The Criminal Alphabet (5 page)

Lay
is an old-fashioned
word dating from the late 1700s. As a criminal, your lay is the crime you specialize
in. For example, if you break into houses during daylight hours, then your lay is
housebreaking. A lot of professional criminals (that is, those who do it for a
living) will try their hand at any sort of crime that will bring the shekels in, but
usually have one form of crime which they are best at, and that would be their lay.
The origins have been lost but I have been told that it comes from the fact that
each day petty criminals would set out to steal enough money to get a bed for the
night, so what they stole first was their ‘laying-down money'. This became shortened
to ‘lay'.

To be
on the bottle
is
to be out and about picking pockets, so-called because the most common place that
men keep their wallets is in the back pocket (bottle and glass = arse). Stealing
from a back pocket is also the easiest pickpocketing move, as the thief is behind
the victim (on the bottle) so cannot be identified and can make an unseen getaway.

See
Hand-over man

To be
on the knocker
is
to be out and about in residential areas knocking on doors in order to facilitate a
con. A lot of conmen go on the knocker, as people feel safe in their own homes and
don't expect to be conned on their own doorstep. The most common con games
perpetrated on the knocker are
the sharp
,
the sparkle
,
the sponsor game
and selling
swag
.

See –
the Sharp
,
the Sparkle
,
the Sponsor game
,
Swag

One of the most common forms of
the jump-up
is going
on the UPS
. This is stealing from
the vans of parcel couriers UPS (United Parcel Service). At one time, these vans
relied on the traditional van lock for security, but this can be easily
jiggled
or
scissored
by professional thieves,
so now they also padlock the doors shut. This makes stealing from UPS slightly more
difficult, although most professional thieves will have a pair of bolt-croppers in
their tool bag for just such a problem. The thief going on the UPS will usually have
a vehicle and drive around until they spot a UPS van, then follow it until it stops
and the driver enters whichever premises he's delivering to. Then the thief will
leap from their vehicle and get to work breaking through the back door of the van to
grab however many parcels they can and get back to the vehicle for the getaway. This
is a simple but audacious theft that's carried out many times a day on the streets
of the UK. Going on the UPS is a particular favourite with drug addicts who need a
constant cash flow to feed their habit.

See
the Jump-up

A
pony bag
is the
security bag or box carried across the pavement by cash-in-transit guards. The bag
(contained inside an alarmed metal box) is only insured to contain up to £25,000 and
this is why criminals refer to it as a pony bag – a
pony
being
twenty-five. A lot of armed robbers who go out on spec are looking for guards
transporting pony bags across the pavement and into financial institutions. The most
dangerous time for the guard is when he has to walk across the stretch of open
ground from the security
of the armoured van to the institution he
is delivering to. This is the window of opportunity for a robber or thief to
strike.

Shoulder surfers
are
criminals who peep over the shoulders of people using cashpoint machines, either to
note the PIN number of the card or to see if there is enough cash coming out of the
machine to be worth snatching. It's a very modern crime. There are also distraction
teams, who specialize in thefts at cashpoint machines. The most common form of
distraction involves two or three thieves, one of whom (the shoulder surfer) stands
directly behind the victim and drops a £5 note by the victim's feet just as he or
she presses the button to withdraw cash. Another of the team, pretending to walk by,
taps the victim on the shoulder and points out the banknote at his feet. As the
victim bends down to pick up the £5, the shoulder surfer will reach over and take
the cash coming out of the machine, or the card, or both. The thief then walks
briskly away with the prize, leaving the victim standing at the machine waiting for
his cash to appear. More sophisticated shoulder surfers are after the details of the
card or the card itself but work in much the same way.

Sleeving
is the lower
end of the market in the
hoisting
game and is done mainly by
youngsters and petty thieves. It involves going into a shop or a supermarket wearing
a jacket with elasticated cuffs (much like perpetrators of
the bird game
) and, while reaching into a fridge or chill cabinet,
slipping a can or bottle of drink up your sleeve.
The ‘sleever'
will then casually walk out of the shop as though they have decided against buying
anything. This method is usually used to steal alcoholic drinks for personal
consumption rather than as a commercial exercise. Another form of sleeving is used
by professional hoisters, and this involves stuffing high-value items which still
have the security tags attached up both sleeves and then lifting your arms over the
top of the alarm sensor on the way out, thus avoiding setting off the alarms. (Most
sensor alarms in large shops reach only to shoulder height.)

See
the Bird game
,
Hoisting

Smash-and-grab merchants
are criminals who specialize in the theft of valuable items from shop windows. A
heavy object is used to break the glass and the goods are snatched before the
criminals make a quick getaway. This crime is usually carried out in broad daylight
and is reliant on the elements of speed and surprise. The main targets are jewellery
shops. These days, smash and grab has all but disappeared, as tougher safety glass
has been fitted to shops with expensive goods displayed in the window. Criminals are
nowadays more likely to drive a vehicle through the windows of a shop than waste
their time throwing bricks. In the mid-2000s, there was a short-lived vogue for
smashing jewellery-shop windows with a Hilti-gun (a tool used in the construction
industry, which fires nails) and a sledgehammer before snatching very expensive
jewellery. This kind of crime came to a head on 7 November 2000, when a gang of
thieves tried to snatch
the Millennium Star diamond (203.04 carats,
and worth £200 million) from the De Beers diamond exhibition in the Millennium Dome
in Greenwich, London. The thieves tried to break into the display case using a
Hilti-gun but the police were lying in wait and the gang members arrested.
Smash-and-grab has all but been replaced by
ram-raiding
, but there
is an element of this old crime in the modern one of smashing the windows of shops
and banks then using a vehicle to drag out a cashpoint machine. Smash-and-grab will
always be with us in one form or another.

