Corey Kilgannon

One milestone not on that list: the biggest jewel heist in New York history, when the Star of India, a 563-carat sapphire the size of a golf ball, was snatched from its display case, along with the rare Eagle Diamond, the DeLong Star Ruby and some 20 other precious gems from a collection donated to the museum by J.P. Morgan.

For several months beginning in October 1964, the city was transfixed by the brazen robbery that the tabloids immediately labeled the heist of the century.

The culprits were not ordinary thieves. They were sharply dressed surfer dudes on a spree that took them from their base in Miami Beach up to their lair in New York, a penthouse suite in a Manhattan hotel. They were caught within two days of the crime, but the jewels remained missing. After a wild escapade in Miami — an unorthodox excursion involving a rented convertible — many of the gems were recovered, including the Star of India, which was promptly put on solo display in the museum’s main floor rotunda — this time, with its own security guard and safe.

When the museum reopens the gem wing next year after a long renovation, the Star of India will be there.

Roberto Lebron, a current spokesman for the museum, would not comment on security aspects before or after the heist, other than to say, “The museum certainly learned a thing or two from that episode, which occurred more than 50 years ago.”

The call came in around 10 a.m. to the 20th Precinct on the Upper West Side. There was a break-in at the museum.

Detective Jack McNally and his colleagues headed right over, arriving to find the Hall of Gems a total mess, with numerous display cases shattered, the cabinets broken and their contents pillaged.

“We were thinking it was some tiny thing,” recalled McNally, who is now 85 and retired and living in a beach community on Long Island. “The whole place was a wreck.”

Within an hour, the press was swarming the museum.

If the Star of India was the story’s headline, museum security was the punch line. The alarms on the hall’s display cases had long stopped working, including the trip alarm on the Star of India. Because of budget cuts, the museum’s security staff was reduced. Of the eight guards on duty that night to cover the 18-building museum complex, it was the responsibility of one aging guard to sporadically shine a flashlight into the Hall of Gems during his rounds.

The museum put the stolen gems’ value at $410,000 — about $3.3 million today. But as historical artifacts, they were irreplaceable and considered priceless.

“We were all dumbfounded that there was no alarm system. That was extremely unusual,” McNally said. “There was no security at all.”

“We asked the curators for a description of the stuff that was taken, and they really didn’t have solid inventory,” he added.

The three thieves — Jack Murphy, Allan Kuhn and Roger Clark — were tan, fit beach boys in their 20s, full of swagger and Rat Pack chic. They had driven up from Miami several weeks earlier in a white Cadillac and had settled into a penthouse suite at the Cambridge House Hotel on West 86th Street, where they threw constant parties.

All the while, they were pulling off smaller robberies around town of hotel rooms and wealthy bar patrons, but it was hard to ignore the museum’s world-class jewel exhibit a few blocks away.

While Kuhn was eager for the museum heist, Murphy recalled being initially leery of the caper. “We were turning heads, and too many people in town knew who we were,” said Murphy, who is 82 and living in Florida.

In scouting the hall, they realized that, for a skilled thief with the chutzpah to break in, the jewels were practically begging to be stolen, recalled Murphy in a recent interview.

“Allan said he could hear the jewels talking,” he recalled. “He said, ‘The jewels are saying, ‘Take us to Miami.’ So I said, ‘Well, let’s take them to Miami.’”

Despite the profile of the crime they were about to commit, Murphy still boasts that they were undaunted by the challenge. “It really was no big deal — a job like this we could pull off anytime,” Murphy recalled. “This was the same as saying, ‘Let’s go bowling.’”

The heist became the basis for the 1975 film “Murph the Surf.” In it, Murphy (played by Don Stroud) and Kuhn (Robert Conrad) dress in sharp suits and squire stylish women into the Hall of Gems to case the joint. They prepare for the heist by flipping open a window latch right under the nose of a wheezy old guard in a cardigan sweater.

