The Criminal Alphabet (4 page)

See
Crack
,
Fence
,
Fencing
,
Roger

Creeping is the exact opposite to the
walk-in
. A
creeper
is the type of burglar who
enters dwellings while the occupants are in bed and creeps around the premises
looking for items to steal. The object of the creeper is to get in and out, with the
valuables, without anyone knowing they've been there until the escape has been made.
Some people get creepers confused with
cat burglars
, but they are
slightly different animals. The cat burglar is a climber, whilst the creeper usually
enters by the ground floor of a premises. Perhaps the most infamous creeper was a
fella called Flannel Foot, a burglar and jewel thief in the 1930s. The legend goes
that, during his time in solitary confinement in Dartmoor Prison, Flannel Foot spent
his entire time training to move in complete silence so as to become a better
creeper on release. He would scatter various objects around the cell floor,
blindfold himself and tie cloths around his feet and hands, then try to make his way
around the cell without disturbing anything or making a noise. In this way, he
taught himself to move silently in complete darkness so he would never need a light
while he was committing a burglary and was unlikely to wake the occupants.

See
Sneak Thief

A
dip
or
dipper
is a pickpocket. The name comes from the Elizabethan
era, when the punishment for pickpockets was to be tied to a ducking stool and
immersed in water until they were near death. The art of picking pockets has been
around for a very long time, probably since we first had pockets, but this crime
enjoyed something of a renaissance in the early 1970s. It became the career choice
of many young criminals, perhaps due to the popularity of the musical film
Oliver
(1968), which starred Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger, Ron Moody
as Fagin and Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes.
Oliver
turned a whole generation of
kids on to the delights of picking a pocket or two. (Interestingly, at one stage,
the punishment for theft, including pickpocketing, was death by hanging. These
executions were held in public as a deterrent to thieves and pickpockets and would
often feature a large scaffold that could hang up to ten thieves in one go. However,
as a deterrent, these public hangings were a complete failure, as pickpockets would
be working the crowds that gathered to watch. Some people will steal no matter what
the penalty if caught – nobody commits crime thinking they will have to pay the
price for it. That's why the death penalty has never been, nor ever will be, a
deterrent.)

See
Whizzer, Whiz mob

Drummer
is a word dating
from the 1920s for a burglar who can get into places, even when they are ‘as tight
as a drum'. Houses are sometimes referred to as ‘drums', as in ‘I went up to his
drum but he wasn't in'. If someone in prison were to tell you he was in for
‘drumming', you
shouldn't therefore assume that he's a criminal
percussionist. (Unless, that is, you're in a Northern Irish prison, where drums and
violent parades can sometimes lead to imprisonment.)

See
Burglary
,
Creeper
,
Housebreaking

Section 22 of the Theft Act 1968 states
that ‘a person handles stolen goods if (otherwise than in the course of stealing)
knowing or believing them to be stolen goods he dishonestly receives the goods, or
dishonestly undertakes or assists in their retention, removal, disposal or
realization by or for the benefit of another person, or if he arranges to do so. A
person guilty of handling stolen goods shall on conviction on indictment be liable
to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.'

Fencing
, or handling
and purchasing stolen goods with a view to selling them on, is a criminal trade for
someone who has the cash to buy goods and the contacts to sell them on. The term
dates back to when dockers would bring items snaffled from the cargo holds of ships
up to the fence of the docks to pass to a buyer or accomplice. It's often said that,
without a
fence
to buy their loot, thieves and burglars would be in
trouble, which is why the courts tend to take a dim view of receivers of stolen
goods. But the truth is that there are more than enough so-called straight-goers who
are willing to part with money even if they know that the goods are stolen. The
usual price paid by a professional fence is one-third of the retail value of the
item, which is the acknowledged rule in the criminal world. The average
£100-a-day-habit drug-addicted thief will therefore have to steal at least £2,400
worth of goods every week in order not to get ‘sick'. Multiply that by the amount of
addicts on
the thieve in the major cities alone and you can see
that a lot of fences must be absolutely coining it. Apart from the serious and
professional criminal fences, there's also a whole network of amateur buyers who,
though they wouldn't class themselves as criminals, make a nice profit from stolen
goods.

See
Crack
Converters
,
Jekyll
,
the Snide game

On a par with the
boot burglar
is the
gas-meter bandit
. This dates back to
the days when most households had gas and electricity meters which you had to feed
with coins in order to have heat, light and cooking facilities. Even burgling a
council flat would guarantee the burglar a quantity of cash from the meters, as well
as whatever other goods they could carry. The most I ever heard of anyone getting
from a coin meter was around £70 – all in ten-pence pieces! Those burglars who broke
into gas and electricity meters were classed as petty amateurs by ‘real' criminals,
and the terms boot burglar and gas-meter bandit were insults. No criminal worth his
salt wanted to be known as either. Of course, these days, there are no coin-operated
meters in houses and flats, and the modern-day equivalent of the gas-meter bandit is
the house burglar who specializes in crude entry – usually by smashing a window or
kicking a door through – and stealing jewellery and electrical goods from council
houses. Many major criminals start out as gas-meter bandits and then progress
through the ranks.

See
Cat Burglars
,
Commie Burgs
,
Creeper

A
hand-over man
is an
essential part of a
dipping
, or pickpocketing, team. The dip, or
finger man, will do the actual stealing by dipping his hand into someone's pockets
and then whatever he takes from the pocket will be handed to his accomplice, the
hand-over man. The hand-over man will walk quickly away from the scene of the crime
so that even if the dip is challenged, the finger man will have no evidence of the
theft about his person.

