He called himself ¡°Murph the Surf,¡± a tanned, roguish, party-loving beach boy from Miami, and he transfixed the nation in 1964 by pulling off the biggest jewel heist in New York City history ¡ª the celebrated snatching of the Star of India, a sapphire larger than a golf ball, and a haul of other gems from the American Museum of Natural History
It was not that 27-year-old Jack Roland Murphy and his accomplices, Allan Kuhn and Roger Clark, were superthieves, like the ones Maximilian Schell and Melina Mercouri portrayed in the then-current Jules Dassin film ¡°Topkapi,¡± about a plot to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul ¡ª a movie the museum thieves had recently seen.
Rather, although they had robbed waterfront mansions in Miami and escaped by speedboat, they left a trail of amateurish clues to the museum theft and were caught by New York detectives two days after the crime, although the loot ¡ª worth more than 3 million in today¡¯s dollars ¡ª was still missing: stashed by then in waterproof pouches in Miami¡¯s Biscayne Bay.
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