JEWEL THIEVES' POVERTY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12853, 29 April 1905, Page 2 (Supplement)

JEWEL THIEVES' POVERTY.

ROBBER CONTINUES TO EVADE DETECTIVES. Thk police are still without a trace of the thief who stole a bag containing £10,000 worth of jewels from a chemist's shop in Birmingham recently. A man was arrested in the neighbourhood of Gray's Inn Road on suspicion of being concerned in the robbery. At Bow-street, however, several persons brought from Birmingham failed to identify him, and he was at once released. The case is in the hands of Detective-in-spectors Stockley and Dew, of Scotland Yard, and a close watch is being kept upon all suspected jewel thieves in the country. The investigations have thrown a strong light ut>on the abject poverty into which some of the most expert jewel thieves have fallen. " We have lost Littlechild and Melville," said a tracker of jewel thieves, "but the fine system of surveillance which they put put into operation are still bearing good lruit. " When a robber gets away with £10,000 worth of jewellery the public is apt to look upon him as a rich man, but the arrogance and avarice of the 'receiver' and the sorrows and poverty of the jewel thief rarely come to light. There are men in London to-day who have perpetrated some of the cleverest of jewel robberies and yet are at a loss to know where to-morrow's breakfast is to com© from. The Continental chloroformed-handker-chief thief; the bag-snatcher; the men who boarded the trains at Brindisi and came through with a harvest—all these men are finding it harder and harder to make a living, and some of them have even begun to work for their bread. "The sort of jewel robberies which resulted in losses by Sir Albert Rollit and his wife, the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, and to the Countess of Carnarvon, both on a French railway, and to the late Marquis of Anglesey in London, while he was at the theatre seeing 'Sherlock Holmes' played, is diminishing under the detectives' 'surveillance. " One class of Continental train aud steamship criminal will continue to reap occasional plunder Sc great is the gullibility of the human rat*, that 1 believe there will always be a soft place for the confidence tricteterj'