The Criminal Alphabet (8 page)

See
Ringers and Clones

TDA merchants
are
basically car thieves, usually of the juvenile variety.

See
Touching dogs' arses
,
Twockers

The charge of stealing cars used to be
called TDA (Taking and Driving Away a motor vehicle), and young criminals found it
amusing to insult amateur car thieves by saying they were into
touching dogs' arses
. Amateur car thieves are the ones who steal cars just for
the fun of it, with no financial gain – so-called joyriders.

Twockers
are car
thieves, usually of the teenaged joyriding variety. On the whole, they are amateurs
who will use any method to steal a car but will usually rely on crudely smashing a
window, either with a sparkplug, centrepunch or by hitting it with a hammer. They
aren't interested in selling the car on, although if a buyer is available they will
usually sell easily removable parts such as the stereo, battery and, sometimes, the
wheels. The car will be driven around until it gets too
hot
, then
dumped or used for further crimes, such as ram-raiding, or to attract the attention
of the police in order to initiate a chase for the sheer excitement of it.

See
Ram-raiding
,
TDA
merchants

The Fraud Act 2006 states that the
crime of obtaining property by deception is committed by ‘a person who by any
deception dishonestly obtains property belonging to another, with the intention of
permanently depriving the other of it. Penalty – not exceeding ten years'
imprisonment'.

‘Working the con' is to be engaged in
spinning stories in order to part gullible people from their money. ‘Con', in this
instance, is short for ‘confidence trick', which is all about making people believe
one thing while the reality of the situation is something completely different. You
build up the person's confidence in what you are saying and then take their money.
For example, you might tell someone that you have some
hot
jewellery for sale when, in reality, what you have is
snide
, or
fake, worthless junk. It will be of no comfort to anyone who has had the con game
worked on them, but it relies almost entirely on the greed of the victim. Most
people, if they think they're getting a great bargain, won't question, or will be
willing to overlook, where the bargain is coming from. Con men thus rely on the
basest of human emotions. There are many small-scale cons being worked all over the
country every day – from sponsored swims to doorstepping
sharps
.
Most straight-goers don't even realize that they have been conned until afterwards,
and some will never know.

In the mid-1980s old yellow-stock bricks
became very popular with yuppies doing house conversions and renovations (they
needed the old bricks to blend in with the existing buildings), and prices went
through the roof. Builders were paying up to
£1.25 per brick, which
made the theft of yellow-stock bricks a very lucrative prospect. Some thieves would
even move into empty buildings and demolish them from the inside in order to steal
them. Others would
clipboard
the bricks from building sites.
Wearing a hard hat, a high-visibility vest and carrying a clipboard, they would
either divert deliveries to places where they could easily be lifted and driven
away, or wait until the bricks were delivered and reload them on to their own
vehicle. The
smother
of the clipboard, high vis and hard hat meant
that passers-by were fooled into thinking the workers loading the bricks were
legitimate. Some brick thieves even had the brass neck to pull up on sites and
brazen it out, telling the workers or owners that they were from the brick company
and were taking the bricks back, as they had been delivered to the wrong place by
mistake, and that the correct order was on its way. A van loaded with old
yellow-stock bricks was as good as money in the bank.

See
Clipboarding
,
Smother

Bujo
, or
the
bag game
, is a Gypsy fortune-telling con that goes back at least
two hundred years. It involves convincing the
mark
that their money
has been cursed. They are told to seal it in a cloth bag and bring it to the elder,
or shaman, in order for it to be blessed and have the curse lifted. During the
‘blessing' the money is secretly removed from the bag and replaced with worthless
paper or stones. The victim is told that the ‘spirit' of the curse changed the money
out of spite. This is a ruse still being extensively used by African conmen.

See
Mark

Clipboarding
is an old
con that made a big comeback in London in the late 1980s. Basically, it's a
misdirection con in which the con merchant poses as an official or somebody
connected to the chosen target premises. Clipboarders usually wear shop coats or
overalls and, obviously, carry a clipboard and pen. They position themselves at the
rear of a commercial premises and watch for delivery vans and lorries delivering
goods, sometimes working on inside information about delivery times, loads and so
on.

