The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Ob

WHEN LANE HELDFOND was notified that the credit card number used for the purchase of the first editions of Joseph in Egypt and The Patchwork Girl of Oz was fraudulent, she was shocked, but assumed insurance would cover their loss—enough money, she realized, for her and Erik and their six-year-old daughter to take a vacation in Hawaii. She was mistaken; insurance didn’t cover it. (Unless merchants obtain signatures from bona fide cardholders, they must absorb the cost of the stolen goods.) Furious, she e-mailed Ken Sanders the details. She had read his recent notices, and unlike so many of her colleagues who are loath to expose their vulnerability, she felt it was important to get word out of their missing books. She wrote that a fairly knowledgeable man had called about buying books as gifts. Like the thief Sanders had warned the trade about, he had used a credit card to pay for them and said a relative would pick them up. But this thief was not elderly. He was in his thirties, she guessed, with dark hair.

Sanders had been sending “Northern California Credit Card Thief” notices to the trade, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was “thieves” he should be warning them about. Was this a gang? He felt as though he were chasing phantoms. His detective work might have been easier had all his fellow dealers been willing to talk about their losses.

THE PLEASURE of Gilkey’s extended vacation with his father was heightened by his success at getting so much for free. Gilkey had two ways to wrangle a night in a hotel: using a stolen credit card number or telling hotel management that the toilet in his room had overflowed, thereby getting a refund. He found that most hotels guaranteed one-hundred-percent satisfaction, so if he complained to the general manager, most of the time they wouldn’t charge him. The same went for meals. Only a couple of times did his methods not work: at the St. Francis Hotel, in San Francisco, where they held his luggage until he could come up with cash to cover the room, and at the Mandarin Oriental, also in San Francisco, where he’d stayed because he had wanted to experience a five-star hotel. When they didn’t offer a refund after he said the toilet overflowed, he cleared the room of the shampoos, soaps, and complimentary slippers, which gave him a small sense of vindication.

As the weeks passed, and June drew near, Gilkey picked up his pace, about two books a week. Although it wasn’t very valuable, one of his favorites was Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, because of how he got it. One of the greatest pleasures of beholding one’s collection is remembering how each volume came to rest on the shelf. Gilkey had ordered The Dead Zone from a pay phone in the Beverly Hills library, right across the street from the police station.

This was an exciting time for Gilkey. He took precautions, always watching book dealers closely to see if something was wrong in case they’d called the police. He made up rules for himself: appear relaxed, chat for five to ten minutes, always check for suspicious cars or people, make sure the bookseller doesn’t seem nervous, compliment the stock. While he usually picked up the books himself, sometimes he would use a taxicab driver. He would tell the driver, “I’m lazy, I’ll give you a good tip.” Or to give the impression that he was not up to the task himself, he would limp, or say he had a headache, or that he wasn’t feeling well. He figured cabbies were “greedy enough, they would do anything for money, even five dollars.” Once, he considered wearing the costume of a priest during a pickup, but felt he had to draw the line somewhere.

Between January and June of 2001, Gilkey was picking up books worth $2,000, $5,000, $10,000. Together, they totaled at least $100,000. He realized that at this rate if he were to stop working entirely and dedicate himself to book collecting, he might end up with a collection worth millions.

He sensed, however, that he might be setting a pattern that would attract attention, especially in Northern California. So he decided he would expand his reach, steal from one major rare book store after another, and get himself fifty rare books. If the authorities were looking for a pattern, they wouldn’t find one. He would order one book from Oregon, another from Idaho, and yet another from Arizona. He’d hit New York, Philadelphia, all over the world. He knew that the market was international, so, as he said, “I could buy a rare book in Argentina, another in England, in South Africa, the Bahamas.”

He also decided to change his MO and stop picking up the books himself (or having someone else do it). Instead, he would have them delivered to hotels, where he would pick them up later. It wasn’t necessary to tell the bookseller it was a hotel; he could just give them an address.

In June, Gilkey finally went to jail to serve time for the bad check he’d written back in January. He would have three and a half months behind bars to think about his next moves. Before he left, he told his father to disregard his past vow.

“Forget about an estate,” he said, “I’m going to build us an empire.”

AFTER SERVING his sentence, Gilkey walked out the doors of Los Angeles County Jail and within several weeks was hired again at Saks Fifth Avenue. Over the next year, while on parole, he sold expensive designer garments, surreptitiously jotted down the credit card numbers of customers who bought them, then used the numbers to steal, according to his estimate, about a book a month, maybe more.

By the end of 2002, with the holiday shopping season in full swing, Gilkey’s employers were so pleased with his performance they offered him a promotion to the customer service center, where he would have access to cash, plus all the credit slips and gift cards. Fearing the move might trigger a background check that would reveal his criminal history, he tried to decline the offer. His caution was inconsistent, though. When his boss persisted and pushed some forms on him, Gilkey carelessly wrote down his Modesto address, where in 1998 he had done sixty days in jail for writing a bad check. Arriving at work one morning shortly after that, he was summoned by the VP of human resources, who confronted him with his falsified records, and that was the end of his employment.

Gilkey had enjoyed his job at Saks more than any other. His coworkers were nice to him, and customers seemed to appreciate his cordiality, all of which a coworker from the men’s department, Tony Garcia, confirmed. “Mostly quiet, very professional” is how Garcia described Gilkey. “Always willing to help.”⁵

Being forced to leave made Gilkey feel once again that the world had been unfair to him, singled him out. With his stockpile of receipts, though, he had the means to get even. Just thinking about it brightened his mood.

A couple of weeks later, on Tuesday, January 28, 2003, Gilkey woke at his mother’s house and got dressed. He skipped breakfast, took the bus to downtown Modesto, wandered around a little, then went to the Doubletree Hotel, where he settled into a comfortable chair next to the phones in a spacious alcove off the lobby. Gilkey was scrupulous about keeping records, of both books he desired and books he stole, noting which credit cards he had used and the circumstances of each swindle. One of his rules was not to place more than two or three orders in one day, but since not all his attempts would necessarily be fruitful, that morning’s list included seven or eight places to call. In addition to books, Gilkey had his heart set on a few antique documents and an antique sterling silver baby rattle he had seen in a catalog. He reached a dealer in Idaho and successfully ordered a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang, coincidentally by Sanders’s friend Edward Abbey. Gilkey had the book shipped to an address in Palo Alto that was actually the Westin Hotel.

Gilkey then called a dealer in New York, and another in Chicago, but either they didn’t have what he was looking for or the credit card numbers were rejected. Last, he dialed the number of Ken Lopez, a dealer in western Massachusetts. He had noticed Lopez’s advertisement in Firsts, the magazine devoted to book collecting. He identified himself as Heath Hawkins⁶ and said he wanted to get something in the $5,000 to $7,000 range. “Hawkins” then asked about their copy of The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Lopez described the book for him, noting that it cost $6,500, and the two men chatted for a while. “Hawkins” seemed genial and somewhat knowledgeable. After their discussion, Lopez agreed to bring the price down to $5,850.

Then “Hawkins” asked Lopez if he thought he should have a clamshell box made for the book, and something clicked in Lopez’s memory. About six months earlier, another man, “Andrew Meade,” had called him, inquiring about a first edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, priced at $7,500—and he had asked about having a clamshell box made. The credit card had not gone through, and although “Meade” had said he would call back with another credit card number, he never did, because it was Gilkey, and he had only one card in Meade’s name.