THE LATEST ROBBERY.
WE do not understand the undertone of half-admiration in which some of the papers record the latest thievish ." exploit "in Upper Berkeley Street. It seems to us sharping of the 'vulgarest and oldest kind, remarkable among such performances only for the scale upon which the experiment was tried. No trick is better known to the police than that of enticing a countryman into a public-house, inducing him on one pretence or another to -" show money," hocussing him, and abstracting the cash ; and the -diamond robbery was effected precisely on this plan. Of course, the locale had to be changed, as the persons to be deceived were not country folks, but first-class London tradesmen ; but it is not very difficult in London to secure the temporary control of a fur- nished house of a good kind, either by bribing the persons in charge or by paying down a rent. This " Mr. Tyrrell" appears to have effected, and from this point the transaction was of the regular and unintellectual kind. A jeweller was to be induced to " show money" in the shape of diamonds, and he was induced by the very obvious expedient of offering to buy a quantity if they were sent to the buyer's residence for inspection. The offer
was a large one, and more than /6,000 worth of diamonds were accordingly sent " for inspection " in the charge of a trustworthy assistant. The dealers, people say, ought to have been more cautions, but the dealers' answer might be abso- lutely complete. They saw no ground of suspicion at all. " Mr. Tyrrell" may not have had the true stamp of the gentleman upon him, but what had that to do with the matter ? Three-fourths of the jewel buyers in London are not gentlemen in any sense which a shopman understands, and are all the better customers because they are not. Are Messrs. London and Ryder to refuse to sell their goods to anybody without a pedigree or an Oxford degree, to reject the money of the new man who wants jewels to advertise his wealth, and accept only that of the Peer, who knows that his trees have far more to do with his position than the contents of his wife's jewel-box? Fortunes are not made in that way, and the jewellers, in sending a trusted shopman with their property for inspection in a good house in Berkeley Street, were in no way departing from the ordinary course of business. They might have sent two men to be sure, one a powerful man to watch down stairs, as a rival firm is said to have done ; but that practice once generally adopted would be no security, as the thieves would only select houses with a back door. Two men could not in the case of honest buying insist upon admittance into a drawing- room without showing an offensive distrust of valuable customers. The man once in the room with the trea- sure, the female confederate's part began. She was as usual to hocuss the victim, and as a proffer of doctored brandy would have excited suspicion, and murder was to be avoided because its penalty is death, chloroform was resorted to. A handkerchief steeped in it was pressed on the victim's face, his resistance was overcome, and he was pinioned till the thief and his accomplice had time to make their escape. All this is in the lower style of criminal ingenuity,—indeed there is hardly any more ingenuity in it than in an ordinary garrotting robbery, a mere confidence in violence which, had the victim been a little stronger, might have been mis- placed. There was audacity of a kind, but even that was not extraordinary, for a bag containing £4,000 worth of diamonds was left behind,—that is, nearly a third of the booty sacrificed in the hurry to escape.
We should like to know the real opinion of the police about the cleverness of thieves. It is their interest to praise it, not to speak of the temptation arising from professional pride ; but we are half inclined to imagine that, like the supernatural keenness of detectives, thieving ability has been much exaggerated by literary skill. We can remember but one case, the railway gold robbery, in which unmistakable intellect was displayed, the superiority of one robber to another consisting in patience and businesslike mode of working rather than in any decided intellectual power. Watch- ing a house for weeks, interrogating or bribing the servants, scaling balconies and so on, are proofs no doubt of mastery in the bad trade, but not proofs that the man who gives them is an original genius in his art. Lord Lytton's idea of the man who had so mastered the will of a madman that he stole irresponsibly for the benefit of the responsible, is in conception far and away beyond anything any thief ever did, and Lord Lytton does not even attribute it to one. Forgers and swindlers and even receivers may sometimes be men of that kind, but a criminal capable of a plan, of a stroke of thieving generalship, as it were, would be too well aware that the vulgar methods of robbery are beset with dangers amidst which intellect is rather a drawback than other- wise, that society, if not cleverer than any thief, is always inde- finitely stronger. He would be sure to grow disgusted with the immense share his confederates would extort, with the perpetual necessity of precaution, and with the associates among whom he would be compelled to live. The best evidence perhaps of this is the infrequency with which we hear of robberies of the jewel dealers. They are necessarily the marks for the whole fraternity, yet they are seldom robbed except by processes about as intellec- tual as pocket-picking, and requiring scarcely more manual adroit- ness, and their establishments are protected by very obvious precautions. If thieves had capital, the jewellers would be in much greater danger ; but then thieves, like other men, if they had capital, would be afraid to lose it in very dangerous adventure.
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