There were some criminals who created specific difficulties for Scotland Yard not merely because of their elusiveness, but also because they were regarded by some as anti-heroes: figures who received a certain reluctant admiration from newspapers and the reading public alike.
Though the Metropolitan Police was the admired bulwark against forces of violence–the trusted bobbies on the beat–there was a type of crime that carried the thrill of escapist intrigue. This being the very finest Knightsbridge and Belgravia salons, and spirited away breathtakingly beautiful jewels.
These were the kinds of stories that blazed across the newspapers and magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. And after the Second World War, the detectives of Scotland Yard had to deal with other less fragrant transgressors who also began to command a kind of social cult appeal. Most notably, certain London gangsters and hoodlums.
This public fascination with certain kinds of crooks has a very long history indeed, stretching back into the eighteenth century to the crimes of highwayman Dick Turpin and jailbreaker Jack Shepherd. These sorts of wrongdoers–who target the rich not with violence but amusing guile and subterfuge–have always given readers a vicarious thrill. From meticulously planned country house artwork heists to the daring and seemingly inexplicable cracking of impregnable safes, these crimes have caused a huge number of headaches for Scotland Yard. Nonetheless, they fed and continue to feed the wider popular imagination.
The puzzles in this section test your inner evil genius with safe codes to be decrypted, mazes of mansion corridors to navigate and guards and dogs to avoid. From the mathematical challenges of security systems to conceiving foolproof getaway routes, being a diabolical mastermind and outwitting Scotland Yard is not easy.
Although it might sound morally dubious to say so, society jewel thieves enjoyed a golden age in the 1920s and 1930s, and judging by the reports, Scotland Yard detectives themselves sometimes held them in a grudging awe. Especially striking was the 1930s criminal who became known to the public as ‘Tiptoes’. Here was a thief who broke into expensive Mayfair apartments when the occupants were out or away, and as well as helping himself to jewellery and valuables, would leave his calling card written in lipstick on a mirror: ‘Tiptoes’.
He was an operator who fearlessly stole across roofs, and silently forced windows open. A man who then sleekly slipped back into darkness. When, at last, he was apprehended by sharp-eyed detectives, it turned out that this suave acrobat was actually a rather timid young man from south London. Tiptoes was his more glamorous alter ego.
Tiptoes’ youth was not an anomaly. Another criminal, 27-year-old George McRaigh, was caught by Scotland Yard operatives in 1921 after a long career of jewel thefts. The detectives told the newspapers of McRaigh’s fantastical life. He was ‘a swell cracksman’ (meaning terrifically good at opening safes), he ‘mixed with the best society’, ‘dined at the smartest of hotels’ and more than this he spent ‘five pounds a day on champagne for his friends’. That five pounds went much further in 1921 than it would do today.
A few years later, a Scotland Yard source briefed The Times about the rise of the swanky criminal. ‘The jewel thief is usually a “Raffles” type rather than Bill Sikes’, ran the report. (Arthur Raffles was a fictional gentleman burglar in a series of popular short stories written by E. W. Hornung; an elegant anti-hero who was driven to crime sometimes more by compulsion than any financial need.)
‘He will frequent the best hotels, sit in the stalls at theatres, go to the best enclosures at race-courses. A thief who was recently caught’, the report continued, ‘had beautifully manicured hands which he protected with lavender kid gloves, while his pocket-set of burglar’s tools was enclosed in a neat leather case with chamois leather coverings for all the sharp-edged tools’.
Jewel thieves with impeccable dress sense and sharp wits continued to plague the aristocracy and those with great wealth. In 1946, the Duchess of Windsor, visiting England with the Duke and staying in a house borrowed from the Earl and Countess of Dudley–Ednam Lodge, in Sunningdale near Windsor–had £25,000 worth of jewellery (according to the Duke’s estimate) stolen by a thief who had sauntered in through the front door. A friend of the Duchess, which most probably meant the Duchess herself, told the newspapers: ‘The robbery took place at dusk on Wednesday evening while the Duke and Duchess were on their way back from London. No-one heard anything’.
