Easier lie the heads...

That wear the jewels in London, now that Peter Scott is no longer working;

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.”

But, eventually crime doesn't pay;

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.