The Criminal Alphabet (2 page)

This book isn't purely about language
and slang, it's also an overview of the demographic that uses slang in their daily
life – the history, events, the people and the lifestyle – so think of it not as a
dictionary but as a journey through a world I have known almost from birth.

I was born in the old Charing Cross
Hospital on the Strand on Christmas Eve 1960, which makes me a Londoner, but both of
my parents are from Ireland – my father from the rough and ready North of Dublin and
my mother from the more genteel Southside of the city – which, under Section 2 of
the Irish constitution, makes me Irish. So, right from the start, I was exposed to
the rich dialect of two capital cities. Until the age of nine I lived in North
London. We tended to move around a lot, as my parents could usually only afford to
rent rooms, so at various times we lived in Paddington, Camden Town, Finsbury Park
and Holloway. As a kid on the streets of North London in the early 1960s I heard the
slang and banter of street-market traders around Angel Market as well as the accents
and dialects of my schoolmates, who were a mix of Londoners, Irish, Scottish and
Jamaicans. The mix of Dublin and London slang I was exposed to as a child could
sometimes be confusing. For example, the Irish call a cupboard a ‘press', and they
call dishes and cups ‘delft' (only, with the Dublin accent, the ‘t' in ‘delft' is
silent). So when my mother told me to ‘wash the delft and put it in the press' I
knew what she was talking about, though my English pals wouldn't have a clue. In
Irish slang, a number of anything is a ‘rake' (‘a rake of delft to wash'). Also,
anything you can't remember the name of is a ‘yoke', as in ‘Where's that yoke that
fits on the end of the carpet sweeper?'. So, from a young age, I had to learn to
translate in my own head what was being said both inside and outside of the home.
Pretty typical for the child of immigrants in what was, to them, basically a foreign
country, but this may have been where my love for words and language was first
ignited. I
remember once I told the teacher that I was going home
for a ‘coddle' that evening and she tried to correct me – ‘No, Noel, it's pronounced
“cuddle”,' she said, emphasizing the ‘u'. I was actually talking about an Irish stew
made from sausage, bacon and potatoes. Dublin coddle was, in my young mind at least,
world famous.

Very early on I learned to adapt my
language to the situation. Those were the days when it wasn't uncommon to hear kids
in London exclaiming ‘Gor blimey!' or ‘Gertcha!' (today, the only time you hear
these expressions is in old black-and-white films or in Chas and Dave songs): we
really did talk like this. Of course, we didn't know that the phrase ‘Gor blimey!'
was a corruption of the ancient exclamation ‘God blind me!', an exhortation to God
to take away the power of sight when you are faced with something terrible or
horrifying. And ‘Gertcha!' was a shortened version of ‘Get the fuck away from me,
you!', usually growled and with the added emphasis of a raised hand. When we were
scrumping apples from local gardens, running round the stalls in Angel Market or
just generally acting like kids, there was always some old geezer who would raise a
hand and shout ‘Gertcha!' in our direction. And we copied what we heard.

When I was nine my family got their
first real home, a council flat in Balham, South London, and off we went to the
badlands of ‘sarf', as North Londoners would say. Living in South London meant
learning a whole new set of words and phrases. For example, in North London playing
truant from school was known as ‘hopping the wag', but in South London it was called
‘bunking it'. In Dublin it was called ‘mitching'. So when my mum asked if I'd been
‘mitching school' I could honestly reply that I hadn't, because in my mind I was
‘bunking it'. It's no wonder I was a confused kid!

South London slang differs from the
slang used in other parts of London, and indeed in the country as a whole.
Bermondsey, in particular, used to have its own language, which
even people in other parts of South London found hard to decipher. A ‘stone ginger'
was a certainty, as was the word ‘million', as in ‘Yeah, he's a million for parole
since he's behaved himself'. Once I became a teenager and involved in a life of
crime, my language expanded further. The language of borstal and juvenile jails is
littered with slang, some of it dating back to Victorian times. For example, in
borstal
there was a tradition for boys in the last fortnight of
their sentence to count down the days like this – ‘14 and a
brek
… 13 and a brek … 12 and a brek' and so on –‘brek' being short for
‘breakfast', because on the morning you leave custody you're not released until the
institution has served breakfast. In the last ten days of the sentence the tradition
was to cough into your hands and then show via your fingers how many days and a brek
you had left. (Of course, it could be very annoying to others, who were only just
starting their sentences, to have people openly and gleefully counting down the days
to their release, and this sometimes led to violence.)

