure yeah I think it's just sort of an intimidation sure
absolutely yeah and I wasn't worried about him taking any books I mean it takes a lot of nerve it takes he's very
nervy that because that's what's scary Allison Hoover Bartlett first wrote a magazine article and then she expanded
it into a book called The Man Who Loved books too much when it came out in 2009 Gilkey called to congratulator
the book was getting a lot of press New York Times and PR Washington Post and all this made Gilkey happy
you'd think that with all of the exposure the book had gotten Gilkey would want to keep his head down but
he's done the opposite I mean it would be nice for me to get up one morning and know that I wasn't going
to get an email in my inbox saying you know Gilkey strikes again this is Garrett Scott a rare book dealer in Ann
Arbor Michigan he's taken over as security chair of the abaa so now he's the one who Fields reports from victims
you know I'll get a report that you know Gilkey has stung somebody for a 75 book in San Francisco you know and
and my day is shot the reports coming in aren't even always about books allegedly
gilkey's been making reservations at small town bnbs with stolen credit card numbers and then showing up and paying
the bill with a check from a closed checking account shopkeepers in those same small towns Jewelers and antique
dealers they report the same they say that they know it's him because his name is printed right there on the
upper left corner of the bad checks John Gilkey he's got open warrants against him but whenever he does get caught and
sent to prison it's only for two or three months at a time and then he's out back in the world and by all accounts
going shopping Garrett Scott says it's like this low-level brush fire that's never going
away you know Ken Ken Sanders forwarded me an email from a woman who said her name was
Natasha who had been a uh said she was a classmate of John gilkey's at San Francisco State and I knew that Gilkey
had gone back to school uh to San Francisco State so this Natasha said that you know she had gotten to be
creeped out by Gilkey and here was a link to John gilkey's pseudonymous Yelp account
where there was a a link to review of a uh of a storage unit in Modesto a lot of
book dealers think that Gilkey has a storage unit in Modesto where he's hiding all of his stolen books along
with prints Maps stamps other fancy Collectibles but the police can't go in and find out without giving a judge a
specific list of items that they think are in there and that hasn't happened so no one knows if the storage space is
even real and so we've got this you know this link to this Yelp review and and of course the woman had to be
named Natasha and not a net or something right I mean and and is it really from this woman named
Natasha or is it Gilkey somehow punking us because you go to the Yelp account and then as you read through there's
like this one star review of Ken Sanders rare books um which which it gives no you know and and
says you know I bought a book from Ken Sanders where books and the pages were funny and they wouldn't let me return it
and and it was just you know how many sort of like weird little fun house mirrors are
reflecting back here and and who's sort of who's sort of getting whom do you think he goes to his storage space and
like I don't know like relishes his collection right right does does he like go do like
sort of a Scrooge McDuck thing and just sort of like go stand among his treasures or does he or does he just
know that they're there put away um and just know that he possesses them even even in a sort of abstract way
it's so funny too because there's so many of all the ways to impersonate a rich person he's chosen like the it's
like invisible he's chosen an invisible one you know right right you know he could he could claim to be a Rockefeller
I mean that's that's always the easiest way to become a you know taken for a rich person you just you know you're at
the cost of a blue blazer and and uh and a fake accent but it's it's um you know why yeah that idea that
that somehow having this invisible Storehouse of books somewhere would would cause him to carry himself in a
different way yeah it is it is strange it you know it is a strange way of attaining some sort
of success I mean I guess it's like the old uh you know the kind of the idea of the lost
dofan you know that you're this uh at heart you're really a sort of a much better richer person than the world
realizes if only the world knew who you really were [Music] we tried long and hard to find John
Gilkey trying phone numbers and email addresses Allison Hoover Bartlett said she hadn't spoken to him since her book
came out in 2009. we couldn't find him and then just as we were finishing up this episode we learned that Gilkey had
been arrested again he's in jail right now without bail for violation of California penal code 470
section D which is a kind of forgery that includes the passing of bad checks Lawrence Spore
criminal is produced by Lauren and me special thanks to Rob Byers Ken Lopez Tim Slover and Sergeant James Jensen
with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office Julianne Alexander does our episode art
you can find out more about the show at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show
if you like what we're doing please go to iTunes and write us a review it means a lot criminal is a proud member of
radiotopia from PRX check out all of the shows at radiotopia.fm shows like mortified
august 19 1999. well we're finally in Africa I feel so Awake and Alive it's as if I was born
yesterday and nothing has ever adulterated My Hope or mind August 22nd I'm more frightened than I've ever been
that's mortified go listen radiotopia is made possible with support from the Knight foundation and MailChimp
celebrating creativity chaos and teamwork I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music]

Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rare books have been disappearing across America since the late 90s, and haven’t resurfaced in the marketplace. We talk with serial book thief, John Charles Gilkey, about how difficult it was to catch him for stealing all these rare books. He also explains that his motivate was more about romance than money on this episode of the Criminal Podcast

Check out the book dealers in this story: John Crichton at The Brick Row Book Shop (https://www.brickrow.com/), Ken Sanders of Ken Sanders Rare Books (https://www.kensandersbooks.com/), and Garrett Scott’s Bibliophagist (https://www.bibliophagist.com/). Learn more about Allison Hoover Bartlett’s book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much http://themanwholovedbookstoomuch.com/.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.chtbl.com/n33u0HsA

Say hello on Twitter (@CriminalShow), Instagram (@criminal_podcast), and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ThisIsCriminal/.

Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice https://bit.ly/accomplicenewsletter.

We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery.

Artwork by Julienne Alexander http://www.yssrs.com/.

Check out our online shop https://store.dftba.com/collections/criminal.

Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 22 originally published 6/26/2015 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-22-ex-libris-6-26-2015

Brief Summary

John Gilkey, a notorious book thief, repeatedly outsmarts rare book dealers and law enforcement, leading to ongoing thefts and frustration in the community.

Key points

The Chase for Stolen Books. Detective Ken Sanders and a team lay a trap to catch a thief stealing rare books.
The Book Thief's Return. John Gilkey, a notorious book thief, returns to a bookstore he once robbed.
Gilkey's Continued Crimes. Despite being caught, Gilkey continues to steal books and evade the law.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Even though Gilkey was sentenced to three years, he was quickly paroled.

10:55WatchNov 2, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

More from Criminal | A Podcast About Crime

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.