ladrone
n. a thief; robber; highwayman; rogue
depeculation
n. a robbing or embezzling
desponsate
adj. married
adhorn
v. to make a cuckold of
According to legend, French highwayman Claude Duval agreed not to rob one gentleman if his wife would dance the courante with him by the wayside.
He was hanged at Tyburn in 1670 “to the great grief of the women.” A memorial in Covent Garden reads, “Here lies DuVall: Reder, if male thou art, Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.”
In 2004, the world’s foremost scholar on Sherlock Holmes was found garrotted on his bed. Richard Lancelyn Green had been planning a three-volume biography of Arthur Conan Doyle but had had trouble gaining rights to the author’s private papers and manuscripts, which were scheduled to be auctioned at Christie’s. Lancelyn Green believed that Doyle’s daughter had wanted these to go to the British Library instead, but his efforts to stop the auction had been unsuccessful. In the weeks before his death he told friends that an unidentified American was following him and that he’d come to fear that his contention over the papers might have put his life in danger.
The coroner returned an open verdict. Lancelyn Green’s best friends said it was not in his nature to take his own life, but others wondered whether he might have arranged his death to cast suspicion on a rival, mirroring the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a jealous wife contrives her suicide to cast doubt on a woman her husband had been flirting with.
The case remains unsolved. “I think he wanted it to look like murder,” said James Gibson, who had edited a Doyle bibliography with Lancelyn Green in 1983. “He must have been planning it for days, giving us false clues. He created the perfect mystery.”
In an 1893 textbook, criminologist Hans Gross tells how investigators interpreted this ideograph, which had appeared on the wall of a remote Austrian chapel:
The bird, drawn with a single stroke, represents a parrot, alluding to the great loquacity of the owner of the mark, who was famous housebreaker. The second sign is a church, the third a key. Below, we see three round objects on a line; this, according to the calendar of the Styrian peasantry, is the emblem of St. Stephen, i.e., three stones placed on the ground, alluding to the martyrdom of the Saint by stoning. They here indicate the date, viz., St. Stephen’s Day, 26th December. By the side is an infant in swaddling clothes, this indicates the birth of the Saviour, the date being 25th December. The whole thus means: the owner of the parrot sign intends to break into a church on 26th December. He desires accomplices, and will accordingly be in the neighbourhood of the sign (a lonely chapel in a wood) on 25th December to meet whoever turns up.
“The police, knowing the importance of the signs, took a copy to the Magistrate, a priest helped to interpret the liturgical emblems, and on Christmas day four dangerous criminals were captured near the chapel in the wood.”
In 1722, Jonathan Swift published the “last speech” of one Ebenezer Elliston, “a malefactor executed for street robbery,” “published at his desire for the common good”:
Now as I am a dying man I have done something which may be of good use to the public. I have left with an honest man (and, indeed, the only honest man I was ever acquainted with) the names of all my wicked brethren, the present places of their abode, with a short account of the chief crimes they have committed, in many of which I have been their accomplice, and heard the rest from their own mouths: I have likewise set down the names of those we call our setters, of the wicked houses we frequent, and of those who receive and buy our stolen goods. I have solemnly charged this honest man and have received his promise upon oath, that whenever he hears of any rogue to be tried for robbing or housebreaking, he will look into his list, and if he finds the name there of the thief concerned, to send the whole paper to the government. Of this I here give my companions fair and public warning, and hope they will take it.
Did it work? Who knows?
‘John Carter,’ the young English convict whose poems brought him pardon, left a farewell message to his friends within the walls of his Minnesota prison. This ‘last will and testament,’ first printed in the weekly Prison Mirror, published in the penitentiary, was reproduced in The St. Paul Dispatch:
‘This is the last will and testament of me, Anglicus. I hereby give and bequeath my collection of books (amounting to some 6,000 volumes) to Mr. Van D., in memory of the not altogether unpleasant hours we spent together, hours marked by no shadow of animosity at any time. We could not be happy, but we were as happy as we could be. To Dr. Van D. I leave my mantle of originality, and what remains of the veuve cliquot, in memory of encouragement when I most needed it.
‘To the editor I leave my space on this journal and the best of good wishes in memory of his unfailing courtesy and forbearance.
