Crime and the State 413dynamics of these groups and their relationship to each other is still rather
vague—just as indeed much remains to be learned about the nature of the crim-
inal gangs they may in many ways have resembled. It does seem clear from the
distribution of reward money that while these groups were almost certainly
rivals,^140 they could also co-operate when it was to their mutual advantage.
Paley identifies seven of the thief-takers who were given shares of the Black Boy
Alley gang reward money as members of the Mitchell group; but more than half
were not.
While acknowledging that thief-takers did prosecute genuine offenders, Ruth
Paley is inclined to emphasize the importance to them of opportunities to profit
from the corruptmanipulation of the law and the ease with which they could
‘make’ thieves in order to ‘take’ them. In part, she bases this judgement on the
apparent inadequacy of the income that such men were likely to derive from
rewards. As she points out, when large numbers of claimants shared even a size-
able reward, individual thief-takers would not be likely to earn enough to in-
duce them to engage in the dangerous business of apprehending robbers and
burglars. They could probably make more by blackmail than prosecution, and
in any case, as she points out, they had no guarantee that after all their trouble
and perhaps danger, the jury might not acquit the accused or at least (which was
the same outcome for those looking for rewards) find them guilty of a lesser
charge than robbery.^141
It is difficult to come to a judgement about this. There is little evidence about
how much reward money individual thief-takers were collecting in the 1740 s.
The City cases reveal that between 1740 and 1751 the highest-earning thief-
takers—John Berry and Stephen McDaniel—received about one hundred and
ten pounds each from proclamation rewards and thus perhaps another forty-
five pounds from the sheriffs for the bounty available under statutes. That was
not a great deal over more than a decade. And while they would have earned
considerably more from prosecuting in other parts of the metropolis, especially
in Westminster and Middlesex, the fact that for several years in the late 1740 s the
one-hundred pound supplementary rewards were not being paid, and that
there seem to have been larger numbers than ever of competing thief-takers, the
returns may not have been as rich as they might have expected.
Shrinking returns from thief-taking—and particularly the ending of the
1743 , when parliament added a statutory reward for the prosecution of this offence, in cases involving
offenders who returned prematurely from transportation. One man arrested in 1738 by Mitchell, along
with William Rice and George Holdernesse, two of his associates, denounced him at his trial as an old
thief who had ‘hang’d many a man [and who] makes it his common practice to take people for the sake
of the reward’—a sentiment that perhaps expressed some popular distaste for the thief-taker, but that
could only have confirmed his usefulness to the authorities (Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 56 – 7 ). Mitchell
was described two decades later as ‘a man eminent in the thief-taking way’ by the high constable of
Blackheath, Joseph Cox, in A faithful narrative of the most wicked and inhuman transactions of that bloody-minded
gang of Thief-takers, alias Thiefmakers, McDaniel, Berry. Salman, Eagan, alias Gahagan.. .( 1756 ), 9.
(^140) Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London’, 320 – 5. (^141) Ibid., 322 – 3.