Lots of Loot

In British movies, crime usually pays handsomely--at least if the crook is a dear old crank whose only motive is to raise some lolly for the League Against Cruel Sports. In real life, larceny is even more lucrative for the professional who specializes in the sophisticated jobs that the English call "Yankee-style" crime. Robberies alone have soared by more than 200% (to some $5,000,000 yearly) in metropolitan London over the past decade, while payroll thefts have gone up almost 500% since 1960. Chief reason for the increase in "snatchings and takings," as Scotland Yard calls them, is that the underworld is now managed by executives with a flair for organization that outstrips the sleuths.

They also have style. In the past year one gang has made frequent headlines by knowledgeable thefts of priceless silver from stately homes, whose doughty walls, it seems, scarcely quiver when burglars blast open the pantry safe. One victim, the Marquess of Bristol, learned recently that $56,000 worth of silver pinched from his mansion last February is now in Russia. Another underworld spectacular that fascinated Britons was carried out last year by eight dapper dastards in bowler hats, and dark suits and carrying tightly furled umbrellas, who marched into London airport, grabbed a $175,000 airline payroll, and beat an elegant retreat in two matching blue Jaguars.

Last week Britons could talk of little else but a cool little coup in which four men swiped a half-ton of gold from a financial-district bullion warehouse in the lunch hour. After tying up a watchman, the villains nonchalantly lugged forty 27-lb. gold bars--worth $560,000 --across a sidewalk into a blue delivery van, then made a clean getaway despite a traffic-stopping dash the wrong way on a one-way street. Hoping to keep the culprits from leaving the country, Scotland Yard posted men at every airfield and seaport in Britain. Flying-squad officers checked every small foundry in London on the off-chance that they might nab the gang in the act of melting their haul into easily portable nuggets.

At week's end the New Lavender Hill Mob, as Fleet Street inevitably christened it, was still at large--probably, guessed Scotland Yard, holed up within metropolitan London. Unlike Alec Guinness' mob, which melted down its loot into solid-gold Eiffel Tower souvenirs and shipped them to Paris, the real-life quartet probably aimed to export its bullion to India, where gold fetches twice the world market price. "I see no reason why they should be caught," said one expert. "They have a market for it all ready. It's that kind of job-."

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