It's London in 1720 and you've just been mugged.
Your father's watch, your billfold and some letters you'd rather keep private
All. Gone.
So you head to the Old Bailey, London's Criminal Court
Where Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker General
Finder of Stolen Property and city's top law enforcement figure keeps his office
Days later
His agents have discovered your belongings.
Wild negotiates a price to release your valuables and you pay off the robbers in an anonymous meetup.
Wild returns your goods and accepts only a small fee for this service
and you thank Heaven that the city has a crime fighter
the likes of Thief-Taker General Wild
But, ask around the right circles and you may hear a different story
They say that all of the city's thieves
from the housebreakers to the highwayman have a master.
One who controls the pickpockets who work Drury Lane
The Star Glazer's who cut open shop windows
The Dazzlers, the Wig Stealers, the Anglers and the Footpads
and that shadowy figure is also
Jonathan Wild
🎶"Birth of the People" By Demetori🎶
Between 1680 and 1720
London experienced an unprecedented crime wave.
Surging populations, deep poverty, and legions of discharged soldiers
created an underclass trying to survive in an economy
that was rapidly transitioning to capitalism, a system they didn't wholly understand.
But ironically, this new economy also provided ways for the desperate and enterprising to live off its underbelly.
Because a dazzling array of manufactured, commercial goods appeared on the scene.
Products that could easily be stolen and anonymously sold.
And a new era of thievery was born.
To combat this, the English rewrote their penal codes, structuring them around property crime
with the value of the goods, determining the punishment.
The problem was: the British law enforcement system didn't have the capacity to deal with this expansion.
Not to mention, the prison system simply didn't have the space.
So, Parliament took another tack:
Deterrence
They would make the punishments
so draconian
so bloody-minded
people just, wouldn't steal
At times, taking goods as little as 12 pence in value
carried a death sentence
"Men are not hanged for stealing horses," one politician wrote, "but that horses may NOT be stolen"
The result was a system of laws known as the Bloody Code
Children as young as 7 were sentenced to death for stealing cups.
Men went to the gallows at Tyburn over spoons and bolts of cloth
And execution days were a holiday
Where people watched hanging after hanging while sitting on bleachers.
The better to see the costs of crime.
Courts sentenced so many to death that sympathetic judges reduced most sentences
to branding on the thumb
or transportation
where they sold convicts into indentured servitude, in faraway colonies like America.
This system of terror, didn't work
In fact, gangs of pickpockets would work the crowd on execution days
lifting billfolds and watches as the crowd stood in rapt attention as a
different pickpocket dangled on the noose.
And exacerbating the problem, London had no professional citywide police force.
In fact, they disliked the concept itself.
In neighboring France, professional law enforcement was an extension of the Army.
where citizens had little recourse against the state.
The lesson the English took from this was
that professional police were an inherently regressive and militarized organisation
and they were better off without one.
So London, now a city of 700,000, made do with an inadequate system of
elderly parish Watchmen, citizen arrests and bounty hunters known as thief-takers.
You see, catch and convict a thief and the government would give you forty pounds
a huge payday at the time.
Equivalent to about $7,000 today.
Which is how they got Thief-Taker General
Jonathan Wild.
Wild's story begins, fittingly enough,
in prison.
He was in debt, among criminals and had a few options.
Originally an apprentice buckle maker, in his early 20s,
Wild left his wife and son and traveled to London as a servant where he quickly lost that job
and fell behind on bills.
Imprisoned until he could earn his release, Wild found himself suddenly immersed in the unfamiliar tapestry of
London's underworld
For jails at the time were infamous for one thing above all others:
They were a university for crime.
Prisons in Georgian Britain were run for-profit
Rather than rehabilitation or even confinement,
the goal was to squeeze inmates for everything they could
and while imprisoned at Wood Street,
Wild had to pay rent for his cell and buy his own food.
Guards loaded prisoners with chains then extorted money for their removal
and the penniless were sent to the beggars crate.
Earning their keep by pleading passers-by for coins.
But the guards liked Wild
He was smart, charming and ruthless
So he began running errands for them, participating in their mechanisms of corruption.
and studying how to extort and intimidate.
He learned about criminal schemes and to use the intricate language of London's underworld.
Soon, he was earning enough to start a money lending operation among his fellow prisoners
and was let out at night to help hunt for thieves.
Upon his release, Wild was a practiced operator.
He'd learned from the best and his new girlfriend Mary Milliner, a worker in the city's sex trade
ran her own criminal gang.