In reality, the three thieves cased the museum beforehand and noticed the fourth-floor windows were left open.

In the end, it was their high living that ultimately brought them down. After the heist, a staffer at their hotel tipped off the police about the three high-rolling Miami dudes who suddenly disappeared as soon as the heist made headlines.

Murphy and Kuhn were quickly located and arrested in Miami, but not before they had unloaded the jewels to be fenced.

Yet the case stayed in the headlines for months and included a wild expedition to recover the stones led by a relentless Manhattan prosecutor named Maurice Nadjari.

Nadjari was a by-the-books prosecutor and a fierce cross-examiner. His regular courtroom was known among opposing defense attorneys as “the Snake Pit.”

He saw the jewel theft as an affront to the city itself, recalled his son, Douglas Nadjari, who cares for his father now that his health has declined.

“My father felt that those jewels belonged to the people of New York City,” Nadjari said.

And so, while the press was still swarming the story, Nadjari proposed an unusual covert mission. He would slip Kuhn out of a New York jail and escort him to Miami, along with McNally and two other detectives, to track down the fenced jewels.

It was a risky ploy, one that Nadjari’s boss, longtime Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, agreed to with trepidation.

“Hogan told me, ‘If you don’t get the jewels, don’t come back,’” recalled Nadjari, now 95.

Murphy grew up in Southern California during the formative years of longboard surfing, which he helped pioneer on the East Coast in the 1950s by opening a shop in Florida.

He dropped out of college as a freshman in the mid-1950s, he said, and hitched to Miami, where he taught tennis and swimming at swanky hotels, also performing as a trick diver in hotel aquatic shows.

But he also fell in with the local hustlers and thieves who robbed mansions along the Intracoastal Waterway. They relied on Murphy’s special talent: He would swim the jewels to a getaway car on the mainland.

A year before the Star of India heist, he was still a world-class surfer, taking first place in a competition in Virginia Beach that was a precursor to the East Coast Surfing Championships. But by the time he arrived in New York that autumn, he was also a hardened jewel thief, fresh off a streak of heists of mansions and hotels in Miami.

The decision to try the museum job was hardly the result of an elaborate scheme. Instead, it was almost a whim after a drinking session at a hotel bar — “I was probably ready for anything,” Murphy said.

Murphy was still dressed sharp — in a dark green velour jacket, turtleneck, corduroys and tennis shoes — when they pulled up in the Cadillac to the southwest corner of the museum, at a truck entrance off Columbus Avenue near 79th Street.

“You got to have a little flair,” he said recently. “If you get arrested and end up on the news, you don’t want to look like a schlub.”

Clark remained behind with a walkie-talkie while Murphy and Kuhn headed in with an airline shoulder bag and a coil of rope. Murphy also carried a pistol, just in case.

To access the Hall of Gems, they entered the courtyard behind the building and scaled a tall iron fence like two acrobats. They climbed the fire escape to the fifth floor and inched along a narrow ledge. Murphy said he almost fell after he startled a covey of pigeons that burst into flight.

The pair broke into the darkened office of Dr. Colin Turnbull, a noted British anthropologist who kept a harpsichord in the office to play at lunchtime.

“They were very, very athletic, these guys, and they were not rookies at this,” McNally recalled. “They had done plenty of this already down in Florida.”

From there, they lowered themselves to an open window in the fourth floor Hall of Gems.

“I wasn’t surprised at all that they were left open,” Murphy recalled. “I don’t think the museum ever expected anyone to get up there.”

The most precious gems were in larger cases in the center of the room, but the alarms had been nonfunctional for years.

“They probably thought, ‘Why do we need alarms? These jewels have been laying here for 70 years and no one’s ever tried to steal them,’” Murphy said.

The thieves could see that the trip alarm on the Star of India’s display stand had batteries that were corroded and probably long dead. Still, Murphy expected that when the Star of India’s alarm went off, they’d just run for it. But nothing happened. A seemingly impossible caper was turning out to be a breeze.

