Part 49

Most burglaries of any importance, especially those in which much plate is stolen, are what is termed "put up;" that is, the thieves are in correspondence with servants in the house, or with those that have been discarded. Many robberies that appear to have been accomplished in a most wonderful manner from without, are committed from within. In "put up" robberies, however, the thieves seldom allow the confederate in the house to know when the robbery is to come off, for fear of what is termed a "double plant;" that is, lest the person who originally "put up" the robbery should, from the stings of conscience, or for other reasons, have officers in waiting to apprehend them. It is quite sufficient for adroit burglars to know where the valuables are kept, and the general arrangements of the house. We are indebted to the Yankees for an extremely clever method of gaining entrance to hotel bed-chambers, even when the inmate has fastened the door. The end of the key which projects through the lock is seized by a pair of steel pliers, and the door is unlocked whilst the traveller sleeps in fancied security. Several robberies of this kind have lately taken place. The most ingenious pilfering of the "put up" kind we ever heard of occurred many years ago in a large town in Hampshire. A gang of first-rate cracksmen, having heard that a certain banker in a country town was in the habit of keeping large sums of money in the strong box of the banking-house in which he himself dwelt, determined to carry it off. For this purpose the most astute and respectable-looking middle-aged man of the gang was despatched to the town, to reconnoitre the premises and get an insight into the character of their victim. The banker, he ascertained, belonged to the sect of Primitive Methodists, and held what is termed "love-feasts." The cracksman accordingly got himself up as a preacher, studied the peculiar method of holding forth in favour with the sect, wore a white neckerchief, assumed the nasal whine, and laid in a powerful stock of scripture phrases. Thus armed, he took occasion to hold forth, and that so "movingly," that the rumour of his "discourses" soon came to the ears of the banker, and he was admitted as a guest. His foot once inside the doors, he rapidly "improved the occasion" in his own peculiar manner. The intimacy grew, and he was speedily on such terms of friendship with every one in the house, that he came and went without notice. He acquainted himself with the position of the strong box, and took impressions in wax of the wards of the locks. These he sent up to his pals in town, and in due course was supplied with false keys. With these he opened the strong box, made exact notes of the value and nature of its contents, and replaced everything as he found it. A plan of the street, the house, and of the particular chamber in which the treasure was kept, was then prepared and forwarded to the confederates in London. He persuaded his kind friend the banker to hold a love-feast on the evening fixed for the final stroke. A few minutes before the time appointed for the robbery, he proposed that the whole assembly should join with him in raising their voices to the glory of the Lord. The cracksman laboured hard and long to keep up the hymn, and noise enough was made to cover the designs of less adroit confederates than his own. The pseudo-preacher, to disarm suspicion, remained with his friend for a fortnight after the theft, and on his departure all the women of the "persuasion" wept that so good a man should go away from among them!

In a large number of cases the servants are only the unconscious instrument in the hands of the housebreaker. We will venture to say that more house robberies are committed through the vanity of servant girls than from any other cause. A smart young fellow, having heard that plunder is to be obtained in a certain house, manages to pick up an acquaintance with one of the female domestics, and makes violent love to her. We all know how communicative young women are to their sweethearts, and the consequence is, that in a short time he gets from her every particular that he requires,--the habits of the family, the times of their going out, the position of the plate-chest, and the fastenings of the doors. Where only a servant of all-work is kept, the process is more simple. The lover calls in the absence of the family at church, proposes a walk, and takes charge of the street-door key, which, unseen to the girl, is passed to a confederate; and whilst the polite lover and his lass are enjoying the cool of the evening the house is being ransacked. An investigation took place at the Lambeth Police Court a few months ago, where the poor girl who had been made the tool of the housebreaker attempted to commit suicide in order to prevent the consequences of her folly. Her account of the manner in which the "plant" was made upon her, affords a good example of the style of "putting up" a house robbery:--

"The young man with whom she had casually become acquainted called after the family had gone out, and she asked him into the back parlour. He then asked her to dress and go out with him, and he remained in the back parlour while she dressed. While in the back parlour he asked her if she could get a glass of wine, and she told him that she could not, as the wine was locked up. He said it did not matter, as they should have one when they went out, and that he expected to meet his sister at the Elephant and Castle. They then left the house and went for a walk, and on reaching the Elephant and Castle remained there for some time, waiting for the young man's sister, but did not see her. They next proceeded to a public-house, where they had a glass of brandy-and-water, and the young man accompanied her to the end of the street, where they parted, with the intention that they should meet at one o'clock on the following day and spend the afternoon together. On going to unlock the door, she found it ajar, and on going in, found that the house had been robbed. On discovering this, she did not know what to do, but thought she would make up a story about thieves having got into the house, and took up the knife and chopped her hand; but after this, not knowing how to face her master or mistress after being so wicked, she took up the knife again, intending to kill herself, and inflicted the wound on her throat."

