The Criminal Alphabet (34 page)

There's a black-market trade in stolen
spare wheels and tyres, and it became known as
boots
because
they're the part of the vehicle that touches the ground.

See
Boot Burglar

Bo Peep
is rhyming slang
for sleep, as in ‘That guard didn't even see me coming, I sent him Bo before he knew
what was happening'.

To be
borasic
means to
have no money (rhyming slang: borasic lint = skint). (Borasic lint is a medical
dressing made from surgical lint soaked in acid and glycerine.)

See
Polo

Bosh
is an all-purpose
word and widely used, for example as an exclamation of surprise
–
‘I opened
the peter and
bosh!
There was the cash!'; or as the sound of hitting
someone – ‘I gave him the right-hander,
bosh!
';
or to mean adding
filling agents to illegal powdered drugs like heroin or cocaine – ‘How many times
has this parcel been boshed?'.

Bottle
can have many
meanings. The first, or original, meaning is from rhyming slang: bottle and glass =
arse. This then led to ‘Aris' (rhyming slang: Aristotle = bottle). From here, it
became a slang word for courage, as in ‘I hope you've got the bottle for this
bit of work
'. It can also mean to attack somebody with a glass
bottle, as in ‘Terry jumped in to stop the fight and somebody bottled him', as a
warning that you are being followed, as in ‘Here, do you know you've got
Old Bill
on your bottle?', and as slang for followed someone, as in ‘Yeah,
I bottled him all the way to
the
jug
' (as in
following closely behind, on someone's arse, hence bottle). In the 1970s it became
slang for
dipping
or picking pockets – ‘to go out on the bottle' –
because most men carry their wallet in a rear pocket. In prison, it means to smuggle
drugs or other items in your anus, as in ‘Yeah, I've got the parcel bottled' and,
finally, it can be used as a word for male homosexual prostitutes.

Bounce
is West Indian
slang meaning to go or leave, as in ‘It's getting late, man's gotta bounce.' It
refers to a particular walk sometimes referred to as ‘the Brixton bounce', bouncing
on the balls of the feet and moving with loose hips.

See
Bake

In the days before all nightclub doormen
had to be registered with the police, and before they were renamed ‘crowd control
technicians', they were known as
bouncers
. It comes from the fact
that if a customer caused a problem they would be ‘bounced' from the premises –
thrown out without ceremony. Aggressive punters would be bounced off the walls and
the pavement in order to subdue them.

To be described as
Brahms
means that you are very drunk (rhyming slang: Brahms and
Liszt = pissed). Both Brahms and Liszt were classical composers so it seems a shame
that they should end up as rhyming slang for the modern inebriated.

See
Elephant's

A
brass
is bit of
northern slang for a prostitute that has made its way down south over the years,
so-called because you need brass (money) in order to pay one.

Brass knuckles
are
knuckledusters, heavy metal weights, sometimes spiked, that are worn over the
fingers and can do terrible damage to an opponent in a fight. For a lot of violent
criminals knuckledusters are their weapon of choice. Being hit by a pound of spiked
brass on the end of someone's fist will knock someone out if they're hit in the
right place. Before
bouncers
had to be registered with the police
and licensed, some of them would carry a set of brass knuckles for dealing with
leery punters.

Bread
is money (bread
and honey = money), initially from London at the turn of the twentieth century when
you'd count yourself lucky to have a meal of bread and honey, but it also became
very popular in America during the hippy era and beyond.

Bread-and-jam-eaters
is
a disparaging Romany term for the children of the
gorja
(non-Gypsies). The
message is that Gypsy children are better fed, better looked after and have a
greater sense of family than the children of non-Gypsies.

A West Indian word used primarily by the
young, and meaning brother or brothers. A lot of West Indians are brought up in
strongly religious households where the Bible is required reading, so the word
‘brethren' is not uncommon. Young black criminals and prisoners use the word to
describe anyone who is a member of their gang or family or a friend, as in ‘Boy,
man's looking to go Pentonville; I got nuff nuff
bredrin
there.'

Brek
is
borstal
and prison slang for breakfast. When calculating a
prison sentence the con will have to take into account the breakfast on the last day
of the sentence, as they will not be released from prison until after, so a trainee
or prisoner coming to the last couple of weeks of a sentence might say,
‘I've got ten and a brek left to do.'

See
Carpet

To have it on your
Bromleys
means to run away or escape (rhyming slang: Bromley by Bow =
toe), as in ‘I just about had the lock off the peter when
Old Bill
crashed the door and I had to have it on my Bromleys.'

See
Have it Away

In the criminal world, if you describe
someone as
brown
it means they are dead (rhyming slang: brown bread
= dead). The nickname of one of the most infamous South
London
criminals of the 1960s, Freddie Foreman, was Brown Bread Fred, because it was said
that if you crossed him you would end up dead. Even though he was from South London,
Brown Bread Fred had a long association with the equally infamous East End Kray
Brothers. Brown Bread Fred was arrested along with the Kray gang in 1966 and charged
with the murder of Frank ‘The Mad Axeman' Mitchell and disposing of the body of Jack
‘The Hat' McVitie.

