They are old men now in their 70s, two robbers who were famous long ago and now sport white hair, Butch and Sundance in twilight. Five decades ago, Jack Murphy (a.k.a., “Murf the Surf”) and his partner Allan Kuhn were high-spirited beach boys who gave swimming lessons at Miami Beach hotels and had a lucrative second occupation—as jewel thieves. In 1964, bored with preying on wealthy divorcees and tourists, these athletic young men drove to Manhattan and pulled off the most audacious jewel heist of the last half-century. Climbing up the stone walls of the American Museum of Natural History on the evening of October 29, 1964, they broke in through a window and stole priceless gems from the J.P. Morgan jewel collection: the Star of India sapphire, the DeLong Star ruby, and fistfuls of diamonds and emeralds. Murphy, now garrulous and robust at age 77, explains, “Just like mountain climbers and skiers, as a jewel thief, you go for the challenge. It’s dangerous, it’s glamorous, there’s an adrenalin rush. We couldn’t just keep doing Palm Beach.”

Apprehended within 48 hours of the robbery, the two men, plus accomplice Roger Clark, became national folk heroes. With the jewels nowhere to be found, an ambitious 23-year-old Wellesley graduate, Nora Ephron, landed her first front-page story for the New York Post by sneaking into the hotel where the thieves had stayed. “These guys had committed the perfect victimless crime,” Ephron recalled in an interview in the fall of 2010. “It was delicious. No one had a clue what they had been up to, they just seemed like fabulous party boys.”

Upon their arrest, the three beach boys taunted and outwitted the authorities. Federal and state prosecutors vied to retrieve the jewels, convening separate grand juries and stealing each other’s witnesses. Only after a bizarre series of events—including a Miami chase scene that included Kuhn jumping out a hotel window, double-dealing by a fence, and ransom money paid by one of America’s richest businessmen—were most of the jewels eventually recovered. The three beach boys, who pled guilty, spent more than two years at Rikers Island.

The second and third acts of Murphy and Kuhn’s story have equally dramatic arcs. Their sentence completed, the three jewel thieves walked out of prison free and famous—and then made choices that took each of them in radically different directions. The bonds of friendship have frayed, yet the men have been forever bound together by their night at the museum. Roger Clark, the amiable bumbler who served as the lookout, suffered from heart disease and died in 2007, at age 71. But Jack Murphy and Allan Kuhn, once high-living partners in crime, still talk about their good old (bad old) days.

Jack Murphy has made being Murf the Surf (his preferred spelling) into a career. A charismatic mile-a-minute talker, Murphy is based near Tampa and makes his living as a prison evangelist, traveling the country—Angola one week, Raiford the next—discussing his rap sheet and urging convicts to find God. In conversation, he is mesmerizingly manipulative—funny and ebullient, then abruptly exuding a hard-edged and menacing persona with a thousand-yard stare. He delights in keeping people off-kilter. “I wasn’t always the kindly white-haired grandfather that you see before you now,” he says. These days, he goes to comic extremes to convey that he is a law-abiding citizen; the fear of even a parking ticket upsets the former second-story man. “I don’t want to get in trouble with the Miami cops,” he says. “I’ve had enough trouble here.”

While Murphy even has his own Web site touting his role in the museum robbery, Allan Kuhn, by contrast, has spent the intervening decades doing everything possible to be invisible. His phone is unlisted. He lives in a tiny mountain town in Northern California, a winding two-hour drive from a major airport that ends with a few turns down a rutted dirt road to a rustic rental house. Kuhn has not met with a reporter in 40-plus years, and insisted as a condition of our interview that I not reveal the name of his hometown. Photos of Kuhn as a young man highlight his chiseled build and daredevil grin; even now, at age 76, he’s in wiry good health and bears a long white ponytail and laidback demeanor. A believer in New Age spirituality, his living room features a shrine with candles, offerings, and photos of U.F.O.s.

A childless widower, Kuhn stumbled into a new line of work in 2007. After complaining about insomnia to a local doctor, Kuhn was given a prescription to grow medical marijuana, which was surprising to a man who had done jail time in the late 1960s for possession of a joint. His backyard crop now provides a lucrative livelihood. When I visited, Kuhn had just returned from delivering a batch to Los Angeles clinics, and the house reeked of weed.

Out of touch for many years, Kuhn and Murphy now frequently reminisce with each other, yet memories have a way of shape-shifting. “Allan can’t remember anything,” complains Murphy, noting that Kuhn has smoked a lot of marijuana. Kuhn shakes his head, saying, “Jack has a need to make every story just a little better.”

