He was quiet and quick — and brazen. A “craftsman,” detectives said in admiration.
The police had no idea who he was.
They called him “Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy,” a reference to the marks left by the pry bar he used to open, or “jimmy,” windows.
In the first month of his crime spree, November 1924, he broke into more than 100 homes in Portland, almost all on the northeast side, and got away every time, taking cash and jewelry, guns and Liberty Bonds.
His boldness terrified Portlanders, according to news reports and police records.
He went into homes even when people were moving about inside, lights ablaze. He went in during dinner parties. He went in when babysitters were putting kids down to sleep.
Rarely did anyone discover him in the act, but when it happened, he’d pull out a revolver, shush whoever had come upon him and then stroll out the front door.
He took advantage of the fact that he didn’t look like a burglar.
Months after it all began, police would learn that the thief had made his way around on a bicycle. Sometimes he glided past officers searching for him. He’d tip his hat, occasionally stop and ask what was going on, offer to help in the search.
He hit 14 homes on one weekend, all in the same neighborhood.
By the beginning of December, terrified Portlanders were demanding action, with many eastside residents going downtown to police headquarters to complain and plead for help.
The public’s rising panic worried Police Chief Leon V. Jenkins. He called a press conference, where he announced he would be sending dozens more officers into the city’s eastside “suburban” neighborhoods to track and find this man.
“The most dangerous type of criminal is the professional house burglar who operates in the residential sections,” Jenkins told reporters.
Jenkins was so rattled that, during the press briefing about Inch-a-Quarter Jimmy, he announced an unexpected — and dramatic — reorganization of the Portland Police Bureau.
He said he was immediately launching an “East Side precinct system” — no longer would every initiative and order have to work its way through Central Station’s bureaucracy (and west-side bias). The newspapers heralded the change as “radical.”
And Jenkins followed through. The First Precinct, at Southeast Belmont Street and 35th Avenue, and Second Precinct, at Northeast Grand Avenue and Multnomah Street, opened within days.
But “Jimmy” wasn’t scared off.
Dec. 25 arrived, the coldest Christmas Day in decades, with the high around 13 degrees Fahrenheit. “But that did not stop the notorious ‘Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy’ from making his round of house-breakings that had the city agog,” the Oregon Journal wrote.
Within blocks of the new Second Precinct, and despite there being by far more officers than ever before trawling the city’s east side, the burglar broke into six homes and made off with Santa’s bounty.
Everyone in the know now agreed that Inch-a-Quarter Jimmy was nonpareil among Portland’s thieves. He had amazing skills, abundant courage.
And this during the golden age of professional burglars, or yeggs — before policing advances and cultural shifts made breaking into houses and businesses an untenable career for any man who liked to think of himself as respectable.
At the time, prowlers were feared, but also, at least in certain circles, admired, with all the best yeggs sporting Runyonesque nicknames known in police stations and saloons throughout whichever city they worked and often beyond.
In Portland, there was The Domino Kid (he wore a checkered scarf over his face during hold-ups) and Jimmy the Flea (because he swiftly jumped from place to place). There was Greasy Dick (a bottle of shoe dye spilled on his head one time) and The Yokel (he took an “unsophisticated” approach to break-ins).
There was Baby Shoes Smith (he had big feet) and Ten Per Cent (a good tipper, it seems). Not to mention Fish Pole and Bourbonnais Ben and Goat Boyd (we can only guess).
Many crooks ended up exclusively using their sobriquet with colleagues and drinking pals so they could keep their real name under wraps, a protection against snitches.
But as 1925 began, the only yegg nickname on every Portlander’s lips was Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy.
On Jenkins’ orders, the Police Bureau put together a special team of investigators just to catch him. The team was given the power to conscript as many patrolmen as needed for the effort, and it liberally used that authority.
On one January night in the Albina District, “a total of 42 extra men, including motorcycle and traffic squads, were patrolling,” The Oregonian reported at the height of the manhunt. “Police were stationed at regular intervals, always in sight of one another, but to no avail. That Friday evening ‘Jimmy’ entered and burgled seven homes.”
