ATLANTA — Even before someone carefully removed a windowpane from a secluded Buckhead home here one rainy June night and slipped away with a 1734 silver mug that had belonged to George II, it was clear to detectives that a meticulous thief with a singular obsession was stealing the great silver pieces of the Old South.
Courtesy of Lonnie Mason
Blane Nordahl after his arrest in Hilliard, Fla., Monday morning. He was charged with burglaries in Atlanta.
Mark Makela for The New York Times
Lonnie Mason, a retired New Jersey detective, suspected that a series of thefts in the South might be the work of an old nemesis.
For months, exquisite sterling silver collections had been disappearing, taken in the dead of night from historic homes in Charleston, S.C., and the wealthy enclaves of Belle Meade, Tenn. Nothing else was touched.
The police in different states did not at first connect the thefts, some of which initially went unnoticed even by the owners. But as the burglaries piled up, a retired New Jersey detective watching reports on the Internet recognized a familiar pattern.
He called an Atlanta detective and said, "Let me explain how your burglaries occurred."
Early Monday, outside an apartment building in the tiny northern Florida town of Hilliard, the police arrested Blane Nordahl, 51, the man they believe is connected not only to the recent Southern silver burglaries but also to 30 years' worth of antique silver thefts in several states.
He was charged with burglaries in Atlanta and will most likely face charges in other states.
"I'm just relieved it's over," said Lonnie Mason, the retired New Jersey detective who made a career out of chasing — and twice capturing — Mr. Nordahl, whose skill as a thief is so notorious it has earned him his own Wikipedia page and the nickname "burglar to the stars."
In one of the biggest recent hauls in which Mr. Nordahl is a suspect, a thief disabled the alarm at the Cooleemee Plantation House in North Carolina and walked away with silver spoons forged by Paul Revere and a coffee and tea set that a slave had once buried for safekeeping when Union soldiers moved through during the Civil War.
Detectives who chased Mr. Nordahl for decades say he is responsible for crimes that have had him in and out of prison since the 1980s. He might ultimately be responsible, they say, for more than 500 burglaries that netted him several million dollars' worth of some of the best domestic silver pieces in the country.
They include 120 pairs of salt and pepper shakers taken from Ivana Trump's Greenwich, Conn., home in 1996 and the priceless collection of period silver in the Edgewater mansion in the Hudson Valley where Richard Hampton Jenrette, a Wall Street financier and restorer of historic homes, was robbed in 2002.
Mr. Nordahl's first burglary arrest was in New Jersey in 1983. He has had dozens since.
"He doesn't abuse drugs and he doesn't abuse alcohol," said Mr. Mason, in an interview Monday from his home near the Jersey Shore. "This is his high. This and trying to beat the police."
One of a string of girlfriends whom the police persuaded to help them pursue Mr. Nordahl told Mr. Mason that "he would be 80 years old and still running down the street with his cane and a piece of silver in his hand. He is just fascinated with this stuff."
Mr. Nordahl is barely 5 foot 4 with a muscular build and the ability to squeeze into homes through small spaces. Over the years he developed a routine that he rarely varied, the police say, tracking his targets through architectural magazines, in libraries and by scouting rich neighborhoods.
He learned to gently pry the putty from windows and disable alarms, the police say, often stacking molding from a door neatly nearby or replacing the glass so victims would sometimes not know they were burglarized until a holiday rolled around and it was time to pull out the good silver.
Mr. Nordahl, whose father, David, is a noted painter, has a deep knowledge of the artistic and cultural value of silver, the police said. In previous cases, he was specific about his haul, leaving behind other valuables and knives with hollow silver handles or trays made of silver plate.
Those signatures are what made Mr. Mason think that the nation's most notorious silver thief had gotten back into the game after being released on parole in 2010.
Mr. Nordahl, who had been in prison six years, had headed to Florida, where he had a sister. So Mr. Mason would occasionally search for reports of silver thefts in Florida.
When he found nothing, he expanded his search to other states in the South and in February found a rash of silver thefts in the Atlanta area and other states. He set to work.
By the end of March, Mr. Mason had become the adviser to a team of 24 members of law enforcement agencies in six Southern states who worked on the case through the summer.
Alan Blinder contributed reporting.
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