This Day in History, 1952: A pickpocket tries to fleece Vancouver's crooked police chief

Dr. John Giovanni claimed to have picked the pockets, or removed the suspenders, from two of the "Big Three" allied leaders in the Second World War — American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, centre, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, right. Here they're in Tehran at an Allied conference in December 1943. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is at left. Vancouver Sun

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On June 25, 1952, the World’s Greatest Pickpocket tried to nick the suspenders off of Vancouver Police Chief Walter Mulligan.

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Mulligan had been forewarned that he was a target, and wore his “most ancient” pair. And they broke when Dr. John Giovanni tried to lift them off his trousers.

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It was a rare failure by Giovanni, who claimed he had fleeced the suspenders off of Winston Churchill. At various times he claimed to have also been a successful brain surgeon and a trapeze artist.

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It sounds like a bunch of hooey, but Giovanni was famous in his day, featured on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Benny Show, and You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx.

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He came to Vancouver to perform in Burnaby’s Diamond Jubilee Show, and stopped at The Vancouver Sun newsroom to make believers out of cynical journalists.

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“He snatched the braces from city editor Ron Rose’s balbriggans, thereby becoming one of the first men in living memory to get something for nothing from the city desk,” wrote reporter Paul St. Pierre. “He next cheerfully picked the pockets of three or four other staff members, pulled 50 cent pieces out of the air and a wedding ring from under a paste pot.”

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At the cop shop he slipped Assistant Chief Harry Whalen’s watch off his arm, and probably would have worked his magic with Mulligan’s suspenders had they not snapped.

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But then Mulligan knew how to slip out of sticky situations. A sensational 1955 police inquiry heard that he had been taking bribes from gamblers for years. He was fired, but never charged, and moved to California.

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Dr. John Giovanni with Vancouver Police Chief Walter Mulligan on June 25, 1952.

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Giovanni was an honest pickpocket who would have been a great vaudeville act.

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“He is a pudgy, grey haired, Italo American with a heavy accent, a broad smile, a fast tongue and no inhibitions,” wrote St. Pierre. “Giovanni started making his hands quicker than the eye as a youth in Italy. Since then he’s performed for King George VI, President Roosevelt and FBI chief Herbert Hoover.

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“He took Hoover’s wallet and lifted the four revolvers of all the president’s bodyguards. ‘Such fun,’ he said. ‘When I took Mr. Churchill’s braces he put his fists up to fight. Then he said, ‘You almost made me forget myself. Amazing.’ ”

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Giovanni said there was no magic to his pickpocketing skills.

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“There is no trickery in the sleight of hand, it is simply that my physical reactions are so much faster than the normal human being’s and I have trained them,” he told St. Pierre.

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While being interviewed, Giovanni removed a wallet and cigarettes from another Sun reporter without them realizing it. Watching him work, his manager said: “Gio doesn’t work with women, for obvious reasons.”

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In a 1957 court case in Los Angeles, his first wife Maria successfully sued for US$13,000 in unpaid alimony payments. Giovanni’s real name was revealed as Adolf Herczog, and his birthplace as Budapest. The couple were married in 1928 and separated in 1936 in London, England, where a court awarded his wife eight pounds a month in support for Maria and their daughter. Giovanni paid until 1945, when he got a divorce in Las Vegas and remarried. But the judge said he still had to pay his ex-wife.