A kaleidoscope of other recollections fills in the fractured gaps. Maurice Nadjari, now 90, the Manhattan prosecutor who pursued the thieves with Javert–like determination, still vividly remembers the case that made his career. Detective Richard Maline dictated his memories in a 50-page oral history, which his widow Barbara passed along to me. Roger Clark, before his death, confided tidbits to family members and friends. Freedom of Information requests produced a trove of yellowing documents from police, prison, and court archives.

The Miami beach boys were clean-cut and photogenic, unlikely types to turn up in a police lineup. Kuhn and Clark had spent several years in the Navy. Murphy, a college dropout from a middle-class family, was a surfer. Their spree began as a game, a way to rebel against society. “It was never about the money,” insists Kuhn. “It was always the thrill of the chase.”

Kuhn had a gritty childhood in West Grove, Missouri. His father abandoned the family when he was a toddler, and his mother worked menial jobs to support Kuhn and his baby sister. “We were always poor,” he says. As a 15-year-old, he was arrested for breaking into neighbors’ homes and sentenced to probation. After a semester at Southern Illinois University, Kuhn enlisted and saw the world via submarine. When his tour of duty ended in 1962, he left the Key West Naval Air Station and headed to Miami Beach, landing a job as a swimming instructor at the Casablanca hotel, an art-deco classic on Collins Drive.

“How did I go from law-abiding citizen to a life of crime?” Kuhn says, grinning. One night a bartender took him into a backroom, where a local jewel thief was nursing a graze from a bullet. The man told Kuhn that he had just been shot by a police officer while trying to rob a coin store; he dared Kuhn to finish the job. “I climbed up the building and found the hole in the roof that Johnny had cut,” Kuhn recalls. “I went down a rope and I cleaned the place out. It was just truly a thrill.” He had been earning $100 a day with tips at the Casablanca; a few days later he claims he was handed an envelope containing $180,000. “I’ve always been adventurous,” he says.

Murphy, the only child of a telephone-company lineman and a housewife, grew up in Oceanside, California, with two strangely contrasting passions—the violin and surfing. “Our home was always decent, clean, moral, no drinking, honesty in all things,” his mother Ruth wrote in a letter attesting to her son’s character. The family moved to Pittsburgh when Jack was in high school. He brags that as a 15-year-old he played violin with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and won a tennis scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. On a snowy day his freshman year, wanderlust hit. “I’m standing in the slush, you could see the junk in the air floating from the steel mills,” he recalls. “I thought, I’m going to die here.” A train came by and he hopped on, eventually arriving in Miami, in the winter of 1955.

He stacked hotel pool chairs, raked beaches, painted cabanas, and was hired to perform diving stunts in hotel aquatic shows. He claims that Barbara Walters’s father, the showman Lou Walters, who owned the Miami Beach nightclub Latin Quarter, booked him for gigs. After a nine-day acquaintance, Murphy married Gloria Sostoc, a well-to-do hotel guest, in 1957, but five years and two sons later, the couple divorced. He quickly remarried. Seeking to capitalize on his fame as a championship surfer, he moved with his second wife to Cocoa Beach and opened a surfboard store. But after a financial dispute with partners, Murphy lost the shop. With his second marriage unraveling, Murphy returned to Miami Beach.

One night he joined friends on a boat ride to rob a mansion, earning a quick $15,000 as his share of the proceeds. The easy money was irresistible. Murphy and Kuhn, who had mutual friends, soon began working together to plunder the city. A bellman or a manicurist might tip them off that a tourist had left her room; a crooked insurance agent might know which rich locals had upped jewelry riders. “We accumulated master keys at most of the hotels,” Murphy claims. Kuhn insists that he never used weapons. “I just didn’t think it was necessary to take something forcibly from someone else.” Murphy had no such qualms. “I had some connections with bad guys. I did some enforcing,” he says. “I had already been further down the dark road than Allan.”

As jewel thieves, they were not subtle. “You do a job, and you go back to the bar that night,” Murphy says. “It’s in the newspapers and it’s not long before everyone knows.” Kuhn says he initially kept a low profile and blames Murphy for initiating him into the good life. “Jack talked me into spending money,” he says. Kuhn upgraded to a tony building and a white Cadillac, speedboat, and sailboat. As Kuhn says wistfully, “That money came and went.” His current abstemious lifestyle includes a $550-per-month rental home, modest furnishings, and a 2002 Subaru.