The borstal system was a hotbed of
slang. If someone was misbehaving, they would be told to ‘toe it', meaning to toe
the line. I found out years later that the expression ‘toe the line' dates back to
the early days of bare-knuckle fighting, when a line would be drawn on the ground
and, after a knockdown, each fighter would start again, with their toes on this
line. So to ‘toe it' meant to get up and get ready for what was coming. Insults in
the borstal system were rife, and if you weren't the brightest spark in the box you
would be referred to as a
Plum
(apparently a reference to a
dim-witted Red Indian character featured in
The Beano
, Little Plum). ‘Sap'
was also big as an insult in borstal. This word has its origins in American slang:
it was a small cosh carried by police and criminals, a blunt instrument. It was
also used to describe a soppy or stupid person, and borstal boys
picked up the word from old Hollywood films. Borstal society was basically split
into two separate factions: you were either a
chap
or a sap. Chaps
were tough guys, future career criminals, and not to be messed with – the leaders.
And the majority of borstal boys were the saps, sheep to be bullied and taken
advantage of.

My entry into the world of the
professional criminal and adult prison was an eye-opener when it came to slang. An
old expression that was still in vogue among criminals when I started out was
‘wearing the paper hat', meaning to be ‘mugged off' or put in a compromising
position with no gain, or to end up behind bars, and it's still heard today in some
circles. If a group of criminals is committing a crime and one of them gets caught
while the rest get away, the one who's caught is said to be left ‘wearing the paper
hat'. Nobody wanted to be in that position. I entered the world of the police
fit-up
(tailoring of evidence by the police to fit the
suspect), the sweatbox (prison transport) and the
mattress job
(a
beating by police in which a cell mattress is put over the prisoner before they are
given a kicking), of
verbals
(made-up statements supposedly said by
the suspect at the time of arrest and recorded in the arresting officers' notebooks
as gospel) and ‘mags' (magistrates' court). The slang was coming fast and hard, and
I barely had time to learn it all before I found myself serving a lengthy
sentence.

At the age of sixteen I appeared at the
Old Bailey, having forsaken the juvenile crimes of TDA (Taking and Driving Away),
hoisting
(shoplifting) and ‘scrumping' (stealing fruit from
gardens or orchards) in order to pursue a career in the more adult environment of
blagging and GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm). I stood in the dock and was sentenced to a
three-stretch (three years) for my indiscretions, and though I was still legally a
juvenile offender, I
was treated like an old
lag
.
My life was now set out for me – crime, detention centre, crime, borstal, crime,
prison, old age, die was what I was heading for. Having read a report written by a
prison governor in 1976, when I was fifteen, I have no reason to believe that ‘the
system' (what most criminals and prisoners call the criminal justice machine) had
any faith in me pulling out of the life I'd chosen. The report said, ‘Smith has been
identified as one of a small group of boys who will spend their lives in and out of
institutions.' Nice to know that I was written off at the age of fifteen! But, it
must be said, I was a terrible little
scrote
who couldn't stop
half-inching
‘the prize' (proceeds of robbery) whenever the
opportunity presented itself.

Armed robbery, the criminal offence that
became my
raison d'être
, is a game that is littered with slang. Sometimes
known as the
heavy
(because of the heavy prison sentences it
attracts), or ‘pavement work' (when it's robbing security vans in the street), or
just
work
(because professional robbers class themselves as working
men; it just so happens that robbing at gunpoint is their job). In order to carry
out an armed robbery, you need certain tools of the trade, such as a ‘shooter'
(gun), a
smother
(mask),
turtles
(gloves), a
happy bag
(the bag used to carry firearms to and the cash from
the job) and a ‘jam jar' (getaway car). Once you have the tools, you'll do a ‘recce'
(reconnaissance) on your target, whether it be a ‘jug' (bank – from the days when
people buried their money in a pot or jug) or the
corey
(security
vehicle), unless, that is, you are just going out on ‘spec' (speculation). You must
keep your eyes open for police
obbo posts
(observation points) or a
ready-eye
(police ambush) by
the Sweeney
(the Flying Squad). Once you go
across the pavement
(start a robbery) you must be on guard for any ‘have-a-gos'
(members of the public who want to be heroes) and go for the prize.

