Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,54
that had taken all of his money. By that point he'd already stopped going to school. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been. And two months after his sixteenth birthday, his mother kicked him out of the house after finally having enough of him stealing from her. He didn’t only take cash, he stole stuff in the house that was worth anything and traded it in, and the final straw was when he stole a favourite necklace from her dresser and pawned it for fifty quid.
Out on the street, broke and alone, he’d started staying at hostels, with friends or at homeless shelters. He’d also started pick-pocketing to keep himself going. He didn’t have any qualifications and no way was he going to do manual labour or construction jobs for a living. Although he'd been nervous about pick-pocketing at first, worried he’d get caught, he'd been surprised at how easy it actually was. Given the congestion and close proximity of passengers on the trains on the Underground, a simple two finger dip into a handbag or pocket when everyone was jostling to get on or off the carriage reaped great dividends. He often worked with a partner, the two of them standing either side of a target on the train to box them in during the rush hour, pretending to be fellow passengers jammed together in the packed train carriage, but robbing them blind instead.
A lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe had started working the Underground too, and given the increase in thefts, the Met had started putting undercover cops down there in an attempt to catch them. A lot of the Poles and Romanians couldn’t spot a copper if he came up in uniform and tapped them on the shoulder, but Leon and the group he ran with could smell them a mile off.
Moving out of the Underground to avoid the police, they used Paddington as another haunt. The station was large and always busy, and its position as a main transport hub meant it was usually full of tourists with their heads buried in maps, disorientated and distracted. It was easy. Pick out a tourist and get one of you to grab their attention. Ten seconds later, when the distraction left and the tourist turned back, they find their bag they’d put on the floor beside them is gone. And whoever had stolen it had now vanished into a crowd of constantly moving, anonymous people.
But it hadn't all been successful. Leon had been nicked a couple of times pick-pocketing, having to pay fines and do a short stint of community service, but as he got older and more confident he'd forgone the secrecy of pick-pocketing unsuspecting victims and moved up a level to armed robbery instead.
He was careful about his targets. A lot of thieves thought that young women were the easiest demographic to go after, given their physical disadvantage and that they were easily intimidated. But in fact they were one of the worst to confront. All those women groups, magazines and adverts on television had made sure a lot of girls were more prepared than they used to be. The fear of attack meant many of them now carried wailing button-alarms or even pepper spray, even though it was illegal, in their handbags. A friend of his had been maced by a girl a few years ago after he tried to mug her, and he still talked about how it was the worst couple of hours of his life. Women were often more alert than men, expecting trouble. It served a thief best to leave them well alone.
Leon took a draw on his cigarette, leaning against the wall, watching the hospice car park, and smiled. No, the best targets for mugging were posh kids or tourists. The toffs were soft as dog shit, unused to violence and easily intimidated, and one look at the knife in Leon's hand would get them scrabbling at their pockets like they couldn’t wait to hand over their stuff. The tourists were equally soft. They were out of their comfort zone and easily scared, especially with the threat of violence and a big knife in their face.
Things had gone well for a while, but then the riots in 2011 had happened and Leon got nicked by an undercover cop. He wasn’t doing anything different from the other rioters. It was just bad luck.
He’d been out of the door of an Argos store across town with over two grand of stolen