The fish course had just been served during a high society soiree at a Buffalo mansion when seven uninvited guests stepped through French doors and announced themselves with the bandit’s how-do-you-do. “Stick ’em up.” The men wore handkerchief masks and two carried guns. They invited the 18 dinner party attendees to hand over their gold, diamonds and pearls. The hoity-toities, lubricated with orange blossom cocktails, tee-heed at the gag. The hosts were such pranksters! The event was at the 52-acre estate of Buffalo doyens Edith and W. Hamilton Gardner. The fete was a celebration of the impending wedding of two idle class fledglings, Courtland Van Clief, of the Newport Van Cliefs, and Eleanor Cameron, of the Waco, Tex., Camerons. They were to marry on Nov. 20, 1929, six days after the party — and four weeks after the stock market crash. If the assembled were concerned about finances, they didn’t admit it to one another. Their wearable assets certainly were intact. As a bandit began collecting the valuables, one of the ladies playfully tugged at his mask, still believing the robbery a ruse. The jollity ended when the intruder shoved the woman to the floor, then clocked her husband with his gun when he objected. The gang got away with jewelry, cash and an armful of fur coats valued at $400,000 in all. The crown jewel of the heist was a quadruple string of perfectly matched pearls, valued at a cool quarter million dollars, snatched from the neck of Mildred Van Clief, mother of the groom. Buffalo police boss James Higgins blamed the holdup on a sophisticated national gang. Similar crimes had been reported in St. Louis and Champaign, Ill., and Higgins deduced that “aristocrats of the criminal world” were identifying targets by scanning the society columns for tips on gilded shindigs. He said more unrefined cons would have blasted their way out of the mansion. M.M. Wilner, a New York broadsheet’s man in Buffalo, had it all figured out: “They appear to be exponents of a social idea which makes luxurious self-indulgence, without toil or responsibility, the one motive in life.” While readers and cops scratched their heads, private eyes rolled up their sleeves. Insurance companies, on the hook for the stolen swag, flooded Buffalo with shrewd investigators, pockets bulging with green incentive. Buffalo magnate and chief promoter of the city’s new Peace Bridge to Canada, offered an attention-grabbing reward. As an uncle to Cameron, the prospective bride, Baird took the crime personally. He offered $5,000 for suspects captured alive — and $10,000 for those delivered morgue-ready. Three days after the robbery, informants whispered a name to Fred J. Healey, chief sleuth of Buffalo’s Burns Detective Agency branch. He learned the suspect had made a back-and-forth trip to New York City to unload jewelry on the black market. At dawn on Nov. 29, the morning after Thanksgiving, a Burns man in a bellhop getup rapped on a door at the Markeen Hotel in Buffalo, 7 miles from the crime scene. The drowsy fellow who answered found himself fitted with handcuffs. He proved to be George Clinton (Red) Duke, 24, a Toronto-based malefactor who knew his way around Buffalo’s alleys. Duke had been charged in a $23,000 Toronto bank robbery the year before. He fled to Buffalo, where he served six months in jail on a gun charge. Deported to Canada, he was acquitted in the bank robbery. A few months later, he was back in Buffalo assembling a crew for the high society heist. They were local crime commoners, not aristocratic crooks, including Ed Rogacki, William Cyner and brothers Eddie and Stanley (Kid Millionaire) Przybyl. The party attendees, including four of the seven robbers, reassembled in an Erie County courtroom in January 1930 for a first-degree robbery trial. The victims couldn’t finger most of the robbers, thanks to their masks. And wives, girlfriends and mothers of the defendants offered alibis, though an appeals court later labeled them “lamentably weak.” The four were convicted, and sentences meted out by Judge Frank Bret Thorn delivered the message that criminals ought not bedevil Buffalo’s well-heeled. Duke, Cyner, Rogacki and Eddie Przybyl all got life in prison, with slight variations — 20 to life for Przybyl, 30 to life for mastermind Duke. Duke spent just a dozen years locked up before he was paroled and deported to Canada in 1942. Back home in the Toronto area, Duke remade himself, founding a lawnmower manufacturing firm in 1948 that grew into one of Canada’s largest purveyors of specialty equipment, from street sweepers to airport runway snow-blowers. He became a millionaire with a sprawling estate overlooking Lake Ontario. In 1970, he was a pivotal figure in a Canadian inquiry into mob influence with the provincial police. Duke was revealed to be a close pal of another jailbird, Johnny (Pops) Papalia, a Mafia boss in Hamilton, Ontario, who served time in New York in the 1960s for the French Connection heroin case. The inquiry blew over thanks to a disbelieving judge, and Duke lived as a free man until his death at age 88 in 1994. While his obit mentioned the Buffalo job, his hometown paper called him “a colorful self-made businessman.” “Self-made” was a stretch. The Buffalo loot was never recovered.