This confession was enough for the officers, and her "young man," with his confederates, were caught and convicted. The frequency of these robberies should put housekeepers on their guard as to what followers are allowed, lest the "young man" should turn out to be a regular cracksman in disguise. We bid the housekeeper also beware of another danger that sometimes threatens him when he has an empty house for a neighbour. Thieves always, if possible, make use of it as a basis of operations against the others. They creep towards the dusk of evening, when the inmates are generally down stairs, along the parapet, and enter successively the bedrooms of the adjoining tenements. As many as half a dozen houses have thus been robbed on the same occasion. Police-constables always keep a careful watch upon these untenanted houses, by placing private marks on some part of the premises; and if any of these signs are disturbed, they suspect that something is wrong, and make a further examination. In the City, where an immense amount of valuable property is stored in warehouses, the private marks are much more used than in other portions of the metropolis, and are continually changed, lest they should become known to thieves and be turned to their advantage.

Professional beggars are almost without exception thieves; but as they are generally recruited from the lowest portion of the population, they never attain any of the higher ranks, but confine themselves to petty acts of filching, or to cunning methods of circumventing the honest. The half-naked wretch that appears to be addressing the basement floor in piteous terms, has a fine eye for the spoons he may see cleaning below; and the shipwrecked sailor just cast ashore from St. Giles's would be an awkward person to meet with in a dark suburban lane. Professional beggars are migratory in their habits. They travel from town to town, not in the filthy rags we are accustomed to see them in, but in good clothing; the rags are carried by their women, and are only donned when they are nearing the place in which they intend to beg.

There is an audacious class of thieves, termed "dragsmen," who plunder vehicles. At the West End they chiefly operate upon cabs going to or coming from the railway stations. As this kind of thieving is carried on under the very eyes of the foot-passengers, it is rarely attempted except in the dusk of the evening. The dragsman manages to hang on behind, as though he were merely taking a surreptitious ride, but in reality to cut leather thongs and undo fastenings, and be able at any convenient moment to slip off a box or parcel unobserved. The carelessness of the public is the best confederate of this sort of thief. In the case of Lady Ellesmere's jewels, the box was put not _inside_, but _outside_, the cab in which the valet rode, and not in the middle of other boxes, but the _hindermost_ of all--just the place in which the dragsman would have planted it. It is now known that the robbery was effected between Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square, as a man was seen with the package standing at the corner of Mount Street, Davies Street, bargaining with a cabman to take him to the City. The man and his booty were driven to a public-house, but the box must have been shifted immediately, for in two hours from the time it was lost it was found rifled of its contents in a waste piece of ground in Shoreditch. It might perhaps for a moment be suspected that this was a "put up" robbery, but we are precluded from adopting this view of the case, as it is, we believe, suspected that the man sold the jewels, which were worth perhaps 25,000_l._, for a very trifling sum. He must have been entirely ignorant of their value, and having by a chance stroke obtained a magnificent booty, threw it away for an old song. Not many weeks after this extraordinary robbery, a plate-chest of her Majesty was stolen from a van between Buckingham Palace and the Great Western Railway. There were persons walking alongside the vehicle, and it seems marvellous how it could be possible to remove unseen a heavy chest under such conditions; but every facility was given in this case, as in the former, for the plunderers to do their work unmolested. In the first place the box was put in such a position that its bottom came flush with the ledge of the van. Next, the journey from Buckingham Palace to Paddington was, in the driver's idea, too far to go without baiting on the way; therefore bait he did at a little public-house, and every person in charge of the property went inside to drink. According to their own account, they did not stop more than a minute; this minute was enough: like Laertes, the thief might have said, "'Twill serve." In this instance also the box was found empty in a field at Shoreditch, and it is believed that a ticket-of-leave man had a hand in both robberies.