The thieves recruited house painter Roger Clark to join the crew. A native of Meriden, Connecticut, Clark had been a high-school lifeguard before joining the Navy. After finishing his service, he briefly tried the nine-to-five life at a Connecticut chemical factory, and then headed for Miami, where he took on gigs as a jack of all trades. “Roger was a sweet guy and he just got in over his head,” says his sister-in-law, Myrta Clark. “The other two were professionals; Roger got caught up in it.” Clark played the extra man, watching out for the police or driving the getaway car. As Murphy recalls, “Roger was a backup guy. Roger was real quiet, real cool, very calm.”

It didn’t take long for Kuhn and Murphy to become persons of interest to Florida law enforcement. Questioned for several robberies and arrested for vagrancy, they got off with the help of local mob lawyer Harvey St. Jean. But by the fall of 1964, the authorities in Miami appeared to be closing in. The F.B.I. would later claim they had been trailing Kuhn and Murphy for six months. Leaving town seemed prudent.

Kuhn and Murphy’s memories diverge when it comes to the reason for visiting Manhattan. Kuhn insists that the trip was organized specifically to steal the American Museum of Natural History’s gem collection, but Murphy vehemently disagrees, recalling that they had their sights set on robbing a Hamptons socialite. “The museum was nowhere on the agenda,” Murphy insists.

Arriving in New York in Kuhn’s white Cadillac, the men checked into the Stanhope Hotel, where they were joined by Clark. As they visited museums, the World’s Fair, and jazz clubs, the tanned and well-muscled men stood out, especially Kuhn, who favored colorful Florida attire. “He dressed like he was part of a Shriner’s convention—argyle socks, a yellow jacket, a fancy shirt,” says Murphy. “I said, ‘Get a dark outfit.’ ”

After moving to cheaper residential lodging, Cambridge House Hotel on West 86th Street near Riverside Park, the three men continued staking out the American Museum of Natural History. “We hid to see when the guards came around, their change of shift,” Kuhn recalls. They were mesmerized by the stones, donated by J.P. Morgan in 1901. Morgan had hired Tiffany’s gemologist George Frederick Kunz to put together the collection: the blue Star of India had been mined in Ceylon 300 years ago, and at 563 carats, it was the size of a golf ball. The Eagle diamond was discovered in 1876 by a farmer in Wisconsin. Socialite Edith Haggin DeLong, the daughter of a copper magnate, had subsequently given the museum a gorgeous red cabochon-cut ruby, unearthed in Burma in the early 1930s.

The Miami men made a memorable impression on the Cambridge House staff, throwing raucous parties at their penthouse suite. As Nora Ephron later recounted in the Post, “They tipped a bellboy $100 for delivering liquor.” And, “Once they bought two cases of soda pop just to get the bottle caps for a game in which they flipped the caps at the wall.” With the Lyndon Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater presidential election days away, a Goldwater canvasser came by the hotel and tried to solicit their votes, later telling Ephron that the men were “rude, obnoxious and fresh.”

Janet Florkiewicz, a beautiful 19-year-old Staten Island native who was sharing an apartment there with a girlfriend, began to spend time with Kuhn, accompanying him to the museum. The brunette would later be referred to in the press as Kuhn’s girlfriend. “Janet was always a bit of a rebel,” says her cousin Linda Raffone, a Pennsylvania nurse. After attending Port Richmond High School, Janet had taken a job at a Wall Street insurance firm as a secretary.

The supplies were purchased, the plans were finalized—and then Murphy got cold feet. He worried that they had been indiscreet. As he recalls telling his companions, “Too many people know. We don’t know if they’ll be standup.” But Kuhn was adamant: “I knew it could be done.”

On the night of Thursday, October 29, the beach boys’ hotel suite was quiet. Florkiewicz was spotted in the laundry room, ironing clothes for a trip. Clark drove the Cadillac to the back of the museum, dropping off his partners. Kuhn and Murphy clambered over a spiked steel fence into a courtyard. The next challenge was to ascend the 125-foot museum wall. Kuhn climbed up until he reached a ledge, and then lowered a rope for Murphy, who pulled himself up. Easing open a fourth-floor window, they slipped into the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals. With 25-foot ceilings and a metal gate locking it off from the rest of the museum, the room was isolated and pristine.

“We sat there for awhile,” Kuhn recalls, making sure no guards were coming by. Then they used tape and glasscutters to open the display cases to get to the jewels. When they lifted out the gems, the room remained eerily silent. “I was sure there were alarms, but they were just old,” Kuhn says. “We got lucky.”