Once they spot a van or lorry pulling in
to deliver a load, they will approach the driver even before he gets out of the cab,
waving the clipboard as if it gives them authority, tell them that there's been some
kind of hitch and redirect them either to premises nearby which they have rented or
entered illegally, or to another quiet yard or parking space in the vicinity. The
clipboarder helps the driver to unload the goods, waves them off and immediately
loads the goods into their own vehicle and heads off to sell them. The delivery
driver is used to seeing men in overalls waving clipboards and will usually be
completely duped. Anything stolen in this way is pure profit and can be sold on for
ridiculous prices. If the delivery driver grows suspicious and starts asking
questions, the clipboarder usually just shrugs and walks away. Clipboarding is a
low-risk/high-value piece of thievery.

See
The Brick Game

In the typical illegal street-trading
team there will be the trader himself, the one who has the patter and does the
selling, and the lookout, or ‘doggy's'(doggy's eye = spy). The doggy's will hump the
gear about, help set up the
pitch, then keep an eye out for police
and trading standards officers. The traditional warning cry of the doggy's is
‘
Have it up!
', which means pack everything fast, the cops are
coming. A cry of ‘Have it up!' on any criminal enterprise is cause for concern and
will result in an unseemly scatter.

Illegal street traders and purveyors of
dodgy goods like nothing better than a large
hedge
of customers
around them as they spin their fanciful yarns in order to sell their
swag
. It's well known that pretty much everyone loves a
bargain, and it would seem that some members of the general public are quite happy
to shell out their hard-earned cash for non-kosher goods just as long as the person
they are buying from, even if he does look a bit shifty, has a nice line in patter.
A lot of street traders like to pretend that the goods they are selling are stolen
property, as in ‘This gear didn't fall off the back of a lorry, ladies and
gentlemen, I had to climb up on the lorry and push it off meself!!!', but in reality
most of the stuff peddled by street traders is legally bought ‘tutt' (poor-quality
items). One way in which illegal street traders do break the law when it comes to
what they sell is by intimating, either very directly or by insinuation, that the
goods are something they are not. For example, commercial wholesalers will sell
boxed yellow metal earrings
and
strips of stickers marked ‘9ct gold' – all
quite legal. Of course, if you were to take the printed stickers and put them on the
boxes of yellow metal earrings, you would be breaking the law, and this is quite
common practice among illegal street traders.

See
Toby

If something is classed as
Jekyll
, it means it is false, a fake, not the real thing. Like
boys
, it is second-level rhyming slang: Jekyll and Hyde =
snide
= fake. It came into usage during the Victorian era with
the popularity of the novella
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by
Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), which tells the story of a doctor who creates a
potion that he hopes will suppress his evil urges but which instead turns him into
his most evil self, and is still in use in many parts of London today.

See
The Snide game

One long and fairly complicated example
of working the con is
the long firm
. This is where you set up a
seemingly legitimate business and pay for your first couple of stock orders promptly
to give the impression that your enterprise is well run. Once you've built up the
confidence of your supplier, you hit them for large orders on credit, which you sell
out of the back door for a fraction of the value, then you abandon the business.
This was very popular up until the 1970s and is by no means dead in the water today.
Many people still work the long firm in various ways, and legitimate businesses are
regularly ripped off in this way. The most infamous practitioners of the long firm
in Britain were the Richardson brothers of South London. Described as a South London
‘Torture Gang' in the media for their treatment of slow payers and business rivals,
before being jailed for up to thirty years at the Old Bailey in 1966, Charles and
Edward Richardson and their gang were pretty accomplished long-firm merchants. The
proceeds of the long firm are sometimes used to finance other criminal ventures.

The
mark
is the victim
of a con, a
Toby
. The con game, much like the racecourse gangs of
the 1930s, had its own slang words and phrases, and ‘mark' is one of them. The mark
was so called because the con man would put a chalk mark on the victim so that their
partners in the con would know who they were to target. The word has now found
favour with younger criminals, who use it to describe any victim, and has been
popularized in the lyrics of American rappers, where it is used to mean a stupid
person or victim
.

