Heroes and Gangs
Even if there were a stable definition of what constituted criminal violence in general, whether or not it was increasing or decreasing is a statistical question which the statistics are incapable of answering.
The principal problems here are that the reporting and the perception of what constituted criminal violence have not remained consistent over time and, in addition, many incidents of criminal violence have never made their way into official statistics, since some victims prefer to hush matters up, or seek an opportunity to revenge themselves personally rather than make a formal report to the police. Surviving Occurrence Books and Refused Charge Books for British police forces contain incidents of individuals refusing to press charges against family members for violent behaviour, even when the evidence of physical injury has been plain for the investigating officers to see. Hospital records have been little used in this respect, but they appear to contain similar evidence of violence which was not taken any further because of family links, fear, possible embarrassment, or possibly the intention of seeking private revenge later.[963] [964]In parts of southern Europe particularly, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries the feud and the vendetta remained facts of life; this, in turn, most probably led to the greater incidence of homicide in comparison with northern Europe. A vendetta killing was committed as a matter of personal or family honour. Among the groups involved it was a matter of ‘justice', and those involved could often employ the language of state power to justify their actions; the local leaders had ‘jurisdiction' and ‘office', they were responsible for ‘administration', they collected ‘taxes', and they demanded ‘loyalty' and the silence of their subordinates.
Yet there were also instances where the official courts were used as a means of continuing a feud, as the British found in the courts that they administered in the Ionian Islands during the early nineteenth century. Here the court became a theatre where a ritual knife fight could be refought with defendants, plaintiffs and witnesses justifying the incident, apportioning blame, celebrating the victor or excusing the loser.11 Yet elsewhere, where the state was weak or imposed by outsiders, as in southern Italy and Sicily, the alternative society might also seep into the new state's political framework. Sicily provides a particularly good example, with politicians - both local and national - as well as bankers, lawyers, police officers and others working with or directing the activities of gangsters. There was a serious attempt to break the mafia in Sicily during the fascist period but, while this hurt some of the clans, the honoured society lived on; and so too did its counterparts in Naples (the Camorra) and Calabria (the ‘Ndrangheta).[965] In the aftermath of the Second World War these so- called ‘honoured societies' expanded their activities to link with similar groups elsewhere in the world in the supply of illicit goods, particularly drugs; indeed new such societies were formed, such as the Puglian Sacra Corona Unita, or emerged in the wake of political upheaval such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. Violent enforcement and punishment remained central to their criminality; they maintained links with local politicians and in some instances with national ones. Even as violent villains, however, a degree of romance has sometimes surrounded the portrayal of these gangsters, as well as other bandits and armed robbers in different forms of media representation.During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ballads were sung and sold, together with rapidly produced dying-speeches, around the scaffolds where offenders were executed. As often as not the printer of a broadside for sale at the scaffold would cannibalise an old wood-cut or print for the upper portion of the sheet.
Some violent offenders who caught the popular imagination through their deeds were celebrated and glamourised in these broadsides, such as the French smuggler Louis Mandrin who was broken on the wheel in 1755. Johannes Buckler, popularly known as Schinderhannes, enjoyed a criminal career in the Hunsruck region of Germany both before and after it was occupied by French troops. He was captured and guillotined but his deeds against the French and other groups disliked or feared by the local population ensured that he lived on in ballads as a Robin Hood character.I wandered through the land, and in the wood lay low And plundered all the rich, and also many a Jew In pitiless fashion! To set my conscience free I'd give some to the poor, perhaps one time in three.[966]
Schinderhannes robbed in rural districts, but it was not just in rural areas or weak states that violent gangs emerged. A century after Schinderhannes large German cities were home to the Ringvereine, literally ring clubs or associations which some suggested took their name from the German word for wrestling, Ringen. These clubs were officially chartered groups collecting fees and imposing fines on members for infringements of their rules. They were initially established to provide mutual aid for their members, who were mainly convicted offenders. Women were barred, but might receive financial assistance if their husband or other male breadwinner was in prison or had died. The clubs, however, appear also to have engaged in criminal activity themselves, notably prostitution, drug trafficking and extortion. And if they generally avoided violence, the threat of such and its occasional use were ways of ensuring that authority was maintained and orders were obeyed. The Ringvereine had unofficial links with the police, usually related to assistance in dealing with sex offences and murders. They were also reported as running Ganovengerichte (hoodlum courts) to try and if necessary punish those that offended their rules.