In an internal Police Bureau investigative report, one detective noted the wide range of descriptions of the burglar from eyeball witnesses, calling the criminal a “chameleon.”
Was Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy the twisted embodiment of Nietzsche’s superman — like Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the high-brow Chicago murderers who had dominated newspaper headlines the previous year? Debate raged in Portland’s social and intellectual salons.
Others viewed him more as a superhero.
“Fourteen-year-old Victor Kraelck, 894 Garfield, saw the phantom criminal jump from the window, stop, open his umbrella and then slip out of sight between two houses,” offered one news report. “The boy told the police that ‘Jimmy’ was wearing a knee-length dark overcoat and a black hat.”
Portlanders — and their representatives in the press — became impatient, raining criticism down on the police. Wrote The Oregonian editorial board on Jan. 7:
“Shaking their domes of thought the police are saying that ‘Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy’ probably is saving all newspaper clippings pertaining to his illegal exploits. Yeh. And what are the police saving?”
Four days after that newspaper broadside, and despite 150 policemen “and scores of vigilantes” out searching for him that night, the celebrity criminal made his way into still more homes in Northeast Portland. He didn’t stop until he came upon a stash of whiskey — the real stuff, a rare find, this being Prohibition times.
“The three bottles of liquor evidently did what the army of police failed to do — drive ‘Jimmy’ from the field,” a reporter wrote. The newsman figured the prolific burglar had gone home to “drink to his own success.”
By February editorialists were really panicking. “A horrid thought arises,” offered The Oregonian. “Suppose ‘Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy’ was a cop.”
He was not a cop.
On Sunday, April 19, someone noticed a man breaking into a house on Northeast Prescott Street and called for help. A beat cop quickly arrived — and as the burglar fled, the cop shot him in the leg.
Realizing they had probably caught the infamous Inch-and-a-Quarter Jimmy, officers hastily bandaged the man’s wound and hauled him downtown. The police brass and newsmen soon gathered to gawk at him.
The burglar’s actual name turned out to be Alexander Gerlach.
The biggest shock wasn’t that he’d finally been caught. It was that the notorious burglar, the “master criminal” who had helped bring about a pronounced (and, it would turn out, lasting) reorganization of the Portland Police Bureau, wasn’t a member of the city’s criminal elite.
Gerlach was, instead, a recently laid-off advertising artist, a 26-year-old husband and father who had never been arrested before.
As such, he did not stand up to his arrest like a seasoned pro. Reporters found him on a cot in the jail infirmary, weeping inconsolably.
“I don’t care what becomes of me,” he told them, shivering under a thin blanket. “I wish someone would look out for my wife and kids.”
Detectives went to Gerlach’s home on Sumner Street, just past Northeast 42nd Avenue, and discovered seven handguns he’d stolen. They did not find any burglary tools.
Neighbors gathered outside during the search. They told police that Gerlach was well-liked, that he was a member in good standing of various fraternal orders. (He was wearing a lodge pin when he was shot.)
Investigators learned Gerlach had worked as a billboard painter for the Foster & Kleiser advertising company until he was laid off the previous fall, shortly before the rash of house break-ins started. One detective’s report noted that the suspect’s young wife, described as “comely,” claimed she had no idea what her husband was doing when he went out night after night.
Gerlach eventually admitted to scores of residential burglaries in Portland over the previous few months, though he couldn’t say if the police’s number — 271 — was correct.
“I did so many jobs last winter that I didn’t keep track of them,” he said. “I don’t know how many I really did.”
When he stepped before a judge, Gerlach, who died in 1975 at 77, said he’d been temporarily insane during his crime spree, acting on some desperate impulse. But ultimately he dropped that claim and pleaded guilty to one count of burglary. He received a 10-year sentence.
Gerlach may not have been a career criminal, but prison did not scare him straight. It did, however, dull his skills.
Within weeks of his release from the Oregon State Penitentiary in 1933, he was spotted placing a ladder under a house’s window. A patrolman arrested him.
Gerlach, the officer found, was carrying a pry bar with an inch-and-a-quarter claw.
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