The Angry Exile: Crime: it fucking well does pay - UPDATED... AGAIN

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Crime: it fucking well does pay - UPDATED... AGAIN

No, seriously it does. Because it turns out that if someone nicks £845 they may end up being paid 13 fucking grand by the poor bastard whose deep misfortune it was to have (a) hired a thieving cunt and (b) have caught him.

Simon Cremer, 47, took Mark Gilbert, 40, to the police station after discovering he had written out a company cheque to himself and taken it to Cash Converters in October 2008.
Gilbert was paraded through the streets of Witham in Essex with a cardboard sign which read: "Thief. I stole £845 am on my way to the police station."

Fair enough. He did do it and he admitted it to police when he got there, and while the sign may be a bit prejudicial even Gilbert concedes that he probably deserved it.

"I probably deserved it for what I did, fair enough..."

See? And no argument from me. A bit of public humiliation may be a little old fashioned but it's not like being in the stocks, and given what happened next it's about all the punishment Gilbert got anyway.

He admitted the crime to police and was let off with a caution ...

Yes, despite admitting the offence he got a caution. I'm not saying he necessarily should have gone to jail for 845 quid but fuck's sake, it's not a trifling sum. I doubt I'm the only one who feels that this was something a court should probably have decided and that at the least there should have been some community service. Instead he gets an official "Now don't do it again" and sent on his way.

Now that's pretty fucking poor but to the UK's shame it's really nothing terribly surprising these days. And what then happened the the thief's boss is starting to get that way too.

... but Mr Cremer was charged with false imprisonment ...

Could someone please explain to this poor, ignorant layman what the cunting fuck was "false" about it when, and this bears emphasising, the guy stole and fucking admitted it? Okay, the case against him and three other men charged along with him collapsed in only a couple of months - I'm guessing someone at the CPS wondered how the hell they were going to persuade a jury to convict, but also all four agreed to be bound over to keep the peace. I'm not sure if Mr Cremer realised he would also have to bend over to be fucked for compo, but that's where the story leads next.

A CROOK who was frogmarched to a police station with a sign around his neck branding him a thief is claiming £90,000 from the boss he robbed.

More than a hundred times what he stole. Nice to see the fucker has a sense of proportion.

[Mr Cremer said] “He’s claiming he has not been able to work for the last two years because of the trauma and distress he has suffered. I don’t think it is right you steal from someone and then sue them. That is not justice.”

Me neither. I'm also in some doubt about whether it was distress and trauma, those ever popular weasel words that occasionally apply to people who really are distressed and traumatised but also willingly whore themselves for every whinging bastard looking for a payout, that caused him to be off work for two years. I have a feeling that the entire town knowing that he's a fucking thief might have something to do with it. Poor Simon Cremer probably is distressed and traumatised though. As he said back in July:

"If I fight him the solicitor’s bill will be huge and he only has to be awarded a pound to win. Or I make him an offer to make it go away for a quarter of the price. What a moral dilemma.
“He’s got legal aid and he’s got £22,000 insurance cover to pay for his legal costs. It adds insult to injury.”

And in the end he gave up and settled out of court. His partner is fighting breast cancer and I'm certainly not going to say it was the wrong decision. He was in a likely lose-lose situation and had other things on his plate. Whether the parasite Gilbert knew or not I have no idea, but it offends any sense of natural justice to think that Simon Cremer has been put through this by a thieving cunt whose "traumatic" experience occurred directly as a result of his decision to fucking steal.

"It would have cost me £25,000 just to go to court, so I had no option but to settle out of court. I could not afford to take it to court, so there was no other option.
"It would financially ruin me, it would break me. I would lose my business and I would risk losing my home because I would have to remortgage it."

Justice? The word must stick in Simon Cremer's throat. Even thinking it must make him want to spit, to try to lose the bitter taste the thought must bring.

And Gilbert, who we must remember is less of a victim and more a FUCKING THIEF, is full of fucking sympathy.

"I feel for the bloke, I respect the bloke but I want him to pay for what he's done."

Oh, that's fucking big of you. You're all heart, aren't you? Never mind him paying for what he's done. What about you paying for what you've done, you thieving bastard? Got any plans in that area?

"I went in my local pub and felt a cold shoulder."

My heart bleeds for you. Is that it? That's the level of your distress? Being sent to Coventry in the boozer? That, a humiliating walk to the cop shop and a police caution seem like a pretty light price to pay for being a thief, especially if you then use it as an onion in the hope of a bigger payday.

"I think this is going to have a long-term effect."

We can but hope, but I doubt it'll have the right effect because you basically got away with your crime and then some. And let's just remind ourselves that you yourself admit that you deserved what happened.

"I probably deserved it for what I did, fair enough but I wasn't stealing from him and I paid the money back."