‘To Uncle John and to Sinbad go my heartiest wishes that we may meet soon in some brighter clime.
‘To Mr. Helgrams, my best dhudeen and the light of hope.
‘To young Steady and to Mr. D. M., my poetic laurels, which they are to share in equal measure.
‘To the boys in the printing office, the consolation of not being obliged to set up my excruciating copy.
‘To the tailors (and to the boss tailor in particular, ‘Little Italy,’) my very best pair of pants.
‘To Jim of the laundry, — but nothing seems good enough for Jim, the best soul that ever walked.
‘To Porfiro Alexio Gonzolio, a grip of the hand.
‘To Davie, pie, pie again, and yet more pie.
‘To the band boys — why, here’s to ’em! May they blow loose.
‘To my fellow pedagogues, “More light,” as Goethe put it, more fellowship; it would be impossible to wise them. They know where I stand and I know where they stand.
‘Lawdy! lawdy! If I hadn’t forgotten Otto and his assistant. Here’s all kinds of luck to ’em, and no mistake about it.
‘Finally to all those not included hereinbefore (for various reasons), here’s to our next merry meeting. To those in authority, thanks for a square deal. To mine enemy — but I mustn’t bul-con him.
‘Gentlemen, I go, but I leave, I hope I leave my reputation behind me.
‘Anglicus.’
— New York Times, July 9, 1910
One morning in 1899, accused Oklahoma prostitute Minnie Stacey was scheduled for trial when the judge found that she had neither an attorney nor the money to hire one. Attorney Temple Lea Houston agreed to defend her and delivered this speech extemporaneously:
Gentlemen of the jury: You heard with what cold cruelty the prosecution referred to the sins of this woman, as if her condition were of her own preference. The evidence has painted you a picture of her life and surroundings. Do you think that they were embraced of her own choosing? Do you think that she willingly embraced a life so revolting and horrible? Ah, no! Gentlemen, one of our own sex was the author of her ruin, more to blame than she.
Then let us judge her gently. What could be more pathetic than the spectacle she presents? An immortal soul in ruin! Where the star of purity once glittered on her girlish brow, burning shame has set its seal and forever. And only a moment ago, they reproached her for the depths to which she had sunk, the company she kept, the life she led. Now, what else is left her? Where can she go and her sin not pursue her? Gentlemen, the very promises of God are denied her. He said: ‘Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ She has indeed labored, and is heavily laden, but if, at this instant she were to kneel before us all and confess to her Redeemer and beseech His tender mercies, where is the church that would receive her? And even if they accepted her, when she passed the portals to worship and to claim her rest, scorn and mockery would greet her; those she met would gather around them their spirits the more closely to avoid the pollution of her touch. And would you tell me a single employment where she can realize ‘Give us our daily bread?’
Our sex wrecked her once pure life. Her own sex shrink from her as they would the pestilence. Society has reared its relentless walls against her, and only in the friendly shelter of the grave can her betrayed and broken heart ever find the Redeemer’s promised rest.
They told you of her assumed names, as fleeting as the shadows on the walls, of her sins, her habits, but they never told you of her sorrows, and who shall tell what her heart, sinful though it may be, now feels? When the remembered voices of mother and sisters, whom she must see no more on this earth, fall again like music on her erring soul, and she prays God that she could only return, and must not — no — not in this life, for the seducer has destroyed the soul.
You know the story of the prodigal son, but he was a son. He was one of us, like her destroyers; but for the prodigal daughter there is no return. Were she with her wasted form and bleeding feet to drag herself back to home, she, the fallen and the lost, which would be her welcome? Oh, consider this when you come to decide her guilt, for she is before us and we must judge her. They (the prosecution) sneer and scoff at her. One should respect her grief, and I tell you that there reigns over her penitent and chastened spirit a desolation now that none, no, none but the Searcher of all hearts can ever know.
None of us are utterly evil, and I remember that when the Saffron Scourge swept over the city of Memphis in 1878, a courtesan there opened wide the doors of her gilded palace of sin to admit the sufferers, and when the scythe of the Reaper swung fast and pitiless, she was angelic in her ministering. Death called her in the midst of her mercies, and she went to join those she tried to save. She, like those the Lord forgave, was a sinner, and yet I believe that in the days of reckoning her judgment will be lighter than those who would prosecute and seek to drive off the earth such poor unfortunates as her whom you are to judge.