The wire on the alarms had been disconnected and the museum staff scarcely monitored the valuables. “The guards did not make their rounds in a proper fashion,” wrote Detective Richard Maline in his account of the investigation. No one heard or saw the thieves, as they slipped back into the night.

At 9:15 A.M. the next morning, Kuhn, Murphy, and Florkiewicz boarded an Eastern Airlines flight from J.F.K. to Miami, traveling under assumed names. Florkiewicz was carrying a distinctive yellow case, later insisting that Kuhn and Murphy had given it to her and that she had no idea what was in it.

Shortly before 10 A.M., while the trio was in the air, museum guard John Hoffman unlocked the gates to the J.P. Morgan Hall. He was so distraught that he was virtually incoherent on the phone to the police. “I caught the case,” remembers then-detective Jack McNally. “The place was a wreck. We had to notify the district commander; the district commander notified the borough chief; the borough chief notified the police commissioner. All the big bosses started showing up.” Reporters swarmed the building. As Tania Long of The New York Times wrote, one detective shouted to another, “Better keep the boys away from these cases, or we’ll have nothing but photographers’ prints all over.”

At an acrimonious press conference, museum director Dr. James Oliver blamed the poor security on city budget cuts and admitted that the missing gems were not insured, saying, “You cannot take items such as these, which are priceless, and get insurance on them.”

As theNew York Daily News reported, “The crime touched off an international manhunt for a master burglar who has written a chapter in criminal history that rivals anything in fiction. . . . Guards at airports and seaports and at border crossovers were alerted. Interpol was asked to alert its farflung operatives to search for the gems.”

By the time the bulletins went out, Murphy, Kuhn, and Florkiewicz had arrived in Miami. Bonnie Lou Sutera, Murphy’s girlfriend, picked them up at the airport and drove them back to Kuhn’s Brickell Avenue apartment. “Allan pulled the curtains real tight, he sent Janet out somewhere, and we took those big stones and rolled them on the carpet with a flashlight,” Murphy recalls, explaining that the points of the sapphires resembled shooting stars. “When you’d roll them, boom, boom, they looked like little explosions.”

In Manhattan the following evening, vice squad detective James Walsh was patrolling the Upper West Side when he was waved over by the front-desk clerk of the Cambridge House Hotel. The employee confided, “There are three guys in this place who are spending money like wild.” Meanwhile, Janet Florkiewiez’s roomate had received a disturbing call from her and subsequently called the authorities. “Janet had called, stating that she was being held in Florida against her will and sounded very frightened,” Maline wrote. Detectives Maline and McNally went to Cambridge House to investigate both tips, and the police woke up a judge to secure a search warrant. At the hotel suite, they discovered sneakers embedded with glass, photos of several museums, burglary tools, scales, and a few packets of heroin. Curious to see if anyone would return, McNally spent the night in the penthouse.

The next morning, Clark, who had driven to Connecticut to visit his family, returned, accompanied by a male friend. “They came into the apartment and they caught me in the bathroom washing up,” McNally recalls, with a laugh. “I had to get to my gun and shield, and then I told them they were under arrest.”

At the local precinct house, the police pressed Clark about his whereabouts. “Clark for a short time denied any complicity or any knowledge of the burglary of the museum,” wrote Maline in his account, “but after some applied psychology, he did make full admissions to the part he played and implicated K and M as his accomplices.” Clark later claimed, in a deposition aimed to quash his confession, that he had been a victim of police brutality “I was beaten and assaulted by one of them who kicked me with his booted feet and struck and jabbed me with a blackjack,” Clark wrote. Indicted on charges of drug possession and possession of burglary tools, Clark pled not guilty and was released on $12,000 bond.

The Manhattan police contacted their Miami counterparts. Eight lawmen burst into the Brickell Avenue apartment: Murphy, his girlfriend Sutera, and Florkiewicz were there, but Kuhn had run out for an errand. He returned to find his home under siege. “The F.B.I. came in and tore my place to pieces,” recalls Kuhn. “But I had hidden the jewels in the hallway outside my apartment, overhead in the ceiling.” Murphy’s memory differs—he says the jewels were actually in a garbage can inside the apartment. Either way, the cops did not find the gems. Sutera and Florkiewicz were allowed to leave, but as soon as Florkiewicz arrived in New York, she was arrested and placed under guard in protective custody at a hotel.

Murphy and Kuhn spent several nights in a Miami jail, charged with interstate transportation of stolen property. Upon being released on bail, the duo gave a wisecracking press conference in the office of lawyer Harvey St. Jean.