But best of all, he finally found his role in London's great ecosystem of crime
Wild became a fence: buying stolen goods, removing any distinguishing marks and selling them on.
It was a role that suited him.
As a fence, Wild took on none of the risks himself and gained leverage over other thieves
And while buying stolen goods was not a crime, selling them was a different matter.
That meant Wild could squeeze the thieves themselves as much as he wanted
and if they didn't like it or tried to go somewhere else, he'd simply sell them to the authorities.
Wild developed a reputation.
And soon a gentleman by the name of Charles Hitchin came a-callin.
A few years before, Hitchin had paid £700 to become the under marshal of London
the city's top law enforcement figure.
But that was just a facade.
In reality, he ran an empire of extortion.
Demanding payoffs and services from the city's brothels
And running a prominent gang known as the Mathematicians.
He would "recover" stolen property and then like Wild, use his skills as a thief taker to line his pockets
And punish those that worked outside his operations
And now he wanted Wild as his deputy.
A man to accompany him that could intimidate under-performers, bribe aldermen
And confront owners of lost property in order to extort or blackmail them.
Hitchin provided the network. Wild, the organizational skill and menace.
So Wild learned the ropes
But he didn't like it
Hitchins operation lacked nuance.
Too many face to face meetings, greedy fees that alienated allies and targets alike
And Hitchin even sent extortion notes signed with his own name
In fact, the main reason Hitchin recruited Wild, was that he had been snared in an anti-corruption investigation.
To avoid scandal, city officials had let him retain his title but did order him to step away from his duties for at least two years.
So Wild, Hitchin explained, was to run the operation until Hitchin could make his glorious return
But as you can probably guess, it didn't shake out like that.
As soon as Hitchin stepped away, Wild started making changes.
He took less of a cut, paying the thieves more and charging his "customers" less.
He also stopped sending blackmail letters
and instead advertised his finds in newspapers where victims would see them
When a client's seeing one of these advertisements visited his offices,
He'd greet them and take notes telling them to return in a few days
Once they did, he'd say he'd found the thieves and negotiated a ransom for the goods
But Wild never touched money (apart from his small fee of course)
The clients paid the thieves and the thieves then gave Wild a cut of that money
along with the goods that he would return to the client.
No evidence he'd orchestrated the whole thing.
He'd even catch the thieves for an additional fee (not his thieves of course) but the competition's
Upon Hitchins return, Wild went into business for himself.
He developed new avenues of crime: stealing account books and ransoming them back to businesses.
He hired etiquette coaches and dancing masters to teach his pickpockets to blend in at society balls
to better make off with the guests jewels.
And, unlike Hitchin, he actually fought crime.
Using his gang to perform police work and then of course
loudly, publicly giving newspapermen accounts of his adventures
and the public hungry for tales of crime and justice lapped it up.
When a gang of footpads shot and killed a gentlewoman during a botched mugging,
Wild swore revenge. His agents dragged the perpetrators in and Wild interrogated them
until they each had incriminated the other and revealed their hideout.
His agents besieged the building, catching the final suspect going out a back window
and putting a bullet in his shoulder.
In another case, Wild personally subdued an armed highwayman
Tackling the man, pinning his hands and biting his chin until he dropped his pistol
Wild was a hero to the city and also got very rich at the same time clearing 400 pounds a year.
And scandal refused to stick to him even as he expanded his criminal empire.
But Charles Hitchin, did not appreciate Wild's success
Thieves increasingly deserted Hitchen's gang, fearful that Wild would send them to the gallows unless they pledged fealty
(which to be fair was a very realistic worry)
Wild was actively moving on Hitchen's organization
So Hitchin decided to hit back.
A pamphlet appeared on the streets without warning, exposing the details of Wild's organization.
But just reading the clumsy essay, Wild knew it was Hitchin.
So Wild responded with his own explosive pamphlet.
Not only did he expose the details of Hitchen's corruption scandal
but he also revealed Hitchin was a homosexual, Regularly extorting services from the city's gay brothels.
This ended Hitchen's career.
Georgian society, deeply homophobic, also just assumed that Hitchen's claims about Wild were lies.
And as a sign of his victory, Wild's pamphlet christened him with a new title:
Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland
He was now perceived as London's defender.
Wearing a fine sword and keeping crime at bay at the height of his power
But little did he know,
Wild was about to encounter his most dangerous rival:
a lowly thief named Jack Shepherd
who in time would burn his corrupt Empire to the ground.
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🎶 "Alleyways and Truncheons" by Tiffany Roman 🎶