ABSTRACT
The Reubens brothers, born in Britain to respectable immigrant parents, plunged into the criminal sub-culture and in doing so briefly entered the history books. The police, doubtless aware of the targeted operation about which it was naturally difficult to get people to talk, believed they could finally settle a long-standing score with the Reubens. On 22 April 1909 Morris Reubens, aged twenty-three, described as a boot salesman, and Marks Reubens, a year younger, whom court papers listed as a costermonger, appeared at the Old Bailey charged with murder. Ignoring the fact that the Reubens brothers were London-born, he claimed that "Years ago such a type as the Reubens was happily unknown in England but existed and does exist in Russia." With the Reubens murder, the Tottenham outrage, the Houndsditch robbery and the death of Leon Beron on Clapham Common, the connection drawn between migration and criminality showed no signs of disappearing up to the Great War.