Of course, once I took
up armed robbery as a career it was odds-on that I'd be spending some time in
prison, and prison is a place that is rich in slang. When in prison, doing
bird
(bird lime = time) or serving your stretch, whether it be
a
shit and a shave
(a very short sentence), a
carpet
(three months; the time it takes a prisoner to make a
rug for his cell), or even ‘the big L' (a life sentence), you need to switch on and
tune in, or you'll be the one left wearing the paper hat.

The
Concise Oxford English
Dictionary
defines crime as ‘an offence against an individual or the state
which is punishable by law'. Very concise. But that definition hardly begins to
scrape the surface of the myriad crimes that exist in this country alone. And for
every crime there is a whole language of slang that, in the criminal world, relates
to it. The successive governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown introduced over
four thousand new laws in just over ten years, which, in effect, means that these
days you can end up with a criminal record without even breaking a sweat. But let us
suppose, just for the sake of simplicity, that you have found yourself on the wrong
side of the law or, even worse, been convicted and sent to prison. To survive in
this environment, you must, at the very least, understand the language. Of course,
it may be that you're determined to make crime your career (a lot of people do, but
it isn't something I'd recommend). In that case, you'll have to start somewhere, and
that would be choosing the sort of criminal activity that appeals to you and which
you might be good at. And to know exactly what is on offer for the novice criminal,
it's important to understand the language. For example, there'd be no point asking
you to ‘get your boys,
turtles
and
smother
for a
bit of
aggy
', as you, at this stage, would have no idea what was
being said. If you're going to be
at it
, you'll have to be familiar
with the world and language of crime, even if you're coming in at the ground floor,
so to speak. All criminals, petty or professional, casual or career, are after what
is known in criminal circles as the
‘
prize'. The prize can be cash,
jewels, gold, silver or any other item worth stealing. No thief – with perhaps the
exception of
joyriders and kleptomaniacs – will go out stealing
just for the fun of it: everybody is after something. The prize is, however, not to
be confused with ‘the big one'. The big one is the ultimate prize, enough loot to
allow the criminal to retire to sunnier climes. Very few criminals ever manage to
pull off the big one, though it has been known – think of the Great Train Robbery
(1963: £2.6 million), the Brink's-MAT Robbery (1983: £26 million in gold; worth £75
million today) and the Tonbridge Securitas Robbery (2006: £53 million), to name but
a few. But it's even rarer for those who manage to take down the big one to get away
with it: most end up in prison for many years, or abroad and on the run in places
that don't sell Watneys Red Barrel or Marmite (not that you can get Watneys Red
Barrel even in this country any more, but hopefully you'll know what I mean).

