Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th-century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London.

As a powerful gang-leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him.

Wild was responsible for the arrest and execution of Jack Sheppard, a petty thief and burglar who had won the public's affection as a lovable rogue.

Wild became popular, running errands for the gaolers and eventually earning enough to repay his original debts and the cost of being imprisoned, and even lend money to other prisoners.

[7][8] Upon release, Wild began to live with Milliner as her husband in Lewkenor's Land (now Macklin Street) in Covent Garden,[8] despite both of them having prior marriages.

In 1712 Charles Hitchen, Wild's forerunner and future rival as thief-taker, said that he personally knew 2,000 people in London who made their living solely by theft.

In around 1713, Wild was approached by Hitchen to become one of his assistants in thief-taking, a profitable activity on account of the £40 reward (£8,000 in 2025) paid by the government for catching a felon.

The public was eager to embrace both colourful criminals (e.g. Jack Sheppard and the entirely upper-class gang called the "Mohocks" in 1712) and valiant crime-fighters.

[9] Wild continued to call himself Hitchen's "Deputy", entirely without any official standing, and took to carrying a sword as a mark of his supposed authority, also alluding to pretensions of gentility.

That very penalty for selling stolen goods, however, allowed Wild to control his gang very effectively, for he could turn in any of his thieves to the authorities at any time.

Thus, in the summer of 1724, the papers carried accounts of Wild's heroic efforts in collecting twenty-one members of the Carrick Gang (with an £800 reward — approximately £158,000 in 2025).

For example, David Nokes quotes (based on Howson) the following advertisement from the Daily Post in 1724 in his edition of Henry Fielding's The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great: "Lost, the 1st of October, a black shagreen Pocket-Book, edged with Silver, with some Notes of Hand.

The real purpose of the ad is to threaten the owner with announcing his visit to a bordello, either to the debtors or the public, and it even names a price for silence (a guinea, or one pound and one shilling).

[15] On 19 May, Wild again had Sheppard arrested for pickpocketing, and this time he was put in St. Ann's Roundhouse in Soho, where he was visited by Elizabeth "Edgworth Bess" Lyon the next day; she too was locked up with him and, being recognised as man and wife, they were sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell.

[17] The following day, Wild sent another one of his men, Quilt Arnold, and had Sheppard arrested a third time and put into Newgate Prison to await trial.

On 9 September, Sheppard avoided capture by Wild's men, but he was caught for a fourth time by a posse from Newgate as he hid out on Finchley Common.

[27] Wild's inability to control Sheppard, and his injuries at the hands of Blueskin, combined with a change of public sentiment regarding authority figures, led to his downfall.

On 6 February 1725, Wild was summoned to Leicester House, where he failed to recover a gold watch for one of his attendants because of the jailbreak and the incident with Blueskin at the Old Bailey.

In the illustration from the True Effigy (top of page), Wild is pictured in Newgate, still with notebook in hand to account for goods coming in and going out of his office.

[30] He was tried on two indictments of privately stealing 50 yards (46 m) of lace from Catherine Statham (a lace-seller who had visited him in prison on 10 March) at Holborn on 22 January.

[32] On the morning of his execution, in fear of death, Wild attempted suicide by drinking a large dose of laudanum, but because he was weakened by fasting, he vomited violently and sank into a coma from which he would not awaken.

[37] In the dead of night, Wild's body was buried in secret at the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church next to Elizabeth Mann, his third wife and one of his many lovers (who had died in about 1718), as he had wished.

Defoe wrote one narrative for Applebee's Journal in May and then had published True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild in June 1725.

The illustration above is from the frontispiece to the "True Effigy of Mr. Jonathan Wild," a companion piece to one of the pamphlets purporting to offer the thief-taker's biography.

Public fascination with the dark side of human nature and with the causes of evil has never waned, and the market for mass-produced accounts was large.

In 2014, author Aaron Skirboll released The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal.

In 2015, Jonathan Wild appeared as a character in the Paul Tobin (author) Eisner-nominated (2015) graphic novel I Was the Cat, drawn by Benjamin Dewey.

[41] Jonathan Wild has an important role in the background to the fantasy novel The Hanging Tree, the sixth part of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

Much of the book's plot revolves around a secret magical treatise by Isaac Newton, which was stolen by Jonathan Wild and disappeared for centuries, only to reappear in the underworld of 21st-century London.

Markus Gasser's 2022 novel "Die Verschwörung der Krähen" based on the life of Daniel Defoe includes Wild, spelled Wylde, as the secret ruler of the London underworld.