The Criminal Alphabet (7 page)

See
Draggers
,
TDA merchants
,
Twockers

To be
tooled up
is to be
equipped for a crime, but particularly for a crime of violence. If someone asks you
if you are tooled up, they are usually enquiring whether you are carrying any
weapons on your person. Tooling up usually means obtaining a firearm. In prison, to
be tooled up is to be carrying a weapon for the purpose of violence.

See
April

If you are going to commit any sort of
crime, the minimum you are going to need in order to avoid detection, arrest and
imprisonment is a decent pair of
turtles
(turtle doves = gloves).
Gloves are of course used by criminals to avoid leaving fingerprints behind at the
scene of the crime, but
they are also useful if your theft requires
you to smash something made of glass (a window usually) in order to gain entry. Not
only do they prevent your hands being cut, but also, should that happen, they enable
you to avoid leaving behind an incriminating drop of blood from which DNA can be
extracted. However, in recent years, forensic experts have been able to take glove
prints from the scene of a crime, and if the perpetrator is caught with the same
gloves in their possession, they can be matched.

Twirls
is old-fashioned
slang for ‘keys'. The word derives from the fact that, once you put the key in the
lock, you then have to spin, or twirl, it in order to open the lock. At one time (up
until the 1960s) twirls referred specifically to skeleton keys, or ‘bones', which
are used in crime and, in particular, burglary. Car twirls were a set of
double-edged FS keys that would fit almost any car, up until car security began to
improve in the 1980s. To be ‘out on the twirl' was slang for thieving of any
sort.

See
Boys

As a professional or full-time criminal
you will class your criminal activities as
work
, because this is
what you earn your living from. Work used to be a word that applied only to armed
robbery. Robbers would talk of ‘having a bit of work' or ‘going to work'. In recent
years the word has come to be applied to most criminal activity from which the
criminal earns enough to avoid real work.

Section 12 of the Theft Act 1968 states
that ‘a person shall be guilty of an offence if, without having the consent of the
owner or other lawful authority, he takes any conveyance for his own or another's
use or, knowing that any conveyance has been taken without such authority, drives it
or allows himself to be carried in or on it. A person guilty of an offence shall be
liable to … a fine … or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six
months, or both.' This is the crime of taking a motor vehicle or other conveyance
without authority.

Transport is essential to most
criminals, not only for getting to and from the job but also as a way of carrying
off the loot. Since the early days of the twentieth century, motorized vehicles have
been used extensively by criminals in order to commit crime or to make a swift
getaway. In America, criminals were quick to spot the potential of the motor
vehicle, in particular the V8 Ford. Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, even
wrote a letter to Henry Ford praising his cars for being great at outrunning the
police. The Prohibition era led to the use of vehicles such as trucks for
transporting illegal liquor, as well as big, fast cars as outriders to protect the
loads. By the 1920s, all over America motor vehicles were being used for crime, from
the store-robbing antics of Bonnie and Clyde to the bank-robbing sprees of John
Dillinger, ‘Machine Gun' Kelly, et al. In Chicago, they would ‘bullet-proof' their
cars by filling the door panels with copies of the Chicago phonebook. It was so
thick it would slow down and absorb gunfire. In the UK, too, criminals were
discovering the benefits of motorized transport. One famous case occurred as early
as 1927, when PC George Gutteridge was shot dead in a quiet village in Essex by a
team of shop-breakers when
he tried to stop their car in the early
hours of the morning (a disturbing aside to this case is that the criminals shot PC
Gutteridge through both eyes after his death, as they believed the last image seen
by a victim was imprinted on their retinas). By the late 1940s in the UK cars were
regularly being used as getaway vehicles by snatch gangs who specialized in the
wages snatch. In those days, many firms and businesses paid their employees in cash,
and this meant that someone from the firm would have to pick the money up from a
bank (this was before the rise of cash-in-transit vehicles) and they would be a
target for robbers. The modus operandi of the old snatch gangs of the 1940s and '50s
was to jump the employee with the cash bag,
cosh
him over the head,
usually with a lead pipe, snatch the cash bag and then jump into a car driven by an
accomplice. Simple, but effective.

Vehicles were also a target of crime.
There are many reasons why vehicles are stolen: for example, joyriding, to sell on,
for parts, or to use in a crime. Lorry hijacking has been going on the world over
for almost as long as lorries have been around. It has been said that the word
‘hijack' comes from the American Prohibition era, when those who wished to steal a
lorry's cargo would approach the driver while he was taking a driving break and
greet him with a friendly ‘Hi, Jack' in order to allay his suspicions.

