The smart merchants adjusted, and some people who had never hawked fruit or vegetables joined in. Produce wasn’t needed to make a living. What was required were social skills, powers of negotiation, and an eye for “good junk.” The roving merchants created a crude and more intimate predecessor to eBay. Family heirlooms changed hands quickly on doorsteps, for cash on the spot. For many people this was just another added convenience—a way to clean out their closets and cupboards and earn a little money while they did it. It wasn’t even necessary to haul anything to the curb for the garbage collection. The merchants, or “knockers,” as they became known, carried it away for them. Free grocery delivery, plus 1-555-GOT-JUNK service, combined.
It was a win-win situation for residents and merchants, or so those residents thought. “But you know people,” laughed Paul. “If they can exploit a situation, they will. And they did.”
Brighton was, and is still, under the jurisdiction of the Sussex Police. Their jurisdiction stretches over a large section of the coast, including Hove, Eastbourne, and Horsham. Brighton is its largest urban centre within that jurisdiction. By the end of 1965, the Sussex Police were receiving a high volume of phone calls from angry Brighton residents. Houses were being burglarized, and at far higher rates than ever recorded in Brighton’s history. All the usual things were going missing— cash and jewellery—but thieves were also targeting such items as antiques, lamps, clocks, and sometimes even landscape and still-life paintings. Sussex Police did some investigating: the break-ins were an unintended consequence of the rise of the knockers.
The business model had evolved in a matter of months, from fruit to junk, but the merchants were no longer standing on the front steps of the houses they visited. Instead people were inviting them into their living rooms to inspect the wares on offer. On the surface, knocking was a service, but now the business model had another layer.
Knockers spent their days wandering through houses and buying families’ refuse, and they ended their days at the Lanes or the North Lanes, selling the junk to savvy, educated antique dealers. The dealers could discern between lesser and greater varieties of junk, and they were finding some incredibly valuable merchandise. “Ah, but there was something else going on now,” Paul continued. “The information was also moving to more insidious circles, from the knocker to the criminal down the block.” Knocking turned into a devious game that allowed thieves to peek at the inventory inside the houses of the upper middle class. It was a plague on the houses of Brighton, but it was a godsend for Paul.
In the 1960s, art theft was still an eccentric crime, relegated to the file of international mystery. The Sussex Police believed they were dealing with a local nuisance, and one that could be contained. Sussex’s five man art theft unit did not possess the foresight or resources to stop what was happening. The problem was not contained. The movement was still going strong when, in 1979, Paul joined the fraternity of knockers working the streets of Brighton. He spent his first few days with a family down the block—a father and two sons who showed him the tricks of the trade. Soon Paul was happy to go knocking on his own.
“YOU KNOCK ON a stranger’s door, you get the owner of the house to let you inside, you buy stuff from them. You take that stuff to the antique dealers. You sell it for more than you bought it for. There’s your profit. Simple. One man’s junk was another man’s treasure,” Paul said. “It’s a small business.”
Paul was a natural when it came to knocking. He possessed exactly the skill set required: he was relaxed, fun, and chatty, and he had a wry sense of humour, making people laugh and feel at ease—a bright young kid who enjoyed meeting elderly, lonely strangers. Paul had no qualms about talking them into selling him their valuables for a discount price, and his methods became more sophisticated with practice. “It wasn’t exactly illegal, but it wasn’t very nice, was it.”
The first “real money” Paul earned was with the boy down the block, on his first couple of days working the streets. “We got into a house and bought a few gold chains for £20. Then we walked to a dealer in the Lanes and he bought those chains from us for £200.” Minus the twenty they’d paid, that left £90 profit each. “You have to understand that in those days that was a lot of money,” said Paul. “It was a cartoon kind of moment. I had these big fucking green dollar bills in my eyes.”