The stealthy thief, not noticed by any staff or groundsmen, seemed to know exactly what he was after, stealing the black box containing the jewellery. Inspector Capstick was on the case and noted prints beneath the Duchess’s window which showed how the criminal had left the house. A little later, the black box itself was found, discarded on a nearby golf course. Some jewels were left inside. The thief had made his careful selection, most probably based upon what he could sell through intermediaries without the pieces being instantly recognised, and escaped.
Nonetheless, the Yard persisted–and five years later in 1951 they made their way out to Windlesham Court in Surrey. They had had a tip-off from a source that some of the jewels had been buried in the grounds, presumably until the heat had died down and they could be retrieved and sold internationally. The police dug, but they found nothing. Possibly they were too late. One of the difficulties with this sort of crime was precisely that it was the opposite of passionate. These were near-military operations planned coolly, carried out with nerves of ice, and before the escape the criminal would take the greatest care to ensure all traces of his crime would vanish with his ill-gotten jewellery.
It was undeniable that there was an element of romance here, so long as the victims were sufficiently wealthy, and completely insured. This was certainly the case with the Duke and Duchess; the jewels had been insured for a six-figure sum. The theft of beauty will always be a blow, but the absence of any financial consequences, in the eyes of most newspaper readers, meant these cases were thrilling and exciting.
This is why reporting of such transgressions focused on the method, rather than the morality, of the thieves. In the early 1930s, amid the opulent mansions of Park Lane and Mayfair, a thief in full evening dress carried out an audacious robbery as an unwitting family and their servants went about their evening routines. The target was one particular piece: a necklace worth £40,000 (obviously many times that now), made of graduated pearls set in platinum and interspersed with diamonds. It belonged to the wife of businessman Mr W. Mosenthal, and was stored safely in her boudoir.
Mr and Mrs Mosenthal were downstairs and there were servants going about their business all over the house. It was just after 6 p.m. Mrs Mosenthal went upstairs, and while she was in her boudoir, she realised the necklace was missing.
The police were called instantly and Scotland Yard detectives were at the house within minutes. They quickly fathomed three things. First, that there were witnesses outside who had not seen anything that appeared incongruous; second, a servant had seen a very elegantly dressed man climb into a car with several other less elegant figures; and third, whoever had taken the necklace clearly knew the layout of the house. How did he get in? It was possible this boulevardier had slipped in through the kitchen back door while the servants were bustling about preparing dinner. But Scotland Yard had another theory, too, that the crime had been so well prepared that the thief had a duplicate key for the front door. On this particular occasion, the theories were not sufficient to track down the languid thief but it did prompt other society hosts in the area to nervously tighten their own security. And since then, the Yard has built up a rather more impressive array of tools to outwit nefarious robbers.
These days there is of course a very much more extensive database (and not kept on cross-referenced cards, as in the old days), as well as formidable technological armoury, when it comes to apprehending jewel thieves. In the new world of CCTV and DNA, and with the invaluable element of strong international links, often the most debonair of thieves can be identified. Added to this, the security measures that the super-rich can take now rather outdo the modest precautions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Yet today there are other sorts of villainous masterminds who can beat the system. Figures who, throughout the years, have been very well known to the detectives of Scotland Yard, yet have somehow contrived to put themselves just beyond arrest, normally by employing proxies to carry out their nefarious work.
A few years before the advent of the publicity-hungry Kray twins (when Ronnie and Reggie were still in short trousers), the East End had other crime lords, including the prominent Jack ‘Spot’ Comer. Jack was known as ‘Spot’ because of a large mole on his face. Brought up in Jewish Whitechapel, Comer ran a variety of rackets, including illegal betting. By the late 1940s, Scotland Yard was well aware of Comer’s illicit business concerns and occasionally their intelligence paid off handsomely and they managed to thwart some big operations. One such occasion, a 1948 raid on a goods warehouse at what was then known as London Airport, came to be known as ‘The Battle of Heathrow’. The Yard were on the case, and officers from the Flying Squad were lying in wait as the villains tried to set their plan in motion. However, Comer was one step removed from the attempted heist, acting as a financier and strategist as opposed to active participant. It took a physical attack on a journalist to actually get him arrested. In that instance, the sentence was a £50 fine.
Comer’s rackety concerns were rather badly hit by the rise of a former business partner, a determined and ferocious figure, called Billy Hill, a St Pancras-born Londoner who had been born into a family of criminality. He had essayed all manner of offences, from intimidation and violence to jewellery theft and protection rackets. He was a man permanently on the radar of the capital’s detectives. Billy Hill initiated gang warfare against ‘Spot’ while planning bigger and more daring crimes himself.
