In the fall of 1724, the most secure prison in England was beaten by a five foot four carpenter with a slight stutter. Jack Sheppard was born in Spitalfields in 1702, sent to a workhouse at six, and bound to a seven year carpentry apprenticeship in which his labor belonged to his master. For five years he was a model apprentice. Then he fell in with the crowd at the Black Lion, including the thief known as Blueskin and Elizabeth Lyon, called Edgworth Bess, pocketed two silver spoons, and walked away from his contract into full-time burglary.

This episode follows the 20 months that made him a legend. Sheppard refused to fence his goods through Jonathan Wild, the self-styled Thief-Taker General who secretly ran London’s organized crime and sent his own men to the gallows for a 40 pound bounty. Wild hunted him, and Sheppard answered with four escapes, each more humiliating to the authorities than the last. His final arrest came two weeks after the greatest of them, when he was found drunk in a stolen black silk suit. An estimated 200,000 people, about a third of London, lined the route to his hanging at Tyburn.

• His first escape took less than three hours: he went through the timber ceiling of St. Giles’s Roundhouse, then pointed at the roof so the crowd would look away while he left.
• Chained to the floor of a Newgate strong room called the Castle, he dug an iron bar out of the chimney, smashed through six iron-reinforced oak doors in the dark, and reached a roof 60 feet up.
• Jailers loaded him with 300 pounds of iron and charged visitors four shillings to see him, while he refused an offer to reduce his sentence by informing.
• Friends planned to rush his body to a doctor for resuscitation, but the crowd that rioted to save him from the surgeons kept them from reaching it.
• An 1839 novel by William Harrison Ainsworth set off such a craze that London banned licensing any play with Sheppard’s name in the title for 40 years.