The money was an aphrodisiac. “I was hooked,” he said. “I took to it like a duck to water.” The new job became addictive, and it opened up the capitalist in Paul. During that first year of knocking he found himself transformed from a hapless teenager into an ambitious young blood scouring the streets of Brighton every day for doors that would open. It was like a game show: behind every door was a prize.
“The hardest part of the job was getting through the front door,” he said. “Once I’m in the front door, half my job was done.” Paul soon found himself doing anything to gain access, and many of his methods were devious. Here is an example of a conversation between a knocker and victim, as told by Paul:
Knocker: “Hello Dear. I wonder if you received my flyer yesterday about buying antiques?”
Mrs. Old Innocent Victim: “Oh yes, I did get that. Well, I probably don’t have anything you’d be interested in buying.”
Knocker (peering through the open door): “Well, I was just talking to Mrs. Whoever-the-Old-Lady-Down-the-Block and she said you have some excellent items. For example, look at that beautiful vase behind you. Did you know that’s worth two hundred pounds?”
Mrs. Victim: “Oh my, I had no idea.”
Knocker walks inside the house to fawn over near-worthless vase but appraises chest of drawers worth £2,000, three landscape paintings in the living room, gold candlesticks, and so on. Knocker begins to create a mental inventory: a list of all the valuable items he can spy. Then knocker pushes his luck and sees if she will bring him upstairs, where the jewels are usually kept.
Knocker: “This vase is absolutely gorgeous. And did you know we also pay top dollar for old bead necklaces? Do you happen to have any old bead necklaces?”
Mrs. Victim: “Well that’s amazing because I do have some old bead necklaces. I had no idea they were valuable. They’re upstairs.”
Knocker: “Really? Just upstairs? We should go have a looky.”
The knocker follows upstairs and inspects the beads that are stored in a silver box with her other jewels. He may negotiate for some of the more valuable jewellery, or not. The knocker has now been given a tour of the house. He buys something and leaves. The knocker remembers her face, the address, the street, and the inventory of the house.
“From day one my advantage was my intelligence and my youth,” Paul told me. “I’d knock on a door with a fist full of cash, and people would think they were taking advantage of a kid. They thought they were exploiting my youth, and were lulled into a false sense of security by my young face. But they were the ones being shafted. I’d buy half the house, and they wouldn’t even know I’d taken them. It was all about bullshitting, but let’s face it, life is one big line of bullshit. It just depends on how good your line is.”
Every afternoon became an adventure. “The entire allure of the game was the unknown. You never knew what you’d find the next day. It could be anything. You could find Michelangelo’s finger tomorrow.”
Paul figured out quickly that a day’s work knocking gave him two categories of things he could sell: one, the junk he’d bought that day, which he could off-load to the dealers in the Lanes or the North Lanes; two, the information he had gathered about the houses he had been inside. “I was friends with a man, at that point, who would buy me drinks or dinner and ask me lots of questions about what I saw on the knock that day,” Paul told me. “It didn’t take long for me to understand what he was using my information for.” Knockers provided a flow of information to the criminal down the block, who would then have a shopping list of what was inside the houses. “A knocker’s primary role turned out to be reconnaissance. It was about gathering inform
ation for later use. I realized, why give away that information when I could hire thieves myself,” he said. “What I learned on the knock was that he who controls the information controls the world.” So family silver was bought during the day. Jewels, high-end antiques, and paintings disappeared by night.
“If you were a knocker and you were smart you moved up quickly. Moving up in the world is always about circumnavigating,” Paul said. “Why would I want to wait for other people to do what I could?”
That can-do attitude served him well. In 1980, in Plymouth, when Paul tried his hand at a home burglary and failed, he realized he wasn’t good at the manual labour. Where Paul was gifted was in intel—organizing talent, giving orders, making connections, negotiating: he was management. When he made that link, he gave himself his first promotion, to middleman. Paul was just a teenager, but he took the information that he collected from his days scouring the streets of Brighton and converted it into a more efficient business model.
