Charles Peace: 19th century burglar and murderer

Charles Peace was a notorious 19^th century murderer. He was once described as ‘the greatest and most naturally gifted criminal England has produced’. 

He was born in Sheffield in 1832, the son of an animal trainer. A childhood accident led to him wearing a false arm with a hook at the end of it. He also became a master of disguise as well as a burglar.

In 1876, while burgling a house near Manchester, he shot and killed a policeman who surprised him. Two brothers were arrested for the murder and sent for trial. Peace attended the trial, with a view to ensuring that his involvement was not suspected, and was relieved when one of the brothers, William Habron, was sentenced to death.

Peace did have a legitimate occupation, that of a picture framer, which he carried out at his home in Sheffield. He became friendly with a civil engineer named Arthur Dyson and his wife Katherine. Despite being married himself, Peace became enamoured of Mrs Dyson, who at first encouraged him in his pursuit of her. However, Katherine Dyson eventually thought that Peace was becoming too insistent and tried to break off the attachment.

The Dysons moved to a different part of Sheffield, but Peace continued to bother her. One night, Mrs Dyson discovered Peace in her back yard armed with a revolver and screamed loudly. Her husband chased Peace down the road but Peace turned and fired at him with fatal consequences.

Peace escaped to London where he rented a villa in Peckham. He adopted a new persona, taking the name John Ward, and turned his attention to inventing scientific instruments. At least, this was what he did during the day – at night he continued his old habit of burgling houses. During one such escapade in Blackheath he shot at and wounded a policeman but that did not stop him from being captured.

His true identity as Charles Peace became known and, having been sentenced to life imprisonment for wounding the policeman, he was then sent to Sheffield to stand trial for killing Arthur Dyson. During the train journey he was able to jump from the train in a bid to escape but was injured as he did so and was soon recaptured.

At his murder trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution he confessed to the killing of the policeman at Manchester for which the Habron brothers had been found guilty. Fortunately, William Habron’s sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment and he was duly released and pardoned, receiving £1000 in compensation.

© John Welford

Jonathan Wild: 18th century criminal and thief-taker

 

Jonathan Wild was a particularly nasty piece of work, operating on both sides of the law in early 18^th-century London. He was responsible for sending many fellow criminals to the gallows until eventually he overreached himself and suffered the same fate.

He was born in Wolverhampton in 1683 and worked there as a bottle maker. In 1707 he deserted his wife and went to London where he was soon imprisoned for debt for four years. This proved to be a useful introduction to the capital’s underworld. When released, he opened a brothel with his mistress, whom he had met in prison. One of his activities was to act as a prostitute’s associate who picked the client’s pockets while the latter’s attention was otherwise engaged.

For ten years, from 1714 to 1724, he controlled London’s criminals by playing them off one against the one, and against the authorities, in a complicated web of intrigue and influence. He acted as a thief-taker and also as a receiver. He pursued thieves with great tenacity, earning large sums of money under the Parliamentary reward system. However, there was more money to be made by acting as their receiver while continuing to inform on them to the officers at Newgate.

Wild organised the thieves into gangs which he controlled, planning their crimes and then disposing of the proceeds in a highly original way. Instead of fencing the stolen goods, he set up a lost-property office and sold the recovered items back to their original owners who, it seemed, were prepared to pay more for the return of the goods than he would have been able to get from professional receivers.

He instructed his gangs to discover the identities of those they were about to rob so that he could, after a suitable interval, notify the victims that their possessions had been ‘recovered’. He paid his thieves poorly, but kept their loyalty by arranging rigged trials when they were caught and by exacting swift revenge if they double-crossed him.

In 1720 the government was naïve enough to consult him about the rising crime rate. Wild told them that they should increase the rewards for capturing criminals – one of his own sources of profit.

It could not last – Wild’s activities had made him too many enemies. A new Act of Parliament was passed that closed the legal loophole on which Wild had theretofore depended. He was finally charged with receiving ten guineas as a reward for helping a lady to recover some stolen lace, a theft that he himself had organised. The law that brought him low was informally known thereafter as Jonathan Wild’s Act. In his defence he pleaded that he had brought 67 criminals to the gallows.

On the night before his execution, in 1725, he attempted suicide by drinking laudanum but did not succeed. He was therefore in very poor health when he reached the gallows at Tyburn. The executioner was prepared to allow him time to recover his senses but the enraged crowd demanded that the sentence be carried out with no further delay, and this was duly done.

 © John Welford

 

The hanging of Dr Dodd

There were two sides to the character of the Reverend Dr William Dodd. Born in 1729 he became an Anglican clergyman, a scholar, a Cambridge academic and an excellent preacher. He was active in a number of charities, some of which he instigated, such as the Society for the Relief of Poor Debtors and the Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons Drowned at Sea. He was at one time a royal chaplain to King George III.

However, he also had a taste for the high life and for living beyond his means. It was this side of him that would eventually lead to his downfall.

One of his ventures forced him to flee to Switzerland, where he stayed with his friend and former pupil Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield. On returning to England he lost large sums of money in gambling and had no choice but to borrow heavily.

