the expenses of running his agents). In some cases, if the stolen items or circumstances allowed for blackmail, he did not wait for the theft to be announced. In addition to "recovering" these stolen goods, he would offer the police aid in finding the thieves. The thieves that Wild would help to "discover", however, were rivals or members of his own gang who had refused to cooperate with his taking the majority of the money. Wild's ability to hold his gang together, and indeed the majority of his scheme, relied upon the fear of theft and the nation's reaction to theft. The crime of selling stolen goods became increasingly dangerous between 1700 and 1720, such that low-level thieves ran a great risk in fencing their goods. Wild avoided this danger and exploited it simultaneously by having his gang steal, either through pickpocketing or, more often, mugging, and then by "recovering" the goods. He never sold the goods back, explicitly, nor ever pretended that they were not stolen. He claimed at all times that he found the goods by policing and avowed hatred of thieves. That very penalty for selling stolen goods, however, allowed Wild to control his gang very effectively, for he could turn in any of his thieves to the authorities at any time. By giving the goods to him for a cut of the profits, Wild's thieves were selling stolen goods. If they did not give their take to him, Wild would simply apprehend them as thieves. However, what Wild chiefly did was use his thieves and ruffians to "apprehend" rival gangs. Wild was not the first thief-taker who was actually a thief himself. Hitchen had used his position as Under Marshal to practise extortion, pressuring brothels and pickpockets to pay him off. When Hitchen was suspended from his duties for corruption in 1712, he engaged Wild to keep his business of extortion going in his absence. Hitchen was reinstated in 1714 and found that Wild was now a rival, and one of Wild's first acts of gang warfare was to eliminate as many of the thieves in Hitchen's control as he could. In 1718, Hitchen attempted to expose Wild with his manuscript, A True Discovery of the Conduct of Receivers and Thief-Takers in and about the City of London, in which he named Wild as a manager and source of crime. Wild replied with a manuscript of