If you choose the drug game as your
criminal career, then you'll have to learn a completely different way of speaking.
When I say ‘choose the drug game', I don't mean choosing to take drugs – though if
you do choose to consume illegal drugs, you'll still have to touch the criminal
world – I mean choosing to deal, smuggle or supply drugs as a criminal enterprise.
The problem with the drug game, as far as a lot of professional criminals are
concerned, is the amount of otherwise ‘straight-goers' who get involved because of
the large profits that can be made. The perfect example is cocaine. In its country
of origin a kilo of pure cocaine can cost as little as £2,000, but once it's
smuggled into Britain that same kilo is worth around £40,000. Once it's been cut
several times and has made its way into street deals of a gram a piece, it can be
worth as much as half a million pounds. With money like that on offer, it stands to
reason that a lot of people who normally wouldn't have much to do with organized and
major crime get greedy and are tempted by the big profits.
Businessmen put up ‘front money' to buy and smuggle the cocaine, then leave the
distribution to a criminal network and sit back and wait for the
paper
to roll in. The trouble starts when the investors end up
getting nicked. Now, I'm not saying that criminals are all stand-up guys (honourable
men), to use the American vernacular, but there is some honour amongst professional
villains, and being a
grass
is a big no-no which, in extreme cases,
is punishable by death. All professional criminals know this; they've entered the
criminal world with their eyes wide open and know that if they don't follow the
rules they're putting themselves in line for serious grief. Professional criminals
have usually come up through the ranks and served their time in remand centres,
detention centres, borstal and prison. They know not to talk to the authorities and
how to behave under interrogation, i.e. ask for your brief and then keep ‘schtum'
(
stumm
is the German word for ‘silent'). Threats by police
interrogators should be like oil off a stone to the professional
law-breaker. However, the businessman who dabbles in the drug game has no such
grounding in the criminal ethos and therefore doesn't know how to act when
confronted by
Plod
. He is liable to panic and sob out the names and
details of everyone involved. Blinded first by the anticipation of great riches for
little effort and then by the fear of ending up in prison, these former
straight-goers will turn over faster than a turtle in a waterfall.

That's one reason why many professional
criminals now shun the drug game in favour of crimes in which they don't have to
rely on straight-goers. As for the language of the drug game, like any other
criminal slang, it's very eclectic and changes constantly. For example, the
smuggling and distribution of drugs rely heavily on phone calls and
messages so, as police and customs crack each drug code, it has to be replaced.
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of words to describe heroin and cocaine alone.
Heroin can be H, horse, tar, tackle, skag,
the naughty
, nikki,
gammynock,
brown
, the dragon,
China white
, Afghan
… to name but several. And Charlie, Chaz, hooter, beak, oats, white, snozz,
trumpet, sniff and YaYo are just a few names for cocaine. So you can see how
complicated it can be. All drugs are now commonly known as ‘food' by street
dealers.

There is a theory of progression in
criminal activity, that there are various ‘gateway' crimes that will inevitably lead
to more serious offences. For example, a lot of shoplifters and sneak thieves go on
to become burglars. The clue is in the furtive nature of these crimes: they appeal
to people who like to keep their offending low-key and under some kind of cover, as
opposed to, say, armed robbers, who commit their crimes out in the open and usually
in full view of their victims. However, not all shoplifting is done by men or women
wearing huge coats with secret pockets; these days, shoplifters are a lot more
blatant.

As an aside, I find it interesting when
slang words and phrases that began life in the crime-and-punishment sphere end up
being used, unknowingly, by straight-goers. For example, a lot of people know the
phrase ‘to be left in the lurch', but not many know its origins. In the days of
public executions in Britain the prisoners who were due to be executed were picked
up from the prison in a caged wagon known as a ‘lurch'. They were then paraded
through the streets to their place of execution, as crowds jeered and pelted them
with stones and rotten food. If a particular miscreant was hated by the crowd, they
would have a whip-round to get a few pennies to give to the driver of
the lurch so he could go and have a drink and something to eat. He
would then leave the prisoners ‘in the lurch' and at the mercy of the crowd.

So now let's move on to the crimes
themselves. We'll start with the
tea leaves
. Thieving has been with
us for as long as people have lived on this earth. The act of taking something that
doesn't belong to you is almost natural – watch a bunch of toddlers interacting with
each other at play and you'll see how quick we humans are to snatch anything that
takes our fancy, even at that age. Some people never learn the lesson that taking
things that don't belong to you is bad, or choose to ignore it. Section 1 of the
Theft Act 1968 states that ‘a person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly
appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently
depriving the other of it'. The maximum penalty in the UK is seven years'
imprisonment. Many people confuse ‘theft' with ‘robbery' and, while they are both
crimes covered by the Theft Act, there are major differences. According to the act,
‘a person is guilty of robbery if he steals, and immediately before or at the time
of doing so, and in order to do so, he uses force on any person or puts or seeks to
put any person in fear of being then and there subjected to force'. To explain it in
simple terms, a thief is someone who will creep into your premises and take your
property without you knowing it, whereas a robber will tell you he is stealing your
property and do it right in front of your eyes by use of threats or force. Under the
Theft Act 1968 there are many varied definitions of the act of theft and, in real
life, thieves come in every shape, size, hue and creed.

