The Criminal Alphabet (3 page)

Aggy,
or aggravated
burglary, is the most violent crime in the burglary genre. It involves forcing your
way into premises while they are occupied, usually by way of threat or violence, in
order to steal from those premises. Often,
aggy merchants
will go
armed and with the intention of inflicting injury on their victims if they do not
comply. Most of the time, the aggy merchant relies on the element of surprise,
either by knocking on the door of the premises and then forcing their way in when
the door is answered by the unsuspecting occupant, or by effecting an entry in
secret and then pouncing on the occupants. The occupants
are
quickly overpowered and secured before being questioned as to the whereabouts of
cash and valuables. In the criminal pecking order, aggy merchants are viewed with a
patina of distaste by other serious criminals, but particularly by armed robbers, or
the
heavy
mob. Aggy is classed as a very personal crime, because
the perpetrators often enter someone's home, rather than commercial or banking
premises, in order to ply their trade, which goes against the code of the serious
criminal. Also, some aggy merchants have rather unsavoury reputations for sexually
abusing or torturing their victims, which doesn't sit well with the professional
robber's ethos of it ‘just being a job'. A lot of psychopaths and other sick people
are attracted to the aggy game.

One of the most infamous aggy merchants
was the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin. Before becoming the dashing highwayman of
story, song and fable, Turpin worked with a gang of aggravated burglars called the
Essex Gang. They specialized in forcing entry into isolated farmhouses and torturing
the occupants for their loot. In one case, Turpin and his gang sat a
sixty-five-year-old woman on an open fire in order to get her to reveal the
whereabouts of her valuables. Aggy merchants are particularly nasty people who will
stop at little in their hunt for the prize.

See
Cat Burglars
,
Commy
Burgs
,
Creeper

If someone is deemed to be
at
it
, it means they are engaged in criminal activity on a regular basis.
A typical conversation between criminals planning a criminal venture will be about
who might be at it, in other words, who is still committing crime and who is no
longer available to take
on the the job because they are ‘on their
toes' (on the run from police or prison) or in ‘shovel' (shovel and pick = nick).
Career criminals are constantly at it. Though used originally by criminals, this
phrase is now often used by the police to describe prolific offenders: the police
will be well aware of who is at it on their particular patch. Of course, like much
other slang, it has more than one meaning in the criminal world. For example, to
‘get someone at it' means you are pulling a stroke on them, i.e. spinning elaborate
lies or tales in order to sucker them in (‘I had John checking his car for listening
devices after I told him I saw someone bugging him. I got him right at it!').

Bilking
is the practice
of eluding payment for goods or services by making a quick getaway. These days, it
is mostly the preserve of motorized bandits and car thieves, who will pull into a
petrol station, fill their tank with fuel and then drive off without paying. There
are also a few hard-core bilkers who make it their business to eat in top
restaurants and leave without paying. If arrested, a bilker will be charged with
theft. It is believed that the word ‘bilk' may be a form of the word ‘balk', which
is a term used in the card game cribbage.

The
bird game
added a new dimension to
hoisting
, in
that the thieves were after a bit of livestock. Some bored sadist with time on his
hands discovered that parrots, cockatiels and other expensive birds were susceptible
to ether. One spray of the stuff and they would keel over and be spark
out for a number of minutes before waking up none the worse for
wear. There is a spray you can buy from most petrol stations called Easy Start which
you squirt into a diesel engine on a cold morning to aid the ignition, and this
spray contains ether. Spray it into the face of a bird, and the bird will go to
bye-byes long enough for it to be stolen without the usual struggle, squawks and
pecking that would result from manhandling a conscious bird. Now parrots, in
particular, are not cheap – some go for upwards of a thousand pounds – and to the
desperate little junkies of Bermondsey, a parrot was drug money for the taking. So,
usually in teams of two, the thieves would enter a pet shop that sold these
expensive birds and go to work. One would wear a puffa jacket, the kind that has
plenty of room in the sleeves, and while their companion distracted the shop staff
with inquiries about the care of his non-existent aardvark or chinchilla, the other
would give a couple of parrots a blast of the ether spray and slip their unconscious
bodies down each sleeve of the jacket before walking nonchalantly out of the shop.
By the time the birds came to, they'd be in a cage in the getaway car, heading
towards a dealer who would facilitate their sale for heroin or crack, or both. The
bird game was a real money spinner for a while, until the market was flooded with
exotic birds – every drug dealer in South London had at least two African Greys
sitting in their front room – and pet shops started beefing up their security.