See
On the Bottle

There is in fact no such criminal charge
as shoplifting (
hoisting
): if you steal from a shop, you will be
charged with theft. In the past, hoisting was considered more a crime perpetrated by
female criminals, but in recent years it has mainly become the preserve of junkies,
who have taken it to another level. Forget the old image of the shady character
hanging about in the aisle of a supermarket in a big coat, nervously stealing
glances at the shop staff as he fingers the packets of rump steak. For the modern
hoister, speed and daring are of the essence. Hoisters normally work in teams of two
or three people: one person to wait outside the shop in a vehicle with the engine
running for a quick getaway; one to do the actual hoisting; and sometimes a third,
who will cause a commotion in order to distract the shop staff. The favourite tool
of the modern-day hoister is the laundry bag – those huge fabric bags you can buy in
laundrettes. Armed with their laundry bag, the hoister will pick his shop carefully
– no point robbing something like an estate agent's or a Burger King; not much to
throw into your bag – and sometimes recce his
target. What they are
after are small, portable, high-value items such as razor blades, perfume,
aftershave or batteries. The hoister will march into the target shop, shaking out
the laundry bag, go directly to the items they intend to steal, then sweep the whole
stock off the shelf and into the bag before marching swiftly from the shop and
jumping into the getaway car. Most times it happens so quickly the security staff
have no time to react. This is also known as
blitzing
or ‘going on
a mission'. This type of shop theft was pioneered by a bunch of junkies from the
Caledonian Road (or
Cali
) area of North London in order to fund
their drug habits, but has now become popular all over the country.

Back in the day, there was no more
prolific a gang of female hoisters than the Forty Elephants, also known as the Forty
Thieves. Hailing from in and around the Elephant and Castle area of South London,
they were closely allied with the male Elephant and Castle mob, who were thieves and
hard men. The Forty Elephants were prolific professional shoplifters who raided the
quality shops in London's West End but also ranged all over the country in the
biggest organized shoplifting operation this country has ever witnessed. The Forty
Elephants gang was in existence from 1873 until the late 1950s. During the early
twentieth century the gang was led by a woman called Alice Diamond, an accomplished
thief and fighter known variously as ‘the Queen of the Forty Thieves' or ‘Diamond
Annie'. At one time, in the 1960s, ‘Mad' Frankie Fraser's sister Eva was a prominent
member.

The word ‘hoisting' could come from the
fact that women would ‘hoist' up their outer garments and secrete the goods under
them, or it could refer to the even older practice of hoisting up the side of a tent
in order to steal its contents.

See
Hoisting bag

Housebreaking
and
burglary are two sides of the same crime. Housebreakers are burglars who specialize
in breaking into houses during daylight hours, whereas burglars will break into any
building, but usually during the night. On the whole, housebreakers are more random
and disorganized than night-time burglars, though most of them will dress smartly in
order to blend into the areas where they plan to commit their crimes. Unless they're
working on inside information, which is rare for housebreakers, they'll simply pick
an area and walk or drive around it looking for a likely target before knocking on
the door to see if anyone is home. If no one answers the door, the housebreaker will
do his job and break in. A lot of housebreakers will enter via the front of the
house, either by breaking a window or kicking or otherwise forcing the front door
open, and they'll go through the premises in a matter of minutes looking for
valuables. The first room a housebreaker will head for is the master bedroom, as
they know this is where most people will keep jewellery, cash and other items of
value. Housebreakers are looking for quick cash and easily saleable items that are
not too bulky. Housebreakers rely on speed and can be in and out of a house within
five minutes.

See
Aggy/Aggy Merchants

These days, most car thieves and those
who steal from vehicles tend to cause a lot of damage in pursuit of the prize.
Because of the sophisticated security systems now fitted as standard on most
vehicles, the only way in is normally to break a window or jemmy the boot or doors.
Though some commercial vehicles can still be scissored,
this is
mainly used by
jump-up
merchants.
Scissoring
is
using a large pair of stainless-steel scissors to open a lock. You insert the point
of the scissors into the lock, wrench them up and down to break the tumblers, then
give them a quick twist, and the lock should spring open. This whole process should
take no more than a few seconds.
Jiggling
can be used on older
vehicles, and this involves using a car key (pretty much any key will do) in the
lock to work it open. You have to move it in a fast up-and-down and side-to-side
motion in order to catch the tumblers in motion and then give it a sharp twist when
you get a bite.

See
Draggers
, TDA
Merchants
,
Twockers

Another crime that has now become
associated with desperate junkies is
the
jump-up
. In the jump-up, a thief follows delivery trucks and vans
in their
smoker
and waits until the target vehicle is left
unattended. The thief then jumps up on to the back of the delivery vehicle and
throws off as many goods and parcels as possible. Usually working in pairs, jump-up
merchants will steal anything that might have even the slightest resale value. Back
in the 1940s and '50s, the jump-up was a respectable crime for any aspiring
professional criminal wanting to get into the game on the ground floor. All you
needed was a smoker and a bit of bottle when it came to nabbing the prize. Nowadays,
the jump-up is mostly the preserve of junkies and petty thieves, some of whom have
no embarrassment or compunction about doing a jump-up on a bread van or milk float
in order to feed their habit. (If the doors of a delivery van are locked, the
jump-up merchant has to open them quickly, and this is done by
jiggling and scissoring
.)
See
Clipboarding
,
On the
UPS