The habits of thieves have been somewhat modified since the institution of the new police, and the adoption of the principle of prevention instead of detection, in dealing with the criminal population. In the time of the old Bow-street Runners the different classes of thieves had their houses of call, in which they regularly assembled. The arrangement was winked at by the magistrates, and approved by the officers, as useful to them in looking after offenders that were wanted. John Townsend, when speaking of the supposed advantage of these flash houses, said, "I know five-and-twenty, or six-and-twenty years ago, there were four houses where we could pop in, and I have taken three or four, or five or six of them at a time, and three or four of them have been convicted, and yet the public-house was tolerably well conducted too." Perhaps officers who lived upon the capture of thieves had good reason for maintaining these flash houses, in which most robberies were concocted; the case is far different now that the police are paid by day rather than by piece-work, by weekly salary rather than by blood-money, and all known flash houses have long been discontinued. Some fifteen years since a few remained in the Borough, but Superintendent Haynes broke them up, and rooted them out. Thieves cannot meet now in respectable houses, for if they did, the constables would become aware of the fact, and the landlord would speedily lose his license. The passing of the Common Lodging-house Act has also assisted in dispersing the desperate gangs, one of which, known under the name of "The Forty Thieves," infested the town a few years since. It may be asked, what sort of mutual fellowship exists among these outcasts who live below the surface of "society"? Of the seven or eight thousand thieves in the metropolis, very few are acquainted with each other; they are, in fact, divided into as many sections as are to be found among honest men. Beyond their own peculiar set they do not associate with their kind. The swell-mobsman is as distinct a being from the cracksman as a Bond-street dandy from a South-Sea islander; they do not even talk the same slang, and could no more practise each other's art, than a shoemaker could make a table. These natural divisions of the underground world of rogues immensely facilitate the operations of the police. The manner in which they do their work is also in some cases a pretty good guide to the detectives. Skill and individuality is evinced in unlawful as well as in lawful pursuits--in the manner in which a door is forced, as much as in the style a picture is painted; and a clever officer, after carefully examining a door or a window, will sometimes say, "This looks like 'Whiteheaded Bob's work,'" or "'Billy-go-Fast,' must have had a hand in this job."

The leading swell-mobsmen are the only class of thieves who "touch," if we may term it, the ordinary society of better men. The practitioner in this line must dress and be as much like a gentleman as possible, in order to pursue his avocation without suspicion. Accordingly, he lives with a woman, who passes for his wife, in genteel lodgings, and generally in the drawing-room floor. As his earnings are often very large, he has everything about him of the most expensive kind; his style of living is luxurious, and he drinks nothing less than hock and champagne. He sometimes keeps a banking account, and one man named Brown, lately apprehended, had a balance at his banker's of 800_l._! As the members of this fraternity work wholly in the daytime, going out in the morning and returning in the evening, the landlady believes that they are engaged in mercantile pursuits, and have business in the City; and, as it is part of their game to pay their way liberally, she esteems them to be model lodgers!

The domestic habits of thieves are all pretty much alike; fluctuating between the prison and the hulks, they exhibit the usual characteristics of men engaged in dangerous enterprises. They mainly pass their time, when not at "work," in gambling, smoking, and drinking, and in listening to the adventures of their companions. It must be remembered, however, that the professed thief, even if he drinks, is never _drunk_; he is employed in desperate undertakings which require him to have his wits about him quite as much, if not more than the honest man. When a pickpocket is flush of money, he spends it in the most lavish manner,--takes a tour with his female companion to the Isle of Wight, or to any other place he has a wish to see, and puts up at the best hotels. In some of these trips he thinks nothing of spending 30_l._ in a fortnight, and when the money is gone he comes back again "to work." Thieves are generally faithful to each other; indeed the community of danger in which they live develops this virtue to an unusual extent. If a "pal" is apprehended, they cheerfully put down their guinea apiece to provide him with counsel for his trial; and if he should be imprisoned, they make a collection for him when he comes out. A curious circumstance is the rapidity with which news of any of the body having been arrested travels among his companions. We are assured that no sooner is a young thief captured and taken to the station-house, although he may have been plundering far away from his home, than some associate brings him his dinner or tea, as a matter of course.

