The Thieves of Threadneedle Street by Nicholas Booth

Author:Nicholas Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

In his later writings, Austin Bidwell claims that he left London ‘serene and confident of the future’, two days before the first batch of forged bills had been sent in (though the prosecution determined it was the day before). Either way, he could not be connected with the execution of the crime.

The prosecution had already anticipated such a gambit. On the first day of the trial, Hardinge Giffard, had elegantly demolished it with what became known as ‘the Kamchatka defence’. Even if he was out of the country, Giffard noted, Austin Bidwell was still responsible:

A man may be at Kamchatka or Rome and yet be just as much guilty as if he were in London if he was a party to the fraud, and I need not tell you what a very strange system of jurisprudence it would be if the laws were otherwise, if it were only necessary for a man to go across the water to another country and then to say he had not committed any offence in the country to which he sends the paper.

Giffard prepared the sucker punch which he hoped the jury would bear in mind when they came to consider the evidence:

There is a very old legal maxim, the importance of which occurs to me that a man who does it by another does it by himself. A man who utters a forged bill in London for the purpose of proxy it to be passed on as a genuine bill is simply the longer hand of the man residing in Rome or Kamchatka and both will be equally responsible but as I have said, the scheme was that Austin Bidwell should be protected and accordingly he appears to have left London.

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