Louis Kripplebauer, 74, member of the K&A gang

On a March day in 1967, Louis J. Kripplebauer Jr. walked into a Philadelphia courtroom to be charged with an $81,000 burglary at a Food Fair store in 1965.

He walked away free because a judge determined that police had used a defective search warrant.

But Mr. Kripplebauer then grew out of neighborhood crimes like that heist at I Street and Hunting Park Avenue.

In August 1976, at 40, he was sentenced to federal prison after pleading no contest to charges that he and others stole $250,000 in silverware and other valuables in a Houston suburb and shipped them back to Philadelphia.

Mr. Kripplebauer was later proud enough of his nationwide crimes to let himself become the subject of the 2006 book Confessions of a Second Story Man: Junior Kripplebauer and the K&A Gang.

On Monday, March 29, Mr. Kripplebauer, 74, died at Woodbury Mews, a retirement community in Gloucester County.

Allen Hornblum, a member of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission from 1989 to 1993 who wrote the 2006 book, said this week that Mr. Kripplebauer "is a legend in the American penal system."

But Hornblum noted that "despite his lengthy criminal history and menacing persona, he was a much-loved and -respected member of the assisted living facility he resided in."

Hornblum said that Mr. Kripplebauer was a crew chief in the larger K&A gang, which flourished from the 1950s through the 1970s from its base near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues in Northeast Philadelphia.

In February 1977, when Mr. Kripplebauer skipped bail in connection with the Houston burglaries, the FBI painted him and his crew, which the agency numbered as many as 16, with a national reputation.

"These people are a major organized group, not just house burglars," Dick Schwein, FBI agent in charge of the investigation of the bail jump, said in an Inquirer report.

Revealing that Mr. Kripplebauer was a suspect in two $500,000 burglaries in the Chicago and Pittsburgh regions after the bail jump, Schwein said, "Obviously, they're active in major burglaries around the country again."

Mr. Kripplebauer was later caught, Hornblum said.

A separate story about the bail jump described him as "a former roofer, truck driver and businessman. . . ."

Mr. Kripplebauer, the Hornblum book states, "was born in 1936 in Upper Byrnesville, a small hillside community on the outskirts of Centralia," in the northeast Pennsylvania coal country, where his father was a miner.

Discharged from the Navy in 1956, the book reports, "he took a job as a welder for a couple of years at a shipyard at Sparrows Point, Md."

On weekends, Hornblum said, he would return to his parents' home in Fairmount and hang out at bars.

On his first criminal job, he and a few friends drove to Baltimore and staged an armed robbery at a gasoline station, good for $1,500.

But, Hornblum said, "in the Philly bars, he met members of the K&A Gang, and he admired their moxie and bravado, and they told him he could make just as much money without waving a gun in somebody's face."

Newspaper stories from the 1960s suggest that he was a very busy criminal.

Mr. Kripplebauer first shows up in Inquirer reports in January 1962, convicted in the September 1961 theft of 207 suits from a store of the old Robert Hall chain on Route 13 in Bristol Township.

An Oct. 30, 1965, story, about the $81,000 burglary a day before, reported that "burglars who wheeled a 1,750-pound safe from a Food Fair store kept the heat off until the last possible moment by leaving a wood facsimile in its place."

The real safe was found at 12th Street and Glenwood Avenue, where it had been opened with a blowtorch.

A May 1967 story reported that Mr. Kripplebauer had been among several arrested in a North Philadelphia raid, in connection with $200,000 in forged money orders.

The documents were traced to the burglary of a Bryant, Ala., post office.

In the raid, police also found a Philadelphia Social Register, stolen in a $10,000 April 1967 burglary of the home of Charles Biddle in Bensalem.

By May 1967, the story reported, Mr. Kripplebauer had already "served terms in Florida state prison, Bucks County Prison and Delaware County Prison."

In October 1967, Mr. Kripplebauer was among 11 accused of two thefts in the summer of 1966 - more than 1,000 wigs valued at $67,000 and $3,700 in cash taken from a wig producer at 7244 Castor Ave., and a truckload of air conditioners valued at $26,000 hijacked from a truck terminal at Fifth Street and Columbia Avenue.

Though the May 1967 story had stated that he was out on bail, the October 1967 story said that by that time his address was Holmesburg Prison.

No services for Mr. Kripplebauer were planned.