Boosting
is American
criminal slang for stealing. To boost something is to take it without paying. To
boost an item is to grab it and go, as in ‘giving it a boost'.

A
boot burglar
is a
petty, motorized thief who will cruise car parks and quiet streets looking for
likely targets, that is, any half-decent-looking car or van that might have
something of value in it that can be quickly sold on. The main items targeted for
theft by the boot burglar are spare wheels – always good for £20 a piece if in good
condition – tools and anything else that people might be tempted to keep in the boot
of their car. Most car boots can be opened by the experienced boot burglar in less
than a minute, using the blade of a large pair of scissors to
jiggle
the lock. If this doesn't work, then there are cruder
methods of entry, such as jemmying the boot lid or breaking a quarterlight and
getting inside the car to release the boot lock. Sometimes a boot burglar can get
lucky and hit the jackpot. A friend of mine once jiggled the boot of a Ford Cortina
and found a bag with £20,000 in cash in it. But, to counter that, I also know
someone who got caught jiggling a boot at three o'clock one morning and had his arm
broken by the owner, who crept from his house wielding a golf club when alerted by
the noise. On the whole, boot burgling is the breadline of the criminal world and
not a way of getting rich and being able to retire. It becomes a high-risk
enterprise when you do it for a living, because of the sheer amount of crimes you
have to commit in order to make any money. In reality, a boot burglar would be
better off getting a straight job, as even road sweeping would pay more.

See
Jiggling and Scissoring

The bull
is the nickname
given by pickpockets to the plainclothes Metropolitan Police pickpocket squad. Quite
often they would jump on and manhandle suspected pickpockets quite roughly, and this
led to them being called bullies, or the bull for short. On the London Underground,
a major hunting ground for pickpockets back in the 1970s and '80s, you would often
hear warning cries of ‘Bull! Bull!' from the gangs when one of the pickpocket squad
was spotted.

Section 9 of the Theft Act 1968 states
that ‘a person is guilty of
burglary
if (a) he enters any building
or part of a building as a trespasser and with intent to commit any such offence as
is mentioned in subsection 2 below (stealing anything in the building or part of the
building in question, of inflicting on any person therein any grievous bodily harm
or raping any person therein, and of doing unlawful damage to the building or
anything therein) or (b) having entered into any building or part of a building as a
trespasser he steals or attempts to steal anything in the building or that part of
it or inflicts or attempts to inflict on any person therein grievous bodily harm. A
person guilty of burglary shall on conviction on indictment be liable to
imprisonment for a term not exceeding (a) where the offence was committed in respect
of a building or part of a building which is a dwelling, fourteen years, and (b) in
any other case, ten years.'

Cat burglars
are the
elite of the burglary game. These are the people who will climb the outside of
buildings in complete darkness and silently break into luxury flats in order to
steal cash and jewels. The cat burglar can be in and out with your goods long before
you know they've been there. Perhaps one of the most infamous British cat burglars
of the twentieth century was Peter Scott, known as the ‘Human Fly'. Scott described
some of his more glamorous exploits in his memoirs,
Gentleman Thief
(1995),
in which he took sole credit for the previously unsolved theft of film star Sophia
Loren's jewellery in the raid on her Elstree hotel room in 1960. However, recent
revelations by the man who supposedly ‘trained' Scott have thrown doubt on this
claim. Ray ‘The Cat' Jones now claims that, though Scott planned the raid, it was
he, Jones, who carried out the job. Sophia Loren was in England that year making
The Millionnairess
and brought her jewels, worth £185,000 (a hell of a
lot of money in 1960), with her. Jones claims he broke into Loren's bedroom as Scott
kept watch downstairs. He sold the jewels to an underworld
fence
for £44,000 and had to pay a £6,000 ‘fee' to the policemen who had supplied the
inside information. Whatever the truth of the story, underworld opinion is that Ray
‘The Cat' Jones was probably the best cat burglar who ever pulled on a pair of
gloves.