To
brown
someone is to
perform anal sex on them, as in ‘Jimmy is a
raving iron
; that's how
come he had the
black
on those MPs, he was browning both of them'
(‘Jimmy is a blatant homosexual; that's how he was blackmailing those Members of
Parliament, he was sodomizing both of them').

See
Raving iron

Browns
is the
brown-coloured two-piece prison uniform that used to be worn by unconvicted remand
prisoners while awaiting trial or sentence in British prisons.

See
Blues

Bunce
is money (rhyming
slang: Bunsen burner = earner), as in ‘I'm going to see if Knuckles has got that bit
of bunce he owes me.' An
‘
earner' is usually illegal money that has
been ‘earned' through skulduggery. The word bunce became quite popular in the 1970s
when it was used in the television series
The Sweeney
. The programme used a
lot of
criminal and police slang which then came into public usage
and was subsequently abandoned by criminals.

See
Bung
,
Nelsons

A
bung
is a purse or
moneybag. The word dates back to Elizabethan times when there were no wallets and
men tended to carry their money in a cloth bag attached to their belt. In the 1950s
the word became slang for a bribe, often to the police, as in ‘Sergeant Plod is
willing to lose the evidence if we give him a bung'. In the 1960s ‘earner' (a sum of
illegal monies) was added to ‘bung', as in
‘I'll see if we can bung Plod an
earner'. By the 1990s ‘bung' was in common usage, particularly in the tabloid press
and often in the context of football managers and agents taking bribes. It's rarely
used by criminals these days.

See
Bung nipper

A
bung nipper
(also
called a cut-purse) was one of a pickpocket team in the eighteenth century who would
carry scissors or a sharp blade in order to cut purses and money bags from the belts
of their victims while they were being distracted by other members of the team. The
original bung nipper died out when wallets were invented and men no longer carried
their money in a bag tied to their belt, though in the early 1990s a form of bung
nipping made a bit of a comeback in the armed robbery trade. Security guards were
issued with a radio alarm device that was strapped to their belts and would emit a
powerful alarm if the cash box was taken from them. In order to counter this, armed
robbers would carry a Stanley knife to cut the radio
from the belt
and take it with them when they took the cash. As long as the device stayed in close
proximity to the cash box, the alarm wouldn't be activated.

See
Dipper

In prison slang a
burn
is a roll-up or a bit of tobacco, quite literally describing the act of
burning tobacco to smoke.

See
Bible pages
,
Civvy
,
Tailor-made

To be
busy
is to be
nosey or to involve yourself in things that don't concern you. Criminals have a
particular hatred for people like this as they, understandably, like to keep their
actions quiet and secret.

To be asked to have a
butcher's
at something is quite common in the underworld
(rhyming slang: butcher's hook = look). If you are going to rob a bank, for example,
you would definitely go and have a butcher's at the premises before committing
yourself.

See
Dekko

The
buzz
is the
addictive feeling some criminals get from committing crime, and this is particularly
true of armed robbers or others who put their lives and liberty in jeopardy in the
pursuit of crime. To some, it's like a drug high, and some professional criminals
describe it as an addiction. It's a feeling of euphoria generally felt during the
commission of the crime, followed by an emotional ‘crash' when the crime is
over.

To be
cakobako
with
something means that you've got more than enough of it. It's from ‘caked', meaning
to be heavily covered with something, and is used quite a lot by North London heroin
addicts when describing someone with a lot of drugs or money, as in ‘The geezer's
cakobako with tackle but his prices are
bollocks
'.

The Cali
is a run-down
area of council estates around Caledonian Road in North London, now infamous for its
hoisting
teams, just as parts of South London are notorious for
their armed robbery crews. The favourite shop of choice for the Cali mob is Gap,
because it is so easy to get away with stuff and it always has a resale value. In
fact, going hoisting in the Cali is now known as ‘going out on the Gap' or
‘Gapping'. One refinement to the hoisting genre was introduced by a little firm in
Bermondsey (also, coincidently, junkies), and this was known as
the bird game
.

See
Blitzing

In East London
canister
is slang for backside, though it probably started out as a mishearing of
keister
, which is from the German word
kiste
, meaning a chest
or box. So if someone from the East End offers you a kick in the canister, they
intend to kick you in the rear. However, in South London your canister is your head,
as in ‘Oh yeah, he's definitely brown
bread
, he took three from a
.45 in his canister'.

See
Bottle (2)

A
carve-up
is a
share-out of stolen loot, as in ‘We had fifty large off the van and then went down
to Freddie's
slaughter
for the carve-up'.