In his new role, Paul wasn’t just a knocker and he wasn’t just a thief. He was a criminal organizer and a handler of stolen art. Below him was the hired muscle, and above him were the dealers and the network of the legitimate trade. He was the bridge in a larger system forming around the art market boom that was occurring all over the globe. The Brighton knockers were becoming a means of delivering supply to that system, and Paul was figuring out the best way to deliver his product. “If thieves could help me deliver more supply, so be it.”
He wanted to move up the chain and he wanted to make a larger profit, so he did what any CEO of that era would have done: he outsourced to a cheap labour force that could deliver a higher-value product while he searched for more buyers. When he could have been drinking like any other teenager, Paul would go home to study auction-house catalogues and read up on the history of art and antiques. “I was learning about the product that I was now dealing in.”
OVER A FEW conversations, I asked Paul to analyze the system for me. He said he’d never quite thought about art theft in terms of a corporate structure, but he had fun breaking it down into categories: “Victim, Knocker, Thief, Organizer, Handler, Dealer, Auction House, and End User,” he told me. “It begins with the victim. The victim supplies the raw material. The art and antiques are drained from their homes,” Paul said. “Victims are the people that get shafted in this system.”
Paul came to understand that the purpose of a burglary was to steal the prize, and every house had prizes. “The more practice you have at the game, the easier it is to identify those items. The more you learn, the faster you know what the prize is in that particular house.” So it was just a matter of identifying which houses had the best prizes.
It was a beautiful business model, because there could never be a shortage of supply. “Art and antiques always serve a practical purpose,” he said. “A grandfather clock worth $10,000 might actually tell the time. An antique vase holds flowers. A painting also serves a purpose—it may be something that has been handed down through generations and that is a part of the family history. A painting can become a part of the fabric of the family. Even if it’s a beautiful object that has been placed behind a glass cabinet door, that object is still serving a purpose. It raises the quality of life for a person. It makes the world a better place for the person who gazes at it.”
Paul’s goal was to strip any family he could of whatever material possessions they loved and cherished. He told me that he appreciated the quality of much of the art he stole and handled but maintained that art was not something for him to covet. It was a product. “It was like being a drug dealer. You don’t want to become a user. You want to get it out of your hands and onto the street to an art dealer.”
Paul felt that mansions were too much of a risk. “Lords and ladies were a waste of time. They were guarded and secretive. They didn’t let anyone in. They were smart,” he said. He also ruled out the other end of the spectrum—the lower class living in the kind of social housing where he himself had grown up. “The goods weren’t high quality or as valuable. It wasn’t worth my time.”
For Paul, the best targets were families from the upper middle class—the level just below the mansions. He explained, “Three generations ago these families might have been the lords and ladies, and may have lived in a mansion once. Time had changed their financial position. Now they have a modest house and a modest life. But inside that modest house may be the remnants of that once richer life. That’s what I’m going to take.”
According to statistics Paul studied, one in eight people in Britain at that time was an elderly person living alone. “Just to be clear, I didn’t target the elderly to be vindictive,” said Paul. “It’s sad, but elderly people are targeted because they are the ones who own art and antiques. If young people owned art and antiques, they would be targeted.”
But the older the victim, the easier to burglarize. Elderly people were physically slow; senile, if Paul was lucky. Maybe with a case of advanced arthritis, and usually talkative. Sometimes they were complete blabbers. Many suffered from damaged hearing or weak eyesight. And they were early to bed. They owned fine art but often didn’t know very much about it, or what it was worth. If Paul was out knocking and knew more than they did, he’d already won. As Paul pointed out, “It really was like taking candy from a baby.”
Paul was also diligent about gathering information from unlikely sources. He visited libraries to scour electoral rolls. “I’d study the names on those lists, and it cut down a lot of legwork. On an electoral roll you could just tell by looking at those names who was old: Roberta, Vernon, Geraldine, Gwendolyn, Florence, Stanley, Winifred.” And their addresses were written beside the names.