One hiccup was the strong double-paned glass in the display cases. The thieves’ initial attempt to smash it with a fat rubber mallet was loud and unsuccessful.

So they used glass cutters to score a circle, which they covered with duct tape to prevent shattering and muffle the sound. Timing their work with the guard’s predictable rounds, they worked carefully over several hours hitting one case after another, synchronizing the smashing with airliners flying overhead and sweeping the floor after each one.

Around midnight, after gathering up roughly two dozen jewels — prize emeralds, diamonds, aquamarines and several diamond bracelets, brooches and rings — they went back out the window and made their way down.

Murphy said that as he slipped through the small park around the museum, he saw a crowd of police officers and froze. He quickly realized that this was not a response to the robbery but rather a routine shift change from the local precinct.

Still, here he was, carrying a bag of stolen jewels, a coil of rope on his shoulder, when two officers headed toward him. He quickly began chatting with a man walking his dog.

“I just said, ‘Good evening, officers’ and they gave me a nod and kept walking,” recalled Murphy, who then hailed a cab on Columbus Avenue — not to the penthouse suite but to the Metropole Cafe in midtown, to check out Gene Krupa’s jazz band.

“I figured, if I wind up going to jail for this,” he said, “I might as well party a little.” Minutes after pulling off an epic heist, Murph the Surf was standing with the jewels and a cocktail at the Metropole, digging Krupa’s star trumpeter, Shorty Rogers.

The next day, Murphy and Kuhn flew to Miami with the gems packed into a ladies’ overnight bag that was carried unwittingly by a 19-year-old woman named Janet Florkiewicz, whom Kuhn had met at the hotel and quickly seduced.

But their liberty was brief. After the tip from the hotel staffer, a warrant was obtained and McNally entered the thieves’ penthouse suite and found plenty of incriminating evidence, including burglary tools and sneakers with glass stuck in the soles.

Clark, the driver, remained in New York and was arrested at the hotel. Detectives quickly located the other two thieves with the help of Florkiewicz’s jilted boyfriend and her roommate in New York, who was speaking by phone with her in Miami.

With the jewels missing, the thieves denying the crime, and no witnesses, Nadjari knew he had a weak case. Bail was set low, and Murphy and Kuhn went back to gallivanting in Miami. They would fly up to New York for court dates and never missed an opportunity to grandstand for the press and insult the authorities as bumbling squares.

After one court date, Murphy lit a cigar and told reporters the plan was to grab the jewels, fence them in Florida, and then hit the North Shore of Hawaii for the winter surf season. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening. “This inconvenience has fouled the whole thing up,” he said.

Nadjari was irritated that the thieves were being portrayed in the press as celebrities and folk heroes. He began searching for other possible crimes the men may have committed, which would necessitate a higher bail and perhaps hold them in jail.

Sure enough, he was able to have the men arrested again, on charges of mugging a woman in a Miami hotel for her jewelry. The victim, improbably, was actress Eva Gabor, who would later decline to press charges, citing her schedule shooting the television show “Green Acres” in Los Angeles.

But for the moment, those charges — which Murphy still denies — allowed the authorities to keep the thieves locked up in the jail in downtown Manhattan known as the Tombs.

“They thought they were tough,” Nadjari’s son said, “but they weren’t tough enough to handle staying in the Tombs.”

Now facing long prison sentences, Kuhn approached Nadjari offering to get the jewels back in return for leniency.

Surprisingly, Nadjari agreed. Kuhn was spirited out of the Tombs and flown to Miami, the detective seated by his side.

During the trip, Kuhn repeatedly offered to bribe Nadjari to drop the charges or simply let him escape.

“Kuhn would say, ‘All you have to do is turn your head away and I’ll make you a rich man,’” Nadjari recalled. Kuhn would then get angry and call the cautious prosecutor stupid for opting for a mild-mannered life as a civil servant over accepting a bribe.