One involved an intricately planned central London postal van robbery in which Hill and his gang managed to grab £287,000 in cash (worth many millions now). The robbery had even been carefully rehearsed the Sunday beforehand in quiet streets. The gang manoeuvred their cars around a van to sandwich it and curious passers-by were told that they were making a film. The following year’s hit Ealing black comedy The Ladykillers (1955) included a reference to the robbery. Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not find it a subject for levity, however, and in the days after the raid he demanded regular updates. Unfortunately for Scotland Yard, the gang was able to spirit itself away, most probably out of the country.
But the Yard knew very well that Billy Hill was the kingpin. He had served one prison sentence in the 1940s, after which he met and fell into a long lasting relationship with Gypsy Riley. She took his name and became Gypsy Hill (not in tribute to the wooded south London area that had been popular with eighteenth-century Romani people–although her first name had been bestowed by her mother because the girl was thought to have a Romany ‘look’ about her). Gypsy was soon to become a much sought-after figure by journalists who relished the colourful copy that she always provided. Rumour had it that on the postal van raid, she was one of the getaway drivers. She had a formidably mercurial temper and Soho nightclubs would clatter with flying chairs if she felt herself to be slighted. Following the postal van raid, and a gold bullion heist, the next Scotland Yard learned of Billy Hill was that he and Gypsy were in Tangier. Billy had bought her a sophisticated nightclub. They called it ‘Churchills’.
There was an unavoidable fascination here, both for Scotland Yard and Fleet Street. A grudging acknowledgement that some criminal lives were irresistibly vibrant and glamorous. Even more maddeningly, and amusingly, Billy Hill decided to work on an autobiography, called with admirable brazenness, The Boss of Britain’s Underworld. The book’s proposition suggested that Hill had had a rackety youth but the gangs and the crime were now behind him. He held a book launch party in an expensive Soho restaurant and among the guests were journalists and policemen. Polite society, as expressed in the pages of conservative journals, shuddered. But before the grim and grotesque violence of the Kray twins and the Richardson gang, here was a figure who might have thought of himself as more of a rogue than a villain (even if the reality of maintaining control over Soho’s criminals meant menacing people with knives).
Hill justified his own criminal rapacity by claiming it was a national characteristic. He had been fascinated by Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, Clive of India and Captain Cook as a boy, and what else were they but thieves on a grand scale, sailing far-off oceans and simply grabbing, plundering and looting anything that they desired?
By the 1960s, Billy Hill had edged himself into the realms of the dissolute upper classes. There were rumours that he was working with a very well-known casino near Knightsbridge that nightly saw titled aristocrats at the green baize tables. The rumour was that, by using a system of ingeniously tampered-with cards, the high-rolling aristocrats were being cheated out of legitimate winnings in crooked games, and the proceeds were being shared between Hill and the house. As with the jewel thieves of previous decades, here was the attractively transgressive idea that a working-class man might be able to fleece landed wealth. Again, there was little Scotland Yard’s detectives could do about it.
Hill wore trilby hats and tinted spectacles, but Gypsy favoured expensive fur. In the 1960s, they became friends with the film actress Diana Dors. On their trips abroad to fashionable enclaves, Gypsy met Aristotle Onassis, second husband to Jackie Kennedy, and the artist Picasso. Billy Hill was always quite content to have held the self-bestowed title of the Boss of Britain’s Underworld but even underworld bosses have to call it a day at some point. And in the 1970s, he retired from crime and devoted himself to taking his young son to the zoo and Madame Tussauds.
While it is true that there always have been, and always will be, some criminals who evade the grasp of Scotland Yard’s brilliant detectives, over the years there have also been some who felt that they were above the law and far beyond the reach of the Yard, when in fact they could be hauled down with an immensely satisfying velocity. This was the case with Ronnie and Reggie Kray: two obvious sociopaths who throughout the 1960s somehow managed to lure celebrities into their spangled nightclubs, while they violently controlled the streets of London.
