13. The women had conducted an elaborate masquerade to victimize London merchants
The elder of the two suspects, one Sheena Suck, aged 22, called herself Madame Schnider, a dressmaker to the Court of St. James. Her accomplice, 17-year old Rose Greenbaum, appeared as her client. Together, the two women worked their scam through the fashionable shopping district of the West End. Officers Whitbread and Wensley followed the pair’s trail from draper’s, woolen merchants, jewelers’, shoemakers’, dressmakers’ and other tradesmen and shops. Finally, armed with the description provided by the furrier, they arrested the pair in their home. There they found, in addition to the stolen capes, underclothes, shoes, petticoats and linens, bolts of cloth including fine imported silks and linens, amongst other items “hoisted” from London’s merchants and tradesmen. One could imagine the arrest ended a spree of thievery, but it only suspended it for a time.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of an organized campaign of calculated thievery, both women appeared in court, where they entered pleas of guilt. Both also claimed legitimate occupations as dressmakers and housekeepers. The court listened to their pleas and requests for leniency, based on their inability to resist the temptations placed before them in the course of their legitimate duties. Suck received 15 months, Greenbaum 9 months. To the undoubted frustration of the policemen who arrested them, both completed their sentences and returned to their occupations as both domestics and thieves. Social scientists and reformers of the time blamed the low cost paid to workers, rather than the temptation of easy money, as the root causes of their crimes. Hoisting continued to plague British merchants and the police for decades, well after the First World War, and even beyond.