‘Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus and Mayhem in the USA’ Review: A Dashing Thief’s Darker Side
By John Anderson
February 2, 2023
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.’”
The prominence of the burglary on Murphy’s résumé wasn’t entirely an accident, not according to “Murf the Surf,” the four-part documentary series directed by R.J. Cutler (“A Perfect Candidate”) and available on MGM+ (formerly EPIX). Stories about the redemption of criminals are usually more interesting when the subjects are still being criminal, although this one makes a good argument that the misbehavior never really stopped—not even after Murphy says he found Jesus, used him to earn early release from Florida State Prison (even though his parole wasn’t scheduled until 2044) and then launched his own post-correctional ministry.
According to Mr. Scott, one of the more insightful sources in the series, the tale of Jack Murphy—onetime California beach boy, Florida surfing champion, close-to-amateurish cat burglar and playboy—was the great American crime story. “If you just went from heist to salvation,” Mr. Scott adds, “it was dashing and handsome and stylish and cool.” You can’t really blame the MGM+ marketing department for exploiting the same storyline.
But the series, produced by Mr. Cutler’s This Machine and the Ron Howard-Brian Grazer entity Imagine Documentaries, is very clear about the very things Murphy tried to obfuscate. The title character is the only “head” who appears and talks during Mr. Cutler’s series; every other source remains a voice imposed over an exhaustive catalog of archival footage that explores not just Murphy and his accomplices, girlfriends and law-enforcement nemeses but also the kind of ’60s cool that’s become so popular for filmmakers to revisit (possibly because they don’t remember it in real time).
It is evident, long before anyone addresses the matter directly, that Murphy took extravagant pains over the years not to answer direct questions about the deaths of Annelle Mohn and Terry Frank, whose bodies were discovered in Broward County’s Whiskey Creek Canal in 1967. The two women had been bludgeoned, stabbed, shot and weighted with concrete blocks to sink in the water. Murphy, whose lawyers had negotiated a relatively lenient deal for the Star of India burglary, now received a double life sentence plus 20 years for his role in the murders and the attempted robbery of a Miami socialite.
Mr. Cutler does not make his presence very obvious, but he does get terrific stuff out of his various interview subjects, who include Murphy’s wife, Kitten; the legendary Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan; and several of Murphy’s old cronies, including Allan Kuhn, who took part in the 1964 caper. Cops, perhaps justifiably, loathed the pair, who thumbed their noses at authority and reveled in their tabloid celebrity; one former Miami police lieutenant, Jim Kelly, recalls how he and fellow officers set fire to Kuhn’s new Cadillac, and when he asked them to call the fire department claimed their radios weren’t working.
Mr. Cutler makes the not-obvious point that the media sensation that erupted around the Star of India theft might have been a response to the Kennedy assassination: In the wake of such a horrendous event, a jewel heist was almost romantic. The suspicion from the beginning was that the break-in was the work of novices and if not for the almost total lack of security at the museum it never would have happened. One investigator recalls that the New York landmark didn’t even have an inventory of its jewels, much less a state-of-the-art alarm system. Murphy rode his bronzed bad-boy image till the wheels fell off, which they did just a few years later, though he always seemed to have good legal representation: When he was on trial for murder in 1969, he was committed to a mental institution—his lawyers and psychiatrists arguing that he had two-way conversations with God. It was the same argument that got him out in 1986.