The Krays’ empire was spread across the city with protection rackets, viciously enforced. Neither twin was shy about using guns. Their circle of closest associates was incredibly tight, and obviously a word against the Krays to the authorities could spell doom not merely for the ‘grass’ but his entire family. Nevertheless, from 1966 onwards, Scotland Yard were patiently on the case, infiltrating and monitoring. During this time, the Krays carried out two murders that they fully believed they would get away with. That of a small-time gangster called George Cornell, who was shot in the head as he sat in ‘The Blind Beggar’ pub in Whitechapel, and that of an associate called Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was stabbed in Hackney. Detective Inspector Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read was determined to outwit them, in spite of a criminal community that would never dare speak out, and the Krays were arrested in 1969. Their trial was a sensation. Ronnie Kray, a paranoid schizophrenic, was committed to Broadmoor hospital and Reggie Kray was sentenced to life in Maidstone prison. Scotland Yard 1; the Krays 0.
There are some other crimes that appear almost cinematic both in their scale and in their colour. One extraordinary attempted theft came in the year 2000 but happily, Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad was there to thwart it. The target was the Millennium Star, a 200-carat diamond, almost priceless. It was located at a De Beers diamond exhibition at the Millennium Dome, just by the River Thames in Greenwich. The criminal plan: to use an excavator truck to crash through the wall of the Dome and ammonia and smoke bombs to knock out guards and security staff. A speedboat waited on the river to be used for the escape.
The Millennium Star was not the only prize the gang had their eyes on. The exhibition also featured a display of wildly valuable blue diamonds. The plot was months in the making and the Scotland Yard surveillance of it was equally patient.
The tip-off came from the Kent constabulary, who had been monitoring the three chief figures of the gang for some time. Scotland Yard had also come across the felons a few months previously, when they had attempted a security van heist in south London, in part using a lorry that was loaded up with Christmas trees as a weapon. The foliage of the trees disguised a big spike attached to the vehicle’s chassis that was to be used as a battering ram. This plan had been narrowly thwarted by a random commuter who saw the (temporarily) empty cab of the lorry, noticed the keys left in it, and removed them, to stop anyone stealing the vehicle. Some weeks later, the gang tried again, and succeeded in jabbing the spike into the security van’s doors. But on that occasion, a police car happened to materialise on the scene, and the putative robbers made a bolt for it down to the river where they escaped in a speedboat. From that point, they were ever more firmly on the radar.
The Yard had enough intelligence on the gang to take serious notice when the three key players visited the diamond exhibition a few weeks later. Caught on security camera, the men affected general interest in the exhibition. One had brought a home video camera and was taking shots of the jewels in their cases. The Yard shrewdly noted that a couple of further visits were made to the exhibition and also that each of these visits coincided with high tide on the Thames.
Linking up with Kent police, the Yard observed that one or two members of the gang were down at the coast learning how to use a speedboat. When the boat was brought up to London and moored opposite the Dome, the Yard thought it likely that the gang would strike.
Scotland Yard had of course notified De Beers and the Millennium Dome, and Operation Magician, the plan to thwart the raid, was every bit as spectacular as the planned crime itself. And at three o’clock on the morning of the planned heist, it was put into full operation. This meant not only a team of officers in the CCTV control room but also the substitution of all Dome staff, security and otherwise, for police officers.
As the criminals later averred, their plan was not to hurt anyone. Instead, they were going to bulldoze the Dome wall, race to the exhibition firing off smoke bombs, shoot a bolt gun at the reinforced glass of the exhibits, grab the diamonds and race to the speedboat to escape downriver in the direction of the estuary.
In reality, they succeeded only in smashing their way into the building and beginning to break the glass. They didn’t know that all the diamonds they were attempting to grab–from The Millennium Star downwards–were fake. And they did not even have a chance to get away with these as the police swooped in before the glass case had even shattered.
Meanwhile, on the river, the getaway speedboat was surrounded by water-borne police. Operation Magician was a complete triumph and as they were arrested, even the criminals seemed to show a little grudging admiration for the fleet-footedness of the Yard.
While it does not do to glamorise, the nature of a planned heist has just a note of romantic escapism about it. Even the conundrum of how anyone could hope to sell the Millennium Star–who would buy the world’s most famous stolen diamond?–tugged at the imagination. Nonetheless, as one of the gang ruefully said, if they had managed to get the jewels and take off down the river, they would have had ‘a blinding Christmas’.
