In efforts to ensure that the Games go off without a hitch, the authorities are sprucing up the city and cracking down on crimes from pocket-picking to terrorism.
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Muggings, purse snatchings, and pocket picking occur frequently, particularly in major cities. Thieves often loiter in transportation hubs like the Metro (subway) and train stations to take advantage of disoriented or distracted travelers.
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He was detected and arrested but, as Count Orlov declined to prosecute, was discharged, though subsequently he was sentenced to three years' hard labour for pocket-picking at Drury Lane theatre. On his release, he was again caught at his old practices and sentenced to five years' hard labour, but influence secured his release on the condition that he leave England. He accordingly went for a short time to Dublin, and then returned to London, where he was once more detected pocket-picking, and, in 1790, sentenced to seven years' transportation.
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She then recommences her pocket picking lifestyle, unaware that her actions are being observed by fellow pickpocket, Mike. Mike corners Kylie in an alley and draws her attention to the fact that both police and local crime organizations have noted her stepped up pocket picking activities. He offers her an alternative with a much bigger heist, suggesting she pose as Marcel's personal dominatrix, Raven (Alexandra Elle), and once he's tied up, abscond with the briefcase of cash he carries with him. Together with Bridget, Mike and Kylie infiltrate the fetish dungeon Marcel frequents, where Kylie assumes the role of Raven.
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In the aftermath of the disastrous robbery of Season 1, everyone's gone their separate ways. Kylie is in hiding, Mike has returned to his pocket picking lifestyle, and Matt has actually been recruited by Marcel and become secretly entangled with Marcel's daughter, Lex (Caitlynne Medrek). Raven's dungeon has been shut down, and she's been forced into becoming Marcel's personal dominatrix, while her former employees have been forced into prostitution. Marcel abducts Bridget and forces her into revealing Kylie's location.
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Kylie returns home from a night of pocket picking to find two goons, including Hatchet Man (Buzz Koffman), threatening to cut off the hand of her boyfriend, Matt. Matt had gotten involved with a courier job for crime boss Marcel, and had failed to deliver the $50,000 he was supposed to. Offering herself in sexual trade, Kylie distracts then dispatches the goons, then goes on the run. She takes up residency in a seedy motel where she befriends the prostitute, Bridget.
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He felt more comfortable as a pickpocket apparently believing the activity to require less skill and provided lower risk for arrest. He typically targeted young women, as well as men on occasion. "He considered it required less skill, less adroitness, and less nerve to slip his fingers into a woman's pocket, and secure the contents, than to jump into a basement and scurry off with whatever he could catch.". Despite his success, he was arrested twice in a two-year period while in the pocket picking line.
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Old Bailey Online, Hertzig Brandham, 11 April 1821. In June 1821 Plunkett testified in two cases of pocket-picking, one of which had taken him back to George Yard.Old Bailey Online, 6 June 1821: Robert Lloyd; Henry Copas. In September two women who had accosted a man walking home at 2 a.m. and had taken 27 shillings from him were sentenced to transportation for life.Old Bailey Online, Catherine Sullivan and Catherine Bryan, 12 September 1821. A year later Plunkett and his colleague John Clark went after two women known to them who were accused of stealing a coat and 35 sovereigns from a retired excise-officer in the street, but although the coat was found the court had doubt of their guilt.Old Bailey Online, Hannah Stanton and Esther Cummins, 11 September 1822.
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Among the earliest Newgate novels were Thomas Gaspey's Richmond (1827) and History of George Godfrey (1828), Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), and William Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834), which featured Dick Turpin. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837) is often also considered to be a Newgate novel. The genre reached its peak with Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard published in 1839, a novel based on the life and exploits of Jack Sheppard, a thief and renowned escape artist who was hanged in 1724. Thackeray, a great opponent of the Newgate novel, reported that vendors sold "Jack Sheppard bags", filled with burglary tools, in the lobbies of the theatres where dramatisation of Ainsworth's story were playing and "one or two young gentlemen have already confessed how much they were indebted to Jack Sheppard who gave them ideas of pocket-picking and thieving [which] they never would have had but for the play".
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