Professional Viewpoint

Thievery, defined as stealing by non-violent methods, is a profession as exclusive and exacting as law or medicine. Published this week was a solid account of the life and activities of The Professional Thief,* notable for the fact that it is not a thriller but a sociological document. Written by a thief named Chic Conwell and edited by onetime University of Chicago Sociologist Edwin H. Sutherland, it represents an informed thief's-eye view of a tight guild whose trades range from shoplifting to the suavities of the confidence man. Highlights:

P:"Codes of ethics are much more binding among thieves than among legitimate commercial firms. Should an outfit have a putup touch (opportunity for theft suggested by an outsider) for 10%, no other outfit would think of offering the putup man 15% for it. . . . Lying is perhaps considered by thieves to be more unethical than it is by the law-abiding. . . ." A member of Yellow Kid Weil's famed Chicago confidence gang reported: "In all my life I never heard of a racket man padding an expense account."

P:"The central principle in all true con [confidence] rackets is to show a sucker how he can make some money by dishonest methods and then beat him in his attempted dishonesty." Standard forms: helping the victim ("prospect") to find a pocketbook, whose grateful owner, another thief, persuades him to invest money of his own in a fake gambling or brokerage office; arranging with the victim to cheat another member of the gang at cards or dice; selling counterfeit pawn tickets for supposedly stolen articles; selling shares in smuggled property; selling complicated but useless counterfeiting machines. Confidence men also practice such sidelines as extorting money from homosexuals and, more recently, from income tax violators ("the Federal shake").

P:When professional thieves are arrested, they rely first on the police ("in hard times a dollar or two or even a drink may be enough"). More difficult arrangements are handled by a fixer who works through the complaining witness, the prosecutor (by trading cases), the bailiff (who forges vacating orders), or the judge. So efficient are fixers that Denver's Ed Blonger for many years kept all his clients out of jail. Chicago's celebrated pickpocket, Eddie Jackson, was arrested "thousands of times," convicted only four times, twice because of factional fights between his political friends.

P: "Kansas City is the easiest place in the country in which to straighten out a case. . . No State is shunned more consistently by professionals [than Connecticut]. . . . There is comparatively little fixing of Federal agents. . . . There are probably many honest coppers, but if so most of them are out in the sticks. . . . When the Eye (Pinkertons) are brought in ... that is bad. They don't think of anything except catching thieves."

P: Most thieves are broke two or three times a year.

P:Roman Catholic "cannons" (pickpockets) will rarely steal from a Catholic priest, but "Jewish cannons will beat a Jewish rabbi whenever possible."

P:As proof that they are no more dishonest than the public, thieves often observe that of the pocketbooks thrown away on the street to avoid arrest, few are ever turned over to the police.

Author. Born to a comfortably-fixed Philadelphia family about 50 years ago, Chic Conwell married a chorus girl while he was ushering in a theatre, began using narcotics with her, left home to become a pimp. For 20 years he circulated around U. S. and European cities, working successively as a shoplifter, pickpocket, confidence man. He was sent to prison three times for a total of five years. Between his third release and his death in 1933, he had several legitimate jobs, one of which was writing his book on a weekly wage from the University of Chicago's Social Science Research Committee.

Described by Professor Sutherland, now a member of the faculty of the University of Indiana, as handsome, attractive, and possessing the "initiative, ingenuity and abilities that are characteristic of leaders," Thief Conwell seems alternately proud and ashamed of his profession, was probably most sincere when he wrote: "It involves as much hard work as any other business. There is little thrill about it. . . . What the hell could anyone find to like about stealing, working hard all the time, always being likely to land in the can, paying over to the coppers and the fixers everything he gets?"

*University of Chicago Press ($2.50).

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