Marshall Joe Kozlovsky (our only family crime fighter, not counting my grandson-in-law Police officer Joe Stark) kept catching the bad guys, but sometimes, the crooks just kept getting away with it. We can only imagine his frustration.

Our two clever pickpockets from last week’s blob – George Sherman and William Smith – seemed to have a way of convincing juries they were as pure as the driven snow. Plus, as we later learn, they had other hidden talents.

Letting them get away with their heinous crimes certainly wasn’t the fault of the ladies. Women didn’t have any rights to speak of in 1898 – including the right to serve on a jury. Even the idea of “the fairer sex” being capable of making such cerebral judgments as to a ten-year jail sentence to be imposed for horse stealing or pickpocketing was a subject of scorn and ridicule in newspaper cartoons like this one.

Just the same, as the story turned out, I like to think it may have been a woman who saved one of the desperados from continuing his life of crime.

The crime of pickpocketing was more “popular” in 1898 than it is today. According to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, “Most pickpockets are professionals. Theirs is a lucrative and highly skilled art requiring unusual manual dexterity, knowledge of human behaviour and precision teamwork. They often work in crowds that can be just as successful with a lone victim.”

Hint: check out George Clooney in “Oceans Eleven”.

But now, back to our busy young crooks.

Previous to their visit to Cedar Rapids, the two rascals had been arrested on various charges but always escaped from their captors or got away with their misdeeds in court. A few weeks after Marshall Joe hauled them into the Cedar Rapids jail, they were tried in court, but the, yes, all-male “imbecile” jury couldn’t decide if they were guilty. Instead of letting them go, the Marshall delivered them to the sheriff at the county jail in Marion, Iowa. Where this happened….

George executed several jailbreaks including this one. Both pickpockets escaped but William Smith (Louis Padden) was caught a month later. He confessed his guilt to Marshall Joe, who delivered him to the police in Minneapolis. He was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in Stillwater prison, but he somehow managed to avoid spending the time, possibly due to his winning personality.

A previous attempt at the same jail failed, but check out the clever tools that were MacGyvered to do it.

George – the apparent mastermind of that and other attempted and sometimes successful prison breaks – was never apprehended. Not then anyway.

In February of 1903, I found two final newspaper articles in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about our two desperados. Both must have been in custody, but before they could be belatedly convicted for their pilfering of the elderly lady’s pocketbook back in 1898, it was noted that she was too infirm to appear in court, and the two other witnesses were no longer available. So they were free.

The second article was even more interesting. During the four years George Sherman was on the run from the law, he must have got married. According to the Gazette, his wife had arrived in Cedar Rapids for the trial and joined up with him afterwards when he was released!

I wasn’t able to find any more references to the lives of our errant pickpockets, but I like to think that they had found the error of their ways and reformed. Either that, or they changed their names once again.

I’m a romantic at heart. I like to think that during his years on the lam, George found love, and this wonderful woman made him see the error of his ways and reformed him. It’s possible.

So okay. Either that, or he taught her tricks of the trade and they spent their remaining years as successful grifters, forever exasperating the efforts of our faithful law-enforcing heroes like Marshall Joseph Kozlovsky.

Whaddya think?