Peter Scott (thief)

Peter Scott (born February 18, 1931 in Belfast , Northern Ireland , as Peter Craig Gulston , † March 17, 2013 in London ) was a Northern Irish thief who was mainly active in London. Since he often chose the homes of celebrities as targets, the press also referred to him as a "star burglar".

Life

Early years

Peter Craig Gulston came from a Belfast family belonging to the middle class. His father, who was in the military, died when Peter was young and the mother immigrated to the United States . He attended the Belfast Royal Academy , where he was found to be very intelligent but did poorly on exams. By the time he left school, he had already squandered all of his father's inheritance.

He began his burglar career at the age of twelve, focusing on the homes of well-off citizens who lived along Malone Road in Belfast. In his school clothes he did not cause a stir and he hid his booty in a rugby bag matching his appearance. As he later claimed, by the time the police first arrested him in 1952, he had already committed 150 burglaries. However, he was only charged with twelve of the crimes, allegedly because the police officers were embarrassed by the long unexplained series of burglaries. He was sentenced to six months in prison, which he served at Belfast's Crumlin Road Jail .

"Burglar with the Stars"

After his release, he took the surname Scott and went to London . There he worked as a doorman in a pub in the West End , but at the same time was also active as a burglar again, mainly in the upscale districts of Mayfair and Belgravia , where the houses of wealthy citizens, decorated with balconies, parapets and porches, created ideal conditions for him. He chose the targets of his break-ins while studying the social columns in newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express . Despite his careful preparations, Scott was repeatedly arrested and sentenced to shorter sentences.

During a prison stay in 1957, he also met George Henry "Taters" Chatham , who was almost twenty years his senior , and who was perhaps the most famous thief in England at the time . The two entered into a partnership and stayed in contact until Chatham's death in 1997. Together they undertook a series of sometimes spectacular break-ins at fur and jewelery dealers and art collectors in London, which brought them millions of dollars. Both tended, however, to quickly spend the money they made - Scott through a life in luxury with sports cars, expensive apartments and attractive companions, Chatham primarily through his gambling addiction.

When Sophia Loren in 1960 for filming the feature film The Millionaire (The Millionairess) stayed in England, steel Scott of the Italian actress a necklace worth 200,000 pounds, which was then presented by the press as "the greatest jewel theft of England". He later sold the £ 30,000 a fence had paid for the jewelry in a casino in Cannes . Other prominent personalities whom he claims to have broken into over the years in London and on the French Riviera include - according to his own list with around a hundred names, which he attached to a letter to the editor to the Daily Telegraph in 1994 - Lauren Bacall , Maria Callas , Shirley MacLaine , Zsa Zsa Gabor , Judy Garland , Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh , but also the game club and zoo owner John Aspinall , the press czar Viscount Kemsley , the wife of the Arab businessman Adnan Kashoggi , the Shah of Persia Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and even the Queen Mother Elizabeth . In the media he became known as "King of the Cat Burglars", "Burglar with the Stars" and (because of his facade climbing) "The Human Fly".

In the 1960s, the sentences he served grew longer. In 1961 a court sentenced him to three years in prison, followed by another five-year sentence in 1964, which he served in Dartmoor prison. In 1965, partly based on his life movie came Anyone who rides a tiger (He Who Rides a Tiger) in the cinemas. Charles Crichton directed ; the main roles were played by Tom Bell and Judi Dench .

Later years and death

Even as he got older, Scott remained active as a burglar. In a jewel heist on Bond Street in the 1980s alone , he stolen £ 1.5 million worth of stolen property. For this he was sentenced to four years in prison in 1985. After his release, he earned his living temporarily as a tennis instructor in a posh London sports club and as a gardener for a church in Camden .

Although he claimed in his 1995 memoir that he had finally renounced the crime, Scott was sentenced to three and a half years in prison again in 1998, this time for stealing a painting by Pablo Picasso that was stolen from a London gallery in March 1997 . In total, Scott spent about 14 years of his life in prisons. According to his own calculations, the value of the stolen property he has stolen over the years adds up to over £ 30 million.