Extradited to Manhattan to face charges of first-degree burglary and possession of burglary tools, the three men were treated like celebrities. Prosecutor Maurice Nadjari was astonished by the public reaction. “These were the bad guys, but . . . the papers had played them as heroic characters. The crowds cheered them as they walked by.”

The circumstantial evidence pointed to their guilt, but without the missing jewels, it was hard to make a case. Freed once again on bail, the beach boys returned to Miami, but Florkiewicz remained under lock and key, guarded around the clock. “She had a strong dislike for the police department and objected to being kept a prisoner,” wrote Maline in his journal.

As her cousin recalls, “My father was a police officer on Staten Island at the time, and he tried to do what he could,” but he was unable to secure her release. Her photograph, in sunglasses with her head bowed, appeared on the front page of the New York Journal-American on the day she arrived at the courthouse to testify before the grand jury about the robbery. A few days later she recanted, claiming that she had testified under duress. “Girl in Gem Theft Asserts She Lied,” headlined The New York Times article on November 26, 1964. Her lawyer insisted that the police had threatened Florkiewicz with jail if she did not cooperate and that she was so frightened that she “made this up.”

Nadjari opposed her lawyer’s request for $5,000 in bail, telling the judge that the beach boys had sought to learn about her whereabouts, and cautioning that if she were released, her life might be in danger. “She was the only witness I had, and she turned on me,” Nadjari says now. Judge Joseph Sarafite set her bail at $25,000 (the equivalent of around $190,000 today), saying that Florkiewicz was “young and without mature judgment” and was a “risk” if freed on bail. She remained in protective custody for three long months at an East 26th Street hotel, according to an Associated Press story.

Her family members, declining to reveal her current whereabouts, say the experience was harrowing for a naïve teenager and haunts her to this day. Contacted this October, a few days before the 50th anniversary of the robbery, a Staten Island relative who remains in touch, says, “She would rather forget about it. When she sees something on the news, it upsets her. She’s happy in her life now. She didn’t deserve the treatment she got at the time. She trusted these three guys, who just used her.”

Kuhn now regrets what happened to Florkiewicz. “I would love to find her and apologize, and do anything I can to make this right,” he says. “She was an innocent bystander.”

Once back in Miami, the thieves were under surveillance, but Kuhn says that he nonetheless managed to sell the Eagle Diamond and some of the smaller jewels. But he says that fence Hy Gordon insisted that the marquee jewels were too hot to handle. Concluding that his apartment was not a safe hiding place, Kuhn turned to yacht broker and former co-conspirator Dickie Pearson, hoping for honor among thieves. “Dick had been my partner,” he said. “I buried the stones in his backyard.” It was a decision that he would regret: a few weeks later, masked men burst into Pearson’s house, demanded the jewels, and pistol-whipped Pearson, but left empty-handed.

The Miami police tracked down even the most absurd tips. In Manhattan, federal and state prosecutors fought over key witnesses such as Gordon. To pressure the thieves, Nadjari began to re-investigate cold cases in Manhattan and asked the Miami police for leads. The desk clerk at the Algonquin Hotel belatedly identified Murphy as the man who had robbed him of $250 in July 1964. “I’ve never been in the Algonquin in my life,” insists Murphy, who freely admits to other crimes. Even reporters were scornful of this indictment. Those charges were later dropped.

Just when the case appeared to be going nowhere, Nadjari hit publicity pay dirt. Researching unsolved Miami cases, he saw that Eva Gabor and her husband, stockbroker Richard Brown, had been pistol-whipped at the Racquet Club in Miami on January 4, 1964, and her $25,000 diamond ring was stolen. Eva Gabor, who was in New York, picked the duo out of a line-up.

Even though the crime had occurred in Florida, Nadjari convinced a New York jury to indict the thieves. At a hearing, Manhattan defense lawyer Gilbert Rosenthal argued that Kuhn’s photo had been “in practically every newspaper in the country” and that Gabor and her husband were trying to “get in to the publicity act.” Gabor’s status as a celebrity crime victim won her an appearance on Johnny Carson. The charges were later dropped, after Gabor refused to turn up for trial, claiming that she was too busy filming Green Acres in Los Angeles.

Ask Nadjari now if he ever really believed that the beach boys robbed Gabor, and he slyly replies, “It served my purposes.” On January 5, 1965, Justice Mitchell Schweitzer responded to the new charges by raising bail to $150,000 each for the beach boys. Unable to come up with the money, the three men were taken to the Tombs. Kuhn immediately decided to make a deal. “Jack did not want to do it,” he recalls. “He would have toughed it out. But I think we would still be in prison if we hadn’t given the jewels back.”

