GANGS IN LONDON

THE ITALIAN CONNECTION 

The Sabini Family and the racecourse gangs

The nearest thing to a London version of the Sicilian Mafia during this period was the Sabini family, who Arthur Harding mentions in his memoires. The Sabinis were from Irish and Sicilian heritage and their base was the Italian community in the old Clerkenwell area of London. They were: "bound together by ties of class, community, ethnicity, neighbourhood and family as much as crime. Thus the Sabini brothers and various other relatives and friends involved in violent territorial conflicts often around family-owned businesses stood dumbly in the dock at Marylebone magistrates court in 1923 when Justice Darling attempted to converse with them in Italian, describing them as direct descendants of Sicilian war-lords. (Shore 2007)
London,  especially areas like the East End, contained criminal areas from earliest times. Some of the old 'rookeries' such a Clerkenwell had been hideouts for generations of professional burglars, pickpockets, forgers and the like. But was there anything approaching the continuous activity  that we associate with organised crime, and what was its relationship with the local communities from which its members came?
The character of the London criminal scene in the years just before the First World War is revealed in the life of Arthur Harding, whose memories were published by the historian Raphael Samuel. Harding described his native area of Whitechapel at the turn of the century:

"Edward Emmanuel had a group of Jewish terrors. There was Jackie Berman. He told a pack of lies against me in the vendetta case - he had me put away… Bobby Levy - he lived down Chingford way - and his brother Moey. Bobby Nark - he was a good fighting chap. In later years all the Jewish terrors worked with the Italian mob on the race course… The Narks were a famous Jewish family from out of Aldgate. Bobby was a fine big fellow though he wasn't very brainy. His team used to hang out in a pub at Aldgate on the corner of Petticoat Lane. I've seen him smash a bloke's hat over his face and knock his beer over. He belonged to the Darby Sabini gang - that was made up of Jewish chaps and Italian chaps. He married an English lady - stone rich - they said she was worth thousands and thousands of pounds. He's dead and gone now. (Samuel 1981: 133-4)

In other words the East End of London was a bit like American cities only on a smaller scale - different ethnic groups had their local gangs, sometimes they worked together and sometimes they fought each other. No group was powerful enough to dominate the scene entirely.