The latest uses of motorized vehicles to
commit crime are the practices of using powerful motorbikes to carry out
smash-and-grab raids on prestigious stores and designer shops and the raiding of
cargo lorries at stops and in lay-bys, during which the thieves will cut straight
through the canvas sides of the vehicles in order to get to the goods inside.

Of course, the police have kept up their
own use of motorized vehicles in their war against crime and criminals. The infamous
Flying Squad was so named
because it was the first group of
Metropolitan Police officers to use motor vehicles.

If you enter a stolen vehicle, knowing or
suspecting it to be stolen, you are liable to a charge of
allowing yourself
to be carried
in a stolen vehicle. This crime can net you up to two
years' imprisonment. It is perhaps the least serious of all the charges involved
with the theft of motor vehicles, but still not to be taken lightly.

See
Draggers

Section 12A of the Theft Act 1968 states
that ‘a person is guilty of aggravated taking of a vehicle if (a) the vehicle was
driven dangerously on a road or other public place; (b) owing to the driving of the
vehicle, an accident occurred by which injury was caused to any person; (c) owing to
the driving of the vehicle, an accident occurred by which damage was caused to any
property, other than the vehicle; and (d) damage was caused to the vehicle. A person
guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable on conviction under
indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or … if it is
proved that the accident caused the death of the person concerned, fourteen
years.'

Aggravated vehicle taking
is what you will be charged with if you use threats or actual
violence while stealing a vehicle. The American term is ‘carjacking', sometimes
shortened to ‘jacking', which is creeping into British usage, mainly through
youngsters who have been exposed to an almost constant diet of American films and TV
shows.

A
dragger
is a
professional car thief. The Romany word ‘drag' dates from the days of horse-drawn
vehicles, when the horse would drag the vehicle behind it. Hence, a place where cars
race is known as a ‘drag strip' and a main road as the ‘main drag'. Draggers steal
vehicles for a variety of reasons. Low down on the car-theft totem pole is the
joyrider – kids and amateurs who steal cars for the pure pleasure of driving, and
sometimes in order to annoy the police and entice them to chase the stolen car.
These people are not really criminals in the professional sense of the word, more
thrill seekers and car enthusiasts who cannot afford or are too young to buy their
own cars. In the old days, when car security was not really up to much, the perfect
way for a dragger to go equipped was with a set of
twirls
–
double-edged FS car keys that would fit almost any motor. You could normally get
these from a friendly, or bent, garage or a breakers' yard. It was simply a matter
of going through your keys until you found one that would fit the door. This would
inevitably fit the ignition, too. Any car was fairly easy to steal, but the
sure-fire winners with a set of twirls were Fords and Austins. Motorbikes were also
pretty easy to steal, though more often than not the potential thief needed to do a
bit of
hot-wiring
in order to start the ignition. The professional
dragger will steal cars to order, sometimes for armed robbery teams. Professional
draggers also make good money by stealing a vehicle, stripping down all the
removable parts and selling them on.

See
Boys
,
Hot-wiring
,
Twirls

Some say that the crime of
ram-raiding
originated in the north of England, around
Tyneside, in the 1990s, but it has
actually been around since the
1930s and is prevalent all over the world. The first use of this term to describe it
was, however, in Belfast in the late 1970s. The crime involves using a vehicle as a
battering ram to smash into shops in order to steal goods. Most ram-raiders are
opportunistic thieves who plan no further than driving a stolen car through the
window of their local supermarket in order to steal cigarettes and alcohol, but
there are also professional thieves who take ram-raiding very seriously and make it
a very lucrative form of crime. Professional ram-raiders target high-end shops that
sell designer items and jewellery. The ‘ram car', usually a heavy SUV, is driven at
speed through the front of the target premises, smashing a way in so that the
thieves can jump out and grab the loot. The perpetrators then transfer the stolen
goods to a couple of ‘clean' vehicles parked outside and make their getaway, leaving
the ram car blocking access to the premises. Speed and surprise are the main
elements in this crime, and the typical professional ram raid will take no more than
three or four minutes. Alarms are no deterrent. The only way to combat ram-raiders
is by placing bollards or concrete blocks in front of your premises so that raiders
cannot get their vehicle close enough to it. Whereas the amateur ram-raider tends to
work at night and favours premises that are empty, the professional will target open
premises during the day. This is particularly the case when the target is a
jewellery shop, as it will have its wares out on display during opening hours but
locked up in a safe when the shop is closed.