Point of order, thief. When you steal from a company you're stealing a little from every honest employee and every shareholder, and even the customers. Heard of the concept of getting a smaller slice but making the cake so much bigger that everyone gets more cake? Thieves have more or less the opposite effect - they don't feel any pain from it because unknown to everyone else they've swiped an extra slice anyway. You might not have stolen a penny directly from Simon Cremer personally - I realise the £13K you've screwed out of the poor bastard with the help of the thieves' welfare service known as the British criminal justice system does not technically count, though I'm sure Simon Cremer feels like he's been robbed - but stealing from a company is not this victimless crime you may believe. You reduce the profits and that means a little less to go around for everybody - a company suffering from internal theft can't offer as much in wages or dividends it might like to, or be as competitive with prices as it might want to. You spread the pain around but that only means you've stolen a little from a very large number of people, but even if the effect is only 10p each from 8,450 people it's as real as if you had gone into their pockets and taken precisely one ten pence coin from each of them. Do you see now, thief, or is there a minimum threshold in your head for it to count as stealing?

Just in case it's not clear, the man on the left is a fucking thief

So the lesson here for would be thieves in the mould of Mark Gilbert is to keep your thefts low enough for the police to let you off without having to dust off and wake up a magistrate. And for their unfortunate employers the lesson is not to take any you catch to the police station yourself, and certainly not to get creative if you do. If the police don't turn up it's probably cheaper in the long run to just give them some more money.

And if you're an employer in the Bristol area, where Mark Gilbert is now believed to be living, or potentially anywhere in the UK that he might move to, I suggest you take a good old look and remember the face. I suggest you remember that its owner is, by his own admission, a thief. And I suggest you remember what he did to the person that caught him if he happens to apply to you for a job.

And if you're Mark Gilbert I'd suggest you enjoy your £13,000. But try to make it last, eh?

UPDATE - In the comments Longrider says that he suspects there is more to this story than meets the eye and points out that there was a dispute over the original £845. I had noticed but forgot to mention it. I'm assuming Longrider is referring to this:

He admitted writing the cheque to himself and cashing it in claiming he was owed wages that he wanted to use for a holiday and his boss was too busy to write it himself.

Which I thought was more convincing than saying the dog ate my homework, but not by much. Even if 100% true it does not justify theft over any of the other courses of action he could have taken, but in any case I'm a bit sceptical. He was waiting for a cheque for wages? That's pretty unusual these days, isn't it? And Cremer was always too busy? Really? There was never two minutes, even at the end of the day or before opening for business, when Cremer could write out the cheque? Has he got some sort of disorder that makes it a much longer task than for the rest of us? And above all else Gilbert's own words condemn him in my mind:

"... I paid the money back."

Strange thing to do if you really believed you were genuinely owed money.

UPDATED AGAIN - Longrider has added to his thoughts over at his own place along with a link to a Beeb article on the story. Again, and I completely agree with him, Longrider feels that much hinges on whether the £845 was owed.

I would however, point out that there is a back story that hasn’t been fully told here that puts a different perspective on the events and if Cremer did owe the money as Gilbert claims, my sympathies tend to swing the other way.

Again, I'd agree with that if it is true, but the only evidence so far pointing that way is Gilbert's claim that he was owed the money. Without something solid to back that claim up the word of a man who stole, and admitted both that he did it and deserved what happened, falls very much into the hearsay category, especially as more than two years have passed in which he could have produced something for a small claims court, or even a newspaper if he wanted to remove some of the doubts over his character. That he hasn't done so, the stuff about there not being time for Cremer to write a cheque, the decision to steal rather than take honest action, and that after the arrest he seemed content to let the owed money go makes me wonder if Gilbert ever had anything at all to back up his claim. He might have honestly believed it for all we know, though of course honestly held belief doesn't necessarily mean accurate or provable. What eventually happened to the £845 would shed some light on that, and the last we have is Gilbert saying he'd paid the money back.

That only leaves one question.

The other question hovering over all of this is that if the theft was straightforward as Cremer maintains, why did Gilbert only receive a caution rather than full prosecution?

I can think of a couple of reasons. First is that the sign probably was a bit overboard and that may have influenced the police's decision. Secondly, and probably more importantly, while 845 quid is a lot of money to find down the back of the sofa it's no doubt much less than he could have stolen. Does it meet the definition of petty theft? Possibly - I don't know what the definition is in Essex and I'm not going to make the obvious jokes about it. But my point is that cautions for theft are far from unprecedented. Finally, as I mentioned above, Gilbert might honestly have believed he was owed the money, and while from the point of view of the police it would have been one man's word against another they may have felt that they were not dealing with an habitual thief. There's probably enough without even speculating on easy results for the monthly figures ;-)