The public appetite for reading about the plots of criminal masterminds never seems to diminish, sometimes to the exasperation of Scotland Yard veterans. The perpetrators of the 1963 Great Train Robbery, a violent heist in which over one million pounds was grabbed from a mail train in Buckinghamshire, were seen as the ultimate anti-heroes, with Buster Edwards, who succeeded in fleeing the country to south America, occasionally held up as a kind of popular folk hero. Even if the truth was that the robbery was brutal, leaving a coshed train driver with life-long injuries.
There was also the case of an elegant folk hero from a century before, described by Scotland Yard’s Inspector John Shore as ‘the Napoleon of the criminal world’. Adam Worth blazed such a criminal trail in late Victorian London that he directly fired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination. Worth was an American who, as a very young man, had begun his swindling career throughout the American Civil War. After cracking open a safe in Boston, Massachusetts–and being thwarted by the detective agency Pinkertons, who managed to track down his temporary hiding place for the loot–he fled the States and set sail for England. For a time, he travelled further, setting up an ‘American bar’ in post-Franco-Prussian-war Paris. Downstairs, this bar served drinks. Upstairs was an illegal gambling den. Any sign of the authorities, and the specially designed tables and chairs were folded and slotted into the walls and the floor.
Following this, Adam Worth (under the name Henry Raymond) came to London with his wife. He was determined to live in opulence, and move within fine society. As well as a flat in Piccadilly, he acquired a grand villa overlooking Clapham Common, then a very fashionable address. His manners and taste were so fine that he was ushered warmly into London’s social whirl. But his criminal activities continued apace. From careful cons to safe-cracking, he generated a small industry of carefully calculated misdemeanours, while always insisting to his henchmen that no violence was to be used.
Inspector John Shore of Scotland Yard was alive with suspicion. He knew that the threads of a capital-wide web of crime led back to Worth. But Worth was always far too careful to ever allow any hint of an association with the crimes that he commissioned. Inspector Shore had his house watched day and night, yet still there was nothing that might be presented to his superiors as proof of wrongdoing.
But Worth could not always resist the adrenaline injection of carrying out a crime himself, and in 1876, he fixed upon a target. The luminously beautiful portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, painted by Gainsborough, had come onto the market. It was being held at the Bond Street art dealers Thomas Agnew and Son. Late one night, Worth and two associates broke into the shop and snuck away with the painting. The associates were eager for Worth to find a buyer, so they could get their financial cut, but Worth had fallen in love with the portrait. He did not want to be parted from it, so he paid them their dues, and kept it. He took ingenious precautions, such as having a false bottom fitted in his travelling trunk in which the painting could be hidden, but with so many subordinates, he was bound to be given away at some point. And indeed, when one of his henchmen, a man called Bullard, was jailed in Belgium, Worth’s own nemesis came when he went over there to visit him. If Worth had simply confined himself to a simple prison visit, he would have been all right. Instead, having seen his friend, and faced with spending some leisurely hours in the city of Liege, Worth gave in to his old compulsions and staged a robbery–very badly. He was captured and the Yard’s Inspector John Shore was there to assure the authorities that Worth’s criminal history was vast and varied.
Although he had been caught red-handed, Worth simply denied everything else the Inspector accused him of. He would confess to this particular robbery, but everything else, he averred, was a tissue of lies. He served seven years in a Belgian prison and was then a free man once more.
The wider point of Worth’s flamboyant tale is that a few years after his arrest, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seized upon him as a model for the master criminal James Moriarty. Worth was the real-life strategist who gave inspiration for the fictional diabolical mastermind who left no trace, no clue, no sign. Moriarty outfoxed the authorities in Europe and America, and could only be out-thought and out-witted by Sherlock Holmes.
In reality, the law catches up with even the most amusing of serial transgressors, and, though we can admire the wit and determination involved in pulling off these lighter crimes, we will always be grateful for the sharp minds of Scotland Yard who eventually–after an entertaining chase–succeed in catching them.
So here then is a selection of puzzles that puts you in the shoes of the roguish transgressors, rather than those who catch them; tests of nerve and calculation designed to measure the extent of your inner diabolical mastermind. After all, as much as it takes logic to defeat crime, it also takes mental discipline to map out grand felonies and escapes as well…