User:Ww2censor/Mail robbery

A Mail robbery is the robbery of mail usually when it is in the possession, custody, or control, of the delivering authority, which in most countries is the postal operator. Less well known are mail robberies of mail already delivered but this is possible where delivery letter boxes, or community mailbox clusters, are located outside the house, or at the property line or in the locality, where they are easily accessed such as those in the United States, Canada, France and Australia.

The objective is to acquire items of value. In the mail service this most oftens means the registered mail that can contain, cash, cheques, jewellery, precious stones, gold and silver, other negotiable instruments or luxury goods. Mail robberies have, for example, taken place from; mail coaches, trains, postal carriers, post offices, mail vans and pillar boxes.

United Kingdom
One of the earlieest mentions of a mail robbery, when some letters were intercepted near Worcester was in 1577. In 1647 correspondence from Edward Popham were stolen from the post boy at Haywards Heath.

During the late eighteenth century in the Kingdom of Great Britain attacks on postboys were so common the Post Office advised customers sending banknotes "to cut all such Notes and Draughts in Half in the following Form, to send them at two different Times, and to wait for the return of the Post, till the receipt of one Half is acknowledged before the other is sent."

Post boys travelled slowly, making them easy target for highwaymen, taking forty-eight hours to transport a letter from Bath to London. In 1782 John Palmer, an owner of theatres in Bath & Bristol, suggested his plan for the night mail coach. The aim was to carry passengers and mail at faster speeds than the passenger service by day over the same route. Armed guards would provide protection and speed gained from lightweight coaches, more reliable post house services and experienced contractors providing fresh horses. Palmer himself travelled around the country timing routes and checking distances. On 29th July 1784 the Bath Chronicle stated that "the letters for London or for any place between or beyond to be put into the Bath Post Office every evening before 6 o'clock, and into the Bristol Post Office before 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and they will be delivered in London the next day".

Few believed this possible but the 'first night' run of 2 August 1784 proved to be a complete success. During 1785 Palmer travelled 5,000 miles in four months and eleven mail coach routes were soon established. SG1258 shows the original Bath Mail coach. Mail coaches quickly gained a reputation for reliability & punctuality. As carriers of the Royal Mail they took precedence over other forms of transport.

The Patent Mail coach designed by John Besant had one very important innovation over the standard coaches of the time, a safety axle box. The standard method of fitting a wheel was with a linch pin which, even with regular greasing, would often shear off without warning. The safety axle was designed so that a metal plate prevented the wheel from coming off, while a groove on the axle arm allowed oil to trickle down on the bearing and metal plate.

Coaches were owned by the Post Office and rented out to contractors who provided coachmen & fresh teams of horses along the route. The Mail Guard, unlike the coachman, was employed by the Post Office and was responsible for the safe keeping of the mail. He was issued with a blunderbuss, a brace of pistols and a military style red coat and cockaded hat. The mail was the Guard's first responsibility and after some accidents, or because of flood or snow, he would carry the mail on foot.

Above is from this web page 1984: Bicentenary of the First Mail Coach Run, Bath and Bristol to London GUILD OF MODEL WHEELWRIGHTS Post and Mail Coaches

Ireland
While Ireland had its own independent post office from 1784 until 1831, a collection of reward notices covering the period from 1820 until 1870, documents a wide variety of robberies from mail coaches and mail cars to post offices and even post boxes, but post-boys seem to have been a popular target to be robbed. Rewards offered were generally between £20 and £100.

Initially there was one mail coach guard but due to the frequent attacks a second and even a third guard were assigned on some night stages. Coaches were even accompanied by a military guard, such as the Belfast coach travelling the lonely and mountainous road between Newry and Drogheda, that could be accompanied by six dragoons. The Irish mail coaches were attacked more frequently than those in England or Scotland.

A mail bag was stolen from a mail coach on Christmas Eve 1799 near Ravensdale, County Louth, and the robbers vanished. The repercussion was that a dozen poor cottagers who lived close by were sent to jail but released after a few days. On 19 January 1803 when the Dublin to Cork mail coach was robbed near Cashel, the guard used up all his ammunition and was wounded but secured the mail bag even though the private parcels were stolen. A robbery in which the guard was killed in 1812 happened at Cappagh Hall in County Kildare but it was not until 1817 that the accused was put on trial though acquitted.

Between 1919 and 1923, during the Anglo Irish War and Irish Civil War, mail trains and post offices were robbed by members of the Irish Republican Army. Military mail was specially targeted for its intelligence and some mail was marked as having been censored before being recovered or returned. In addition to post offices, postmen were also robbed of their mail. It's recorded that in just four weeks of Spring 1922 there were 331 post office robberies alone.

United States of America
In 1799 the Congress of the United States passed a law authorizing the death penalty for a second offence of mail robbery or if the carrier was wounded or his life put in jeopary.

Billy the Kid was interviewed by post office inspectors about a mail robbery in Santa Fe in 1881.

The last known stagecoach robbery was solved in 1916 when the perpetrators were caught five days after the event by the United States Postal Inspection Service.

In the 1920s robberies of mail trains had increased to a level of that more than $6.3 million had been stolen in three dozen incidents that included all forms of mail transportation.