“I said, ‘I may be stupid, but you’re going to jail and I’m going home to my wife and children,’” recalled Nadjari. He did, however, indulge one of Kuhn’s requests: While they were in Miami, the detective sprung for the rental of a flashy red Cadillac convertible.

Over several days, as Kuhn negotiated for the return of the jewels, the group hopped from one motel to the next to evade a press scrum tailing them, along with federal agents vying to take over the case.

“We were actually fugitives,” recalled McNally, who was also on the trip. “We had 100 reporters chasing us, as well as the FBI.”

At one point the group hopped out a rear motel window that had a long drop down to the beach.

When Kuhn balked at this, Nadjari told him, “If you don’t jump, I’m throwing you out.”

Kuhn was impressed with the detective’s skill in slipping in and out of motel windows.

“He told me, ‘I wish we’d met earlier — you would have made a great jewel thief,’” recalled Nadjari, who at one point put on a mask and snorkel to search for the jewels, which were said to be stashed underwater in Biscayne Bay near Kuhn’s boat.

In the end, fewer than half of the two dozen stolen gems were recovered. But they did retrieve the Star of India.

Kuhn arranged with the fence to pick up the jewels in a locker in a Miami bus terminal. They were left in two soaking pouches drenched in salt water.

Nadjari immediately stuffed them in his pockets, drenching his pants. Once on the plane back to New York, he transferred them to airsickness bags.

“I wasn’t going to let them out of my sight,” he said.

For his work on the case, McNally made second-grade detective.

In exchange for cooperating with the recovery, Murphy and his partners received light sentences, serving roughly two years each on Rikers Island.

After that, Clark and Kuhn went straight, fading into conventional lives. Both have died in recent years.

But Murphy’s criminal career continued. In 1969, he was convicted in a murder case in Florida for his involvement in the deaths of two women who had fallen in with him and several other thieves.

In prison, Murphy developed a popular Christian ministry for inmates and was granted parole in the mid-1980s to administer prison outreach.

Murphy now lives in a small town near Tampa. He continues his prison evangelism and still invokes the museum heist as the impetus for the criminal odyssey that ultimately led him to Jesus and redemption. He even zips over to Florida’s east coast to catch the occasional wave.

Nadjari went on to become a special prosecutor weeding out corruption and ran unsuccessfully for Queens district attorney. To this day, he keeps a photo of the Star of India in his living room, a reminder of the most meaningful case of his career.

“He felt like those guys stuck a finger in the city’s eye,” his son said. “And he really wanted to get the jewels back for the city of New York.”

This article originally appeared in

A Jewel Heist at the Museum: How the Beach Boy Burglars Stole the Star of India

NEW YORK — For its 150th anniversary, the American Museum of Natural History is celebrating its many historic moments, from its 1869 founding, to the 1902 discovery of the first T. rex skeleton, to the creation of the Teddy Roosevelt statue erected out front in 1940.

So when he died at 82 on Sept. 8, his daughter Monique Heller sought to provide it by writing a paid obituary in the local paper describing her father’s inimitably irreverent and preposterous personality.

Her humorous tribute was published — online and in print — last week in The Hartford Courant and immediately caught digital fire.

Readers loved the infectious account of this small town Everyman who embodied the tight-knit nature of this hamlet near the Connecticut River, between New Haven and New London.

The obituary listed achievements such as being a “consummate napper” and a regular browser of collectibles at the local dump.

“There wasn’t a road, restaurant or friend’s house in Essex that he didn’t fall asleep on or in,” Heller wrote, adding that her father “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants that they have no idea what to do with.”

Heller wrote that her father had warned her against a fancy send-off when he died, preferring that his family “dig a hole in the backyard and just roll him in.”

“He said, ‘I don’t want any of that funeral home stuff,’” she said, employing an off-color word for stuff.