They wish to fine this woman and make her leave. They wish to wring from the wages of her shame the price of this meditated injustice; to take from her the little money she might have — and God knows, gentlemen, it came hard enough. The old Jewish law told you that the price of a dog, nor the hire of such as she, should come not within the house of the Lord, and I say unto you that our justice, fitly symbolized by this woman’s form, does not ask that you add to the woes of this unhappy one, one only asks at your hands the pitiful privilege of being left alone.
The Master, while on Earth, while He spake in wrath and rebuke to the kings and rulers, never reproached one of these. One he forgave. Another he acquitted. You remember both — and now looking upon this friendless outcast, if any of you can say to her, ‘I am holier than thou’ in the respect which she is charged with sinning, who is he? The Jews who brought the woman before the Savior have been held up to execution for two thousand years. I always respected them. A man who will yield to the reproaches of his conscience as they did has the element of good in him, but the modern hypocrite has no such compunctions. If the prosecutors of the woman whom you are trying had brought her before the Savior, they would have accepted His challenge and each one gathered a rock and stoned her, in the twinkling of an eye. No, Gentlemen, do as your Master did twice under the same circumstances that surround you. Tell her to go in peace.
The all-male jury voted to acquit Stacey as soon as they reached the jury room. Some trial attorneys still cite Houston’s “plea for a fallen woman” as the perfect closing argument.
Con man Joseph Weil once paid a Chicago bartender $10 to watch his dog, saying he had an urgent business meeting. He told him it was a pedigreed hunting dog. He then sent in a confederate, who admired the dog and offered to pay the barman $300 for it. When the bartender said he was only watching it, the confederate left him with a phone number, asking him to call if the dog’s owner proved willing to sell it.
Weil returned, looking downcast and saying that his business deal had fallen through. Sensing an opportunity, the bartender offered to buy the dog for $250. Weil declined at first, but the barman persisted, and eventually the deal was struck. Weil departed with the money, the phone number turned out to be fake, and the dog was an unsaleable mutt.
Weil claimed to have earned $8 million over the years in schemes defrauding greedy gamblers and stock manipulators. “Each of my victims had larceny in his heart,” he wrote. “I never fleeced anyone who could not afford to pay my price for a lesson in honesty.”
In “Short Notes of My Life,” Horace Walpole records an alarming experience:
One night in the beginning of November, 1749, as I was returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten at night, I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some marks of shot on my face, and stunned me. The ball went through the top of the chariot, and if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, must have gone through my head.
After an account of the robbery appeared in the London Evening Post, he received a letter:
Sir: seeing an advertisement in the papers of to Day giveing an account of your being Rob’d by two Highway men on wedensday night last in Hyde Parke and during the time a Pistol being fired whether Intended or Accidentally was Doubtfull Oblidges Us to take this Method of assureing you that it was the latter and by no means Design’d Either to hurt or frighten you for tho’ we are Reduced by the misfortunes of the world and obliged to have Recourse to this method getting money Yet we have Humanity Enough not to take any body’s life where there is Not a Nessecety for it.
The highwayman returned Walpole’s belongings in exchange for the reward that had been offered. He turned out to be James MacLaine, second son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, who had turned to crime after his wife’s death. Over the course of six months, he and his accomplices committed 20 highway robberies, wearing Venetian masks and treating their victims with courtesy. When MacLaine was captured the following year, Walpole refused to appear against him, and when he was condemned Walpole noted that 3,000 people went to see him in his cell at Newgate.
Cruising off Rhode Island in 1717, pirate Samuel Bellamy plundered a Boston sloop and granted his crew’s wish to sink her. Before putting the captain ashore, Bellamy told him:
I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?
The captain replied that his conscience forbade him to break the laws of God or man. Bellamy returned, “You are a devilish conscience rascal! I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.”
(From Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724.)
Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water.
In his Life of Artaxerxes, Plutarch describes an ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism in which vermin devour a victim trapped between mated boats:
Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lie down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, then forcing him to ingest a mixture of milk and honey before pouring all over his face and body. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed.
Happily Plutarch seems to have based his account on a report by the Greek historian Ctesias, whose reliability has been questioned, so perhaps this never happened.