The warden called Nadjari, saying, “A prisoner wants to see you,” and Kuhn was shown in. In Nadjari’s words, “We hit the jackpot.” Kuhn offered to retrieve the jewels in return for a lighter sentence; Nadjari agreed to recommend leniency. That night, Kuhn, Nadjari, and three detectives—McNally, Maline, and Peter Meenan—flew to Miami. At the Florida airport, Kuhn balked at the sight of the black sedan rental car. “He didn’t like the car I got him,” recalls McNally, laughing, “So I had to get him a red convertible.”

Kuhn led the law-enforcement authorities all over Miami Beach, making hush-hush calls and hitting the bars for supposed “meetings.” He and his entourage were chased by dozens of reporters. Frustrated with Kuhn’s stalling, Maline and McNally invited fence Hy Gordon to dinner at the Holiday Inn. “He said that he would do anything he could to help us as long as he did not get involved in a conspiracy and subject himself to any prosecution,” wrote Maline in his account.

The breakthrough came with a three A.M. phone call to the University Inn, where Kuhn and the lawmen were staying. Gordon picked up Detective Maline and they drove to a Hot Shoppe. The odd couple went inside briefly, and when they returned to the automobile, they found a note, along with a key, directing them to the Trailways bus station and locker 0911. Gordon stuffed the incriminating note in his mouth and ate it. At the terminal, Maline retrieved two damp bags.

The police detectives and Nadjari insist that Kuhn was not involved in the recovery of the jewels, and instead was glued to the TV. But Kuhn has his own version of the story, which differs from every newspaper account from that era, and he cannot offer proof. “They let me go,” Kuhn says. “I was their only salvation, I knew where the jewels were. I went to Dick Pearson’s and we got the shovel and dug them up.” Pearson died in 1990 and Kuhn’s version is impossible to substantiate. Nadjari insists, “That’s not true. We never let him out of our sight.”

When the contents of the grubby bags were spilled onto the coffee table at the University Inn, Nadjari says he felt “elation” at the sight of the Star of India, the Midnight Star, a sapphire, five emeralds, and two aquamarines. But Kuhn did a double take. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” Kuhn says. The DeLong Star ruby was missing. He speculated that Pearson had dug up the jewels earlier and grabbed the ruby.

No one had thought to bring a jewel case. Nadjari placed the jewels in a sanitary-napkin bag. En route to the airport, their car broke down. As the prosecutor recalls, “Here we are with a fortune in our pockets and we don’t know who is chasing us—the bad guys, the bent cops, the press. And we’re stuck by the side of the road.” They hiked to a pay phone and called a local private detective, whose wife drove them onto the tarmac to a waiting plane.

A month later, in early February 1965, Florkiewicz was finally released from custody.

On April 6, 1965, Allan Kuhn, Jack Murphy, and Roger Clark pled guilty to burglary and grand larceny. Complaining that the thieves had not helped to retrieve the jewels, Nadjari asked for a three-year sentence, and the judge agreed, sending them back to Rikers Island.

Stuck behind bars, the beach boys were furious at Pearson. “Dick shafted us,” says Murphy, who asked his Miami pals to send a message. “Some of my people tied him up and hurt him, friends who didn’t appreciate that I got more time because he didn’t return the ruby.” The police were aware that Pearson had a shady reputation but were unable to link him directly to the case.

The story faded from the headlines. But later that year, Florida freelance writer Francis P. Antel confronted Pearson about rumors that the yacht broker had hocked the ruby to the Chicago underworld for a loan. According to a detailed summary of these events in a 1967 federal court ruling, Pearson hinted to Antel that he might “be able to contact” somebody who could get hold of the ruby, “if there were a possibility of immunity.” He wanted a $25,000 reward. As Antel later wrote in his book, Ransom and Gems: The DeLong Ruby Story, he and Pearson then made overtures to the authorities but the prosecutors put the kibosh on handing over cash to an intermediary.

The persistent Antel contacted the New York Daily News and promised the newspaper an exclusive as he continued to try to broker a deal. In the hopes of finding someone willing to pay a ransom, Antel set up a meeting with billionaire insurance magnate John D. MacArthur, whose foundation now disperses the “genius” grants. An eighth-grade dropout who amassed more than 100,000 acres of prime Florida real estate, MacArthur ran his empire out of the coffee shop of the Colonnades Hotel on Singer Island. The philanthropist was famously frugal, yet he was intrigued by the missing ruby and agreed to pay the $25,000 ransom. “If the museum thought this was important enough to have placed it on view for everybody in the world to see and appreciate,” MacArthur later told the Daily News, “then I would go along with the scheme to buy it back and bail it out for the public.”

