‘Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus and Mayhem in the USA’ Review: A Dashing Thief’s Darker Side

Up until his death in 2020, Jack “Murf the Surf” Murphy remained most famous for the 1964 burglary of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which netted its perpetrators a bagful of precious gems, including the 563-carat Star of India sapphire. It was the kind of story people like to tell. And retell. “I’d kept reading story after story about Murf where there’d be 15 paragraphs about this heist,” says journalist Nate Scott. “And in the 16th paragraph it would be like ‘Oh, and then he was convicted for murder.’”