Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [203]
But all these, too, were in the end of merely secondary importance. The real catch was the mastermind, the pirate himself. This figure was the publisher's illicit doppelganger. He was the criminal capitalist, the musical Moriarty, the piratical patron of the arts who oversaw the whole enterprise while never getting his own fingers inky. The pirate might be a highly visible public figure, yet one able to move from place to place with apparent ease. And the pirate was the one figure that Preston, Abbott, and their men had never managed to nab. He seemed to be, as the Sheffield Telegraph lamented, "ungetatable."38 For all its dynamism, Preston's offensive would not be a true success until it trapped a real pirate.
Then, on Christmas Eve, 1903, it did.
THE KING IN PARLIAMENT
THE PIRATE KING, IN GILBERT AND SULLIVAN'S
Pirates of Penzance
The great Victorian railway termini of London give rise to lines that snake out across the city atop stolid brick viaducts. The arches under these viaducts have often been converted into warehouses and workshops. Today, for example, the rare pedestrian who wanders onto Link Street, a few steps from the traffic that roars by incessantly on the main road between the east London boroughs of Hackney and Homerton, will find a line of such arches occupied by a taxi firm, a repair shop, and a used-car dealer. Hundreds of London's distinctive black cabs are parked there nose to tail, awaiting mechanics and drivers. There is nothing to show that this is the place where, a century ago, music's first pirate king held court.
For some time, Abbott, still pirate hunting, had had one of the Link Street arches under observation in what he called "the best Sherlock Holmes manner." Finally, on December 24, 1903, he was ready to launch his raid. Armed with an order from Hackney Police Court, he and two plainclothes policemen entered the archway. There they garnered a huge haul: almost seventy-five thousand sheets of pirated music that had been about to be dispatched down the Great Western Railway to the pirate network. It was a big enough discovery that for once the pirate turned up to contest it. His name, apparently, was James Frederick Willetts.
Not much is known about Willetts. Even his name is a little uncertain. As pirate king, he often used the alias John Fisher, coined apparently because he had at one point been a fishmonger of some kind; and he also had a number of other monikers, among them "the colonel." His mother had been a printer, and he had served an apprenticeship, probably in her house. He was experienced in the business, having worked in newspapers for fifteen years. But since then he had tried out various other trades, including that of traveling salesman. He had once been imprisoned for embezzlement, which he defended as appropriating what were rightfully his wages when his erstwhile employer went bankrupt. Since the 1902 law, however, he had seen an opportunity to earn a windfall from his original trade, and had become the nation's leading music pirate.39 His business card (for J. Fisher and Co.) listed his address as the Rose and Crown in Goswell Road, which madeTumTum his agent. Willetts coordinated some half a dozen printers, and a distribution network that extended across the nation. Dealing in huge quantities of music, it was he who so insouciantly dismissed a seizure of forty-five thousand copies