Once the scheme to swap the money for the ruby was arranged, Daily News reporter Bill Federici and photographer Dan Farrell came to Miami to capture the scene. On September 2, 1965 Antel picked up the ransom money from MacArthur at the First Marine Bank, and later handed it over to Pearson.

Waiting at the Colonnades Hotel late that night, MacArthur and the newspapermen got a call from Antel telling them to go to a service plaza on the Sunshine State Parkway. When they arrived, a pay phone was ringing. Federici answered. Relaying Pearson’s instructions, Antel told the reporter to reach up over a ledge. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Federici announced. The photographer captured the moment. The front page of the next morning’s Daily News read, “HERE’S RUBY! Exclusive! Our Man Picks Up Ransomed Gem.”

Dick Pearson was arrested several months later while burglarizing a jewelry store in Macon, Georgia, caught carrying a stack of $100 bills with serial numbers that matched the ransom money. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for his involvement in the DeLong Star ruby case, a longer term than the thieves themselves received.

As for the remaining colorful characters in the beach boys’ saga: Hy Gordon was convicted for fencing other stolen jewels, and died of a heart attack in prison. Lawyer Harvey St. Jean was gunned down in his Cadillac, a Miami underworld murder that remains unsolved. New York Justice Mitchell Schweitzer, who presided over the case, was investigated for accepting bribes in an unrelated case and resigned. Maurice Nadjari went on to a happier fate, named in 1972 by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a special prosecutor to investigate police corruption. The Cambridge House hotel on West 86th Street, where the beach boys planned their caper, has now become a senior living center, the Atria.

Perhaps the strangest tale, however, is what befell the beach boys after their release from Rikers, in 1967. Roger Clark became a bartender and golf pro. Settling near Mt. Snow, Vermont, he spent 15 years working at a French restaurant, Le Petit Chef, owned by Betty Hillman. “I would trust Roger with my life,” Hillman says. “Roger was so law-abiding that he wouldn’t jaywalk.” She adds with a laugh, “He drove so slowly. I used to say to him, ‘You drove the getaway car?’ ”

Jack Murphy and Allan Kuhn returned to Miami, and to their careers as jewel thieves. Allan married a former hotel swimming pupil, Susan Schuler—he shows me their wedding photo, a handsome and ecstatically happy couple—but shortly after their honeymoon, the police made a threatening late-night visit to their apartment. “They kicked the door in,” recalls Kuhn. He and the terrified Susan packed up and left for Los Angeles. Murphy followed, as did the headlines. The Arizona Republic ran a story on September 2, 1967, “Thief ‘Murph the Surf’ Moves to West Coast,” reporting that he and Kuhn had been arrested for several burglaries. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

That November, two secretaries at a Los Angeles brokerage firm ran off with $488,732 worth of negotiable securities. Terry Kent Frank, 23, and Annelie Maria Mohn, 21, took a bus cross-country and checked into a tourist hotel in Bal Harbour. Frank had previously been convicted of forgery. Kuhn and Murphy each claim the other made the introductions to the women. Once acquainted, the two secretaries moved into Murphy’s place, unable to afford their Florida hotel after just five days. “The girls are starting to get antsy, so we went for a boat ride,” Murphy says.

On that boat ride more than 40 years ago, Murphy says there were five passengers—the two girls, himself, Griffin, and a mysterious guy named Rusty. Murphy claims that he was at the wheel when a contentious conversation broke out: “One of the girls said, ‘If we don’t get our money, we’re going to the F.B.I.’ ”

On December 8, 1967, the two women’s bikini-clad bodies were discovered submerged in the Whiskey Creek canal, weighed down with concrete blocks. They had been stabbed in the stomach and their skulls had been smashed. Murphy insists to me that the shadowy Rusty murdered the women. But a witness testified at trial that she only saw four people getting on the boat. Murphy’s defense lawyer, Jack Nageley, told me that he had no recollection of ever hearing about the fifth man, Rusty, replying, “Murphy is now a man of religion. Murph has got to make what he says as nice as possible.”

The beach boy admits that he helped dispose of the corpses, confessing, “It was an absolute nightmare. This was not part of the plan. I’ve got dead bodies in the back of the boat. You get rid of the situation the best you can.”

