He called himself "Murph the Surf,” a tanned, roguish, party-loving beach boy from Miami, and he transfixed the nation in 1964 by pulling off the biggest jewel heist in New York City history — the celebrated snatching of the Star of India, a sapphire larger than a golf ball, and a haul of other gems from the American Museum of Natural History
It was not that 27-year-old Jack Roland Murphy and his accomplices, Allan Kuhn and Roger Clark, were superthieves, like the ones Maximilian Schell and Melina Mercouri portrayed in the then-current Jules Dassin film "Topkapi,” about a plot to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul — a movie the museum thieves had recently seen.
Rather, although they had robbed waterfront mansions in Miami and escaped by speedboat, they left a trail of amateurish clues to the museum theft and were caught by New York detectives two days after the crime, although the loot — worth more than 3 million in today’s dollars — was still missing: stashed by then in waterproof pouches in Miami’s Biscayne Bay.