![]() ![]() That belief was a little premature, for as late as Septemthe ‘Derby Daily Telegraph’ announced on its front page that a gang of nearly 25 pickpockets and card sharpers from Birmingham had arrived for the races. Yet ‘since the gangs had been broken up break-up he had inspired terror among inoffensive people’. A man connected with the Elephant Boys, ‘Watts was a member of the gangs that assaulted bookmakers who declined to pay money when blackmailed’. Under the headline of ‘Race Gang Bully’s Crimes’ it recounted that Ernest Watts had been sentenced to five years for wounding. They now held joint conferences ‘under a regular Chairman, at which they carefully allocate each other’s respective spheres of activity, and settle plans and policy’.īy now, though, the days of the racecourse gangs were numbered as was made plain in a report in the ‘Manchester Guardian’ on May 1, 1928. Indeed on Apthe ‘Exeter and Plymouth Gazette’ revealed that the two ‘remarkable confederacies’ had called a truce. The conflict was short-lived because of the unwelcome attention from the press and the authorities. A Birmingham detective said that they were seldom brought to court because the bookmakers feared them.Ĭope’s conviction emphasised the determination of the police to stamp out the gangs that preyed on bookies and onlookers and which had become notorious again in 1925 with the flare up of the war that between the Brummagem Gang and the Sabinis of London. He was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour for robbing a London bookmaker who ‘had fled in terror’ from the gang. Seven men who ‘terrorised and blackmailed bookmakers’ were rounded up after ‘an exciting conflict’ in which a hammer was used and bottles were thrown’. His real identity was soon made plain in an event that made the ‘Manchester Guardian’ on under the headline ‘Racecourse Gang at Chester’. Giving himself a bookmaker from Stockton-on-Tees, Cope was bound over for £5 for the charge of assault and ordered to keep the peace for six months. On Decemthe ‘Tamworth Herald’ noted that the complainant from Erdington had also been assaulted but now said that ‘he did not want the Bench to take a serious view of the assault, and that he desired the charge of demanding money with menaces to be withdrawn’. ![]() James Cope had not been out of prison long when he and another man were prosecuted for unlawfully demanding money with menaces at Drayton Bassett. Consequently, they sentenced him only to three months’ hard labour. Fortunately for him, the magistrates believed his story that he was ‘running’, taking bets, for two other men who had disappeared. PC Bramall had been on duty and had seen the prisoner dash between some coaches, pursued by some people who claimed that he had taken their bets and then run off with the money without paying those who had won.Ĭope denied that he was a bookmaker, even though he had on him betting tickets and an enamelled badge with the name of Jim Cope. On April 30, the ‘Nottingham Evening Post’ reported that ‘he was charged with larceny’ for ‘welshing’ at the Quorn Hunt Steeplechases. He gave his occupation as a polisher but in fact he was ‘a racecourse pest’, and from 1924 the police began to gain the upper hand against him and his kind. In 1906, when he was aged 25, he had received convictions for using obscene language, drunkenness and gaming and a year later he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour for breaking and entering into a shop and stealing money and goods. All regular low cost softwares lacks the flexibility of multiple PDf files and Creep Functions.James Cope was a villain and a leading figure in the Brummagem Gang that controlled the protection rackets on the racecourses of the Midlands and the North of England. The easiest & low cost professional 2up PDF Book Printing Solution available.
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