Swell Mobsman

Stanley Lake was swearing, in his low tones, like a swell-mobsman to-night. ❋ Unknown (2003)

'He's a vulgarian, he's a swell-mobsman, he's the sort of man who hangs about the corridors of trains going to the Riviera and steals ladies' jewel-cases. ❋ Max Beerbohm (1914)

And the landlord had ever insisted that no one, no one at all, could always distinguish with certainty between a real gent and a swell-mobsman. ❋ Arnold Bennett (1899)

You may well believe him a choice flower in the bouquet of the corporation; we mean the corporation that banquets and becomes jubilant while assassins stab their victims in the broad street -- that becomes befogged while bands of ruffians disgrace the city with their fiendish outrages -- that makes presidents and drinks whiskey when the city would seem given over to the swell-mobsman -- when no security is offered to life, and wholesale harlotry, flaunting with naked arms and bared bosoms, passes along in possession of Broadway by night. ❋ Unknown (N/A)

The murderer's widow of Prague was built of sterner stuff; she cared not a hempen strand for Joanna, a pale consumptive doxy, according to her picturing, who had jilted me for an eminent swell-mobsman in London. " ❋ William John Locke (1896)

Now, I haven't been pursering for ten years without learning something, and I can smell a swell-mobsman almost before I see him. " ❋ Louis Becke (1884)

She was spared from any encounter with a travelling swell-mobsman, who would have garotted her for the sake of her watch and purse, or an insolent bagman, who would have made himself obnoxiously agreeable on account of her pretty face. " ❋ Unknown (1875)