Thread: RIP Peter Scott

Peter Scott, who has died aged 82, was a highly accomplished cat burglar, and as Britain’s most prolific plunderer of the great and good took particular pains to select his victims from the ranks of aristocrats, film stars and even royalty.

According to a list of 100 names he supplied to The Daily Telegraph, he targeted figures such as Soraya Khashoggi, Shirley MacLaine, the Shah of Iran, Judy Garland and even Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother — although he added apologetically that, in her case, the authorities had covered up by issuing a “D-notice ”.

In 1994 Scott wrote to the newspaper to say that he would consider it “a massive disappointment if I were not to get a mention in [its] illustrious obituary column”. He explained that he derived much pleasure from reading accounts of the exploits of war heroes, adding: “I would like to think I would have fronted the Hun with the same enthusiasm as I did the fleshpots in Mayfair.” He added that he had been a Telegraph reader since 1957, when newspapers were first allowed in prisons, “on account of its broad coverage on crime”.

In the course of thieving jewellery and artworks from Mayfair mansions, Bond Street shops and stately homes, Scott also served Fleet Street as handy headline fodder, being variously hailed the “King of the Cat Burglars”, “Burglar to the Stars” or the “Human Fly”. He identified a Robin Hood streak in himself, too, asserting in his memoirs that he had been “sent by God to take back some of the wealth that the outrageously rich had taken from the rest of us”.

“I felt like a missionary seeing his flock for the first time,” he explained when he recalled casing Dropmore House, the country house of the press baron Viscount Kemsley, on a rainy night in 1956 and squinting through the window at the well-heeled guests sitting down to dinner. “I decided these people were my life’s work.”

Always a meticulous planner, Scott bought a new suit before each job, so that he would not look out of place in the premises he was burgling. Fear, the possibility of capture, excited him.

During one break-in “a titled lady appeared at the top of the stairs. 'Everything’s all right, madam,’ I shouted up, and she went off to bed thinking I was the butler.” On other occasions, if disturbed by the occupier, he would shout reassuringly: “It’s only me!”

In all, by his own reckoning, Scott stole jewels, furs and artworks worth more than £30 million. He held none of his victims in great esteem (“upper-class prats chattering in monosyllables”). The roll-call of “marks” from whom he claimed to have stolen valuables included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Sophia Loren, Maria Callas and the gambling club and zoo owner John Aspinall. “Robbing that bastard Aspinall was one of my favourites,” he recollected. “Sophia Loren got what she deserved too.”

Scott stole a £200,000 necklace from the Italian star when she was in Britain filming The Millionairess in 1960. Billed in the newspapers as Britain’s biggest jewellery theft, it yielded Scott £30,000 from a “fence”. After Miss Loren had pointed at him on television saying: “I come from a long line of gipsies. You will have no luck,” Scott lost every penny in the Palm Beach Casino at Cannes.

In the 1950s and 1960s he pinpointed his targets by perusing the society columns in the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Nor did he ease up with the approach of middle-age; in the 1980s he was still scaling walls and drainpipes. In one Bond Street caper alone he stole jewellery worth £1.5 million, and in 1985 he was jailed for four years. On his release he expanded his social horizons by becoming a celebrity “tennis bum”, a racquet for hire at a smart London club where — as he put it in his autobiography — he coached still more potential “rich prats”.

By the mid-1990s, Scott had served 12 years in prison in the course of half a dozen separate stretches, and claimed to have laid down his “cane” [jemmy] and retired from a life of crime.

But in 1998 he was jailed for another three and a half years for handling, following the theft of Picasso’s Tête de Femme from the Lefevre Gallery in Mayfair the year before. To the impassive detectives who arrested him, Scott quoted a line from WE Henley: “Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.” He often drew on literary allusions, quoting Confucius, Oscar Wilde and Proust.

Scott was also a past-master in self-justification of his crimes and misdemeanours: “The people I burgled got rich by greed and skulduggery. They indulged in the mechanics of ostentation — they deserved me and I deserved them. If I rob Ivana Trump, it is just a meeting of two different kinds of degeneracy on a dark rooftop.”

In his memoirs, Gentleman Thief (1995), Scott admitted to an even stronger motivation than fear as he contemplated another “job”: “Even now, after 30 years, it was a sexual thrill.” There was the additional satisfaction in his assumption that the millions reading about his exploits in the papers were silently cheering him on.

He was born Peter Craig Gulston on February 18 1931 into a middle-class military family in Belfast. His father died when he was young, and his mother, sensing that Peter was destined to be trouble, emigrated to the United States. By the time he left the Belfast Royal Academy, where he was one of the brightest boys but inept at exams, he had squandered his father’s inheritance.

While still in his teens he was wandering the Malone Road in his school scarf burgling houses of the well-off and stashing the spoils in a rugby bag slung over his shoulder. He estimated that he had committed 150 such “screwers” before the police finally nailed him in 1952. “They never suspected me,” he explained, “because I looked like a resident. When the police eventually caught on, I had done so many jobs that they were embarrassed and only charged me with 12.” They were enough, however, to earn him six months in Crumlin Road jail.

