tooler

Sometimes a promising quarry would be watched for days until the tooler knew precisely how and where to make the pull.

Ikey was always on the look-out for a talent, a boy with fingers light enough to make a tooler.

Ikey knew Marley was no tooler.

'Young tooler planted 'em in there, Bob Marley were the blow!'

A tooler was the most elite of the pickpockets, a planner and plotter, a boy with brains, daring and courage.

Leastways, no tooler what's just a brat!'

He showed all the makings of becoming an expert tooler, with fingers light and sticky as cobwebs and the fearless disposition of the young. '

That's trainin', my dear, that's discipline, that be what makes a great tooler into a swell mobsman, an aristocrat o' the art o' pickin' pockets!'

Seems when that solid, beautiful tree fell, it gave Mr. Nardone, the former proprietor of a bohemian coffeehouse and current full-time plaster object maker, leather tooler and knickknack collector, some feverish inspiration.

It was just such lack of attention to detail which leads to downfall and, Ikey told himself, if a mistake of the same magnitude of neglect had occurred with one of his urchins, the young tooler would have been most severely punished.

Tooling was where the real money lay in the art of pickpocketing and it required four boys, the tooler himself, a stickman and two stalls and, if available, up to four urchins to transport the goods from the scene of the crime as quickly as possible.

A great tooler could go on to be a swell mobsman, though most, even some of the best, got their hands to shaking from too frequent imbibement of gin or brandy or found their minds preoccupied and numbed to action by the fear of being caught and transported.

Choosing a victim was a task not taken lightly, for the tooler was trained to observe human nature in the smallest detail, to watch the mannerisms of a chosen quarry, how each talked and walked and where they placed their hands, with whom they conversed and where they stopped.

Industrial labor not only meant that Buffalo Forge slaves possessed valuable skills - often passed on, as with Tooler Sr. and Tooler Jr., from father to son, or, as with Harry Hunt, through four generations of Virginia slave ironworkers.

The second stall was on duty between the tooler and the stickman and was generally a larger boy who was required to impede the progress of any person in too hot pursuit of the stickman, who was the first to receive the article from the tooler and get the transportation of the lifted goods under way.