"The bundle was found to contain a coat trimmed with Persian lamb's wool and two shot guns."

Howard Anderson, a.k.a. Andrew Andrews, was a fin-de-siècle British-born burglar run amok in New York City, a second-story man with sticky fingers and a ready alibi. He resolutely lived the grifter’s life, as the following story from the January 10, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle illustrates. An excerpt:

“Howard Anderson, alias Andrew Andrews, 44 years old, said by the police to be an English crook, was arraigned before Magistrate Meade in the Harlem Police Court to-day as a suspicious person. At 1 o’clock this morning Policeman Powers of the East One Hundred and Twenty-sixth street and Third Avenue with a bundle. Powers asked the man what he had. Anderson said that he was a purchaser of pawnbroker’s tickets and had just takent something out of a pawn.

Powers took the man to the station and the bundle was found to contain a coat trimmed with Persian lamb’s wool and two shot guns. The Sergeant happened to have at the station a police alarm relative to the burglary of the summer home of Charles W. Dickel, who keeps a riding school in Fifty-sixth street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and who has his summer home at Scarsdale, which is just beyonmd White Plains.

On the night of January 2 last Dickel was awakened by hearing some one move about the house. He went through the house and scared the burglar off, but he had gotten away with the coat and two shotguns.

So soon as the articles were identified Chief of Police Carpenter of White Plains was notified and he came to this city. He was in court when Anderson was arraigned.

Detective Frank Prince, who was in court identified Anderson as Howard Andrews, a well known English crook and worker of suburban houses and second story thief . Detective Prince said he had served six and a half years of a ten years’ sentence for stealing $10,000 worth of silverware from a millionaire’s residence in Hmepstead, L.I.

Magistrate Meade dismissed the case against Anderson and turned him over to Chief Carpenter of White Plains, warning Caroenter to look out and not let him go.”