Probably the most notorious cat burglar
of the nineteenth century was Charles Peace, one of the few real criminals to be
mentioned by Arthur Conan Doyle's fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes (in his short
story ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client'). Charles Peace was a highly skilled
musician, a violin virtuoso described as the ‘modern Paganini' (having taught
himself on a
violin with only one string), but it was his skills as
a cat burglar that led to his notoriety and brought him wealth and fame. Peace was
what Victorians called a ‘portico thief' (because their method of entry was to climb
the portico of a house and enter by an upstairs window or skylight), which later in
the twentieth century became known as a cat burglar. He was once described, by the
Earl of Birkenhead, Solicitor General of Britain, as an ‘arch-criminal, a curious
mixture of sordid villainy and artistic tastes'. Charles Peace was perhaps the first
man to turn burglary into a serious business, as he invented a set of special tools
with which to gain entry to premises, his ‘burglary kit', which consisted of a
skeleton key, two pick-locks, a centre-bit, a gimlet, a gouge, a chisel, a vice
jemmy, a knife, a portable ladder, a revolver and a life preserver (a heavy piece of
cane about a foot long with a six-ounce lead ball on one end and a leather or catgut
loop to go around the wrist on the other, which was used as a cosh and much favoured
by nineteenth-century ‘gentlemen'). He also found time to invent a few other things.
Along with a man named Brion, Charles Peace patented a device for raising sunken
vessels, and worked on a smoke helmet for firemen, an improved brush for washing
railway carriages and a form of hydraulic tank. Peace was arrested during a burglary
in Blackheath, after trying to shoot the arresting officer, and was eventually
hanged in 1879, for the murder of a police officer during an earlier burglary and
the murder of a love rival. But, like the
creeper
Flannel Foot,
Charles Peace took burglary to a more sophisticated level.

See
Creeper

Commy burgs
, or
commercial burglars, are the people who will break into warehouses, shops or
factories in their pursuit of ill-gotten gains. Commy burgs are unlikely to come
across anyone during their crime, so theirs is seen as an entirely impersonal crime,
acquisitive rather than violent. Commy burgs are usually highly organized and will
know exactly what they're after and sometimes have a buyer lined up before they even
start. In the twenty-first century a lot of the commy burgs at the top end of the
scale steal technology, such as microchips and circuit boards, which can be worth a
small fortune. Others prefer to raid warehouses and steal lorry loads of goods;
anything with a quick resale value is the order of the day. Nowadays, with the price
of metal so high, a lot of commy burgs are targeting scrapyards or anywhere that may
hold unmarked metals that can quickly be weighed in at a scrap merchant's.

See
Cat Burglars

In recent years in most cities and towns
in the UK there has been an influx of shops that buy or lend money on things of
value such as jewellery, electrical goods and other household items. Perhaps the
best known of these is the ubiquitous Cash Converters – known to the thieving junkie
contingent as
Crack Converters
, because it's usually here that they
convert their stolen goods into cash for crack cocaine and other drugs. Funnily
enough, Cash Converters usually offers less than a third of the retail price for the
goods they buy, i.e. less than the criminal
fence
has traditionally
offered for stolen goods. These type of businesses normally try to safeguard
themselves by
demanding various forms of identification from the
sellers, but thieves, and in particular thieving junkies, have little trouble
stealing or forging ID – it's part of the life.