The Sabini Family and the racecourse gangs

The nearest thing to a London version of the Sicilian Mafia during this period was the Sabini family, who Arthur Harding mentions in his memoires. The Sabinis were from Irish and Sicilian heritage and their base was the Italian community in the old Clerkenwell area of London. They were: "bound together by ties of class, community, ethnicity, neighbourhood and family as much as crime. Thus the Sabini brothers and various other relatives and friends involved in violent territorial conflicts often around family-owned businesses stood dumbly in the dock at Marylebone magistrates court in 1923 when Justice Darling attempted to converse with them in Italian, describing them as direct descendants of Sicilian war-lords. (Shore 2007)
There is a biography of Darby Sabini by Edward Hart (see the booklist at the end of the lecture). What did they do, apart from fighting with other gangs, that can classify them as organised crime? Remember organised crime, as opposed to project crime, requires continuous activity. They protected the Italian community from attacks by Hackney and Birmingham gangs. They engaged in a little loansharking to people with bad gambling debts and protected illegal bookies on the horse race tracks. They worked mainly on the race courses at Epson, Brighton and Lewes. Illegal bookies (betting stalls) were out in the open air on the race course and had a lot of cash on them. They needed protection. Sabini and his gang would have fights - using in those days barber shop razors as their main weapon - with rival gangs over this lucrative protection racket. The Jewish bookmakers made an alliance with these Italian gangsters for protection. The Sabinis also formed an alliance, it is said, with the police to keep other gangs out. The racecourse protection rackets continued well into the 1930s and feature in Graham Greene's famous novel Brighton Rock (made into a film in 1947 starring Richard Attenborough - see poster on left)The East End gangs tried, without much success, to extend their protection rackets to the nightclub scene in London's West End. Just before the Second World War 1939-45 the Sabini gang was displaced by the Whites, an Islington family, as the main racecourse racketeers.
If we look back, particularly at the Sabini gang, we can see that on the one hand they had all the qualifications for being regarded as organised crime in the sense we have been using the term: they both engaged in criminal activity of a continuing nature, and at the same time provided certain protection services for members of their own (Italian) community. In this respect they were no different from the Sicilian communities developing at that time in New York and Chicago. The only difference was that in London these things were happening on a smaller scale.
But on the other hand they failed to move into the West End. That is to say they failed to move out of their local community into the wider world. This is the big difference from the United States. As we know, it was Prohibition that gave the big boost to people like Al Capone. By contrast there was no such thing in Britain that would help the local gangs break out of their own territory into the 'big time'. Exactly the same was true of the Kray twins' outfit in the 1960s. Indeed the attempt to move into the West End was, as we shall see, their undoing. It is not that criminal gangs don't operate protection rackets in the West End, it is rather that where no group is sufficiently powerful either to challenge either competing criminal groups or the police, the attempt to move into a new area is precarious and usually fails.
During the period between the two world wars therefore, while in America the Mafia was becoming a national force, in Britain organised crime groups were simply one stage up from street gangs and did not manage to break out of their own neighbourhoods. Indeed, the most interesting forms of 'gangster' crime during that period concerned not the Mafia but project criminals - 'hit and run' or 'smash and grab' style bank robbers and jewel thieves. These were the sections of the criminal underworld that were the innovators. For example the first modern robbers to use a motor car in Britain were Ruby Sparks and his girlfriend driver Lillian Goldstein who were equivalents to the American bandits Bonny and Clyde. Like their American equivalents these robbers had little to do with organised crime. They would simply do a robbery somewhere where they were least expected and then lie low and sell the jewels or whatever they had stolen. Bank robbers were getting more skilled in their techniques of safebreaking, gelignite was becoming more widely used. But organised crime remained at a localised and restricted level. As far as most commentators were concerned, we simply didn't have it in Britain.
During and after the Second World War (1939-45) there was some petty corruption. War-time shortages and rationing of food after the war gave opportunities to the criminal fraternity to run the 'black market' as it was called, in illegal smuggled foodstuffs and other scarce items. As Donald Thomas documents, in his book An Underworld at War all sorts of people, and not just professional criminals, were involved in wartime racketeering.
But the opportunities presented by war-time shortages and the rationing of essential goods that continued into the post-war years was no equivalent to the Prohibition era in the United States. The criminal scene in London during the 1950s remained a mixture of small time gangs engaged in very localised protection rackets, illegal gambling clubs (mainstream gambling was legalised in 1960 which cut the ground from under the criminal element). Most of the big cities had their gangs - Glasgow, Sheffield. But they were always simply one step up from petty crime and certainly lacked any political connections with local government. There were a variety of characters involved. Many of them, in East London, connected with the Boxing scene. During the 1950s the local rackets - illegal gambling, extortion and protection, were run by the likes of Jack Spot, Billy Hill and Albert Dimes . These people had their fingers in a number of pies from the organised crime activities just mentioned to 'smash and grab raids' Armed robberies were on the increase at that time. Prostitution and vice were concentrated at that time in the hands of the Maltese family the Messina brothers
One of the more colourful characters from the East End at that time (1950s) was Shirley Pitts who was one of a rare breed of female professional criminals. She was into high class shoplifting. Shirley and her 'girls' focused their attention on big West End Stores like Harrods but made 'shopping' expeditions as far afield as Paris, Geneva and Berlin. She died in 1992, she was reportedly buried in an expensive dress, stolen for the occasion. Their were wreaths from everyone in the London criminal underworld and flowers on the hearse were made up in the shape of a Harrods bag with the words 'gone shopping'. Her life story was recently written by Lorraine Gamman (1996)
There was some, fairly low level corruption in the police particularly as regards the prostitution scene in London in the 1960s. This was recently portrayed in the TV serial 'Our Friends in the North' which you may (or may not) have seen.