Swan's Way

In late March, there was a home invasion - make that mansion invasion - in Beverly, an oceanfront town North of Boston. Beverly is a very nice community, but the real ritzy-ritzes live in the Pride's Crossing area. 

Well, pride cometh before the fall for one of those ritzy-ritzes, as his home was invaded to the tune of $8M worth of stuff that the invader got (temporarily) away with.

I've been to Beverly plenty of times - my sister Trish lives in the next town - and have seen many really nice houes there. But this $18M pile, 28,000 square foot leaves me cold. Sure, the owners - Thomas Swan III and his husband - have four kids, but I can't imagine there's any way to make this pile seem homey. To me, it looks institutional. A mental institution for the uber-wealthy. Headquarters of some Catholic religious order that inherited the place in the 1950s when the OG family wanted to get rid of it, and there were still plenty of nuns, priests, and monks around. 

It may not be to my liking, but it was built back in the Gilden Age, when money was no object, and off-the-boat Irish servants were a dime a dozen. 

Known as “Rock Edge,” Swan’s Georgian revival-style mansion is one of many stately homes lining Paine Avenue, a historic neighborhood in a wealthy area known as Prides Crossing. The house was commissioned in the early 1900s by a woman named Marian Sargent, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson whose husband made a fortune in the textile industry. (Source: Boston Globe)

Thomas Swan has plenty of dough. He runs the family business, which makes and distributes heating and plumbing equipment, and owns a lot of real estate. And he's ritzy-ritz enough to own a home worth about $20M, and at least $8M of whatever - cash, coins, jewelry, watches - that the thieves got away with. That and a Porsche worth $300K that was pretty quickly found abandoned (and dowsed in bleach, I guess to remove DNA evidence) in a cemetery in Lynn, an less grand working class city a few towns down the road from Beverly. 

The heist - which is how all the Boston news outlets have described it, often with the modifier brazen - was a quasi-inside job, the perp who's been caught (supposedly he had a co-invader) is the ex-BF of a housekeeper who'd worked the day shift the day before the breakin. She is now an ex-housekeeper. (She has not been charged. Yet, anyway.)

When the thieves arrived in the dead of night, a back door had been left open, and the Swan family was not at home. (I suspect they have a few other places where they can hang.) But a woman in her 60's - variously said to be a friend of the family, housekeeper, nanny, and dogsitter - was pretty roughed up. Pistol-whipped, and left tied up in the garage with a bag over her head. She's okay (physically) but must have been terrified.

Reports say that the suspect they've apprehended was identified in part because of Ring camera footage. It's not clear whether it was Ring footage from "Rock Edge" or from other homes in the 'hood. I'm guessing it must have been from "Rock Edge," as the mansion is pretty well set back from the world at large. 

It does seem curious that the place didn't have more a sophisticated surveillance system than a Ring doorbell camera, which seems like the sort of security device when you want to keep an eye on your home, but that home isn't worth nearly $20M, you mostly want to see if someone's scooting off with your Amazon deliveries, and you don't own $8M+ worth of property in it.

It just seems completely crazy that this place didn't have inside and outside security to the hilt. Just insane.

If I were a rich man woman -  ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum (not my favorite musical, but I couldn't resist) - I'm pretty sure I'd have plenty o' surveillance gear and a safe or two. Guess it just wasn't Swan's way. 

It's more likely that I would have been there as the housekeeper, nanny, or dogsitter, and I sure as hell wouldn't have been comfortable spending the night alone in a 28,000 square foot house. And I definitely would have checked to make sure all the doors were locked before I put on my nightgown and got into bed with a good book.

Not that this excuses the vicious, dumbo thieves, but there sure seems to be an awful lot of idiocy going on with this story. 

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Image Source: The Boston Globe