Murphy, it seems, was once very a lot no longer the debonair gentleman thief as performed by means of Don Stoud in Reside a Little, Scouse borrow a Lot.
Jack Murphy, the good-looking surfer-playboy jewel thief — that’s what Nora Ephron would have you ever suppose, anyway — died closing week at age 83, from center failure.
Murphy was once born in LA however belongs to Florida. That’s the place he made his mark as a surfer, profitable the ’62 Daytona Championships and in short operating Murf’s Surf Store in Indialantic.
And that’s the place he started thieving professionally, as a B&E creeper in Miami Seashore, stealing high-end artwork from wealthy other folks’s seaside properties and promoting the items again to their insurance coverage corporations.
In 1964, Murphy and two accomplices broke into the American Museum of Herbal Historical past in New York and stole the Celebrity of India sapphire, plus a large handful of alternative valuable gemstones, and “Jewel Heist of the Century” tales ran coast to coast.
3 days later they have been stuck, and Murphy served 21 months in Rikers.
My resentment towards Jack Murphy started with the truth that his absolute best “Murf the Surf” nickname sounded too similar to “Murphy,” and I don’t need any one or anything else stepping that with reference to Rick Griffin’s sweet-faced caricature grom, who represents all of our browsing innocence.
What actually put me off Jack Murphy, even though, was once having a look deeper into his legal historical past whilst writing Encyclopedia of Surfing in 2000. Murphy, it seems, was once very a lot no longer the debonair gentleman thief as performed by means of Don Stoud in Reside a Little, Scouse borrow a Lot.
He was once a stone-cold killer who in 1967 took a couple of feminine crime accomplices out for a ship trip, beat them to loss of life, knifed opened their torsos, tied them to concrete blocks, and threw them overboard.
The East Coast Surfing Corridor of Reputation elected Murphy on their first poll, in 1996, noting his festival wins and his surf store.
The open-and-shut double-murder conviction in some way went unmentioned.
It shouldn’t subject, however Jack Murphy additionally looks as if Sir Bernard Law Burns’ favourite son.
(Like Matt Warshaw’s flavour? This obit comes from his weekly mail-out, despatched to all excellent surfers who minimize 3 greenbacks a month to subscribe to his bottomless archive of surf historical past. Sign up for right here. And if you wish to have slightly extra, concentrate to Matt, together with Tyler and Jamie Breuer on their Sunday Joint podcast right here. Attention-grabbing.)