The police were of opinion that these robberies were both the work of the same hand. But it was not until the autumn that they traced some of the notes stolen from the Custom House to Jordan and Sullivan. About this time also suspicion fell upon Huey, one of the clerks, who was arrested soon afterwards, and made a clean breast of the whole affair. There was a hunt for the two well-known housebreakers, who were eventually heard of at a lodging in Kennington. But they at once made tracks, and took up their residence under assumed names in a tavern in Bloomsbury. The police lost all trace of them for some days, but at length Sullivan’s brother was followed from the house in Kennington to the above-mentioned tavern. Both the thieves were now apprehended, but only a small portion of the lost property was recovered, notwithstanding a minute search through the room they had occupied. After their arrest, Jordan’s wife and Sullivan’s brother came to the inn, and begged to be allowed to visit this room; but their request, in spite of their earnest entreaties, was refused, at the instigation of the police. A few days later a frequent guest at the tavern arrived, and had this same room allotted to him. A fire was lit in it, and the maid in doing so threw a lot of rubbish, as it seemed, which had accumulated under the grate, on top of the burning coals. By and by the occupant of the room noticed something glittering in the centre of the fire, which, to inspect more closely, he took out with the tongs. It was a large gold brooch set in pearls, but a portion of the mounting had melted with the heat. The fire was raked out, and in the ashes were found seven large and four dozen small brilliants, also seven emeralds, one of them of considerable size. A part of the “swag” stolen from the bonded warehouse was thus recovered, but it was supposed that a number of the stolen notes had perished in the fire.
The condign punishment meted out to these Custom House robbers had no deterrent effect seemingly. Within three months, three new and most mysterious burglaries were committed at the West End, all in houses adjoining each other. One was occupied by the Portuguese ambassador, who lost a quantity of jewelry from an escritoire, and his neighbours lost plate and cash. Not the slightest clue to these large affairs was ever obtained, but it is probable that they were “put up” jobs, or managed with the complicity of servants. The next year twelve thousand sovereigns were cleverly stolen in the Mile End Road.
The gold-dust robbery of 1839, the first of its kind, was cleverly and carefully planned with the assistance of a dishonest employee. A young man named Caspar, clerk to a steamship company, learned through the firm’s correspondence that a quantity of gold-dust brought in a man-of-war from Brazil had been transhipped at Falmouth for conveyance to London. The letter informed him of the marks and sizes of the cases containing the precious metal, and he with his father arranged that a messenger should call for the stuff with forged credentials, thus anticipating the rightful owner. The fraudulent messenger, by the help of young Caspar, established his claim to the boxes, paid the wharfage dues, and carried off the gold-dust. Presently the proper person arrived from the consignees, but found the gold-dust gone. The police were at once employed, and after infinite pains they discovered the person, one Moss, who had acted as the messenger. Moss was known to be intimate with the elder Caspar, father of the clerk to the steamship company, and these facts were deemed sufficient to justify the arrest of all three. They also ascertained that a gold-refiner, Solomons, had sold bar gold to the value of £1,200 to certain bullion dealers. Solomons was not straightforward in his replies as to where he got the gold, and he was soon placed in the dock with the Caspars and Moss. Moss presently turned approver, and implicated “Money Moses,” another Jew, for the whole affair had been planned and executed by members of the Hebrew persuasion. “Money Moses” had received the stolen gold-dust from Moss’ father-in-law, Davis, or Isaacs, who was never arrested, and passed it on to Solomons by his daughter, a widow named Abrahams. Solomons was now also admitted as a witness, and his evidence, with that of Moss, secured the transportation of the principal actors in the theft. In the course of the trial it came out that almost every one concerned except the Caspars had endeavoured to defraud his accomplices. Moss peached because he declared he had been done out of the proper price of the gold-dust; but it was clear that he had tried to appropriate the whole of the stuff, instead of handing it or the price of it back to the Caspars. “Money Moses” and Mrs. Abrahams imposed upon Moss as to the price paid by Solomons; Mrs. Abrahams imposed upon her father by abstracting a portion of the dust and selling it on her own account; Solomons cheated the whole lot by retaining half the gold in his possession, and only giving an I. O. U. for it, which he refused to redeem on account of the row about the robbery.
Moses, it may be added, was a direct descendant of the Ikey Solomons already mentioned. He was ostensibly a publican, and kept the Black Lion in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane, where secretly he did business as one of the most daring and successful fencers ever known in the metropolis. His arrest and conviction cast dismay over the whole gang of receivers, and for a time seriously checked the nefarious traffic. It may be added that prison life did not agree with “Money Moses;” a striking change came over his appearance while in prison. Before his confinement he had been a sleek round person, addicted obviously to the pleasures of the table. He did not thrive on prison fare, now more strictly meagre, thanks to the inspectors and the more stringent discipline, and before he embarked for Australia to undergo his fourteen years, he was reported to have fallen away to a shadow.