In February 1777 he got the notion that he could relieve himself of debt by committing a fraud that involved Lord Chesterfield. He forged a bond for £4,200 – an absolutely massive sum at that time – in Chesterfield’s name. He pretended to be Chesterfield’s agent in raising a loan, the money to be forwarded via himself. However this was never going to work, because the forged bond was always going to be sent to Chesterfield on completion, and when this happened it was immediately disowned because Chesterfield recognized the handwriting of his old tutor.

Dodd’s defence was that the bond was only going to be temporary arrangement and he always intended to repay it, but this did not convince the jury at his trial for forgery at the Old Bailey. The guilty verdict came back after only ten minutes.

During the 18^th century there were 350 offences on the statute book that carried the death penalty, and forgery was quite high on the list. This was therefore to be Dr Dodd’s fate.

This now proved to be a “cause celebre”, with much public sympathy being aroused for Dr Dodd. It was generally thought to set a bad example for such a respected clergyman to be hanged in public. His most eminent supporter was Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote a number of speeches for Dr Dodd to use in his appeal for a royal pardon.

However, the appeal came to naught and Dr William Dodd was duly hanged at Tyburn on 27^th June 1777. There was a considerable outcry after the event, with calls being made for a lessening in the severity of the penal code, but this probably had much to do with the fact that the protesters came from the same high social class as the late Dr Dodd.

A 15-year-old orphan named John Harris was hanged on the same day as Dr Dodd, his offence being the theft of two and a half guineas. There was no outpouring of concern for his fate, least of all from Dr Johnson.


© John Welford

Jenny Diver: a noted female criminal

Jenny Diver was born in about 1650 and died on the gallows in 1710 after a lifetime of thievery, mostly in London, in which her cleverness at relieving wealthy people of their property excited a certain amount of admiration, although not from those who were her victims!

Jenny Diver usually worked as the leader of a team, although she was central to the action and never simply sent others to do her dirty work on her behalf.

One stratagem was to wear a dress to which was attached a pair of realistic-looking false arms and gloved hands. The dress would also be stuffed with a cushion to make her look pregnant. Jenny would attend church and sit between two rich ladies. While the ladies knelt to pray and most eyes were reverentially closed, Jenny’s real hands would get to work, relieving the ladies of their valuables and passing them to her companions in adjoining pews. Should one of the ladies discover that they had been robbed, nobody would suspect the pregnant lady whose hands had been in her lap the entire time!

The fainting fit was another good ruse. Jenny would choose a crowd of people, such as might be watching a royal procession go by, then pretend to faint and fall to the ground. While everyone nearby showed concern and tried to help her, their pockets would be swiftly plundered by Jenny’s team members.

One of her more outrageous exploits came when she knocked on the door of a house in Wapping that belonged to wealthy lady named Mrs Mapplebeck. Jenny Diver’s “footman” explained that she was not feeling well but had not got her smelling salts with her. Mrs Mapplebeck asked them in while she went upstairs to find her own bottle of smelling salts – Jenny waited in the lounge while the footman was sent to wait in the kitchen. They took good advantage of this time to help themselves to a good collection of Mrs Mapplebeck’s belongings from both rooms. Just for good measure, when they left the house they drove off in Mrs Mapplebeck’s coach!

The following day, Jenny Diver went to the theatre, still in Mrs Mapplebeck’s coach, and flirted with a young gentleman from Yorkshire who was clearly well-to-do. She suggested that he visit her at home the next day, when her husband would be away. This was, of course, not her own home but a lodging house rented for the purpose. After the young man had undressed and was looking forward to what would follow, Jenny’s maid knocked on the door to say that the “husband” had returned early and was on his way upstairs. The man from Yorkshire hid under the bed and only dared to emerge half an hour later, to find the place devoid of Jenny, her maid, his clothes, and all the cash and valuables from his pockets!

An expected end but immortality of a kind

Jenny Diver later moved to Bristol where her luck ran out and she was arrested and deported to the American colonies. However, she conned her way back and resumed her old ways, only to be caught one last time. This time there was no second chance and she ended up being hanged at Tyburn. However, her reputation was such that she was accorded the dignity of being taken to the gallows in a coach rather than a wagon. She also became a character in John Gay’s 1728 celebration of low life, “The Beggar’s Opera”.

© John Welford

Charles Ponzi, fraudster

The maxim that a fool and his money are soon parted is never more true than when the method used for doing the parting is a fraudulent financial scheme of the “pyramid” type in which people are promised massive returns on their investment but there is no proper foundation for such confidence. Such schemes are often dubbed “Ponzi schemes”, but why are they so called?

The name derives from Charles Ponzi, although the man in question did not invent the scheme that bears his name. However, his activities became so notorious during the early years of the 20th century that the label “Ponzi scheme” has been attached to frauds of this type ever since.


Charles Ponzi’s early career

Charles Ponzi was born in 1882 in Lugo, a small town in northern Italy. His early years are shrouded in mystery, but it is known that he emigrated to the United States in 1903 with only $2.50 in his pocket. He settled in Boston.

