An inside job is a crime, most often a robbery, theft or fraud, committed by someone who lives or works in the place that was targeted, or planned with that person’s help. When detectives call a burglary an inside job they mean the locks were never the problem: somebody with keys, knowledge or access either did the work or handed it to those who did. Since the early 2000s the phrase has also had a second life among conspiracy theorists, for whom an inside job is a public disaster secretly arranged by the very authorities who claim to be its victims.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘inside job’?
The phrase is American police and criminal slang, and it was already established jargon by the 1880s. The earliest printings so far found are both in Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (1887) by George W. Walling, thirty-eight years on the city’s force. Looking back at the unsolved murder of Benjamin Nathan, Walling wrote that “some of the able detectives engaged on the case insisted that it was what is known as an ‘inside job’”, suspicion falling on the housekeeper’s son rather than the family. That “what is known as” is the giveaway: Walling was glossing a term his readers in the trade already used. Later in the book he applied it to the raid on the Manhattan Savings Institution on 27th October 1878, in which a syndicate led by the burglar George Leonidas Leslie took cash and securities valued at $2,747,700: “It was an ‘inside’ job from the start.”
The building blocks are older. “Job” had been thieves’ slang for a planned robbery since the early 18th century, and “inside” names the essential ingredient: keys, combinations or floor plans supplied by someone the victim trusted. Confusingly, in the building trades of the same era an inside job was simply indoor work; a painter advertising for inside jobs in January was not confessing to anything.
In “The Man Higher Up”, in his 1908 collection The Gentle Grafter, O. Henry has a burglar who gains entry to houses by romancing the parlour-maid grumble that “the police are calling it an inside job just because the old lady’s nephew teaches a Bible class”.
For most of the 20th century an inside job remained a matter for detectives and insurance investigators. Within a week of the attacks of 11th September 2001, the claim that the American government had staged them was being described in the press as an “inside job” theory, and “9/11 was an inside job” became the slogan of the so-called truth movement. It has since softened into a stock internet joke: whatever went wrong, someone will announce that it was an inside job.