THE CLEVERNESS OF CRIMINALS. A LL men, the cynics say, and
some of the theologians, are potential criminals, and certainly they can produce one argument for their melancholy belief. All men have a sort of intellectual liking, betrayed by an otherwise unaccountable admiration, for successful, or partially successful criminals. They do not. even unconsciously approve their crimes, and they do not even unconsciously respect their persons ; but they do in the oddest way, the way which, under other circumstances, would be pronounced most sympathetic, acknowledge and exaggerate the qualities they believe them to possess. Ti they are violent criminals, they are accredited, sometimes in defiance of facts, with surpassing courage. Pirates, as a rule, have not been one whit braver than the sailors who defeated them ; and brigands are usually decidedly poor soldiers, treacherous, apprehensive, and cruel from fear ; yet the courage of buccaneers and the audacity of brigands have passed among all nations into proverbs, the truth being, we suppose, that the ascendancy of law weighs so strongly upon most men's spirits, that those who defy it are credited with a daring not attributed to men who display courage much more obviously upon the side which the law protects. A man who has broken jail cleverly is remembered much longer than one who has scaled a fortress, and Jack Sheppard has a greater popular reputation than the paladin of the seas, Lord Dundonald. Milton's Satan seems brave, not because he is brave, for he is a much mightier angel than any angel he bullies or defies, but because, with extreme want of common-sense, he is fighting the irresistible Power before whom all beings but himself instinctively bow down. Most thieves, swindlers, and burglars are comparatively fools, always inferior in brains to the lawyers who prosecute, or the police who trap them, and often, as any collection of criminal photographs will testify, decidedly cretin; yet a notion that they are unusually clever lingers ineradicable in the popular mind, and is not with- out an influence even on the educated. If a jewel robbery is committed, we always hear of the address of the robber, who has discovered where the jewels are kept, and the habits of the owners, and the weaknesses of the servant-maids,—who has, that is, exhibited a little, often a very little, of the skill of the most ordinary and half-experienced detective. If a criminal escapes from prison, the papers are full of compliments on his ingenuity, patience, and skill in adapting means to ends, though he has done nothing which an ordinary artisan, with a difficult job of repairs to finish, does not do every day. It takes more patience, and skill, and perseverence, for instance, to file a complicated door-key, than to cut through any number of bars ; and the work is, in most cases, done at once better and more quickly. Forgery, a low variety of the commonest imitative art, displaying no power except one possessed by almost every draughtsman—we doubt if there is a portrait-painter alive who, in a week, could not imitate any signature—always moves reporters to admiration ; while swindling, if only the amount obtained is sufficient, rouses judges and advocates to a loudly expressed conviction that the swindler, had he only been honest might, with less exertion, have risen high in any trade or profession. He would probably not have risen at all. Industry is wanting to all habitual criminals, and though there have, of course, been exceptions, still, as a rule, the most successful "plants," the robberies which have excited the most attention and raised their authors highest in the criminal class, have demanded no qualities in those who arranged them beyond those which are displayed by every minor actor, or wandering juggler, or composer of fiction for the "penny dreadfuls." It is said, for example, that most of the thefts of jewel-boxes, dressing- cases, and the like at railway stations, are effected by the thief quietly placing an empty cover looking like a travelling-bag over the article to be stolen, which he then carries away quietly as if it were his own. That is pronounced very ingenious, and is done every day by any juggler at a fair, or low-foreheadedlout who cheats bumpkins by " thimble-rigging " on a race-course. The "confidence trick" which has gone on for centuries, which has been exposed every week, and which still continues to find victims, depends for success on a certain low histrionic skill possessed by every naughty boy in a village academy, and displayed every day of the week by an inferior class of servants, when accused of carelessness or misbehaviour. And at least half the "ingenious frauds" of our day demand in their perpetrators no capacities higher than those displayed by tenth or twentieth-rate writers of cheap fiction, depend, in fact, for success upon persistent lying of the clumsiest kind.
