![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Old tricks, new medium
Dec. 31st, 2007 07:41 pmWay back in the when in the 1980s, I mixed with some fairly unsavoury characters. That's an inevitable by-product of working in the betting shop business. By "unsavoury" I don't mean the kind of guy you take the risk of being sat next to in any live tournament; I don't mean the kind of guy who would get you wanting to chew off your own leg rather than have to listen to another tale about something that just doesn't matter.
No, I mean the kind of "dodgy" character with whom you would happily share a drink in the pub, but whom you definitely would not trust with your last fiver -- or indeed anyone else's last fiver; Actually, you wouldn't trust them with your first fiver, let alone your last.
The old Mecca near Waterloo Station was the "office" of a number of profesional shoplifters and one or two professional receivers. The Denmark Street shop was the residennce of a number of "wide boys", some of whom I am sure I also saw railbirding at the Vic in search of someone who'd had a touch at the tables, so that they, in turn, could be "touched" for "just a nifty until next Friday". The Mecca in North Row used to be home to the street barrow boys on Oxford Street, those guys who pretended to be selling stolen perfume, but who were really selling fake perfume. The three-card tricksters would occasionally gather there, or in Shepherd Market shop, or sometimes in the shop in Knightsbridge. Here they would share out the money they had fleeced from naive tourists. If you see any three-card trick game, there are at least four and usually five people "in on it". Plus two "lookers" on either side, checking for the Old Bill.
One of my first shops was in Middlesex Street, or "Petticoat Lane". Most of the customers here (this was 1981) were "honest" traders in the market. Benny and his brother sold leather coats; Michael sold mushrooms, or bananas, or whatever was a good bargain that morning in New Covent Garden. Paul was a wide boy (in both senses of the word) who sold shirts from his stall. His attire when it rained would be a plastic bin-liner, turned upside down and with a hole punched in the top and at the sides, to accompany head and arms.
All were Jewish. Although nearby Brick Lane was already the home of great curries, Petticoat Lane and its environs hosted the remnants of the Jewish wave of immigration the previous century. Blooms was still open on Whitechapel Road and the Jellied Eel stall nearby was legendary (it appeared on a Richard Digance album cover). The whole area closed on Saturdays (part of Petticoat Lane's popularity was down to the fact that it was one of the few places that was open on a Sunday for shopping). Many of these people wokring in Petticoat Lane had actually moved out to Chigwell and Epping (including the owner of the nearby Bell pub) but still came into the old town to work. The guy who had a fur shop (he tailored bespoke fur coats and imported his own pelts from relatives in Russia, I think) actually lived in a posh house in Chelsea, just off the Kings Road at the Sloane Square end, but "commuted" back to the East End to work. The poorer and less successful still lived here, in the council flats. These days, the stores are almost excluysively Asian-run. Most of these people to whom I refer are dead, and those who are not are retired. Although the last time I was there, Michael was still selling vegetables from his stall.
Anyhoo, when Christmas approached, there was an old con that a few people specialised in. One of the guys, a regular in Denmark Street, turned up in the Petticoat Lane shop one day, somewhat to my surprise. London was and is a collection of villages. It's always a bit of a shock to see someone you associate with the West End turn up in the East End. I remember once that I met a barman in a pub in North End Road, near Olympia, one afternoon, and he said "don't I know you?" He did look familiar, but it took us some time to realize that we had last met each other in Rotherhithe -- one just didn't associate people with other parts of London.
This guy who turned up in Petticoat Lane was a typical "unsavoury". A real laugh of a villain who had probably never done a taxed day's work in his life. But his entrepreneurship was unrivalled. His "speciality" near Christmas was to rent a store for a few weeks and to set up a little speaker system. He would then "blind auction" stuff in closed boxes. The first few boxes would go for a couple of quid and, when opened by the "customers", would contain stereos or portable TVs (and TVs were expensive back in the early 1980s).
Soon he would be getting ordinary people bidding £40 for a closed box. As soon as the bid was made and succeeded, an associate in the crowd would get the money within seconds (this was important, because it didn't take long for the biddder to realize that he had been a bit stupid -- carried away in a bit of mini-dotcom mania). As you will by now have guessed, the original "sales" were fixed, with the customers being associates of the auctioneer.
Most people were too embarrassed by their stupidity to complain when the box they opened turned out to contain an alarm clock worth no more than a couple of quid. After all, there were no guarantees with the auction. And, if they did complain that it was a con, there were a couple of muscle boys to ensure that disagreements didn't get too physical.
This team could clear a grand or so a day between them in the couple of weeks before Christmas, which wasn't bad when an average salary was about eighty quid a week.
So, it was with a bit of a chuckle that I read in the Guardian this week of auctions on EBay of "unopened Christmas presents found behind the tree" . This is the old "closed box" auction reinvented for the Internet. No guarantee, and bids caught up in the whole fever of the thing. The newspaper didn't spot this, of course, mainly because most journalists are too young and midddle-class to know about how con-games work. But, think about it. Who would auction an unopened present on EBay? I mean, can anyone fall for this?