As the century advanced crimes of fraud increased. They were not only more numerous, but on a wider scale. The most extensive and systematic robberies were planned so ingeniously and carried out so cleverly that they long escaped detection. Among the earliest of the big operators in fraudulent finance was Edward Beaumont Smith who uttered false exchequer bills to an almost fabulous amount. Another fraud greatly developed was the wilful shipwreck and casting away of a ship which with her cargo, real or imaginary, had been heavily insured. The Dryad was a brig owned principally by two persons named Wallace, one a seaman, the other a merchant. She was freighted by the firm of Zulueta and Co. for a voyage to Santa Cruz. Her owners insured her for a full sum of £2,000, after which the Wallaces insured her privily with other underwriters for a second sum of £2,000. After this, on the faith of forged bills of lading, the captain, Loose by name, being a party to the intended fraud, they obtained further insurances on goods never shipped. It was fully proved in evidence that when the Dryad sailed she carried nothing but the cargo belonging to Zulueta and Co. Yet the Wallaces pretended to have put on board quantities of flannels, cloths, cotton prints, beef, pork, butter, and earthenwares, on all of which they effected insurances. Loose had his instructions to cast away the ship on the first possible opportunity, and from the time of his leaving Liverpool he acted in a manner which excited the suspicions of the crew. The larboard pump was suffered to remain choked up, and the long-boat was fitted with tackles and held ready for use at a moment’s notice. The ship, however, met with exasperatingly fine weather, and it was not until the captain reached the West India Islands that he got a chance of accomplishing his crime. At a place called the Silver Keys he ran the ship on the reef. But another ship, concluding that he was acting in ignorance, rendered him assistance. The Dryad was got off, repaired, and her voyage renewed to Santa Cruz. He crept along the coast close in shore, looking for a quiet spot to cast away the ship, and at last, when within fifteen miles of port, with wind and weather perfectly fair, he ran her on to the rocks. Even then she might have been saved, but the captain would not suffer the crew to act. Nearly the whole of the cargo was lost as well as the ship. The captain and crew, however, got safely to Jamaica, and so to England, the captain dying on the voyage home.
The crime soon became public. Mate, carpenter, and crew were eager to disavow complicity, and voluntarily gave information. The Wallaces were arrested, committed to Newgate, and tried at the Old Bailey. The case was clearly proved against them, and both were sentenced to transportation for life. While lying in Newgate, awaiting removal to the convict ship, both prisoners made full confessions. According to their own statements the loss of the Dryad was only one of six intentional shipwrecks with which they had been concerned. The crime of fraudulent insurance they declared was very common, and the underwriters must have lost great sums in this way. The merchant Wallace said he had been led into the crime by the advice and example of a city friend who had gone largely into this nefarious business; this Wallace added that his friend had made several voyages with the distinct intention of superintending the predetermined shipwrecks. The other Wallace, the sailor, also traced his lapse into crime to evil counsel. He was an honest sea-captain, he said, trading from Liverpool, where once he had the misfortune to be introduced to a man of wealth, the foundations of which had been laid by buying old ships on purpose to cast them away. This person made much of Wallace, encouraged his attentions to his daughter, and tempted him to take to fraudulent insurance as a certain method of achieving fortune. Wallace’s relations warned him against his Liverpool friend, but he would not take their advice, and developing his transactions, ended as we have seen.
A clergyman nearly a century later followed in the steps of Dr. Dodd, but under more humane laws did not lose his life. The Rev. W. Bailey, LL. D., was convicted at the Central Criminal Court, in February, 1843, of forgery. A notorious miser, Robert Smith, had recently died in Seven Dials, where he had amassed a considerable fortune. But among the charges on the estate he left was a promissory note for £2,875, produced by Dr. Bailey, and purporting to be signed by Smith. The executors to the estate disputed the validity of this document. Miss Bailey, the doctor’s sister, in whose favour the note was said to have been given, then brought an action against the administrators, and at the trial Dr. Bailey swore that the note had been given him by Smith. The jury did not believe him, and the verdict was for the defendants. Subsequently Bailey was arrested on a charge of forgery, and after a long trial found guilty. His sentence was transportation for life.
