Zoe Progl
British criminal
Zoe Progl (28 March 1928 – before 2021) was a British criminal. Born into a poor family and with a father who was often drunk and in trouble with the police, Progl began stealing to feed herself from the age of six. She later progressed to shoplifting and worked in nightclubs where she fraternised with criminals. Progl married an American soldier at the age of 18, but soon left him and began carrying out burglaries with a new partner. Whilst three months pregnant, she was sentenced to three years detention at Aylesbury Borstal. After her release, she had an affair with Tommy "Scarface" Smithson, a London gangster whose gang included the Kray twins. She had a second child with Smithson before he left her.
Progl specialised in burglaries, shoplifting, and "jump ups", thefts of loaded lorries from the dockside. On one occasion, she stole £250,000 of fur clothing. She received a 3-month prison sentence for the robbery of an American soldier, and a 15-month sentence for the theft of a safe from a solicitor.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zoe Progl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.