Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.
Two years into the crime wave, investigators were no closer to identifying the burglars, who were more prolific than ever. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1982, they hit five houses in Bedford alone. In Greenwich, they were returning to rob homes they’d previously struck. Police decided to cast a wider net via teletype, a messaging system used by law enforcement around the country, in the hope that someone, somewhere, knew something useful. According to Hirsch, the teletype spelled out the thieves’ methods and asked any department experiencing similar crimes in its jurisdiction to contact the Greenwich police.
The next morning, Hirsch got a call from a cop in Massachusetts who wanted to know: Had he ever heard of a book called the Social Register?
America’s aristocracy traces its lineage to a time between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century, in the Gilded Age. Think Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Robber barons built obscene fortunes, monopolies lined the pockets of corrupt politicians, and unchecked capitalism opened a permanent chasm between the very rich and everyone else. The upper crust loved to throw opulent balls and banquets, which allowed hosts to show off their money, power, and influence, and prominent socialites kept so-called visiting lists of well-connected friends, acquaintances, and business contacts.
Louis Keller was not part of the new aristocracy, but he recognized a business opportunity in these quasi-private lists. He collected them, consolidated them, and produced a master copy of high society, selling it only to those who’d made the cut. First published in 1886, the Social Register was a thin, elegantly bound book with pumpkin-colored lettering on a black background. When later editions featured a blue cover, it became known as the Blue Book.
The first edition drew exclusively from the social lists of people with homes in Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite vacation destination of the elite. In time there were Blue Books for almost every major U.S. city. A group called the Social Register Association became the gatekeeper of the Blue Book, and it created strict rules for new entries. A person could be listed because of marriage to someone already included in the book, if they were elected president of the United States, or if they were nominated by an existing member. For many years, the Social Register was classist as well as anti-Semitic and racist; excluded Jewish society members in Chicago created their own version of the Blue Book in 1918, and the Social Register did not include a Black member for nearly a century after its creation.