To go
across the
pavement
is criminal parlance for robbing banks and security vans. If
someone tells you that he likes to go across the pavement, it means he is active in
armed robbery. It comes from the modus operandi of serious armed robbery. When
robbing a bank or any other premises, the method is usually to pull up outside,
emerge from the vehicle as quickly as possible, then go across the pavement to the
premises without attracting too much attention. The ‘pavement' can be compared to
the Rubicon as, once it has been crossed, there is usually no going back. When
robbing security vans (money in transit) you will ‘take the pavement', which means
to control the stretch of street immediately around the target by means of threats
and threatening gestures, usually with a firearm, to keep the public at bay while
the robbery is being carried out.

The Wembley Mob (a gang of bank robbers
from the late 1960s and early '70s led by Derek ‘Bertie' Creighton Smalls) pioneered
the MO of driving the getaway vehicle up on to the pavement outside the target bank
and blocking the entrance to passers-by. It was what became known as a ‘crash-bang
gang', in that they would rely on the element of surprise by ‘crashing' the bank
doors open and then firing (‘bang!') a shotgun into the ceiling in order to elicit
fear and compliance. ‘Bertie' Smalls was eventually caught for the robbery of
£237,736 in cash from the Wembley branch of Barclays Bank and, faced with the
prospect of a twenty-five-stretch in the ‘big house', he decided to give up his
confederates in a deal with the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) that saw him
walk free without serving a single day in prison for his numerous crimes. Billed as
the first ever supergrass, and the only one never to serve any time, Bertie gave
evidence against dozens of his former
mates and criminal partners
in return for complete immunity from prosecution. The men he grassed on were
sentenced to a total of 414 years in prison. Only two men came out of the Bertie
Smalls deal with smiles on their faces: one was Bertie Smalls himself, and the other
was a man named Jimmy Saunders. Saunders had been
fitted up
by the
police for a robbery in Ilford in 1970 and had been jailed for twelve years, despite
his protestations of innocence. If the police and the DPP were going to accept the
word of Smalls in order to jail nearly fifty major criminals, then it stood to
reason that when he gave up the team for the 1970 Ilford robbery and Saunders wasn't
in it, they had to accept that Saunders was an innocent man.

See
Rice Shots

Active
is a word used by
police and prison officers to describe a criminal or prisoner they suspect of
carrying out illegal activities (‘He's keeping a low profile at the moment but we
know he's active'). Often the major police squads will carry out intermittent
surveillance on criminals who they think are active in order to try to get some
intelligence on exactly what they are up to. The active criminal will be followed,
filmed and recorded, and all their contacts will be marked as suspect. This is the
police version of trawling in the hope of making a catch, and sometimes they'll get
lucky and come across a crime that is being planned or one that's in progress. In
prison, the Security Department will do the same with active prisoners who they
suspect of drug dealing, planning escape or sedition. The easiest way for the prison
Security Department to find out who's dealing drugs on a prison wing is
to introduce a couple of
clucking
junkies (drug
addicts who need their fix) into the environment and then just watch who they go to
or talk to. Clucking junkies will find a drug dealer on a prison wing within minutes
of landing.

Section 10 of the Theft Act 1968 states
that ‘a person is guilty of aggravated burglary if he commits any burglary and at
the time has with him any firearm or imitation firearm, any weapon of offence, or
any explosive; and for this purpose (a) “firearm” includes an airgun or air pistol,
and “imitation firearm” means anything which has the appearance of being a firearm,
whether capable of being discharged or not; and (b) “weapon of offence” means any
article made or adapted for use for causing injury to or incapacitating a person, or
intended by the person having it with him for such use; and (c) “explosive” means
any article manufactured for the purpose of producing a practical effect by
explosion, or intended by the person having it with him for that purpose. A person
guilty of aggravated burglary shall on conviction on indictment be liable to
imprisonment for life.'