The best class of swell-mobsmen sometimes act upon the joint-stock principle "with limited liabilities." When a good thing is in prospect--a gold-dust robbery or a bank robbery--it is not unusual for several of them to "post" as much as 50_l._ apiece in order to provide the sinews of war to carry on the plan in a business-like manner. If in the end the job succeeds, the money advanced is carefully paid back to the persons advancing it--several of whom have lived for years on plunder thus obtained, without the police being able to detect them. Often the receivers make these adventures in crime, and plot the robbery of a jeweller's shop with as much coolness and shrewdness as though it were an ordinary mercantile speculation, and the produce is disposed of in the same business-like manner. Watches are what is termed "re-christened," that is, the maker's names and numbers are taken out and fresh ones put in; they are then exported in large quantities to America. All articles of plate are immediately thrown into the crucible and melted down, so as to place them beyond the hope of identification. In many cases, when the receiver cannot thoroughly depend upon the thief, it is, we believe, customary to employ intermediate receivers so as to render it impossible to trace the property to its ultimate destination. It must not be supposed that the passion for gain is always the sole incentive to robbery. "Oh, how I do love thieving! If I had thousands, I'd still be thief;" such were the words uttered by a youth in Coldbath-fields Prison, and overheard by the governor.[49]

If the machinery for preventing and detecting crime has so vastly improved within this present century, the same may be said for the method of dispensing justice. Up to as late as 1792, the magistrates of Bow-street--the first "police-office," as it was then termed--were paid in that most obnoxious of all modes, by fees, which were often obtained in a manner so disgraceful that the magistrates got the name of "trading justices" and "basket justices." Our old friend John Townsend, whom we must summon once more to our aid, gives an insight into their proceedings, and he knew them well. He said, "The plan used to be to issue warrants, and to take up all the poor devils in the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 2_s._ 4_d._, which the magistrate had. _In taking up a hundred girls_, that would make, at 2_s._ 4_d._, 11_l._ 13_s._ 4_d._ They sent none to jail, _for the bailing them was so much better_!" The old Bow-street worthy then draws a picture of the magistrate settling the amount of these ill-gotten fees with his clerk on the Monday morning. The "basket justices" were so called, because they allowed themselves to be bought over by presents of baskets of game. These enormities were so glaring, that, according to Townsend, "they at last led to the Police Bill, and it was a great blessing to the public to do away with these men, for they were nothing better than the encouragers of blacklegs, vice, and plunderers. There is no doubt about it." In 1792 seven other "offices" were established, namely, Queen-square, Great Marlborough-street, Hatton Garden, Worship-street, Lambeth, Shadwell, and Union-street, each office having three magistrates, who did the duties alternately. These, by the addition of the suburban courts, have since been augmented to eleven. They form the judgment-seats to which all offenders in this great capital of 2,500,000 inhabitants are brought, either to be punished summarily, or to be remanded to the sessions to take their trial.

The police-courts may be likened to so many shafts sunk in the smooth surface of society, through which the seething mass of debauchery, violence, and crime, are daily bubbling up before the public eye. A spectator cannot sit beside the magistrate on the bench for a couple of hours without feeling that there are currents of wickedness flowing among the population as fixedly as the trade-winds in the tropics. A panorama of sin passes before his eye which he shudders to think is only like a single thread drawn from the fabric of vice which underlies the whole system of elegant, punctilious, and accomplished metropolitan life. On every case that comes before him the magistrate unassisted has to decide rapidly and justly, unless he desires to call down upon his head the thunders of an ever-watchful press. In addition to his judicial duties, he has to answer numberless questions, and to give advice upon law points to distressed persons: and all this amid a pestilential atmosphere which is calculated to depress both body and mind. Nevertheless, the work is done admirably, and justice, as speedy as that dispensed by cadis in Eastern tales, and much more impartial, is dealt to the throng brought before him.

From an analysis of the Criminal Returns of the Metropolitan Police, it is apparent that crimes have their peculiar seasons. Thus attempts to commit suicide generally occur in the months of June, July, and August, and rarely in November, according to the commonly accepted notion; comfort, it is evident, is considered even in the accomplishment of this desperate act. Common assaults and drunkenness also multiply wonderfully in the dog-days. In the winter, on the contrary, burglaries increase, and, for some unknown reason, the uttering of counterfeit coin.

The character of the cases brought before the police-courts varies, in some degree, according to the neighbourhood and other causes. Bow-street still maintains the pre-eminence over the other courts which it exercised in the old days, when the horse-patrol and the detective police, known as the Bow-street runners, were in existence; and this it does in consequence of its special jurisdiction over persons who are amenable to foreign law. The cases of this class--arson, murder, or bankruptcy--are heard in private, generally by the chief magistrate, and the depositions are forwarded direct to the Foreign Office. Ticket-of-leave men who have committed fresh offences, are here deprived of their tickets and apprehended by a warrant from the Home-Office. All Inland Revenue and Post-Office cases, such as stealing from letters, are adjudicated upon exclusively at Bow-street, which is, in fact, _the_ Government office.