London's bobbies traditionally go about their duties armed at most with truncheons. In a kind of underworld version of old-school-tie sportsmanship, the bullyboys and tearaways in "The Smoke"−as England's capital is known to its criminals−reciprocate by settling their private differences in an equally quiet way, with razor blades half-buried in potatoes or the point of a razor-sharp shiv. Last week London's sensational penny press was black with scare headlines suggesting that gang warfare of a cruder type had come to The Smoke. Four men had pulled up in a car before a dingy boarding house in Maida Vale, crossed the sidewalk in broad daylight, entered the house and pumped lead into a sleazy race-track gambler. "Police believe," reported the conservative Daily Telegraph, "that the murder is gang war with the lid off . . . The razor and knuckle-duster gangs have turned to firearms." The Daily Sketch wondered: "Should the police now be armed?" Few London crime reporters could resist comparing their city to Chicago in the '20s.
The newspapers were whooping it up, but the fact is that Scotland Yard has for more than a year been concerned by a London gang war that centers around a shakedown racket involving race-track bookies.
Wet Sponges. Barby Sabini, a shifty Italian from the unsavory Saffron Hill district, started the racket way back in the 1920s when he and his brothers, armed with wet sponges, used to hang around the race tracks, erasing the chalked odds on the bookie's tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents in a Whitechapel tenement in 1912, Jack Spot (né Comer) was a shrewd operator with a taste for custom-made silk shirts, big black cigars and 40-guinea suits. It took a fat wad of track-protection money to buy these luxuries for Jack, but to help him collect it he had the assistance of an artful knife-wielder named Billy Hill.