A gigantic conspiracy to defraud was discovered in the following year, when a solicitor named William Henry Barber, Joshua Fletcher, a surgeon, and three others were charged with forging wills for the purpose of obtaining unclaimed stock in the funds. There were two separate affairs. In the first a maiden lady, Miss Slack, who was the possessor of two separate sums in consols, neglected through strange carelessness on her own part and that of her friends to draw the dividends on more than one sum. The other, remaining unclaimed for ten years, was transferred at the end of that time to the commissioners for the reduction of the National Debt. Barber, it was said, became aware of this, and he gained access to Miss Slack on pretence of conveying to her some funded property left her by an aunt. By this means her signature was obtained; a forged will was prepared bequeathing the unclaimed stock to Miss Slack; a note purporting to be from Miss Slack was addressed to the governor of the Bank of England, begging that the said stock might be handed over to her, and a person calling herself Miss Slack duly attended at the bank, where the money was handed over to her in proper form. A second will, also forged, was propounded at Doctors’ Commons as that of a Mrs. Hunt of Bristol. Mrs. Hunt had left money in the funds which remained unclaimed, and had been transferred, as in Miss Slack’s case. Here again the money, with ten years’ interest, was handed over to Barber and another calling himself Thomas Hunt, an executor of the will. It was shown that the will must be a forgery, as its signature was dated 1829, whereas Mrs. Hunt actually died in 1806. A third similar fraud to the amount of £2,000 was also brought to light. Fletcher was the moving spirit of the whole business. It was he who had introduced Barber to Miss Slack, and held all the threads of these intricate and nefarious transactions. Barber and Fletcher were both transported for life, although Fletcher declared that Barber was innocent, and had no guilty knowledge of what was being done. Barber was subsequently pardoned, but was not replaced on the rolls as an attorney till 1855, when Lord Campbell delivered judgment on Barber’s petition, to the effect that “the evidence to establish his (Barber’s) connivance in the frauds was too doubtful for us to continue his exclusion any longer.”
Foremost on the Millbank calendar stand those of the upper classes, who were afterwards styled in Australia, “specials,” or “gentlemen convicts.” It was said that of these there were at one and the same time in Millbank two captains, a baronet, four clergymen, a solicitor, and one or two doctors of medicine. The tradition is ben trovato, if not exactly true. Of course in such a prison there would be representatives of every class, and although the percentage of gentlemen who commit crimes is in the long run far below that of the middle or lower classes, there is no special natural law by which the blue blood is exempted from the ordinary weakness and imperfections of humanity. Most of these genteel people who found themselves in Millbank owed their fate to forgery or fraud. There was the old gentleman of seventy years of age, who had been a mayor in a north-country manufacturing town, and who had forged and defrauded his nieces out of some £360,000. The officers spoke of him as “a fine old fellow,” who took to his new task of tailoring like a man, and who could soon turn out a soldier’s great-coat as well as any one in the prison. Another convict of this stamp was Mr. T., a Liverpool merchant in a prosperous business, who was a forger on quite a colossal scale. It was proved at his trial that he had forged thirty bills of exchange, amounting to a total of £32,811, and that he had a guilty knowledge of one hundred and fifteen other bills, which were valued in all at £133,000. In his defence it was urged that he had taken up many bills before they were due, and would undoubtedly have taken up all had not the discovery of one forgery exposed his frauds and put an end suddenly to his business. Still, said his counsel, his estate could have paid from twelve to fifteen shillings in the pound, and it could hardly be maintained against him that he had any moral intention of defrauding. Judge Talfourd appears to have commented strongly, in summing up, upon such an idea of morality as this; and then and there sentenced Mr. T. to transportation for life. Unfortunately for the criminal himself, his sentence came a little too late: had he gone out to New South Wales twenty years earlier, with his commercial aptitude and generally unscrupulous plan of action, he would have run well to the front in the race for wealth amidst his felon competitors.
More contemptible, but not less atrocious, was the conduct of Mr. B., who had taken his diploma as surgeon, and practised as such in many parts of the country. His offence was bigamy on a large scale: he was guilty of a series of heartless deceptions, so that it was said the scene in court when this Blue Beard was finally arraigned, and all his victims appeared against him, was painful in the extreme. He was brought to book by the friend of a young lady to whom he was trying to pay his attentions. This gentleman, being somewhat suspicious, made inquiries, and discovered enough to have him arrested. Four different certificates of marriage were put in evidence. It seemed that, although already married in Cornwall, he moved thence and took a practice in another county, where he became acquainted with a lady residing in the neighbourhood, who had a little money of her own. He made her an offer, married her, and then found that by marriage she forfeited the annuity she previously enjoyed. After a short time he deserted her, having first obtained possession of all her clothes, furniture, trinkets, and so forth, which he sold. His next affair was on board an East Indiaman bound to Calcutta, in which he sailed as surgeon—wishing doubtless to keep out of the way for a while. Among the passengers was a Miss B., only fifteen years of age, who was going out to the East with her mother and sisters. He succeeded in gaining her affections, and obtained the mother’s consent to the marriage on arrival at Calcutta. He made out, by means of fraudulent documents prepared on purpose, that he had inherited £5,000 from his father, and offered to settle £3,000 on his bride. The marriage came off in due course at Calcutta, and then the happy pair returned to England. Soon after their arrival, Mr. B. deserted his new wife in a hotel in Liverpool, and after that he began the affair which led to his detection.