CRIMINAL TYPES

Evening Star, Issue 22575, 17 February 1937, Page 6

CRIMINAL TYPES

CONFIDENCE MAN'S IDEAL i I was brought up in a criminal environment. I have spent several years in prison, and my best friends are criminals, states Mark Benny in the ‘ Listener.’ But I can no more identify a criminal when I meet one than anybody else. I have seen criminals who look like bishops, and bishops, who well, might have been distinguished “ con men.” Of course, it is the whole art of a confidence man to look like a bishop. Once I was just going off to do a burglary in Mayfair, and I was told by a taxi driver that I looked like a bank clerk. Another time I was doing a burglary in evening dress—quite a useful disguise—and 1 was getting in by the back way of a house wton a policeman appeared. He asked me, rather truculently what I was doing, and on the spur of the moment I made up a tale about living there. I said that my father was a, very irascible person and did not like his son to come in at late hours, and I had to use the back way to get in at all. The policeman said, “ I quite undersir,” and helped me over the railings. No jin evening dress or in prison clothes, the average criminal seldom looks any different from the ordinary honest citizen —that is, if you judge by his physical appearance alone. VANITY PLAYS ITS PART Vanity, again, is thought to bo another characteristic of the criminal, according to the popular idea.. No doubt there is something in this. 1 remember once I was doing a iob in the London mansion of a very wealthy man, and I had the misfortune to run into the man himself. I. stuck my fingers in my pocket to imitate a revolver, but he paid no attention and came on at me. My impulse was to hit him.

But at the same time I was conscious of a hole in the toe of my sock (for I had been creeping about in stockings), and I was afraid that he would see it; I felt that such a thing in such luxurious surroundings would Jet down the whole tone of burglary. Because this hole distracted my attention at the critical moment, I did not hit him, and it cost me 18 months. It is a fact that burglars doll themselves up very carefully before they do a job, but this is natural.

If possibly they are caught, they like their fellow prisoners to think that they have been doing well by crime. Really all this is not vanity, so much as mere professional pride. Does it mean very much more than the carefulness of the doctor to dress himself well before visiting his patients? And anyway, is vanity a monopoly of the criminal classes?

All the same, though the idea of a “ criminal type ” won’t bear examination, it is still absolutely true that what the criminal £ does and what society does to the criminal must leave its mark on his mental and physical character. In my view it is at least as important to know what the criminal is trying to be, and why, as to know what he is. One thing has struck me constantly in my travels through the underworld. And that is that nearly all criminals, however 'diverse their characters and faculties, try to conform to a common pattern. CROOK OF THE FILMS And that is very curious, for there are many kinds of crime. You would think that burglary, for instance would tend to produce in its practitioners an idea of, an ideal burglar, motor-banditry an ideal motor bandit, and so on. After all, bank clerks seem to have their own conception of what a bank clerk should be, and so do doctors, and so do navvies. But actually, criminals do their best to conform to type. Now why is this? From my own observations I conclude that it is the effect of society’s attitude to criminals. For the fashionable criminal type does not come from the criminals themselves,but is forced on them from the outside. When I was in Chelmsford serving a term of three years’ penal servitude, I was working in the paint shop with a young fellow of 24,' a small, babyish, plump type of chap, with an intelligent but child-like mind. This youngster spent all his time in prison cultivating a pair of meagre moustaches, with the intention of making himself look like a film villain.

He used to walk about with his Up droopipg And his eye half-closed in the bett style of the American tough guy.