Crime and the State 381have enhanced his influence over the activities of robbers and thieves, and
helped to establish him in the early 1720 s, by his own assessment, as the ‘thief-
taker general’.^33 He and his agents were well-informed detectives precisely be-
cause they had acted effectively as receivers for so many robbers and burglars.
Some members of gangs refused to deal with him for just this reason. But the ex-
istence of gangs in fact played into the hands of someone who could take advan-
tage of their inherent weaknesses. In particular, gangs were vulnerable to
betrayal when one of their members was arrested, since he would be strongly
tempted to save his own skin by giving the evidence that would lead to the arrest
and conviction ofhis colleagues—and such convictions could also mean massive
pay-offs in reward money. Wild developed knowledge of the haunts of the gangs
and of their activities, and he had a sufficiently strong organization ofhis own to
pick them off and profit from the powerful weapons—the pardon and the re-
ward—that the law now provided in the support of policing and prosecution.
Wild almost certainly arranged perjured evidence to save some men when it
served his purposes, and invented evidence to convict others. One of the men he
prosecuted complained at his trial that Wild ‘makes it his Business to swear away
honest Men’s Lives for the sake of the Reward, and that is what he gets his Liveli-
hood by’.^34 That cut little ice with the authorities. He was doing their work.
In the end, it was not his use of perjured evidence in the conduct of these pros-
ecutions that brought him down, but the second element in his corrupt career:
arranging too boldly the return of stolen goods for a reward. When Bernard
Mandeville addressed the problem of crime in the metropolis in 1725 in six
essays in the British Journal, subsequently slightly reworked in his Enquiry into
the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn, he devoted his first two essays to ‘the
destructive Consequences... and the Damage the Publick sustains from the
Trade that is drove by Thiefcatchers’, in which Wild was the central figure.^35
‘[N]othing is more common among us’, Mandeville wrote—in a passage com-
posed before Wild was arrested, though published afterwards—‘As soon as any
Thing is missing, suspected to be stolen, the first Course we steer is directly to
the Office of Mr. Jonathan Wild... and offer more for it than Mr. Thiefcan make
of it.. .’.^36 And he said ofWild that
It is certain, that the Correspondence he kept up with Highway-Men, House-breakers,
and Rogues of all Sorts, was, for some Years, beyond Example; and that none of his
Predecessors or Contemporaries, enjoy’d the Superintendency over Thieves with such
an absolute Sway, or so long and successfully as himself. No Person was ever more
universally known in his Occupation, or had the hundredth Part of the Addresses made
to them for the Recovery of stolen Goods.^37
(^33) Howson, Thief-Taker General, 71 – 3.
(^34) Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey.. .( 4 vols, 1742 ) I, 360 – 1 (William Duce).
(^35) Mandeville, An Enquiry, preface. (^36) Ibid., 3.
(^37) The British Journal, 24 April 1725. For Mandeville’s authorship of this letter, see Thomas A. Horne,
The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England( 1978 ), 110.