They disappointed him with a festive memorial Thursday evening at the town firehouse, where everyone told Joe Heller stories. The obituary implored attendees to wear “the most inappropriate T-shirt that you are comfortable being seen in public with, as Joe often did.”

On Friday morning, Heller’s body, in a coffin draped with a U.S. flag, was placed on the 1941 Mack fire truck he helped restore and taken to Centerbrook Cemetery to be buried next to his wife, Irene, who died in 2015, and whom he embarrassed daily “with his mouth and choice of clothing,” according to the obituary.

Family members followed the fire truck in Heller’s immaculately restored 1932 Plymouth roadster with, as per his request, a set of plastic testicles dangling from the rear bumper.

Heller’s obit was shared widely on social media, first locally among his many friends in town and then around the world, leading to articles in countless news outlets.

Monique Heller said Friday that, “My friend told me that my obit started a new category called Joe-bituaries. She said, ‘You just put the ‘fun’ in funeral.’”

While many paid obituaries are often brief, grievous catalogs of survivors and funeral information, Heller’s submission was a snappy, unvarnished take on her father as one of the great pranksters in Middlesex County, Connecticut.

“God thankfully broke the mold after Joe was born,” she wrote.

Monique Heller, the youngest of Heller’s three daughters, recalled her father’s doctor approaching them toward the end of Heller’s life and informing them that he was “a very sick man.”

Their humorous response: “You have no idea.”

The obit chronicled Heller’s wry outlook and his constant pranks, from passing laxative-filled cake off to friends who pilfered his lunch to bestowing his dogs with off-color names (the better to make loved ones blush when calling the animal).

“I wrote the obit for his local cronies and friends and never thought it would go any further, but I guess it just resounds with people,” Heller said, adding that comments and condolences have come in “from all 50 states” as well as several countries, including from as far as Australia and New Zealand.

“I’m thankful to the universe that this message of love went viral,” wrote “Dawn from Canada.”

“Sounds like he was an amazing bloke,” wrote John Williams from London.

“Good ole Joe could have been my relative — lol,” wrote Bruce Freshwater from Pittsburgh.

As a young man, Heller worked as a library assistant at the Yale Law School library before joining the Navy. With no money for college, he managed to secure a job as a self-taught chemist at a local makeup company, where he developed its early cosmetic lines.

When the company moved to Greenwich, Heller decided the new town would be too rich for his blood, and he opted to give up the job to stay in Centerbrook, among the working-class friends he treasured, Heller said.

“He was proud of being a blue-collar guy and not part of the old or new money of Essex,” she said of the municipality that includes Centerbrook and has affluent sections and a wealthy summer contingent with yachts and second homes.

The obituary Heller submitted noted that her father considered many of these people “wannabe blue bloods, snoots and summer barnacles that roamed about town.”

Joe Heller was also proud to be a local civil servant, as a long-standing member of the Essex Volunteer Fire Department and a founder of the local ambulance corps.

He also worked variously as town constable, snowplow operator, crossing guard and dogcatcher, she said.

“He got these jobs because he was the go-to guy in town,” Heller said. “When the town needed something done, they’d just call Joe.”

As dogcatcher, he customized the wording on his truck to read “Dawg Kecher,” and he staunchly refused to follow local guidelines requiring the euthanizing of some dogs.

Heller said her father raised his daughters on a steady diet of television characters like Archie Bunker and Benny Hill.

When young men sought to pick his daughters up for a date, Heller would first run their license plates and check their vehicles for safety, including an inspection of how worn their tires were.

When suitors entered the home, he made sure to be cleaning one of his guns, and that his collection of shotguns and harpoons were clearly on display, Heller said.

On Friday morning, a Navy honor guard — long known as the Antique Veterans Organization because of its aging membership — delivered a rifle salute, played taps and performed a ceremonial flag-folding ceremony.

The honor guard’s commander, Joseph Barry, admitted that Joe Heller would have “dropped a few F-bombs” in declaring the whole thing superfluous.

