It’s been six years since the Belle Meade lady found the gypsy in her house, but she still remembers it vividly. She had just come from a tennis game and had unlocked her house when the landscaper drove up. Not bothering to lock the door, she walked out into the yard to talk about which bushes needed trimming. It was a nice spring day in Belle Meade, a good day for getting caught up on the yard work. She was outside for only a few minutes.
“Then I went back into the house. As I started down the hall—the carpet in our hall is quite light colored, and I could see a big, black shadow fall across the floor as I came to the guest room. And I wondered if that was a cloud passing by outside.
“I walked past the room, went into another room to hear my messages, when I heard someone run out. The door slammed.” She ran toward the sound and looked out into her backyard, just in time to see a figure (“I assumed it was a man”) running away. Wearing painter’s pants and a green shirt, the fleeing figure had “thick black hair, pulled back” and olive skin. “He went toward a little bridge back there and as I watched, [he] just melted away.”
She later discovered that some other things had melted away as well: a diamond Rolex watch, a diamond necklace, and two rings that had been in the family for years. Now they weren’t in the family any more.
The lady of the house had learned that gypsies are real, as real as the silver and jewelry in the homes of Belle Meade. It is those very real treasures that attract thieves, like cats to catnip, to Nashville’s most exclusive enclave; tales of itinerant con artists and burglars proliferate in the ’05 zip code.
The stories of gypsies in Belle Meade may be exaggerated, and the descriptions of the mysterious, dark-skinned thieves smack of stereotyping, the sort of unquestioning xenophobia that supposedly went out with Joe McCarthy. In Belle Meade, however, the stories persist, and there is no local chapter of the Gypsy Anti-Defamation League.
A few things are true:Gypsies don’t just exist in the imaginations of fiction writers. Well-organized traveling gypsy bands migrate through Middle Tennessee during the warm weather. Not all of them are thieves, but their arrival is regularly accompanied by a rash of home-repair scams, shoplifting excursions and, in prosperous neighborhoods, home robberies.
Gypsies in Belle Meade? A touch of paranoia is, perhaps, understandable.
“Their mode of operation, you might say, is that the woman in the team goes to the house—they are very brazen—and if the door is not locked, they’ll go right in,” says City of Belle Meade Mayor T. Scott Fillebrown. “Sometimes the [homeowner] is in the yard or the garden and this [gypsy] person will go right in and take jewelry, silver, whatever else they can carry. If they are caught, they’ll say something like, ‘I was looking for so-and-so’s house. Am I in the wrong house?’ or ‘I was looking for my dog.’ ”
Fillebrown admits that “it’s difficult to say someone is a gypsy—I don’t know how that is defined.” Still, he insists that the “mode of operations” of Belle Meade’s seasonal thieves is “consistent with what we understand are like those identified as gypsies.”
Even when people tell tales of the The Gypsy Scare, they admit that gypsies, for all their legendary mysteriousness, are not known for being violent or carrying weapons. Nevertheless, the words “brazen” and “pushy” come up a lot when robbery victims and law enforcement officials attempt to describe gypsy-style criminal behaviors and patterns. Echoes of age-old stereotyping abound. On the other hand, law enforcement officials insist that they are merely trying to do their jobs.
“Gypsies can be pushy. I have heard of them getting very physical with people and pushing their way into a house,” says Metro Police Sgt. Mark Wynn, who studied the habits of gypsy criminal groups years ago while he was working in Police Intelligence. “It’s a form of organized crime. It’s not the Mafia, but these people make a lot of money. To them, [crime is] a business.”
Although gypsy theft or fraud rings have been reported for years all over Middle Tennessee—from Columbia to Springfield—gypsy bands seem to have a special fondness for Belle Meade, where some theft-weary residents tell of multiple hits and others describe instances in which an entire neighborhood has been attacked in a single day. “I have heard, off and on for years, the gypsies are coming to Belle Meade!” says Belle Meade City Commissioner Chippy Pirtle, whose son once chased a gypsy woman out of their house with a golf club.
“I was working in the garden,” recalls Pirtle, a genteel grande dame and one of the earliest chairmen of the Swan Ball. “My son came to the door and said, ‘Mother, come here.’ A girl in a long white dress and dark hair was standing there. She had only gotten to the breakfast room when my son came in and caught her. He had a golf club and she asked him, ‘Are you going to hit me?’ and he said ‘No.’
“A big four-door car came blazing by and she jumps in it and was gone,” says Pirtle. A few days later, Pirtle identified the woman and her male partner after they had been arrested by Belle Meade police during an apparent burglary attempt at the Belle Meade home of the George Creaghs. The Creaghs’ grown daughter, Catherine Stewart, was in the house alone with her new baby and became frightened when she realized that a woman she didn’t know was trying to break into the house.
The intruder appeared to be the same woman who had repeatedly rung the doorbell the previous day. When Stewart had answered the door, the unknown woman had claimed to be a babysitter hired by the Creaghs to help care for their grandchild. Catherine Stewart called the police and watched as they arrested the woman in the driveway.
“She had black hair. I think she had a couple of gold teeth,” says Stewart, who might well be describing Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil. “She spoke in broken English with an Eastern European accent. She was wearing a nylon sweatsuit and sports shoes.” Both the intruder and her male companion gave the police Brooklyn, N.Y., home addresses and produced Polish drivers’ licenses for identification. They told police they had no Social Security numbers or phone numbers.