He drifted from one dead-end job to another, until in 1907 he became a junior clerk at the Zarossi Bank in Montreal, Canada. He did well at his job and became a manager, which was when he realised just how the bank was operating in terms of its investment business.

The Zarossi Bank paid six per cent to investors on their cash deposits. However, these sums were not paid from the proceeds of careful fund management such as property investment but from the fresh deposits of new investors. Eventually the bank failed, with the owner fleeing the country with as much cash as he could carry, and leaving Charles Ponzi and the other employees out of a job.


Time in jail

Ponzi forged a cheque to pay his way back to the United States, and this led to him being thrown in jail for three years. He did not get to the States until 1911, when he again fell foul of the law and served another prison term, this time for two years.

It is often said that prisons are universities of crime, and this certainly proved to be true for Charles Ponzi. While in prison in Atlanta he came across two notorious criminals, namely Mafia boss Lupo Saietta and crooked financier Charles Wyman Morse. There is every possibility that he learned a great deal from those two masters of crime.


A legitimate business

After making his way back to Boston, he tried several new ventures which were, surprisingly for him, legitimate. One of these involved correspondence with potential customers in Europe and this led him to realise that a new line of business could open up for him.

When a correspondent wanted to ensure a reply by Charles Ponzi he or she would send an international reply coupon (IRC) which could then be redeemed in the form of US postage stamps to cover the cost of the return letter or packet. However, during the period following World War One the relative values of these coupons as against American postage stamps was not the same – an IRC bought in Italy, for example, was worth more in American stamps than the actual cost of the postage.

There was therefore an opportunity to buy IRCs in Italy and make a profit on them in the United States. Although the profit margin was small, if this operation could be ramped up significantly there was a potential fortune to be made.

So this was what Charles Ponzi started to do. There was nothing illegal about this trade, but the difficulty was that it was impossible to carry it out in volume because each transaction had to be performed singly by taking an IRC to a post office and redeeming it for stamps.


Criminal activity

However, by recruiting agents Ponzi was able to start trading, and he also invited people to invest in the trade with the promise of a high return in a short time (50% in 45 days). Some people even went to the extent of taking out large loans and mortgaging their homes in order to make investments that were as large as possible.

It was not long before Ponzi started to apply the principles he had seen at work during his previous employment at Zarossi’s Bank, such that his Securities Exchange Company, established in 1919, soon ceased to have much to do with IRCs.

Instead, Charles Ponzi grew very rich by persuading people to invest and paying them with the deposits made by later investors. The initial success of their investments persuaded people to re-invest their profits, and it was due to people surrendering what they had already won that enabled Ponzi to take a controlling interest in Boston’s Hanover Trust Bank, buy a huge mansion, and live the life of a multi-millionaire.


The bubble bursts

Needless to say, the bubble could not stay inflated for long! When questions were asked about how the business was financed, people started to call in their investments and an audit in August 1920 revealed a $7 million dollar black hole in the accounts. Ponzi had no choice but to plead guilty to fraud and was sentenced to five years in jail.

After that, it was all downhill for Charles Ponzi. Further charges and convictions followed, and he was eventually deported back to Italy in 1934 – he had never bothered to take US citizenship.

After a short time working as a financier for Benito Mussolini he fled Italy to end his days in South America, where he died penniless in 1949.

However, despite the sad example of Charles Ponzi’s career from rags to riches and back to rags, others since his time have sought to succeed where he failed, with the same inevitable result. The best that can be said for Charles Ponzi is that his name lives on.

© John Welford

Al Capone, aka Scarface

25^th January 1947 was the day on which Al Capone died at the age of 48, from a stroke complicated by pneumonia and syphilis.

He started his criminal career in New York, where an encounter with the brother of a woman he had insulted led to the facial injury that earned him the nickname of Scarface, but at the age of 20 he moved to Chicago where he soon became the leading mobster in the city, with earnings coming from gambling, prostitution and fixing horse races, although the era of Prohibition was what really propelled him to the top.

It is believed that Capone’s industrial-scale activities involving the manufacture and sale of illegal alcohol earned him around $100 million a year, and he took every step he could to protect that income by eliminating his rivals.

The most notorious event in his catalogue of crime occurred on 14^th February 1929 (St Valentine’s Day) when four members of his gang turned up at a Chicago garage that was the headquarters of a rival bootlegger named Bugs Moran. Fortunately for Moran he was across the street when Capone’s men arrived, but six of Moran’s men, plus a garage attendant who had the misfortune to be there at the time, were not so lucky as they were lined up against a wall and shot dead.

Capone’s ability to intimidate and bribe his way to wherever he wanted meant that pinning any sort of criminal charge against him was virtually impossible until somebody pointed out that he had never filed an income tax return. The master criminal of Chicago therefore went to jail for tax evasion.

Capone spent more than eight years in jail, firstly at Atlanta where he bought special privileges for himself, but then at the much tougher fortress prison of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

He was a broken man when he was finally released in 1939 and was able to retire to his estate in Florida. The effect of syphilis and his time in jail was to bring on mid-life dementia, which meant that he was no threat to anyone during his final years.

© John Welford