“Then I’d spend a few days knocking. Okay, door number six. Remember that door.” Paul estimates that when he started there were over two thousand knockers and thieves operating from Brighton, but they were constantly moving across the countryside.
While Paul was out infiltrating future targets to burglarize, he also studied the habits of his victims. At one point he noticed that a lot of people he visited were watching snooker on television in the afternoons. So Paul started to watch snooker. “I could get inside a strange woman’s house and talk to her for half an hour about snooker,” he said.
Paul’s outlook was optimistic because there could never be a shortage of targets. If he was smart at his job, each house he arranged to steal from gave him a healthy profit margin. Sometimes he would spend months hitting the same house, first as a knocker and then by paying thieves to steal the rest. “If there was a house that had a lot of stuff, you just kept going back until there was nothing left. I might have gone knocking to the same house six times and then had it robbed. It’s nothing personal. I could have taken the most personal thing to them, but to me it could be worth $10,000. It’s shameful, but that was my attitude.”
One day, a few minutes after we’d said goodbye after we’d spent an hour on the phone talking about his spectacular break-and-enter career, Paul called me back. I picked up and he said, “Look, I just need you to realize, I know I’ve said a lot of horrible things today, about all these terrible things I’ve done. You need to keep in mind that I came from a rough life. I didn’t have anything to fall back on. This is what I had.” He paused. “Do you believe in redemption?” he asked.
Maybe talking to a stranger on the phone for an hour about all the victims he’d stolen from had struck a self-reflective nerve? I wondered if this was another line of bullshit. But he sounded sincere.
PAUL DIDN’T HAVE a hard time finding thieves to hire. “They were down at the pub in the neighbourhood where I grew up. You just knew who was game. These were relatively simple men, with simple wants, who treated their jobs with professionalism in order to fuel a lifestyle. Stealing things was what they did to support themselves,” he said.
“A professional thief will break into a house to steal an object, which he can then sell for cash value. This is what he does each week to earn his
living. If you saw these men at the pub, they would appear normal to you. They might live normally all week, and then at the end of the week they’ll do one high-value burglary to pay the rent,” Paul explained. “They didn’t care what they were stealing. It could be a stereo, jewels, a couch. They really didn’t care. Most of the men I dealt with enjoyed a drug habit or wanted to live a certain type of way, and stealing is simply what they did to support that lifestyle. They don’t care about art or antiques, they just want to earn a living.”
A good thief required a few basic skills, and those skills were quite different from Paul’s talents of charm, negotiation, and bullshitting. It was this that Paul learned that night in Plymouth, in 1980. He had the courage to break into a home, but he just wasn’t fast enough, graceful enough.
“An average burglary takes twenty minutes,” Paul said. “In that twenty minutes a thief is doing a lot of work and managing a series of stresses and anxieties. It’s a high-pressure job. You must have courage to do what they do, to enter a house illegally that may or may not be empty. Courage in a man, by the way, can be enhanced by certain drugs, and some of the thieves I dealt with used heroin or cocaine to artificially gain the courage they needed to do their work,” he said. “I didn’t mind if a thief took heroin, because heroin is an opiate. Cocaine is different, though. I didn’t like thieves on coke. They could just freak out.”
The time frame for a burglary is so short that a thief must have the ability to remain calm. “You’re not in there for very long, so you have to keep your wits about you and stay focussed,” Paul said. The focus was essential because in the dark, with the adrenaline turned up and the senses buzzing, it was easy to lose track of why you were there.
“Always keep your eye on the prize,” said Paul. This was his new corporate mantra. “The prize is the whole point of the job. It doesn’t matter how much courage you have or how calm you are. If you don’t come out of that house with the prize, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.” The prize could be a number of different material items: porcelain miniatures, Royal Doulton pieces, gold, silver, clocks. Larger pieces of furniture could be worth a lot as well: chests of drawers, grandfather clocks, lamps. There were also, of course, paintings.
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