The sun was still lolling its way toward New York when four streetlight shadows slinked into Washington Square Park and fixed sidelong eyes on the mansion that was their mark.
One by one, the men crept toward the brownstone at 19 Washington Square North and disappeared down its curbside coal chute. For seven hours that morning — April 2, 1922 — they huddled in the cellar, unseen by the silk-stocking homeowners, Albert and Mary Shattuck, and their gaggle of servants.
The ringleader, a Frenchman with a schnoz cut like Napoleon’s, his fellow Corsican, gave a signal at 1 p.m. The crew donned black bandanas and ascended to the kitchen, where the hirelings were eating Sunday lunch.
Two intruders held guns on the eight servants as the top-cat Frenchy and a confrere went upstairs to rouse the Shattucks.
Despite the mask, Albert Shattuck immediately recognized the chef de crime as Henri Boilat, his former butler who disappeared in 1917 with $12,000 in his wife’s gems.
Five years later, Boilat was back for more.
He went methodically from room to room, shopping like a choosy lapidary. He passed over middling finery (as well as rare 17th century Chinese porcelain) in favor of 25 pieces suitable for Tiffany’s private stock.
In minutes, he had scooped up $90,000 worth of jewelry. The loot included an 8-carat diamond solitaire pendant; a 7-carat emerald ring; a 5-carat diamond ring; two diamond bracelets with a dozen stones; a platinum broach with nine diamonds, and an exquisite collection of pearls, including a perfect egg-shaped specimen.
The robbers squeezed the 10 victims into an elevator-sized wine vault — a claustrophobic space 6 feet high and 8 feet wide. Before he locked them away, the sadistic Boilat poked a pistol at the quaking Mrs. Shattuck and took her wedding ring.
Boilat and two other robbers slipped out of the house and disappeared into the Sunday afternoon throng on Washington Square. A fourth was slow to flee because he had gone back upstairs to swipe a silver service.
Inside the vault, Albert Shattuck worked frantically with just a penknife and a dime to dismantle the door lock as the others panicked over fear of suffocation. He succeeded after 30 minutes, and the 10 tumbled choking out of the chamber.
“We were gasping for breath because of the exhaustion of air,” Victor Tirosi, the couple’s doorman, later said.
Police arrived as the fourth robber, Eugenio Diaset, 27, was lugging out a bag of silver. Collared, he spilled the details of the caper.
Diaset said the job was planned at Chevalier’s restaurant on W. 45th St., where he was a waiter. Boilat and a second Corsican, Paul Camilliere, had recruited two New York Frenchmen, Diaset and Maurice Bagnoli.
Boilat had drawn a detailed diagram of the mansion and promised easy pickings.
“Henri knew where everything was that we wanted,” Diaset said.
Albert Shattuck, 68, seethed over the robbery, which wrecked his nerves.
The Shattucks were Social Register paragons. He had earned a fortune as a New Orleans mortgage banker, and she was a New York blueblood, daughter of ex-Mayor William Lafayette Strong. Among other properties, they owned The Mount, author Edith Wharton’s opulent former estate in the Berkshires.
Shattuck vowed to spend up to $1 million of his fortune to bring Boilat to justice. It wasn’t about money — the jewelry was fully insured.
“It is the most outrageous and high-handed crime that I ever heard of,” he said, “especially when one considers that there were about 2,000 people seated in the park at the time.”
Bagnoli was arrested a week after the stickup at a Plainfield, N.J., hideout, but Boilat and Camilliere had fled to France — riding freights to Mexico, then crossing the Atlantic via steamer.
Paris police, early adapters of fingerprint technology, used those records to identify Boilat as Gabriel Mourey, 35, a career con who had escaped from a French prison under sentence for attempted murder.
Dissatisfied with the NYPD’s inability to reach across the ocean, Shattuck sailed to Europe, where he spent months hound-dogging Boilat/Mourey despite his own declining health.
His work motivated new global law enforcement cooperation. The absurdity of a rich American doing his own gumshoe work abroad helped spur the 1923 creation of the International Criminal Police Commission, later renamed INTERPOL.
In the fall of 1923, days after Shattuck sailed home from a second European snoop-trip, French police trailed Mourey’s girlfriend to Gournay-sur-Marne, a Paris suburb. After days of surveillance, Mourey was confronted in a restaurant on Oct. 4 and wounded when he tried to shoot his way out.
As he lay in a prison infirmary, he said, “Since I am caught, I might as well confess. It was I who planned the Shattuck robbery and directed its execution.”
A grateful Shattuck sent a $15,000 reward to French cops.
Mourey chose to face trial in France, expecting leniency. Instead, he was convicted and sentenced to die, although French President Gaston Doumergue commuted that to life in prison.
His three accomplices, all tried in New York, were sentenced to 60 years but were freed after about 20.
Albert Shattuck never recovered from the strain and died on Nov. 4, 1924. Mary Strong Shattuck refused to return to the Washington Square mansion, which is now owned by New York University.
She died at The Mount in 1935 and was buried with her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
