Read Online Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper by Peter Thurgood - Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t patrol, unless in pairs. Before leaving the office, the outgoing superintendent in charge of H Division stated that assaults on police officers were more frequent in H Division than any other part of the country. This was an area where the inhabitants fought with each other using knives, knuckledusters and coshes.The intended victim, who was usually a drunk emerging from a pub, would be mugged, in the hope that he or she might provide the mugger with their beer money for the evening. Apart from shopkeepers, many of whom employed personal minders, no respectable person, man or woman, would walk through many of these streets, especially at night.
    It didn’t take Abberline long to find out most of these facts; and far from putting him off, they made him more determined than ever to make the streets of Whitechapel safe again for ordinary people. He was probably one of the first police officers in Great Britain to install amongst his officers what we call today a zero-tolerance policy.
    Just a couple of weeks after becoming installed at H Division, a case was brought to his attention which involved a Jewish shopkeeper named Abraham Kikal, who had apparently attacked two men with an axe. One of the men lost two fingers in the attack and the other one suffered multiple cuts and bruises.
    Abberline went down to the cells where Kikal was being held. He wanted to see for himself what sort of monster could commit such a crime on an open street in broad daylight. He interviewed Kikal for nearly an hour before returning to his office, where he summoned the arresting officers. Abberline was furious as he paced up and down his office, shouting at the officers at the top of his voice. ‘How long have you two worked in Whitechapel?’ he asked them. ‘Did either of you take a good look at this man, or ask him his age?’ he demanded. Kikal, it seemed, was in his mid-seventies, and had never been in trouble with the police since he had come to Great Britain some thirty years earlier. The two officers were dumbfounded; they were under the impression that they needed to come down heavily on any wrongdoer, especially one who committed such a violent attack as this.
    ‘This man,’ yelled Abberline, ‘was the victim in this affair, not the aggressor.’ He explained to his men that all Kikal had done was try to protect his business, and possibly his life, from a local gang of thugs known as the Bessarabians, who were demanding protection money from local shopkeepers, stallholders and publicans.
    The Bessarabians were a forty-strong gang, who owed their curious name to a region of southern Russia, located on the Romanian border. They specialised in terrorising mainly Russian Jewish immigrants, who had an ingrained terror of authority and the police in general. In almost every case involving the Bessarabians, the victim refused to give evidence against them and consequently the majority of cases had to be dropped through lack of evidence.
    When local people heard about Kikal, and the way he had stood up to the gang, they decided to organise themselves and take an example from the old man’s books. They set up a vigilante group for their mutual protection, but within a few weeks, the vigilantes, who termed themselves the Odessians, had seen the huge profits that were made by offering protection, and they also started demanding money with menaces.
    Instead of bettering the situation, it grew worse, with shopkeepers now being attacked and beaten up just for paying off the wrong gang. Meanwhile, the Bessarabians and the Odessians fought each other openly on the streets, in a battle for control of the Whitechapel area. At one point, the Odessians lured a leading Bessarabian named Perkoff into an alley and sliced off one of his ears. In revenge, the Bessarabians smashed up a coffee stall which was supposedly under the protection of the Odessians.
    Abberline worked ceaselessly with his team to combat the gangs, but on the rare occasions