moon_custafer | Meanwhile, on the other side of the law and the Atlantic

From 1920s female detectives to 1920s female criminals — apparently London’s West end had an all-woman organize crime syndicate called the Forty Elephants that began at least as far back as the 1870s and continued until the 1950s. Their heyday was in the ‘twenties, under the rule of a woman known as Alice Diamond. Most of them spent their ill-gotten gains on partying, but one apparently set up a carefully constructed alternate identity as an upper-class lady living out in the country who ran all the local social events and was known for her generosity (her frequent trips into London were explained as visits to her rakish husband, to plead with him to reform). So, basically that’s a real-life Agatha Christie novel right there.