Thieves now also target residential letter boxes and post office post boxes, removing all the just delivered mail. As recently as September 2017, a mail carrier in Kansas was convicted of stealing gift cards, cash and prepaid debit cards he was entrusted to deliver and sentenced to six months in prison. Under US Code Title 18, which covers a wide range of mail theft a person can receive a fine and be sentenced up to five year in prison.

Post-boys to mail carriers
Post-boys

Mail coach robberies
Despite the death penalty in the UK stage coach (from 1784 Mail coach) robberies by highwaymen were common. For example, in 1722 two were executed for robbing the Bristol mail.

The newspaper account of a robbery, during the early 1800s, were of the Stirling–Edinburgh mail coach reports that three men took £10,000 cash while it was stopped at Kirkliston though one of the robbers was caught.

During the American gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s, Wells Fargo was carrying both mail and gold in the strongboxes on their mail coaches. Many holdups took place by individual robbers and entire gangs. The Butterfield Overland Mail route was eventually taken over by Wells Fargo who build up their own detective and police force to combat robbery of their mail coaches. Black Bart a notorious mail coach robber is documented as having robbed at least twenty-six Wells Fargo stage coaches from which he is alleged to have also stolen the mail. A reward of $800 was offered on a poster for just two robberies in 1877 and 1878 though he robbed more. He was tracked down by James B. Hume, Wells Fargo's chief detective who brought the plague of robberies under control, and convicted of one robbery to which he admitted for which he was sentenced to six years in San Quentin prison that started on November 21, 1883. Black Bart was released in January 1888.

Mail train robberies
Robberies from trains also began early and one such example was on the Bristol and Exeter Railway in 1849.

In the United States the period immediately following the First World War witnessed a large number of mail robberies. Eventually, the frequency of these thefts caused the war department to place armed marines on all mail trains.

A number of high-value mail robberies occurred in the UK after the Second World War, as a result of a lack of improvements in security in the transport of money. One major example was the Eastcastle Street robbery in 1952, involving the theft of £287,000 from a post office van in London. Overall that year, 629 mailbags went missing, and in the following year the figure was 738.

The two significant mail robberies occurred in the early 1960s. In the UK, £2.6 million was taken in the 'Great Train Robbery' of 1963. A year earlier, $1.5 million was stolen from the hold-up of a U.S. Mail truck in Massachusetts. By the end of the 1960s, however, mail robbery had become less common.

The 1976 Sallins Train robbery in Ireland, £200,000 was stolen from the Cork to Dublin mail train and eventually claimed in 1980 as carried out by the Provisional IRA. Five members of the IRSP were arrested and three were falsely accused (one left the country and one refused to sign an alleged confession). The first trial of 65-days was the longest ever in Irish criminal history and collapsed after one of the three judges died.<ref name="wicklow people"/ Two men were convicted during the second trial, while Nicky Kelly was sentenced in absentia as he fled to the United States before his conviction. Following the Provisional IRA claim in 1980, the two men's convictions were quashed because their confessions were made under duress. Kelly returned, on the basis he would also be acquitted, but spent four year in a maximum-security prison proclaiming his innocence that included a 38-day hunger strike. Kelly was released on humanitarian grounds in 1984, given a presidential pardon in 1992 and received £1,000,000 in compensation. No one stood trial for this robbery.

Post box robbery
Mail deposited in post boxes have been subject of attempted robbery by thieves and in Denver in 2014, a man with previous mail theft convictions dating from 2008, pled guilty of attempting to obtain a USPS collection mail box master key by threatening a mail carrier with a knife.

Postal facility theft
In 2006 a 19-year Royal Mail employee, Roy Johnson, was caught in a trap laid for him when customers complained of money missing from their letters that had been handled in the Oldham mail centre, Manchester where Johnson worked as a night manager. Over a two-year period he rifled through mail bags searching for travellers' cheques and foreign currency netting him GB£70,000 that he used to make down-payments of a Jaguar and a Mercedes car and paid for home improvements in cash.

Before Christmas 2007, a letter carrier in the Brooklyn borough of New York, was suspected of stealing mail within his delivery routes. Decoy "test greeting card letters" were added to his mail and after more complaints, a letter addressed to a non-existing address, with cash and an electronic transmitter, was found in his car's glovebox with another 38 envelopes and in the trunk another were 100 torn open envelopes. The grinch-like mailman admitted he had been stealing mail since Valentine's Day and stole more during the holiday periods.

A 2017 USPIS report recounts that they recovered about $3 US million following 1,364 investigations resulting in 409 arrests and more than 1,000 administrative actions against staff during the period October 2016 to September 2017. USPS has online advise for securing mail within its mail centres.

Identity theft
Mail robbery has sparked identity theft fears because thieves have broken into mailboxes and community mailbox clusters, and with personel information may be able to ruin a person's good credit or even assume their identity. According to USPS, in December 2007 is was fastest growing crime in the United States.

Films

 * The Great Train Robbery 1903
 * Overland Mail Robbery 1943
 * Roadblock 1951
 * The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery 1966
 * Robbery 1967
 * The Great Train Robbery 2013

References and sources

 * Notes


 * Sources