The Ringvereine were largely destroyed by the Nazi Law on Preventive Custody and extra-legal methods.[967] [968] Generally speaking they were no threat to most ordinary citizens, and to this extent they were like the British gangs of the same period whose main concern was profiteering from the bookmakers at racecourses. The racecourse gangs were the milieu for Graham Greene's violent young thug Pinky in his novel Brighton Rock (1938). Ordinary citizens, once again, were not much threatened by the gangsters of interwar Britain, nor by those of the postwar period when the violent Kray brothers attracted a degree of personal celebrity not least by attracting rather silly actors, politicians and other attention seekers to bask in the celebrity of their nightclub. Towards the end of the twentieth century the collapse of the Soviet empire fostered the emergence of mafias that profited from the turmoil and opportunities of the changing market conditions.Violent gangs, however, did not necessarily organise for the purpose of financial gain. In the industrial cities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain gangs of young men fought over territory, over insults, over girls; weapons from knuckle dusters to knives, razors and even pistols were used. As with the Ringvereine, outsiders were rarely at risk, unless they got in the way; although on occasions gang members specifically targeted people for robbery, and the members did not take kindly to police officers seeking to suppress their behaviour. The press gave the gangs group labels - hooligans, peaky blinders and scuttlers respectively in London, Birmingham and Manchester at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Half a century later came Teddy Boys, then Mods and Rockers in the 1960s, and the Skinheads in the 1970s. Some of these titles suited the gangs, though they often took names from their local streets and neighbourhoods, something that appealed to their group pride, such as the Protestant sectarianism of the Glaswegian ‘Billy Boys'.
On other occasions a gang might use a place name for personal identification, like the scuttler gang whose members called themselves the ‘Bengal Tigers' after their home-base in Bengal Street in Ancoats, Manchester. A couple of miles north-west of Ancoats a gang based in the colliery district of Whit Lane, Salford, chose the more exotic title of ‘Buffalo Bill's Gang' after the veteran American scout who had become an international showman.15 The gangs in Paris in the decade or so before the First World War became known collectively as apaches; the term was chosen deliberately to link them to the allegedly cruel and violent Native American tribe. The gangs themselves assumed similar titles to those in Manchester; there were names alluding to a district (Bande d'Auteuil, Courbeaux de l'lle Saint-Louis, Loups de Montmartre) and to dress (Casquettes Vertes, Habits Noirs). In the late 1950s, following a term devised by the daily newspaper France Soir, Parisian gangs acquired the collective name of blousons noirs. This linked them with the youth cult emerging in the United States which, with its rock and roll music and cultural icons such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1956), was so distasteful to many of their parents' generation. Cocking a snook at the older generation appealed to the gang members in France and elsewhere, and their violence, commonly directed towards establishing superiority over another gang, appears like the violence of earlier gangs, principally as a means of expressing their masculinity. 16Gang violence made good stories for the press and later for television news. So too did other forms of violent assault and murder, although up until the middle of the twentieth century stories of sexual violence and rape tended to be restrained and wrapped in euphemism. It has often been suggested that the statistics of murder and manslaughter are the closest criminal statistics to actual levels of criminal offending since there is usually solid evidence of the crime in the form of a corpse.
There remain problems, however, in equating the statistics from different countries as well as different regions to assess whether or not everywhere experienced the same kinds of patterns and fluctuations. At the end of the First World War, for example, an eminent criminologist suggested that across Europe there was an increase in murder; yet the scale of the increase varied from country to country and was scarcely perceptible in England and Wales.17 Moreover, the different legal definitions to be found in different countries mean that comparisons have to be made with caveats and qualifications. Hermann Mannheim, who fled Nazi Germany for Britain in 1933, pointed out that the English concept of ‘murder' was much wider than the German Mord.18 The media, however, has always tended to shy away from complexity; it also has shown a short memory and has focused on the stories of individual murders, or other exceptional crimes, to make the points that it wishes to stress about the ills of society.16 Dominique Kalifa, L'encre et le sang: recits de crimes et societe a la Belle Epoque (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 163; Dominique Kalifa and Jean-Claude Farcy, Atlas du crime a Paris du moyen age a nos jours (Paris: Parigramme, 2015), pp. 125-8, 180-2.
17 Thorsten Sellin, ‘Is Murder Increasing in Europe?', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 126 (1926), 29-34.
18 Hermann Mannheim, Social Aspects of Crime in England between the Wars (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), p. 48.