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Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with IHeartRadio.

People thought Jonathan Wilde was a good, upstanding kind of guy.

He was a thief taker who was very good at catching criminals.

The Privy Council, advisors to the Crown, consulted with him on methods of controlling crime

in London. Highway robbers, who were having their own golden age of crime at the time,

were a scourge on the city, and Jonathan had them in his sights.

But what most people did not know was that Jonathan himself was actually a very bad guy.

Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarky.

And I'm Holly Fry.

So we thought we'd do a 180 for this episode and talk not about highway robbers, but the people who highway

robbers feared, the thief takers. In England, between roughly 1675 and 1830, if you witnessed a crime,

you were legally obliged to apprehend the perpetrator if it was possible. At a minimum,

you were expected to report the crime

to a magistrate or other official. But citizens were uncomfortable and or unwilling to police their own

city as crimes became more and more violent in nature and more frequent. Before the establishment of a professional police force in London,

which didn't happen until the 19th century, thief takers began to fill the need. They were private

citizens who captured criminals and recovered stolen goods for a reward. That's it. Those are the

basics of the gig. They didn't have the same level of

training or oversight as what we would expect from law enforcement officials or even private

investigators or bounty hunters of today. Often, thief takers were former or sometimes active criminals

themselves, and many frequently used illegal, unethical, or unscrupulous methods to get

...