In keeping with the “Oceans Eleven” movies, heists of major institutions require a high-tech, fast-talking, rigorously orchestrated operation.
But when Murf the Surf decided to steal some jewels from Recent York City’s Museum of Natural History, all it took was an open window.
It’s unknown who decided to crack the fourth-floor window, which opened onto the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals, in October 1964. Jack “Murf the Surf” Murphy, then 27, and two pals, Arthur Kuhn, and Roger Clark, were visiting the museum once they happened to note it — which was very convenient for surfer dudes turned jewel thieves. On October 29, they climbed back in and pulled off Recent York City’s grandest museum robbery. No guards were in sight, and no alarms went off.
Using a glass cutter, the lads etched a hole within the display case and five-fingered the DeLong Star Ruby, a 100.32-carat gem; the Eagle Diamond, which had been purchased for the museum by banker J.P. Morgan; and the Star of India, a 563-carat sapphire then considered the world’s most precious jewel, together with other sparklers.
Back at their temporary digs on the Upper East Side, the trio celebrated before jetting home to Miami with Kuhn’s unwitting girlfriend carrying the haul inside a makeup bag.
The heist made The Post’s front page, in a story written by reporter Nora Ephron, and, all these years later, led to “Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus, and Mayhem within the USA,” a documentary that premieres Sunday on MGM+.
“People were fascinated with the theft, and later with these handsome surfers turned jewel thieves who pulled it off,” director R.J. Cutler told The Post. “They were the primary true-crime celebrities.”
As publicity of the theft rapidly mounted, a desk clerk of their Manhattan constructing tipped off cops in regards to the tenants who spent money like mad (tipping a bellhop $100 for a liquor delivery) and threw ragers. It was the gang’s hard-partying lifestyle that drew attention, however it was their carelessness that got them busted. When detectives entered the room, they found sneakers studded with glass, burglary tools, a gun, and photos of the museum.
But by the point the NYPD alerted Miami police, two days after the heist, the jewels were nowhere to be present in the fellows’ Brickell neighborhood apartment. The three were arrested anyway.
Kuhn, Clark, and Murf made bond and promptly thumbed their noses at authorities for the following six months, even talking about opening a nightclub called Jewel of India. The general public, meanwhile, loved it, buying up bumper stickers that read “Save Murf the Surf.”
Eventually, a lot of the jewels were found. The DeLong ruby was recovered through a $25,000 ransom paid by billionaire John D. MacArthur, whose foundation later instituted the so-called “genius award.” The Star of India and other smaller gems were retrieved from a Trailways bus station locker in Miami. The Eagle Diamond, nonetheless, never turned up and is believed to have been cut into smaller stones.
The trio pleaded guilty to burglary and grand larceny in April 1965. A Recent York judge sentenced them to 3 years at Rikers Island.
Murf likened the upcoming time to “being stuck in afternoon traffic.”
“He was an outlaw by every definition,” said Cutler. “He defied the laws of nature.”
Long before becoming a convicted jewel thief, Murf was a golden boy from the California beach town of Oceanside — acing surf championships, playing the violin, winning a tennis scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. But winter hit hard there and Murf wondered what the hell he was doing within the cold.
He quit during freshman 12 months, 1955, and headed to Miami Beach to work as a pool boy and rub elbows with celebrities resembling Milton Berle and mobsters like Albert Anastasia. Murf also married a wealthy hotel guest, fathered two children along with her, divorced in 1962, rapidly remarried and just as quickly divorced again. Capitalizing on his surf-stud notoriety, he relocated to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to open a surf shop.
When that failed, Murf torched the business for insurance money. “He got away with it,” said Cutler. “He didn’t accept the traditional bounds of legality.”
Along with his business smoldered, Murf returned to Miami around 1963 and discovered that his beach-boy buddies had evolved. As per Cutler, “They went from rubbing shoulders with gangsters to becoming criminals themselves. Jack became a part of that.”
