Report from the Underworld
By PETA FORDHAM
was sitting in one of the glossier West End
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establishments when the news of the murder of the three policemen broke. My companions were friendly but not what is usually called res- pectable, Yet no stern moralist from the popular press could have been more censorious in the condemnation of the murderers of those three young men. 'Put them up against the wall and shoot them, that's the thing to do with them,' said the first. 'Bring back hanging for people like that,' said the second. The third, rather more cautious, added, 'Does us no good.'
Dickens, a first-class reporter and a great ob- server of human nature, knew well enough that the underworld does not approve of murder. It did not do so then; it does not do so now. Par- ticularly, it does not approve of the murder of policemen. 'Villains' are but human—perhaps a little more human than some; and their reac- tions, like those of the rest of us, are concerned mainly with self-preservation. The murder of a policeman (even more so, the murder of three policemen) rouses a corporate feeling of com- radeship in the police which spurs them on tb work in a way that nothing else can ever do. They go into action with speed and the resulting turnover is so thorough that everyone in the underworld trembles. There is no knowing what will come to light.
The second reason for dislike is also con- cerned with self-preservation. Relations between the villains and the police are not nearly as strained as is commonly believed. There is, in fact, a good deal of symbiosis; the qualities and morals of every relevant policeman are carefully assessed and known in the appropriate manors. Fox and hound know each other very well and if there is not actually friendship (far from it), there is, at least, a reasonable tolerance of each other's point of view. 'They have got to live the same as us,' I have heard said, though I have also heard it added, 'I can't think why.' The murder of a policeman always upsets the status quo and everything is made uncomfortable. The few police who can be 'straightened,' as the saying goes, become unaccountably distant and the underworld does not know where it is for a time. Hence another very good reason for dis- liking this particular killing.
In the third place, we come to the general moral feeling that murder is a bad thing; that it is not liked. It is unprofessional; it lets the side down; it is a thing that respectable thieves who form the hard core of the underworld do not go in for. There is, of course, no one more censorious than the criminal of another's wrong- doing which is not in his own line. The burgled burglar is the most indignant man on earth. My impression from many recent conversations, before and after this murder, is that there is not nearly so much grassing as there used to be. The attitude now is that, while you do not inform the police, because informing is the really deadly sin of the underworld, at least you don't help the murderers. The disgusted reaction is very real, there is no doubt about it, but it is not so deep as all that. The people who were most censorious about the police killings were not averse to taking advantage of the great manhunt to go thieving; and I am told that there was almost a record number of jobs knocked up. After all, business is business. In the upper world, so in the under.
A major crime always stirs something in the
Underworld and curious things come floating to the surface of this usually muddy pool. What has been particularly interesting this time is that it was a crime obviously committed in a very small circle and only gossip was running around the usual channels. Sooner or later, however, con- versations almost invariably turned to the evils of gambling, a subject on which these circles should be informed if nobody else is; for the money that now pours across the counters of betting shops and round the gaming tables of London and the provincial cities is something to make even a respectable crook's hair stand on end. Gambling may be, and is, a national pastime now, but it has its roots, as always, in the underworld and it is the underworld which is its prop and stay.
It is also the underworld which suffers the most from the results of enormous sums of money changing hands. `Ubi praeda, ibi patria,' as Tacitus said of the Germans. He might well have applied it to today's underworld scene. For where there is booty the gangsters move in, and where the gangsters move in trouble follows for the private operator who has been unused to things on such scale. It has never ceased to surprise me how many Jemima Puddle-Ducks there are in the underworld; even the mention of sage and onions does not make them suspicious! Put the picture of large gain before the eyes of any ordinary crook and he is blinded to the conse- quences; but the results continue to amaze them and it is from these people that the toughest cry has been heard this week to clean up gambling.
Not tc stop gambling. Nobody suggests that you can stop gambling; but what is suggested by those who should know is that it would be a good idea to follow continental principles and municipalise the casinos and most of the gambling in order that most of the profits might be stopped from going into private hands. I do not think that a passionate advocate of this, who kept me up to a very late hour explaining the exact arithmetic of something I did not wish to in- vestigate, had any real interest in playing fields, cancer research or the victims of polio; but he waxed remarkably eloquent on the amount of money that had gone into a certain gentle- man's pocket which might have been devoted to all these ends. Since we have dropped the hypocrisy that used to keep bookies' runners on the streets, we might as well perhaps drop the hypocrisy that gambling is so evil that we must have nothing to do with its profits. If the profits are not used sensibly, they will certainly fall into the wrong hands; and if the Devil is quoting scripture for his purposes here, the Devil has usually been assumed to be a very intelligent gentleman.
Another thing that has come out of discus- sions on this crime is an almost laughable similarity to complaints made in the respectable world. 'The trouble is,' said one old crook, with several youngsters unusually enough nodding agreement, 'we haven't got a real leader.' The trouble is the underworld wants someone to control it the proper way. `Leadership, that's what we want.' Nobody about with inspiration,' said another. Whatever the moral issues involved, this is quite true. When there is a really top gang of skilled thieves—people who make crime pay and run things easily and smoothly—the bad gangs and the violent men are kept in their place. There is no one at the moment to take the place of an absent gentleman, whose name I shall not mention for fear of involving the SPECTATOR in libel, but whom any member of the underworld whose eyes chance to rest upon these lines will recognise clearly. His departure in terms of peace and quiet was a disaster.
Crime is becoming more international every day. It is no new thing for jewel thieves and others to exchange information and booty, but the fact that a well-dressed, well-heeled junior underworld travels the world has had the inevit- able result of spreading the crime net very much wider. It is just dawning upon some of these young hopefuls that Britain is going to lose its place in the criminal world, unless something happens to British crime. This is not altruistic jingoism: it is a hard fact that unless leadership emerges in the underworld, there is no doubt whatever that, with large sums of money sculling around, American leadership may take over. This is to be deplored, and is deplored. This story (to quote 'Frankie and Johnnie') has no moral, this story has no end. Exactly what is going to happen to British crime is impossible to foresee, but one thing is quite certain. Unless gambling is con- trolled—and quickly—so that it is seen not to pay as it pays at the moment, the results will be something we have not yet witnessed in this country.
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