After making a combined $40,000 bond, the pair skipped town. They haven’t been seen since. That incident occurred almost two years ago.
Gypsies are a close-knit, communal people with enough common biological, cultural and linguistic heritage to qualify as an ethnic group. Their origins are uncertain, but, in the late 18th century, their original homeland was thought to be northwestern India. Theirs is a rich culture, but they have historically been ostracized by established society. Through centuries of migrations into Europe, the gypsies picked up vocabulary and physical characteristics from many countries, most notably from Greece and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. They were one of the races declared impure by Hitler’s National Socialist Party, and many gypsies perished in concentration camps along with Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and people from other “dangerous” groups. Today, it is estimated that the worldwide gypsy population may be as high as 6 million. But the American gypsy population is said to be no more than about 100,000.
When gypsies succeed as thieves, they often elude the law because of their nomadic lifestyle, their organization and their boldness. According to anthropologist Anne Sutherland, gypsies believe they have a God-given right to steal from the gaje. In The Hidden Americans, her study of California gypsies, Sutherland explains that gypsies have passed along a “Story of God” that justifies their larceny. It’s a story, she says, that every gypsy child, woman and man knows:
“Jesus was going to be crucified, and a gypsy blacksmith, who was a slave, was ordered by the Roman soldiers to make four nails, three to go into his hands and feet and one through his heart. The gypsy stalled and stalled, but the soldier whipped him, so he made the four nails. He asked God to help him and to help the gypsies. God cried and the gypsy cried. When he was to deliver the nails, he swallowed one and told the soldiers he had lost it. When God saw that he had swallowed the nail for Jesus’ heart, He said, ‘Gypsy, you are free to go and travel anywhere, and you can steal your food and take what you need to live.’ And that is why Gypsies travel and why they steal.”
Not all gypsies are thieves. There are wandering gypsy bands, both here and abroad, that engage in a variety of legal businesses, including crafts, odd jobs such as pot-mending, and, predictably, fortune-telling, which is a trade restricted exclusively to women.
What’s more, Belle Meade has been repeatedly been the target for systematic burglaries, most of which have little to do with dark-skinned people with Eastern European accents. Decades ago, in the era when the daily newspapers published full guest lists of impending social events, a number of Belle Meade homes were ransacked while the swells were out partying. To this day, while browsing at yard sales, flea markets and antique malls, Belle Meade matrons still stumble over pieces of the family silver, heirlooms that supposedly had been lost forever. Many of those robberies remain unsolved. Nobody, apparently, has ever considered blaming a band of roving gypsies.
Nevertheless, gypsies do have a reputation as troublemakers. “There are the European types who come out of Chicago, a group of Polish gypsies from Chicago who specialize in home burglaries,” says Lt. Larry Green of the Robertson County sheriff’s department, “and then there’s the ones from South Carolina. They dress like anybody else.”
According to Green, the gypsies who visit Middle Tennessee have “two or three different scams.” In one version of the scam, he says, “they go to a house in a big group and ask to use the phone. A diversion is created, maybe children are crying. During this, they steal.”
In another scam, Green says, gypsies go into stores in groups. While one part of the troupe creates a diversion, others shoplift or steal cash from the register. This kind of gypsy visitation, Green says, has been going on in Robertson County for a number of years. “They always drive new pickup trucks,” he says. “If we spot ’em, we stop ’em real quick and we let ’em know that, if they steal anything in this county, they’re going to jail.”
In an effort to protect Robertson County residents, Green says, he has researched gypsies and discovered a thing or two about their belief system. He says that gypsies believe the head is sacred and that the lower body is unclean, or marime, a gypsy word that indicates something so bad, Green says, “we don’t have a word for it in English.” That’s why, Green says without batting an eye, gypsy women can go bare-chested, as long as they wear long skirts to cover their legs.
Cultural clashes are inevitable. But, according to Green, his knowledge has proved helpful, even if his anti-gypsy tactics do sound a bit like gypsy-style hocus pocus.
Sometimes, Green says, a Robertson County law enforcement officer can intimidate a gypsy suspect by conspicuously scratching his crotch in front of the suspect and then placing his hand over the gypsy’s head. All the officer has to do, Green says, is place his hand on the roof of the car while the gypsy is still sitting inside.
“They become very agitated...but it makes them easier to control,” says Green. “If they steal anything, I tell ’em they’re going to jail—they really hate jail—and they’re going to have to sleep on the bottom bunk.” To the traditional gypsy mind-set, it would be marime to have to sleep with a polluting non-gypsy, a gaje, over his head.
According to a Metro burglary detective familiar with the gypsy scams, the robberies plague all of West Nashville. “It’s not only Belle Meade, but all up Highway 100 into Fairview and Williamson County,” he says. But the detective says he has heard that would-be victims can drive a gypsy thief away, perhaps permanently, by taking advantage of the gypsies’ peculiar body-related superstitions. “You isolate the man in the group, you take a broom and sweep some of the dirt from around his feet and pass that over the top of his head,” the detective says. “It shames and defiles him. He’ll pack up and go and take his group with him.” One potential victim, according to the detective, “swears it works. He’s done it before.”
But Wynn, the former police intelligence officer, cautions that, before the denizens of Belle Meade or others start using dirty brooms or trying the old crotch-scratching trick to scare away gypsies, they should realize that, “unless you understand every single piece of their belief system, you could get yourself in trouble. If these people are engaged in criminal activity, they need to be held accountable for their crimes.”