The smother game
is picking pockets or stealing from handbags using a
coat draped over the arm to hide your actions; it's often practised on public
transport during the rush hour. The
stiks
or
stiks
men
of the 1970s even had certain named moves for stealing using a
smother.

See
Stiks/Stiks man

The
sneak thief
is
classed as perhaps the lowest of the low amongst the
tea-leaf
fraternity. A sneak thief will steal anything from anyone – family, friends, the
disabled, the weak and frail – they have no conscience. They will enter premises,
ask to use the toilet and, while pretending to do so, will rifle through the
victim's goods looking for anything of value. The modus operandi of the sneak thief
is to leave as little evidence of their thieving as possible so that the victim
might blame someone else for it when it is finally discovered. But they also
specialize in stealing charity boxes from public places. Nothing is sacrosanct to
the sneak thief.

See
Tea leaf

A
snowdropper
is someone
who makes a living by stealing clothes from washing lines (as opposed to someone who
steals only underwear from lines and is known as a pervert!). This crime was
particularly prevalent in the Victorian era, when cotton and linen sheets stolen
from the washing lines of the rich and well-to-do was a pretty lucrative
lay
. These days, snowdroppers usually go for designer clothing
and sell the items in pubs and markets. Though it can be a fairly profitable crime
if you steal the right snowdrops, it is still well down on the scale of serious
theft and practised mainly by kids and the desperate amateur.

See
Lay

The re-emergence of the pickpocket in the
1970s meant a change in the name
dipper
, which had become too well
known, to
stiks
or
stiks man
, from the line in the
nursery rhyme ‘Five, six, pick up sticks'. (This is used mainly by young West Indian
pickpockets.) In the 1970s a lot of thriving pickpocket gangs used distraction
techniques in order to steal. Typically, a stiks gang would consist of three
members: the
dip
or ‘feeler', who sticks their hand into pockets
and bags; the ‘front man', who bumps into the victim and pretends to be confused and
flustered, all the better to confuse and fluster the victim as they brush them down
and apologize profusely while the dip goes to work; and, lastly, the ‘pass-off' man,
to whom the prize will be passed once it has been retrieved. The stiks gangs work
with great speed, which is why the pass-off man is essential. If the victim feels or
senses that their pocket has been picked,
then by the time they
raise the alarm and point the finger, the prize will have been deftly palmed off to
the innocent-looking pass-off man, who will have quickly walked away. Even if the
dip and front man are grabbed by passers-by and held for
the bull
, nothing will be found on them.

The stiks gangs had their own slang,
such as ‘the bull' for police, which was short for ‘bullies'. The ‘bull squad' or
‘dip squad' in London usually operated out of West End Central Police Station and
had a reputation amongst the dippers and stiks men as being a bit heavy-handed and
very sneaky. Members of the bull squad would disguise themselves as tourists or
tramps, or even dress up as women in their constant quest to nick the dips. The
squad had a fairly constant turnover because as soon as they'd made four or five
nickings they would be easily recognizable to the dips.

If a stiks man were to say, ‘I've been
under the earth looking for beagles and practising my back-off,' it would be
translated as ‘I've been working the London Underground looking for wallets and
purses and practising stealing from back pockets'. The London Underground was the
main hunting ground for stiks men, as there were very few CCTV cameras in the 1970s
and '80s and, in the rush-hour crowds, it was easy to get close to someone in order
to steal from them. A wallet or purse was known as a ‘beagle', but nobody seems to
know why. Stiks men and dips had various tried-and-tested methods of stealing, such
as the ‘back-off' (lifting the prize from the victim's back pocket by gripping with
the fingertips and then kneeing the victim lightly behind their knee to make them
bend slightly so the wallet, or whatever it was, comes out of the pocket easily),
the ‘breast-off' (putting a coat or newspaper under the victim's chin or in front of
their face while the dip hand reaches for the inside jacket pocket), or
the ‘slide' (quickly sliding the hand into a side pocket, as
though it were an accident). Picking pockets using distraction techniques is known
as working
the smother game
. Pickpocketing is also known as going
out
on the bottle
, from the action of getting behind the
victim.

See
On the Bottle
,
the Bull
,
the Smother game

If you are
at it
, then
the chances are better than good that you're a
tea leaf
. In the
original cockney rhyming slang, a tea leaf means a thief. There are many forms of
thieving or ‘tea-leafing', from pickpocketing to commercial burglary. In some
‘manors', or districts, being a tea leaf is a fairly honourable profession, and
sometimes a way of life and a means of survival. In the 1800s there were lots of
‘thieves' dens', particularly in London, where all the tea leafs lived with their
families and from where they would set out to rob the rich, or the richer. Some
areas of London still have a hangover of that reputation today and are viewed as
‘criminal manors', such as Bermondsey in South London, or
the Cali
(Caledonian Road) in North London. Former assistant commissioner in charge of the
CID Gilbert Kelland states in
Crime in London
that, from the 1970s until
the '90s, ‘ninety-seven per cent of the armed robberies committed in England were
carried out by a small group of robbers from one small corner of South London.'