After the burial, Monique Heller held the American flag presented in her father’s honor and said perhaps the obit had struck a chord with regular people.

“People like my dad are the backbone of this country,” she said, “and I think the world wants to hear their stories.’’

The Best Obituary Ever, and the Wacky Funeral That Followed

CENTERBROOK, Conn. — Joe Heller always wanted to have the last laugh.

These days, the famous statue in New York Harbor mostly welcomes a torrent of tourists.

A proliferation of tour groups has set off pedestrian gridlock inside the statue and its sister site, the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, which together receive a combined 4.5 million visitors a year.

It has gotten so bad that the National Park Service, which runs both sites, is taking a dramatic step. Starting in mid-May, the agency is banning organized tours to the statue’s popular outdoor observation deck and to the Ellis Island museum.

A surge in commercial tours has resulted in the need to alleviate “the mounting overcrowding and conflicts with National Park Service programming and operations in the interior spaces on both islands,” said Jerry Willis, a spokesman for the agency. “It has severely degraded the visitor experience in the park.”

Officials with Statue Cruises, the ferry line contracted by the Park Service for service to the two islands, said roughly 250,000 passengers took commercial tours in 2018 — six times as many compared with a decade ago.

The move to limit tourists comes as New York City, from the subway to the streets and parks, seems enveloped in crowds. The city’s population has grown in the past decade to 8.4 million people, and tourism has reached record levels.

Sidewalks in parts of Manhattan are so jammed that harried New Yorkers are forced to walk in the street. Times Square has become an obstacle course where pedestrians have to evade fake superheroes seeking tips and sales agents for tour buses and theater shows.

Most visitors go to the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island on their own. But the two islands are among the most desirable destinations for tour groups in New York City, with perhaps 1,000 people per day traveling to the two sites as part of tours.

While that is only a small fraction of the 24,000 visitors the islands get on a busy day, the tour groups cause a disproportionate amount of problems, Park Service officials said.

Many tours crowd doorways and exhibits and obstruct traffic flow and create safety concerns, Willis said.

Then there is the issue of tour guides behaving badly — from loud talking and altercations with other tour leaders, to hogging prime exhibit spaces and giving incorrect information, he said.

But the exclusion of commercial tours has angered guides, who say the Park Service is responding too harshly to these problems.

Michael Morgenthal, a tour guide and a member of Guides Association of New York City, an industry group, said the guides had asked park officials to adopt a reasonable code of conduct, among other possible solutions, instead of issuing a ban.

“Instead, they just dropped the hammer on us,” he said. “We think it’s an overreaction, and it’s going to hurt the visitor experience.”

Poor behavior by tour guides is rare, he said. In fact, most guides add to smooth traffic flow by shepherding their groups efficiently through the sites and by watching for problems from their group and other visitors, he added.

Outdoor commercial tours of the islands will still be permitted. Commercial tours will also be allowed inside of the statue’s lobby and mezzanine, which are below the observation deck, though Park Service staffers will monitor them closely, Willis said.

The new restrictions have cast a pall among tour guides at an otherwise high point for the Statue of Liberty, where a new museum is scheduled to open May 16, the same day the new restrictions take effect.

The museum will feature an immersive theater and the statue’s original torch.

Morgenthal said roughly 250 guides regularly lead tours on the islands — about several dozen per day — and that the new restrictions would decimate business for them.

Far fewer tourists are likely to hire a guide merely for an outdoor tour, he said. Many will instead opt for Park Service tours, which he said would be overwhelmed by the new demand. Also, he wondered how the Park Service would enforce the ban.

Willis said tour guides or companies that do not abide by the rules could be excluded from the islands entirely by being prevented from purchasing ferry tickets.

A more extreme enforcement step could entail limiting the number of tours allowed on the islands and requiring guides to have permits that would carry fees and revenue sharing requirements with the Park Service.