Having changed his name to Scott, he then moved to London, where he realised that the houses of Mayfair and Belgravia, with their balconies, porticos and parapets, might have been designed to be burgled. Working as a pub bouncer in the West End, he moonlighted as a housebreaker .

In 1957, during one of his jail stretches, Scott met George “Taters” Chatham, renowned as London’s most celebrated cat burglar, with whom he formed a partnership that would eventually secure the pair a haul of art and jewellery worth millions of pounds. In between their incursions into Bond Street furriers and jewellery stores and the Mayfair drawing-rooms of art collectors, they served increasingly lengthy prison terms; having been sent down for a modest couple of years in the late 1950s, in 1961 Scott was jailed for three years and, in 1964, a further five.

In his memoirs he confessed to “an obscene passion for larceny”, but made no excuses, recognising that he could have made a comfortable living by honest means. Barring one incident in which he broke a policeman’s nose as he struggled to get away, Scott had no convictions for violence, which he considered “an anathema”. He characterised himself as “a man who has made all the mistakes that vanity, envy and greed create”.

Like Raffles, the gentleman thief of Edwardian fiction, Scott in his heyday lived high on the hog, frittering away his fortune on flashy cars, luxury homes and fast women.

He escorted a string of glamorous girlfriends, including the model Jackie Bowyer (“a great sport”), whom he met in 1963 and who became the second of his four wives. His criminal career was the basis of the film He Who Rides a Tiger (1965), in which Tom Bell played the Scott character and Judi Dench his long-suffering girlfriend. Scott himself was serving a prison sentence in Dartmoor at the time and profited little from the film.

He ended up broke, reflecting ruefully that “I gave all my money to head waiters and tarts”. Declared bankrupt, owing creditors £440,000, he lived on benefits of £60 a week in a council flat in Islington.

A son survives him.


Peter Scott, born February 18 1931, died March 17 2013

Peter Scott - Telegraph

Heh, used to work for Aspinall.
Family of inbred morons.

He claims that he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor , but he then says that he spent all his money on himself.
The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

CCTV has ruined everything.

Originally Posted by Fluke

The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

Plenty of bankers do, some even get knighted.

Originally Posted by Fluke

He claims that he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor , but he then says that he spent all his money on himself.
The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

Yeah.. but last of a breed.
Now we just have thugs in hoodies doing old ladies in the street.
Another downside of high tech security... in a way.

Originally Posted by Kurgen

Originally Posted by Fluke

The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

Plenty of bankers do, some even get knighted.

I dont see many people who see bankers as heros though .

Originally Posted by the dogcatcher

Originally Posted by Fluke

He claims that he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor , but he then says that he spent all his money on himself.
The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

Yeah.. but last of a breed.
Now we just have thugs in hoodies doing old ladies in the street.
Another downside of high tech security... in a way.

There are still burglars in the UK though .
That is what this guy was, a burglar

Originally Posted by Fluke

Originally Posted by the dogcatcher

Originally Posted by Fluke

He claims that he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor , but he then says that he spent all his money on himself.
The mans a thief and he shouldnt have celebrity status .

Yeah.. but last of a breed.
Now we just have thugs in hoodies doing old ladies in the street.
Another downside of high tech security... in a way.

There are still burglars in the UK though .
That is what this guy was, a burglar

I know... but yer know?

Americans would say he burglarised.

.. which makes him a burglariser.

^
You have to wonder about Pattaya these days

Originally Posted by wasabi

I'd like to se a pic of her.
Might just go and rob her shop.

Just Googled her.
Lots of pics... none any good.
All sounds like bullshit.

Originally Posted by Necron99

Heh, used to work for Aspinall.
Family of inbred morons.

Me too, 1980-1990! What did you do? PM if ya like.

^ Casino.

I wonder what people would say if a Thai burglar, who targeted Foreigners for 60 years and robbed the Foreigners of 100 s Milions Baht worth of property died and Thais celebrated his lifes "work" .
"Its OK, I only targeted rich felangs , never stole from poor Thais"

We celebrate thieving all the time.
We make blockbuster movies about it.
Seen if you can think of any.
I'll start.
The Italian job.
Oceans 11....

Originally Posted by the dogcatcher

We celebrate thieving all the time.
We make blockbuster movies about it.
Seen if you can think of any.
I'll start.
The Italian job.
Oceans 11....

They are movies though , movie arent real life .
We are talking about real life people and events

We still like it though.
True or otherwise.

Would you like it if you went home and found a burglar in your house?
Would you sit back and watch him for entertainment as he robbed you?

I was burgled in London

It was a nasty traumatic experience and I can only wish ill to those that carry out such crimes

Originally Posted by Fluke

Would you like it if you went home and found a burglar in your house?
Would you sit back and watch him for entertainment as he robbed you?

Bet you've watched the Italian Job though... hav'nt you?

Originally Posted by the dogcatcher

Originally Posted by Fluke

Would you like it if you went home and found a burglar in your house?
Would you sit back and watch him for entertainment as he robbed you?

Bet you've watched the Italian Job though... hav'nt you?

Peter Scott was a burglar, Michael Caine is an actor

Originally Posted by Fluke

Would you like it if you went home and found a burglar in your house?

No, but neither would I like someone coming to my country and staying there illegally and contributing nothing to the economy. - Sound like anybody you might know!!