Free The Profession of Violence by John Pearson

criminals in London.
    â€˜A regular den of thieves,’ is how one of the regulars remembers it. It was certainly convenient, and cheap – and close to all the places where criminals could work.
    It was not the place for the upper echelons of crime. They had more exclusive social territory. But in the old days, after midnight in the big downstairs lounge of the hotel, one saw the social side of West End crime – the small-time fences and ponces, the informers and thieves and pickpockets, the villains and the bouncers who required work or a chat and the society of their own kind. This was where the twins were brought by Dickie Morgan, and they soon began to make their mark on this nocturnal criminal society.
    Almost everyone who met them now agrees there was a strange air of innocence about them which marked them out from other villains round about them. Some thought them shy. They were extraordinarily polite to anyone older who took the trouble to talk to them. They never bragged, were never loud-mouthed, never seemed to swear. Among a race of almost universal gamblers they never gambled. Among womanizers and ponces they showed no interest in women. Among hard-drinkers they were never drunk.
    Most of the time they would just sit – slightly apart from everybody else – usually silent and impassive, watching and listening to what went on. Several who knew them now remark upon their eyes. ‘There was something about them that bored right through you, especially if you were lying to them. You always felt they knew.’
    They also had an air of weirdness and danger, which everybody noticed from the start. Some say they cultivated this quite consciously. Certainly they did so later. Natural actors that they were, they picked up all the tricks of instilling fear with an economy of effort and projecting their presence to maximum effect. But what distinguished them even now from all the other violent characters around them, is that they had an extraordinary presence to project.
    It remains something of a mystery. Part of it was due to their behaviour as identical twins. With their telepathy and uncanny similarity their effect was literally double that of a normal individual, and this certainly explains much of their effectiveness. So does their imperviousness to pain and danger. They were so fit and vicious that they had already perfected a technique of synchronized and ruthless combat which rendered them invulnerable as long as they stayed together.
    But there was something else. ‘They were,’ says one old villain who came up against them shortly afterwards, ‘a thoroughly evil pair of bastards.’ And from now on in their story, the idea continually recurs that they were uniquely and positively ‘evil’.
    Largely because of this the twins were accepted as true villains from the start. Without knowing exactly why, older and more experienced thugs were wary of them. One or two who weren’t were dealt with efficiently and unemotionally, but these were ‘unimportant nobodies’ – ‘liberty-takers’ who hadn’t the good sense to understand the twins for what they were. There was an old wrestler, working as a doorman at a club in Berwick Street, who had the stupidity to refer to the twins as ‘boys’ and whosejaw was nearly broken by a punch that sent all sixteen stone of him down the stairs to the men’s room.
    People who befriended them were shrewder. ‘You never knew who you’d be needing next time. You weren’t getting any tougher or any younger and it was common sense to keep on the right side of a pair of up-and-coming youngsters like the twins.’
    One of the first freelance villains to befriend the twins during their Piccadilly days was Tommy Smithson from Hackney – gambler, tearaway and non-caring fighting man, he remained one of the twins’ extremely few real-life heroes. Smithson was the supreme non-carer of the