As Morgenthal spoke inside the Ellis Island museum’s Great Hall, a Park Service guide brought a group of about 50 visitors around an old desk once used for interviewing immigrants, blocking other visitors from accessing it.

“We understand it’s their home turf, but that’s certainly something we tell our guides not to do,” he said.

Along with tourism in New York City — which has risen steadily for the past decade to a record high of 65.2 million visitors in 2018 — the number of tour guides has also grown in recent years. There are about 3,350 sightseeing guides licensed by the city.

Willis emphasized that most tour guides were professional and courteous. Still, he said, some problematic ones conducted tours loudly and sometimes created friction and altercations with other guides vying for space.

This included big-footing other visitors away to give their group exclusive access to key attractions, such as the old desks in the Great Hall.

Commercial tour guides will be permitted to conduct “a brief site orientation” for their group in a first-floor area of the Ellis Island museum, from November to March and during periods of inclement weather.

The statue’s popularity has had other ramifications at the ferry dock in lower Manhattan, said Rafael Abreu, a spokesman for Statue Cruises.

Tourists heading to the ferry ticket offices in Battery Park are regularly swarmed by ticket sellers for other companies who offer more expensive tickets for trips that typically involve taking a bus to another ferry that circles Liberty Island, but does not actually dock there or on Ellis Island.

Tom Bernardin — a 70-year-old guide known as “Mr. Ellis Island” for his tenure giving tours at the island beginning 41 years ago as a park ranger — called the restrictions extreme.

“This is basically ending my career, if they enforce this,” Bernardin said.

Lourdes Reyes, who runs Spanish-speaking tours on the islands, also criticized the ban.

“This is the greatest tourist site in the greatest city in the world,” she said, “and instead of establishing a protocol to fix the problem, they just suddenly ban all tour guides, who really enhance the visitor experience.”

On a recent weekday, Leanne Littlestone, a tour guide and native New Yorker who livens up her tours by acting out historical roles in a street-savvy shtick, briefed her group of 15 tourists on the Statue of Liberty’s history and then led them inside and up to the sixth-floor observation deck. But she avoided making a speaking stop there so to not clog traffic.

“We guide people through quicker than they could on their own, so it’s only going to get more chaotic without us inside,” she said. “We make things more efficient and orderly, not less.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/nyregion/statue-of-liberty-tour-guides.html" id="b6b63f92-c8b4-3b0c-a4f2-53d1dc184bb6">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The familiar words etched on the Statue of Liberty read, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Tour Groups to Be Limited on Ellis Island and at Statue of Liberty

Down a long hallway lined with specimen cabinets, he hung a left at a hanging skeleton and entered the office of a fellow researcher, Ian Tattersall, for their regular Friday night anthropological happy hour.

The two men — respected research scientists who work on museum collections and exhibitions — began sipping beer and talking shop, which in this case involved evolutionary theory.

Over the past dozen years, they have jointly written 10 books and scores of scientific articles and papers on human biology and language — with their latest book, “The Accidental Homo Sapiens,” coming out this month.

The ideas for most of their articles and books were developed during these post-work drinking-and-thinking sessions in Tattersall’s fourth-floor office in one of the museum’s turret towers, directly below the former office of the researcher Margaret Mead, who died in 1978.

“Nobody notices us here,” Tattersall said of the remote location, which has the feel of a speakeasy for scientists.

In recent years, the men have also turned their scientific analysis to the drinks themselves. They have written two books on drinking — “A Natural History of Wine” in 2015 and “A Natural History of Beer” in February — and are working on a book about spirits.

Their liquor stash is kept in an inconspicuous mini-fridge near a laboratory sink. For their first sampling of the evening, they had pulled out an ale called Eye of Newt, made by Catskill Brewery in upstate New York. It was tart, they noted, with a fruity nose.

“It has strange overtones to it,” said Tattersall, as if analyzing a newly unearthed primate skull.