After serving his last prison sentence, he lived near King's Cross Station in a rough neighborhood, where he occasionally acted as a mediator between warring groups. Even at an advanced age, he was mostly out and about on his bike, until knee damage, the result of several falls during his break-ins in earlier years, no longer allowed this. He then drove an old Mercedes that had been given to him as a present by a son of gangster Billy Hill . In 2004 he took part in a program on Channel 4 television that faked robberies. He spent the last years of his life impoverished and burdened with high debts in a council flat in the London borough of Islington . In 2012, Roland Kennedy Hutchison released a 25-minute documentary called My Friend the Thief , in which the very old Scott recounts his experiences and provides insights into his miserable everyday life. The film received awards at several European film festivals.

Scott was married four times and had one son. His second wife was the model Jackie Bowyer , famous in the 1960s . He had met her in a nightclub in 1963 . The relationship broke up during one of his prison stays and Scott later remembered his lost love with nostalgia.

Peter Scott died on March 17, 2013 at the age of 82 years in London to cancer .

memoirs

In 1995 Scott's memoirs appeared under the title Gentleman Thief: The Recollections of a Cat Burglar , in which he reported in the third person about his life as a criminal. He showed little remorse and confessed that he had no real justification for what he was doing, since he had enough opportunities to earn his money in an honest way. He also expressed himself disparagingly about those he had stolen and claimed that they often owed their wealth only to greed and deceit. He himself was "sent by God to bring back some of the riches that the immensely wealthy had stolen from the rest of us."

Scott described how strong the thrill of getting caught had always been for him, and compared the excitement of planning his coups to sexual arousal. He confessed that the media reports had given him an additional motive to continue his criminal career, believing that many of the millions of newspaper readers had secretly cheered him on. But he hated violence. Other than breaking a police officer's nose in a fight while trying to escape, he was never charged with a violent crime.

In a Guardian article on memoirs published by British criminals, journalist Duncan Campbell highlighted Scott's book in 2011, describing it as one of the most original examples of the genre .

Publications

• Peter Scott: Gentleman Thief. Recollections of a Cat Burglar. HarperCollins, London 1995, ISBN 0-00-255565-4 .

literature

• Duncan Campbell: Peter Scott Obituary . Guardian obituary dated March 20, 2013.
• Peter Scott . Telegraph obituarydated March 22, 2013.

Web links

• My Friend the Thief - The Official Film . Short documentary (2012) by Roland Kennedy Hutchison about Peter Scott

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Scott . Telegraph obituary of March 22, 2013. Accessed March 29, 2013.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Duncan Campbell: Peter Scott Obituary . Guardian Obituary , March 20, 2013. Accessed March 29, 2013. Peter Scott . Telegraph obituary dated March 22, 2013.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Peter Scott . Telegraph obituary dated March 22, 2013.
4. ↑ Peter Scott . Obituary of the Telegraph of March 22, 2013. Cat burglar admits role in stolen Picasso plot . In: The Independent . Accessed May 12, 1998. Accessed March 20, 2013. For Chatham, see Richard Hobbs: Chatham, George Henry [nicknamed Taters] (1992–1997) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004.
5. ↑ Cat burglar admits role in stolen Picasso plot . In: The Independent . May 12, 1998.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Campbell: Peter Scott obituary . Guardian obituary dated March 20, 2013.
7. ^ Campbell: Peter Scott Obituary . Obituary by the Guardian of March 20, 2013. The film can be viewed online: My Friend the Thief - The Official Film . Accessed March 29, 2014.
8. ↑ My Friend the Thief - The Official Film .
9. ↑ In the original: "sent by God to take back some of the wealth that the outrageously rich had taken from the rest of us." Quoted from: Peter Scott . Telegraph obituary of March 22, 2013. Accessed March 29, 2013.
10. ^ Duncan Campbell: Criminal Confessions . In: The Guardian . July 3, 2011. Accessed March 29, 2013.