Crime: Burglars in Blue

Denver’s burglary binge was stunning.

The Happy Cat Tavern was hit for $2,000 and two cases of whisky. From the Reese House restaurant, $4,000 was stolen. The U.S. Loan Co. lost $7,250. There were scores of others, and finally $40,000 was swiped from a Safeway supermarket on Denver’s south side in one of the biggest thefts in the city’s history. Denver screamed for the police to do something.

The cops, it turned out, already had: by last weekend, no fewer than 35 of Denver’s police force had been fingered as the actual burglars. In all, over a seven-year period, the burglars in blue had committed at least 129 crimes.

The Ring. Denver’s burgling cops were well organized and enjoyed obvious advantages. They cased jobs from police cars, returned at night to steal while lookouts monitored the police radio for alarm calls. Once the burglaries were discovered, the same policemen came back officially to investigate, were able to destroy any leftover evidence. In one case, an insurance company investigator discovered a pair of policeman’s trousers near a burglary scene. Two city detectives confiscated the evidence ; the pants disappeared forever.

In the Safeway burglary, the police knew that extra cash was in the store. The crooked cops carefully surveyed the one-story, yellow brick building during the day. A few nights later, three policemen jimmied the aluminum front door. A police car stopped across the street as lookout; one of the three burglars remained by the store window to watch for a flashing-headlight danger signal. At the safe, his two companions worked with a carborundum wheel, cooled it with cartons of milk. In 90 minutes the safe was cracked.

The Failure. Last week, as the disgraced cops paraded before his disgusted gaze, at the State Capitol, Colorado’s Democratic Governor Stephen McNichols, a onetime FBI man, explained that the ring had sprung from a single group in the south Denver district. When gang members were transferred to other districts, new members were recruited.

There were few failures—but one of them led to the burglars’ downfall. Cruising one night in April 1960, Patrolman John D. Bates saw burglars leave a 17th Street coffee shop. When Bates chased the getaway car, a safe fell out of the trunk; the man who came back to retrieve it turned out to be a policeman. Bates told his story to Chief James E. Childers, passed on department rumors that a dozen policemen were cracking safes. He was ordered to see a psychiatrist. When the psychiatrist reported Bates was eminently sane and was probably telling the truth, the police department began an investigation. It lasted almost a year, and it was found that the corruption spread beyond Denver’s city limits. The sheriff of neighboring Adams County was arrested, and five sheriff’s officers were nabbed in adjacent Arapahoe County.

As of last week, the Denver scandal seemed almost cleaned up. Said Governor McNichols: “We think we have the hard core:” Chief Childers, under severe criticism for his laxity, resigned, and a top-to-bottom overhaul began. Because the burglars had systematically faked police records, no one was able to say exactly how much had been taken over the years; the Safeway supermarket chain alone estimated it had lost $125,000. With many of its veteran cops in jail, the Denver 778-man police department was hard put to keep up patrols; 28 rookies with only two weeks’ experience were rushed into regular duty. But worse than the shortage was the loss of faith that Denver had in its police. When two cops cruised up to a housing project last week, a group of workmen yelled: “We got to lock up our cars. Cops are in the neighborhood.”