Tattersall, 73, is a biological anthropologist specializing in human evolution; DeSalle, 65, is a genomicist — which, he said, “basically means that Ian knows the bones and I know the DNA.”

The two researchers met a dozen years ago when they were curating the museum’s redesigned Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins and found that sharing a bottle of wine helped the flow of their discussions.

“We found quickly that we could write together, but, more importantly, we could drink together,” DeSalle said. “It loosened us up and got us away from being the science nerds we were.”

They began meeting regularly after work for discussions over wine or beer and sketching out broad ideas and frameworks for pieces to be written later in more detail, separately and soberly.

“We don’t get drunk, but this lets our inhibitions drop a little bit, so you’re a bit more imaginative and can think about things more creatively,” DeSalle added.

Tattersall’s circular office has shelves filled with books on anthropology and alcohol, and walls lined with images of early man and species of lemur, which Tattersall has studied during many trips to Madagascar.

Their drinking pursuits also have led the men to visit wine and beer regions around the world.

When DeSalle began recalling a particularly raucous Oktoberfest in Munich, Tattersall suddenly raised a finger and said, “That reminds me of the time I was on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago” and proceeded to launch into one of his anthropology stories.

“Sitting in the office with him is like watching Monty Python,” DeSalle said.

A typical Friday-night gathering involves a few beers or a bottle of wine, he said.

The sessions are an open secret among museum research staffers, some of whom will occasionally drop by. On this particular evening, Will Harcourt-Smith, a research associate in the museum’s paleontology division, wandered in and grabbed a glass from a lab sink where beer and wineglasses were arrayed like so many beakers and test tubes.

“I’ve always loved the intellectual fermentation in this room,” said Harcourt-Smith, joining the tasting and discussion near a long table where issues of “Lemur News’’ shared space with skeletal and skull casts from an extinct species related to humans, Homo naledi.

Between philosophical musings and scientific debates — how different beers are related, how different primates are related — the researchers cracked another beer, sampled it, discussed it and then jotted down notes.

The conversation alternated between beer evaluation and a science journal article on the role of language in human evolution.

While Tattersall pondered the emergence of language in humans, DeSalle posed a pressing question: Should they next taste an ale? Or maybe a lager?

They went with a Queensbridge IPA from the Big Alice Brewing Co. in Queens and commended its hoppy-fruity qualities.

A tasting of Big Alice’s Lemongrass Kölsch sent DeSalle off on a tangent on the finer points of the type of fermentation used for making a Kölsch, a type of beer developed in Cologne, Germany.

Ever the molecularist, DeSalle explained that some of the tangiest beers they had tasted had been fermented with a type of yeast known as brettanomyces, which was not to be confused with the saccharomyces yeast strain more commonly used in making beer.

With the tasting of each beer, DeSalle wrote notes in a small field book, logging observations of the beer’s character and taste, something they have done for more than 200 different beers over the years.

They have also created diagrams of how wine varietals are related and have charted the evolution of specific beers.

“This is data that can be digested in a scientific manner,” Tattersall said. “We subject them to phylogenetic analysis, meaning that the way we’d look at relationships among animals, we try to sort out relationships among beers, categorizing them and treating them as organisms.”

“We’re not claiming it’s great science,” DeSalle said of their drinking sessions. “But it’s a cool thing to do.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/nyregion/museum-natural-history-scientists.html" id="e20ea331-1e59-3b72-a70a-72a24fba1e49">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The scene could have been straight out of one of the “Night at the Museum” movies: The public filtered out of the American Museum of Natural History at closing time, while Rob DeSalle headed deep into the museum’s anthropology wing.

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But when news of a bank heist made national headlines, vexing police officials, the department asked Goodwin to pose as a maid and infiltrate a seedy boardinghouse. Her mission: Find enough evidence to arrest the suspect, a gangster named Eddie (The Boob) Kinsman who frequented the quarters to see his sweetheart, Swede Annie.

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