The "great turf fraud," for instance, which was finished this week, and occupied judge and jurymen, and counsel and witnesses, for twelve days, seems to have extorted a sort of cry of admiration from the spectators, and to have induced the judge to display unusual severity against men "so dangerous to society," yet there is nothing in it beyond a certain talent for florid fiction. The conspirators, or their leader, invented a sort of brummagem Davenport Dunn, a "Mr. Andrew Montgomery," who had such a talent for betting that he had been able to net hundreds of thousands on the turf. They described him and his grandeurs in florid language in a printed paper headed "Sport,':, because there is a paper of that name, and stating that he wanted agents, sent it out to all the stupid people with money they could hear of. A victim bit ; forged cheques on a non- existent bank were sent to him or her to bet with ; he was advised to bet for himself, and if he did so, the money he remitted to the bookmakers indicated by "Mr. Montgomery" was appropriated. That is all ; and surely that all is within the power of any writer of fiction who composes stories for the most inferior rival of the London Journal. There was no more art in the contrivance than there is art in the advertisements informing the world that if a lady in want of an income will send five shillings, she will be told how to make fifty pounds a year, the method revealed being usually an agency for some kind of article not in demand. The swindlers did not tell their story specially well. They wrote rubbish about "Mr. Montgomery" and his successes such as ought not to have deceived a servant-maid. They spoke of "sworn bookmakers "as if betting on commission were a trade specially recognised and protected by the Legislature. They inserted in their letters assurances of good faith, "faith on oath," "paroles d'honneur," of which any competent begging-letter writer would be ashamed, as too inartistic, and calculated only to excite suspicion. The first decently intelligent human being, in this case a banker, to whom their story was related, exposed it at once, and they ex- cited " confidence " by a device, the forwarding of the unreal cheques, which, without their knowing it, exposed them to the terrible penalties of forgery. We see no evidence of genius whatever in their proceedings, unless indeed it consisted in this. Their chief, Benson, apparently had brain enough to understand that wealth is no guarantee for wisdom, that there may be as much simplicity and greed among people with money and educa- tion as among any yokels at a fair ; that, in fact, it was as easy to get thousands by florid falsehood as to get five-pound notes. There was a flash of insight, a sort of Napoleonic insight, in that ; but it is the only bit of unusual intelligence in the entire transaction. It seems incredible that even this hypothesis should be plausible, that there should exist in the world many men or women like Madame de Goncourt, with money and position, simple enough to believe that a bookmaker wished to make their fortunes, yet covetous enough to desire strongly to have them so made, but there can be no doubt that Benson hit a truth. Lawyers who deal with the rich, and especially " family " lawyers who are really trusted, know well that many among the rich want protection as much as if they were children or lunatics, that they will believe anything, and that they will run the most astounding risks in order to avoid trouble or to obtain without effort a sum of money which they do not in the least degree want, and would not try to earn by a single week of hard persistent labour either with head or band. They will trust people of whom they know nothing except that they are pleasant, will accept the most extraordinary stories, and embark fortunes on the faith of representations about which they dare not ask previous advice from the men on whose professional guidance they habitually rely. Why should it not be so ? There is nothing in wealth to guard a man from swindlers except the
power of obtaining sound advice, and nothing in position except its attendant inaccessibility. If those two barriers can be sur- mounted, there are proportionately just as many " sheep " among the great as among the little, perhaps more, because the rich have not the instinctive caution which protects those whom a mistake would ruin. That granted, there is very little need for special cleverness in swindlers, for the depth of human foolish- ness passes any guage. Every week some knowing farmer, or " shrewd " shopkeeper, or experienced dealer is taken in by that shallowest of all swindling tricks, the demand that he should "show confidence " in a casual acquaintance, by placing money or a watch in his hands, and every week the trick is exposed, without the smallest advantage to the next victim ; and why should simplicity be confined to the workers of the world whom hard necessity ought to make exceptionally distrustful? The truth is, and we wish it were more generally recognised, that the occasional success of swindlers is not the result of any exceptional ability in them, but a consequence of the extraordinary amount of foolish- ness in the world, foolishness which is not, as we are all apt to fancy, diminished in proportion either to education, or means, or even intellectual capacity. Men of the highest force, and men, too, specially familiar with the ways of criminals, having tried them by the hundred, are cheated every day by devices which any London inspector knows to be at least as old as civilisation.
Previous page