A version of ram-raiding that has become
popular among serious criminals is the stealing of cashpoint machines. This does not
use traditional ram-raiding techniques and is usually carried out in the small hours
of the morning, but it does rely on speed and surprise. Thieves find premises with a
cashpoint and a clear pavement outside, then steal
a tractor, JCB
or similar vehicle, drive it right up to the target premises and smash straight into
the cashpoint, knocking it loose and loading it on to the back of a pick-up truck,
which is then driven away at speed. The crime seems worth it to criminals because of
the large amount of ready cash that is held in these machines. This crime usually
causes thousands of pounds' worth of damage to the machines and the surrounding
premises, and wakes up the whole neighbourhood, but by the time the police arrive
there is only rubble left behind.

Ram-raiding can also take place on an
industrial scale, with large trucks used to smash into the warehouses of technology
companies to steal high-value equipment to sell on the black market.

See
Commy Burgs
,
Draggers

Ringers
and
clones
are pretty much two sides of the same coin. Both involve
changing the identity of a vehicle for criminal purposes, but ringing is more
involved and professional than cloning.

In order to ring or clone a car you must
first nick the car! Let's assume you have a red-hot Range Rover Vogue in your
possession. Obviously, you won't be able to drive a stolen car for long without
attracting the attention of the police, so you need to
smother
,
or
disguise, the car. Step one is to find a similar car: same model, same colour, not
necessarily the same year but as close as possible. You don't even have to touch
this second car, just write down what the number plate is. Next, get a friendly/bent
garage to knock you up a set of number plates using this number and you replace the
plates on your stolen car with the new ones. Using a golf-ball typewriter (it
produces the typeface favoured by
the DVLA), fill in your stolen or
fake log book (blank log books for vehicles can be picked up for as little as £50)
and advertise your new car. Lock it up for a week or so while you place an advert in
the free press. Your advert might say ‘For sale, blue Range Rover Vogue' and give
the year of the new plate and a mobile phone number (usually a cheap, ‘throwaway'
phone bought specifically for this purpose). Give it a few days, then drive your new
Range Rover out on to the street. The car will now withstand a cursory police check
(although, if you get a pull and they start going under the bonnet and checking the
VIN (Vehicle Identity Number), all bets will be off!) and, if you do nothing to
attract the attention of the police, you can probably (and some people do) drive
this car for years without any comeback. If you do get a pull and the police
discover that your car is a clone, you can point out that you bought the car after
seeing the advert – there will be a record of it – and that you were even given a
log book! This will be enough to raise reasonable doubt over whether you purchased
the vehicle in good faith. At worst, the car will be confiscated, in which case you
just move on to the next one.

Ringers are a much more involved and
professional proposition. A professional vehicle ringer will work only on the most
expensive vehicles – ones that are worth the effort, usually luxury sports cars or
prestige vehicles, often exported to oil-rich countries for large amounts of cash. A
good ringer will first erase all sign of the target vehicle's true identity. This
includes removing VIN plates from the bodywork and engine, grinding out any numbers
on the chassis or engine, replacing any glass that had identification numbers on it.
They will then make and fit their own VIN plates and identification numbers for the
car and put in new glass, attach new number plates and sometimes even respray the
vehicle to match the details on the new (fake)
logbook. They will
also replace the tax disc (and, if necessary, the MOT certificate) so that
everything on the car matches up. Most good ringers can pass any roadside test. It's
only if the police take the car in and give it a thorough ramp inspection that it
might be discovered to be a ringer.

One of the things that most thieves and,
in particular, those who practise
hoisting
, need in order to get
about is transport. This normally comes in the form of a
smoker
– a
cheap second-hand car usually purchased for under £100 from a breaker's yard or the
side of the street. As most criminals have opted out of straight society, they don't
bother themselves with such niceties as having a driver's licence, MOT, tax or
insurance. As long as the vehicle runs reasonably well and won't attract too much
adverse attention, it'll do. Smokers are also used by burglars, car thieves,
boot burglars
and
gas-meter bandits
. The joy of a
smoker for the criminal is that, because the car is not registered, none of the
crimes committed in it can come back to the criminal once he scraps it or sells it
on. You can park where you like and not worry about tickets or fines, and you can
cane the vehicle into the ground and just buy another. Police estimate that there
are over ten thousand smokers on the roads at any one time.