The
raffle game
is a simple con that can be practised by con merchants
of all ages. It involves setting up a fake raffle with a desirable prize, or prizes,
and selling tickets to punters who feel they may be in with a chance of winning.
This con can be played in many ways and with as many prizes as you like. A
sophisticated version will have a visible prize with which to tempt the punters – a
car, say, or something of similar value. Sadly, as the raffle is fixed, nobody will
ever get their hands on it! The rule in this con is ‘the bigger the prize, the more
expensive the ticket'. You can pick up books of raffle tickets at any stationery
shop for less than a pound, and that is all you need. Selling the tickets for a
pound a piece and claiming the prize is worth £200 will bring in customers all day
long. As the tickets are sold to loads of different people, no one will ever know
who won (or that nobody won, in fact). Most people, especially in pubs when they've
had a few drinks, will buy a handful of raffle tickets and forget all about them. If
they do remember, the majority will merely shrug and assume that
someone else has won. It's a perfect con, guaranteed to bring the money rolling in
and carrying little danger of the perpetrator being sussed.

The sharp
is a
little-known con game extensively used by Gypsies and Travellers. It involves going
from door to door offering to sharpen household implements – knives, chisels,
shears, scissors, the blades of lawn mowers, secateurs, and so on. Basically, it's a
simple con which involves charging cash for a service that will never be provided.
In order to carry out the sharp all you need is a small metal file, a can of oil and
some old newspapers. You knock on the doors of houses, preferably in middle-class
residential areas, offering to sharpen a variety of household and garden tools and
implements. If a householder hands over, say, a set of knives, the con artist
carries them out of sight of the owner (saying that they are taking them to the
sharpening wheel in the back of their vehicle) and either gives the blades a rub
with the file or, if you don't have a file, runs the blades up and down a lamp post
or kerb to get a burr on them. They then smear oil over them, wrap them up in
newspaper, take them back to the owner and charge around £65. When handing the
‘sharpened' tools back, the con man will say something like ‘Careful there, my love,
those blades are now so sharp you could have your fingers off!' and tell the victim
that they should leave the oil on the blades for at least a couple of hours, which
will give the con merchant plenty of time to vacate the area. If the victim asks to
come and watch the blades being sharpened, they'll generally be told that insurance
forbids anyone being in the vicinity of the sharpening wheel because of flying
slivers of metal, and that the work is done in the back of a truck with
the doors closed so there is nothing to see. As in all cons, cash
is king; anyone involved in the sharp will refuse a cheque, perhaps by saying that
several have bounced in recent years. Some sharpeners can earn up to £1,000 a day
with little or no outlay or overheads.

See
On the Knocker

The snide game
became
quite popular in London around the late 1970s and involved fake jewellery that had
been stamped with a hallmark. The jewellery itself – heavy rings, bracelets, chains,
watches, and so on, all without hallmarks – would be bought cheaply and a forger
would mark them using a set of metal dies and a hammer. Once marked, the jewellery
would pass as genuine under any quick visual examination. Any jeweller would be able
to spot the fakes immediately, of course – but that's why you would never sell to a
jeweller! Selling snide depends entirely on the greed and gullibility of the buyer.
Those at the sharp end – the street sellers, usually young criminals – would buy
several items from the supplier, paying pretty low prices, i.e. £5 per item, and
then go into shops, markets and factories with a story about the items being
hot
– very similar to the way illegal street traders work – and
needing to offload them quickly at half price. The rule was that you could charge
whatever the market could stand. For example, a bracelet marked ‘9ct gold' for which
you had paid £5 might go for as much as £40 to the right customer, but would, in
reality, be worth about 6 pence in scrap. It's surprising how many law-abiding
citizens will part with their cash if they think they're getting a bargain. Of
course, if they tried to sell the piece on to a legitimate buyer, they would quickly
find out they had been conned. The beauty of this crime, for the criminal, however,
is that there is no comeback
from the buyer. Who's going to go to
the police and explain that they have paid cash for an item that they know, in their
heart of hearts, is stolen? ‘Snide' is also used as an insult for a false or sneaky
person.