Editing Jonathan Wild (section)

==Wild's public career as "Thief-Taker General"==
It is believed that Wild's method of illegally amassing riches while appearing to be on the side of the law was ingenious. He ran a gang of thieves, kept the stolen goods, and waited for the crime and theft to be announced in the newspapers. At this point, he would claim that his "thief-taking agents" ([[bounty hunting|bounty hunters]]) had found the stolen merchandise, and he would return it to its rightful owners for a reward (to cover the expenses of running his agents). In some cases, if the stolen items or circumstances allowed for [[blackmail]], he did not wait for the theft to be announced. In addition to "recovering" these stolen goods, he would offer the police aid in finding the thieves. The thieves that Wild would help to "discover", however, were rivals or members of his own gang who had refused to cooperate with his taking the majority of the money.{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}}
 
Wild's ability to hold his gang together, and indeed the majority of his scheme, relied upon the fear of theft and the nation's reaction to theft.  
The crime of selling stolen goods became increasingly dangerous between 1700 and 1720, such that low-level thieves ran a great risk in fencing their goods. Wild avoided this danger and exploited it simultaneously by having his gang steal, either through [[pickpocketing]] or, more often, [[robbery|mugging]], and then by "recovering" the goods. He never sold the goods back, explicitly, nor ever pretended that they were not stolen. He claimed at all times that he found the goods by policing and avowed hatred of thieves. That very penalty for selling stolen goods, however, allowed Wild to control his gang very effectively, for he could turn in any of his thieves to the authorities at any time. By giving the goods to him for a cut of the profits, Wild's thieves were selling stolen goods. If they did not give their take to him, Wild would simply apprehend them as thieves. However, what Wild chiefly did was use his thieves and ruffians to "apprehend" rival gangs.{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}}

Wild was not the first thief-taker who was actually a thief himself. Hitchen had used his position as Under Marshal to practise extortion, pressuring [[brothel]]s and pickpockets to pay him off. When Hitchen was suspended from his duties for [[corruption]] in 1712, he engaged Wild to keep his business of extortion going in his absence. Hitchen was reinstated in 1714 and found that Wild was now a rival, and one of Wild's first acts of gang warfare was to eliminate as many of the thieves in Hitchen's control as he could. In 1718, Hitchen attempted to expose Wild with his [[manuscript]], ''A True Discovery of the Conduct of Receivers and Thief-Takers in and about the City of London'', in which he named Wild as a manager and source of crime.

Wild replied with a manuscript of his own, ''An Answer to a Late Insolent Libel'', and there explained that Hitchen was a [[homosexual]] who visited "molly houses" (homosexual brothels).<ref>{{cite book | title=Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld | series=Penguin Classics | editor=Lucy Moore | publisher=Penguin | year=2004 | isbn=0-14-043760-6 }}</ref> Hitchen attempted to further combat Wild with a pamphlet entitled ''The Regulator,'' which was his characterization of Wild,<ref>{{cite book | title=Criminality and narrative in eighteenth-century England: beyond the law | author=Hal Gladfelder | publisher=JHU Press | year=2001 | isbn=0-8018-6608-1 | pages=30–31 }}</ref> but Hitchen's prior suspensions from duties and the shocking (at that time) charge of homosexuality virtually eliminated him as a threat to Wild.

Wild held a virtual [[monopoly]] on crime in London, and legends arose surrounding his management of his "empire." One held that he kept records of all thieves in his employ, and when they had outlived their usefulness he would sell them to the [[gallows]] for the £40 reward. This supposed system inspired a fake or folk [[etymology]] of the phrase "[[Double cross (betrayal)|double cross]]": it was alleged that, when a thief vexed Wild in some way, he put a cross by the thief's name; a second cross condemned the man to be sold to [[the Crown]] for hanging. (This story is contradicted by the fact that the noun "double cross" did not enter English usage until 1834.)

Wild publicly presented an heroic face. In 1718 he called himself "Thief Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland". By his testimony, over sixty thieves were sent to the gallows. His "finding" of lost merchandise was private, but his efforts at finding thieves were public. Wild's office in the [[Old Bailey]] was a busy spot. Victims of crime would come by, even before announcing their losses, and discover that Wild's agents had "found" the missing items, and Wild would offer to help find the criminals for an extra fee. However, while fictional treatments made use of the device, it is not known whether or not Wild ever actually turned in one of his own gang for a private fee.

In 1720, Wild's fame was such that the [[Privy Council]] consulted with him on methods of controlling crime. His recommendation was, unsurprisingly, that the rewards for evidence against thieves be raised. Indeed, the reward for capturing a thief went from £40 to £140 within the year, amounting to a significant pay increase for Wild.

There is some evidence that Wild was favoured, or at least ignored, by the [[British Whig Party|Whig]] politicians and opposed by the [[Tory]] politicians. In 1718, a Tory group had succeeded in having the laws against receiving stolen property tightened, primarily with Wild's activities in mind. 
Ironically, these laws had the opposite intended effect of strengthening Wild's hand, for it made it more difficult for thieves to fence their goods ''except'' through Wild.

Wild's battles with thieves made excellent press. Wild himself would approach the papers with accounts of his derring-do, and the papers passed these on to a concerned public. Thus, in the summer of 1724, the papers carried accounts of Wild's heroic efforts in collecting twenty-one members of the Carrick Gang (with an £800 reward — approximately £{{Inflation|GBP|800|1724|r=-3|fmt=c}} in {{CURRENTYEAR}}). When one of the members of the gang was released, Wild pursued him and had him arrested on "further information". To the public, this seemed like a relentless defence of order. In reality, it was gang warfare disguised as a national service.

When Wild solicited for a finder's fee, he usually held all the power in the transaction. For example, David Nokes quotes (based on Howson) the following advertisement from the ''[[Daily Post (London newspaper)|Daily Post]]'' in 1724 in his edition of [[Henry Fielding]]'s ''[[The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great]]'':

{{blockquote |<poem>"Lost, the 1st of October, a black shagreen Pocket-Book, edged with
Silver, with some Notes of Hand. The said Book was lost in the 
Strand, near Fountain Tavern, about 7 or 8 o'clock at Night. If
any Person will bring aforementioned Book to Mr Jonathan Wild,
in the Old Bailey, he shall have a Guinea reward."</poem>}}

The advertisement is extortion. The "notes of hand" (agreements of debt) means signatures, so Wild already knows the name of the notebook's owner. Furthermore, Wild tells the owner through the ad that he knows what its owner was doing at the time, since the Fountain Tavern was a brothel. The real purpose of the ad is to threaten the owner with announcing his visit to a bordello, either to the debtors or the public, and it even names a price for silence (a [[British coin Guinea|guinea]], or one pound and one [[shilling]]).