Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1896 — ODD FEELINGS OF THIEVES [ARTICLE]

ODD FEELINGS OF THIEVES

SOMETIMES HAVE NO REASON OR WISH TO STEAL Criminals Work for the Excitement of the Thing-~Revelations by a Member of the Dark Fraternity. Thieves are not always mercenary. They do not themselves know very often why they steal, but in talks had with them from time to time, as they have been brought to metropolitan police headquarters they have shown unintentionally that many attractions besides plunder keep them what they are. Except with the kleptomaniac, gain may have been the primal purpose. 'J'he experienced thief, however, like the criminal born, is so far beyond the material view of his trade that he seldom reverts to that aspect of it. He has forgotten what he was after. “If you only could know ‘the feel’ of ‘lifting’ a watch when the man what carries it is looking right at you, and hear him apologize for shoving against you when you shove against him to make him not feel the lift.” A pickpocket said this one day, and as he spoke a light came into his eyes not unlike that with which an artist illuminates his praise of a bit of technique. It is an unfinished sentence, but that is the way thieves and politicians have of expressing themselves on such subjects. They assume intelligence in the listener. The politician says: “If you had a chance to do a job easy and no risk.” you would steal too, of course, is the conclusion of both. In fact, thieves assume that if con- ; ventional people understood their business from the criminal point of view, thieving would be less harshly judged and more universal. Let us see.

Captain O’Brien had among his prisoners last week a young man who had been one of three burglars w’ho entered a country house. He was weeping when the interview began. The captain had been trying to make him confess, and the burglar pleaded that the last time be bad “give up” (confessed) his comrades in prison had abused him for it. They kicked him when in line, tripped him to get him punished for stumbling, heaved granite chips at him when breaking stone, dropped things on him when in bed, jeered at him, ostracized him, and In various ways made his imprisonment hard. The reporter reassured him; it was an interview, not a confession, that was sought. Why was he a thief? He began by stealing bicycles. His sister had married a “bike-lifter,” and there was money in it, so he went into it for a sordid reason. But he related incidents of exciting chases, once, for instance when he was arrested, locked up, and discharged with a reprimand to the cop by the magistrate, and his tears dried. His face became animated. He told !ibout how in search of something not so “dead easy” he and his brother-in-law turned to burglary. Sneak robberies occupied them at first, and furnished enough excitement. Then they ventured flat-thiev-ing. There was some adventure in that till the man who afterwards led them to higher work laughed at their proud boast of triumphs over women and children in daylight. They must do a “second-story job” if they wished to acquire standing as “good men.” A country house was watched for days till the habits of the occupants were known to the plotters. Observation was supplemented by flirtations with the servants, and at last a night was decided on for the burglary. “Maybe you think it ain't nothing,” he said, “to be sneaking through a house you don’t know about. Most people are scared of men in the dark come to rob them. But I tell you the people that know the house and belong in it are on top every time. They know the ground. That night I trembled so me brother-in-law took away the candle out of me hand. I was all sweat and cold. The sounds Iwas awful. Everything creaked and tihe other fellows seen I was dead scared. So Bob he up and just to show’ me picked up a big pot and flung It against the wall. It blew up like a cannon and fell in pieces with a rattle on the wood floor. I stood still, me hair crept over me head, and me knees—oh, say, I’ll never forget tlipt. I couldn’t run or I would ’a’. And they laughed, or Bob did. Me brother-in-law only smiles like. He said afterwards he w’asn’t scared, but he was.”

Bob’s -bit of bravado was unprofessional. He and his pals are second-rate burglars. They struck a frightened woman in the face with a revolver that night, and the result was the case attracted extraordinary attention, and the burglars were run down and seiit to prison. They were out for adventure, and with that purpose was mixed up the idea of having something to brag about to bigger thieves. Even these burglars, however, did not talk about what they stole. That was utterly subordinate to the excitement and the tickled vanity, for they thought, of course, the reporter admired them. “Good men,” in criminal and police parlance, are thieves who do “clean work.” That is to say, they plan a robbery and carry it through without noise, without injuring anyone, and without leaving * a clue behind them. It is a rule among such men never to shoot. They carry arms and draw them to frighten alarmists into silence, but if a bluff is not successful they prefer to run. Commenting on this rule of criminal practice, a detective once soberly advised that the man who wakes up at night to see a masked face and a revolver over him, shout and jump up as if to fight. “Suppose the burglar isn’t a good man.” objected the reporter. “Then he'll do something so we can send him up for life.” This gave a glimpse of the detective’s professional view of crime, which is limited and unconventional like the thief’s. To hear a detective and a criminal talk about a crime is to get the facts in much the same light Both speak of the skill displayed in It. But the detective is only the dilettante after all. The burglar talks with the sensitive appreciation of the accomplishment which is professional in the broadest sense of the word. He has his vanity. Indeed, this weakness is so abnormally developed that it Is frequently the cause of his rpin. He must tell the women he knows and other criminals that he has “done a job,” especially if it is a good one. The

T assumption that it is a rudimentary conscience that stings him to confession is a popular error. His admissions ■ to the police are prompted by a hope i to lessen his sentence, and they are not called for till he is caught or believes . himself caught. His vanity makes him I tell bis kind and they repeat what be lias said till some stool-pigeon hears it Then the police know. The police work upon this weakness constantly through their agents. Captain O’Brien has reduced the method to a minimum of sacrifices; he says he makes none. But his staff have their “connections” ■ out all the time. The difficulty is to ! prove a case after the culprit is known. | Captain O’Brien knows, for example, I who robbed the Dennett restaurant. The men who did that left a “clean job”; they were “good men,” but they had to talk a little, and what they said reached the bureau. That was all the good it did. They could not be convicted. So with the Brentano safe burglary; the theives were named to the police, who had them sent away to another city for a crime there. Conviction here was impossible. Another difficulty that springs from the same appreciation of crime is that of confessions to “good work” by lesser thieves who did not do it They would be willing to go to prison if they could go with the glory of such a crime among the convicts who understand such things. This vanity and the statement quoted of the pickpocket show that there is an aesthetic sense of crime as of other things. It may be pretty hard to turn one’s mind far enough around to see crime in such a way as to perceive the applicability of the term, but the nervous excitement of a shoplifter as she is reaching for the object selected for theft is often the sensation that keeps her stealing. Some women not known as thieves at all, not in any need of their stealings, women well provided for in good homes, rob counters daily.