lk.

To readers unfamiliar with the cast of mind of professional criminals it
will be almost impossible to appreciate with what bold insouciance these
vultures now hovered over the metropolitan barnyard. Had not the Court
of Appeals itself recognized their profession? They had nothing to fear.
The law was on their side. They walked the streets flaunting their
immunity in the very face of the police. "Wire-tapping" became an
industry, a legalized industry with which the authorities might
interfere at their peril. Indeed, there is one instance in which a
"wire-tapper" successfully prosecuted his victim (after he had trimmed
him) upon a charge of grand larceny arising out of the same transaction.
One crook bred another every time he made a victim, and the disease of
crime, the most infectious of all distempers, ate its way unchecked into
the body politic. Broadway was thronged by a prosperous gentry, the
aristocracy and elite of knavery, who dressed resplendently, flourished
like the green bay-tree, and spent their (or rather their victims')
money with the lavish hand of one of Dumas's gentlemen.

But the evil did not stop there. Seeing that their brothers prospered in
New York, and neither being learned in the law nor gifted with the power
of nice discrimination between rogueries, all the other knaves in the
country took it for granted that they had at last found the Elysian
fields and came trooping here by hundreds to ply their various trades.
The McCord case stood out like a cabalistic sign upon a gate-post
telling all the rascals who passed that way that the city was full of
honest folk waiting to be turned into rogues and "trimmed."

"And presently we did pass a narrow lane, and at the mouth espied a
written stone, telling beggars by a word like a wee pitchfork to go
that way."

The tip went abroad that the city was "good graft" for everybody, and in
the train of the "wire-tappers" thronged the "flimflammer," "confidence
man," "booster," "capper" and every sort of affiliated crook, recalling
Charles Reade's account in "The Cloister and the Hearth" of Gerard in
Lorraine among their kin of another period:

With them and all they had, 'twas lightly come and lightly go; and
when we left them my master said to me, "This is thy first lesson,
but to-night we shall be at Hansburgh. Come with me to the 'rotboss'
there, and I'll show thee all our folk and their lays, and
especially 'the loss