Introduction to Robbers, Arsonists and Bandits

Introduction

• Bandits have long been romanticized by the wider populace, who admires their bravery, daring, and refusal to follow social conventions.
  • Many have been viewed as daredevils as opposed to just regular crooks.
  • Such was the public's impression of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, bandits operating in 1930s America, who moved in a Buick sedan and hid out in boarding houses and vacant barns between robberies and murders.
  • Although Bonnie and Clyde committed horrendous crimes, they captivated the public's attention and drew hordes of fans who were delighted in hearing about their most recent escapades.
• The Great Train Robbers, a 15-person gang that preyed on the Glasgow to London mail train in 1963, were no exception.
  • They took 120 mailbags carrying more than £2.6 million in cash while wearing ski masks, helmets, and gloves, gravely hurting train driver Jack Mills in the process.
  • The Great Train Robbers were, nevertheless, exalted by some sectors of the British people, who were happy that some of them managed to elude justice and disregarded their violent and unlawful activities.
• The Great Train Robbery and Bonnie and Clyde's actions were turned into motion pictures that catered to the public's enduring fascination with villains.
• John Nevison: A notoriously polite British highwayman from the 1670s.
  • He apologized to his victims after robbing them of their money while holding up stagecoaches on horseback.
  • Strangely, being robbed by Nevison almost became a badge of honor.
  • His rash 320 km trek from the county of Kent to York to construct an alibi for a robbery he had committed earlier in the day — a stunt that gave him the nickname "Swift Nick"—was what solidified his legendary status.

Ingenious Crimes

• In November 1971, above the northwest United States, one of the most daring robberies in modern history took place in midair.
  • D.B. Cooper, the hijacker of a Boeing 727, became well-known. He Coo fled the scene by parachute, carrying a ransom of $200,000 in $20 bills with him.
• A few years later, in Nice, France, thieves broke into the Societe Generale bank through the city's sewers, committing the largest robbery in history at the time.
• In 2003, a gang of thieves who broke into his seemingly impregnable underground vault two floors below the Antwerp Diamond Center displayed similar ambitions and committed what has been described as the "perfect crime."
  • The gang took about £60m worth of booty.
  • However, the ringleader made a fatal mistake and left a trail of his DNA near the crime scene.
• Art thefts also tend to capture the public’s imagination, because they often demonstrate brazen opportunism with little thought for the consequences.
  • The 2003 case of amateur art thief Robert Mang, who climbed up the scaffolding outside a museum and squeezed through a broken window to steal a multimillion dollar work by the Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini.
  • However, there was no market for the miniature masterpiece and he was forced to bury it in the woods.

Darker Acts

• It's a horrifying story about body-snatchers William Burke and William Hare, who in early 19th-century Edinburgh turned to murder to provide cadavers for Dr. Robert Knox's anatomy lessons at the univeristy.
• The string of arson attacks that fire investigator John Leonard Orr carried out in California were particularly ominous and unsettling.
  • Because so much of the evidence was lost in the fire, it was incredibly challenging to solve this case.
  • His arrest was made possible by a partial fingerprint found on an unburned portion of his incendiary device.
  • Orr made a name for himself as a legend who was known for being the first detective to arrive at the scene of the crimes he secretly committed.
  • The only traits that Orr has in common with the bandits and robbers are his fearlessness and mastery of manipulation.
• As a result of their notoriety, which in some cases has reached mythic status, they have all been listed in the criminal history.

Key Timeline

• 1671: Thomas Blood, an Irishman, makes an attempt to rob the English Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

• 1676: Highwayman John Nevison travels 200 miles (320 km) by bicycle in a single day across England in an effort to create a plausible deniability.

• 1716–18: Pirate Edward "Blackbeard" Teach robs ships off the American East Coast and in the Caribbean.

• 1827–28: William Burke and William Hare, two Scottish grave robbers, start killing people to sell their victims' bodies for dissection.

• 1866–82: In the American Midwest, Jesse James commands the James-Younger Gang in railway and bank robberies.

• 1930–34: As part of their crime spree, Bonnie and Clyde commit murder and kidnapping when they are cornered.

• 1963: The Glasgow to London mail train was robbed of more than £2.6 million by the Great Train Robbers.

• 1971: A man going by the name of D.B. Cooper hijacks a plane in Washington State, demands a £158,000 ransom, and then parachutes out of the sky.

• 1979–83: Phoolan Devi, often known as the Bandit Queen, commits numerous highway robberies in Uttar Pradesh, India.

• 1984–91: John Leonard Orr, a licensed fire investigator and covert arsonist, starts a number of deadly fires in southern California.

• 2003: Thieves stole £60 million worth of diamonds from the Antwerp Diamond Center vault in Belgium.

• 2015: In the largest burglary in UK history, veteran thieves loot the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company in central London.

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