Jewel heists were a booming business in Miami, and Murf and his athletically inclined crew became successful cat burglars — breaking into high-rise apartments and hopping from one balcony to a different.
Occasionally, they got rough. In January 1964, months before the museum break-in, “Green Acres” actress Eva Gabor and her stockbroker husband Richard Brown were robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped in Miami, with the crooks making off along with her $25,000 diamond ring. Gabor picked Kuhn and Murf out of a police lineup.
The charge went nowhere however it led to bail being bumped as much as $150,000 for the opposite infractions. Kuhn rolled over, leading cops to the bus station jewels for a lighter sentence.
Murf, meanwhile, pleaded guilty and ended up being sentenced to 3 years at Rikers. He served 21 months.
“My life radically modified,” he admits within the documentary. He’d gone from babes and surf to “a foul prison where I used to be in with 400 guys who knew all of the crazy stuff. It was an incredible experience … I used to be a cool cracker.”
Upon release in 1967, “The very first thing I did was get a pistol. I learned a whole lot of stuff in prison and I used to be able to roll.”
From there, he pulled off armed robberies from Miami to Beverly Hills. After which things got really dark.
In November of that 12 months, Murf and Kuhn were contacted by Terry Frank and Annelie Mohn, two young secretaries who had stolen $488,732 value of negotiable securities through a piece connection. They hoped that Murf and Kuhn could move the paper. But, Murf told Vanity Fair, “The women [started] to get antsy, so we went for a ship ride.”
One month later, the ladies’s badly mutilated bodies were present in Whiskey Creek, north of Miami. Murf and a karate champion named Jack Griffith were arrested, pled innocent, and released on bail.
That left time for one last fling: the house invasion of rich Miami socialite Olive Wofford. Murf and his collaborators threatened to throw boiling water within the face of her young niece, who happened to be in the home if Wofford didn’t give them the jewels; as an alternative, she secretly pressed a panic button that summoned police and led to a shoot-out. Murf was once more arrested and, this time, sentenced to double life in prison for each the shoot-out and his alleged role within the murder of Frank.
Though he never admitted to killing the secretaries — he blamed a mysterious man named Rusty — Murf did admit to cleansing the crime scene. “I’ve got dead bodies behind the boat,” he told Vanity Fair. “You eliminate the situation the very best you’ll be able to.”
Sent to Florida State Maximum Security Prison in 1969, Murf did relatively well. He emerged because the joint’s drug-dealing kingpin — complete with an enforcer to beat anyone who took too long to pay him — and was someway allowed to decorate in a white shirt and slacks as an alternative of the usual prison jumpsuit. He even did occasional TV interviews from behind bars and managed to win the guts of local crew member Kitten Collins, who became his girlfriend.
After his appeals for release failed through the Sixties and into the mid-’70s, Murf got tipped that his only shot at walking would require faith in God. He went all out — praying with Pat Robertson when the evangelist taped a 700 Club TV special behind bars and posing for photos with Roger Staubach when the born-again NFL great brought his Prison Crusade to Florida.
Some officials believed that Murf was a modified man. Others disagreed. “When one considers the violence loss and bloodshed that Murphy caused, is that this the person that society wants back in its community?” asked Ken Glassman, Miami chief of police in a mid-’80s letter to the parole board.
Nevertheless, Murf surfed out of prison and right into a halfway house in 1986. Inside two years, his devotion to Christian ministry earned him a advice for early release. Murf saluted fellow inmates who sang Christian spirituals as he exited. On the skin, he began his own ministry, traveling from prison to prison and preaching the gospel to the incarcerated.
Murf did in September 2020, at age 83, soon after being interviewed for the documentary, “Jack was willing to cross the road until he found a line that will not catch as much as him. That line was his faith,” Cutler said. “And it’s difficult to query a person’s faith.”
As Murf says within the film: “Everybody bends the reality to their advantage.”