Well, apparently they can.
Like I say, there's nothing new under the sun.
No, I mean the kind of "dodgy" character with whom you would happily share a drink in the pub, but whom you definitely would not trust with your last fiver -- or indeed anyone else's last fiver; Actually, you wouldn't trust them with your first fiver, let alone your last.
The old Mecca near Waterloo Station was the "office" of a number of profesional shoplifters and one or two professional receivers. The Denmark Street shop was the residennce of a number of "wide boys", some of whom I am sure I also saw railbirding at the Vic in search of someone who'd had a touch at the tables, so that they, in turn, could be "touched" for "just a nifty until next Friday". The Mecca in North Row used to be home to the street barrow boys on Oxford Street, those guys who pretended to be selling stolen perfume, but who were really selling fake perfume. The three-card tricksters would occasionally gather there, or in Shepherd Market shop, or sometimes in the shop in Knightsbridge. Here they would share out the money they had fleeced from naive tourists. If you see any three-card trick game, there are at least four and usually five people "in on it". Plus two "lookers" on either side, checking for the Old Bill.
One of my first shops was in Middlesex Street, or "Petticoat Lane". Most of the customers here (this was 1981) were "honest" traders in the market. Benny and his brother sold leather coats; Michael sold mushrooms, or bananas, or whatever was a good bargain that morning in New Covent Garden. Paul was a wide boy (in both senses of the word) who sold shirts from his stall. His attire when it rained would be a plastic bin-liner, turned upside down and with a hole punched in the top and at the sides, to accompany head and arms.
All were Jewish. Although nearby Brick Lane was already the home of great curries, Petticoat Lane and its environs hosted the remnants of the Jewish wave of immigration the previous century. Blooms was still open on Whitechapel Road and the Jellied Eel stall nearby was legendary (it appeared on a Richard Digance album cover). The whole area closed on Saturdays (part of Petticoat Lane's popularity was down to the fact that it was one of the few places that was open on a Sunday for shopping). Many of these people wokring in Petticoat Lane had actually moved out to Chigwell and Epping (including the owner of the nearby Bell pub) but still came into the old town to work. The guy who had a fur shop (he tailored bespoke fur coats and imported his own pelts from relatives in Russia, I think) actually lived in a posh house in Chelsea, just off the Kings Road at the Sloane Square end, but "commuted" back to the East End to work. The poorer and less successful still lived here, in the council flats. These days, the stores are almost excluysively Asian-run. Most of these people to whom I refer are dead, and those who are not are retired. Although the last time I was there, Michael was still selling vegetables from his stall.
Anyhoo, when Christmas approached, there was an old con that a few people specialised in. One of the guys, a regular in Denmark Street, turned up in the Petticoat Lane shop one day, somewhat to my surprise. London was and is a collection of villages. It's always a bit of a shock to see someone you associate with the West End turn up in the East End. I remember once that I met a barman in a pub in North End Road, near Olympia, one afternoon, and he said "don't I know you?" He did look familiar, but it took us some time to realize that we had last met each other in Rotherhithe -- one just didn't associate people with other parts of London.
This guy who turned up in Petticoat Lane was a typical "unsavoury". A real laugh of a villain who had probably never done a taxed day's work in his life. But his entrepreneurship was unrivalled. His "speciality" near Christmas was to rent a store for a few weeks and to set up a little speaker system. He would then "blind auction" stuff in closed boxes. The first few boxes would go for a couple of quid and, when opened by the "customers", would contain stereos or portable TVs (and TVs were expensive back in the early 1980s).
Soon he would be getting ordinary people bidding £40 for a closed box. As soon as the bid was made and succeeded, an associate in the crowd would get the money within seconds (this was important, because it didn't take long for the biddder to realize that he had been a bit stupid -- carried away in a bit of mini-dotcom mania). As you will by now have guessed, the original "sales" were fixed, with the customers being associates of the auctioneer.
Most people were too embarrassed by their stupidity to complain when the box they opened turned out to contain an alarm clock worth no more than a couple of quid. After all, there were no guarantees with the auction. And, if they did complain that it was a con, there were a couple of muscle boys to ensure that disagreements didn't get too physical.
This team could clear a grand or so a day between them in the couple of weeks before Christmas, which wasn't bad when an average salary was about eighty quid a week.
So, it was with a bit of a chuckle that I read in the Guardian this week of auctions on EBay of "unopened Christmas presents found behind the tree" . This is the old "closed box" auction reinvented for the Internet. No guarantee, and bids caught up in the whole fever of the thing. The newspaper didn't spot this, of course, mainly because most journalists are too young and midddle-class to know about how con-games work. But, think about it. Who would auction an unopened present on EBay? I mean, can anyone fall for this?
Well, apparently they can.
Like I say, there's nothing new under the sun.