He and Griffith were arrested, but since the evidence was initially circumstantial, they were released on bail. Murphy then participated in one last flamboyant robbery at a waterfront home owned by Olive Wofford, a wealthy widow.

Indicted for the Whiskey Creek murders (and later for the Wofford robbery), Murphy opted for an insanity plea. “We had no defense,” says Nageley. Murphy was committed to a mental hospital for several months until the judge ruled that he was fit to stand trial. In March 1969, Murphy and Griffith were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, and then Murphy racked up another life sentence for the Wofford robbery.

Allan Kuhn was convicted of conspiring to receive and transport stolen securities, and served a one-year stint in a California federal prison. Kuhn was never accused of involvement or knowledge about the murders, and says, convincingly, that he was horrified to learn of Murphy’s crime: “That was so totally wrong. I was devastated.”

The two men had an uncomfortable reunion in 1974. Texas oilman Caruth Byrd decided to produce the movie Murph the Surf about the museum robbery, and flew the actors (Robert Conrad as Kuhn, Don Stroud as Murphy) and Kuhn, as technical consultant, to Florida for a prison visit with Murphy. “It was awkward,” Murphy says. A plate-glass wall separated him from the visitors. Small talk was difficult. As Kuhn recalls, “It was hard for me to pretend that nothing had happened.”

Kuhn had become a law-abiding citizen, first working as a prop master for movies in Los Angeles, then moving with his wife to Highlandville, Missouri, where he opened up a topsoil and landscaping business. He buried his history since there was nothing to gain by mentioning that he was an ex-convict. “This was the Bible Belt, they are not very forgiving,” he says.

But the press kept Murphy in the news. Every few years he would give a jokey interview in prison. “The food’s good, although not as good as the Waldorf, and the company’s excellent,” he told United Press International. He painted watercolors. A Florida television station interviewed him, and crewmember Kitten Collins became enamored, visiting twice a week for more than a decade.

The years passed slowly for inmate 024627. “What you have in prison is time to really think about things,” Murphy says. “You’d watch guys going to chapel, and their demeanor changed. You don’t want to believe in God because you think, what if I’ve been wrong all my life?” But in 1975, Murphy did go to church and kept returning, proselytizing to his fellow inmates. “You find out how lost you really are,” Murphy says. “You start the God journey.”

Prison officials could not decide whether this was a genuine conversion or a ploy for early release. The Florida Parole Board chose to believe that Murphy was a changed man and in December 1986, he was released on parole. A year later, he married Kitten and became a prison evangelist under the auspices of Champions for Life, a prison reform group.

Murphy, who now lives with his wife in a small town near Tampa and is helping raise her three grandchildren, has since traveled the world, trying to convince other inmates to see the light. Miami developer Todd Glaser, who got to know Murphy a few years ago, says, “I think he is haunted by those deaths and wants to make amends.”

Once released, Murphy was eager to track down his old pals. As Vermont restaurateur Betty Hillman recalls, “Murph called one day for Roger. He came up to Vermont a few times to visit.” The two men reminisced about the museum caper. “In Roger’s eyes, it was a stupid thing he had done,” Hillman said, “but it was fun. The two men remained in touch up until Clark’s death in 2007.

Allan Kuhn was elusive. After his wife Susan died of M.S. in 2001, he sold their Missouri farm and moved to Alaska to mine for gold. Several years later he got a worried call from his elderly father’s neighbor, concerned that con men were fleecing Dale Kuhn out of his savings. Kuhn moved to Northern California to sort out the damage.

Reading the local newspaper in 2004, Kuhn was startled to see an announcement that Murph the Surf would be speaking at a prison near Fresno, California. Kuhn was curious. He had not spoken to Murphy in decades. He left a message at Champions for Life, and Murphy called back 15 minutes later. “We picked up right where we left off,” marvels Kuhn. Murphy had a proposition for his former partner: “Do you want to go to prison with me?” Kuhn replied, “Didn’t we already do that?”

Their reunion took place in front of hundreds of inmates at an evangelical extravaganza at the Fresno prison. “Jack rolls up with 40 bikers, there are pretty girls playing guitar, there are counselors to talk to the inmates,” Kuhn recalls. “Jack gives his speech, and then he hands the microphone to me.”

The crowd was cheering. The years fell away. They were young men again with a crazy idea, captivated by the Star of India in its velvet case at the American Museum of Natural History, blinded by the radiance and their own hubris to the life-changing consequences of their crime.