Peter Scott - Telegraph During one break-in "a titled lady appeared at the top of the stairs. 'Everything's all right, madam," I shouted up, and she went off to bed thinking I was the butler." On other occasions, if disturbed by the occupier, he would shout reassuringly: "It's only me!" In all, by his own reckoning, Scott stole jewels, furs and artworks worth more than £30 million. He held none of his victims in great esteem ("upper-class prats chattering in monosyllables"). The roll-call of "marks" from whom he claimed to have stolen valuables included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Sophia Loren, Maria Callas and the gambling club and zoo owner John Aspinall. "Robbing that bastard Aspinall was one of my favourites," he recollected. Sophia Loren got what she deserved too. Scott stole a £200,000 necklace from the Italian star when she was in Britain filming The Millionairess in 1960. Billed in the newspapers as Britain's biggest jewellery theft, it yielded Scott £30,000 from a "fence." After Miss Loren had pointed at him on television saying: "I come from a long line of gipsies. You will have no luck," Scott lost every penny in the Palm Beach Casino at Cannes. In the 1950s and 1960s he pinpointed his targets by perusing the society columns in the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Nor did he ease up with the approach of middle-age; in the 1980s he was still scaling walls and drainpipes. In one Bond Street caper alone he stole jewellery worth £1.5 million, and in 1985 he was jailed for four years. On his release he expanded his social horizons by becoming a celebrity "tennis bum," a racquet for hire at a smart London club where - as he put it in his autobiography - he coached still more potential "rich prats." By the mid-1990s, Scott had served 12 years in prison in the course of half a dozen separate stretches, and claimed to have laid down his "cane" [jemmy] and retired from a life of crime. But in 1998 he was jailed for another three and a half years for handling, following the theft of Picasso's Tête de Femme from the Lefevre Gallery in Mayfair the year before. To the impassive detectives who arrested him, Scott quoted a line from WE Henley: "Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed." He often drew on literary allusions, quoting Confucius, Oscar Wilde and Proust. Scott was also a past-master in self-justification of his crimes and misdemeanours: "The people I burgled got rich by greed and skulduggery. They indulged in the mechanics of ostentation - they deserved me and I deserved them. If I rob Ivana Trump, it is just a meeting of two different kinds of degeneracy on a dark rooftop. In his memoirs, Gentleman Thief (1995), Scott admitted to an even stronger motivation than fear as he contemplated another "job": "Even now, after 30 years, it was a sexual thrill." There was the additional satisfaction in his assumption that the millions reading about his exploits in the papers were silently cheering him on. He was born Peter Craig Gulston on February 18 1931 into a middle-class military family in Belfast. His father died when he was young, and his mother, sensing that Peter was destined to be trouble, emigrated to the United States. By the time he left the Belfast Royal Academy, where he was one of the brightest boys but inept at exams, he had squandered his father's inheritance. While still in his teens he was wandering the Malone Road in his school scarf burgling houses of the well-off and stashing the spoils in a rugby bag slung over his shoulder. He estimated that he had committed 150 such "screwers" before the police finally nailed him in 1952. "They never suspected me," he explained, "because I looked like a resident. When the police eventually caught on, I had done so many jobs that they were embarrassed and only charged me with 12. They were enough, however, to earn him six months in Crumlin Road jail. Having changed his name to Scott, he then moved to London, where he realised that the houses of Mayfair and Belgravia, with their balconies, porticos and parapets, might have been designed to be burgled. Working as a pub bouncer in the West End, he moonlighted as a housebreaker . In 1957, during one of his jail stretches, Scott met George "Taters" Chatham, renowned as London's most celebrated cat burglar, with whom he formed a partnership that would eventually secure the pair a haul of art and jewellery worth millions of pounds. In between their incursions into Bond Street furriers and jewellery stores and the Mayfair drawing-rooms of art collectors, they served increasingly lengthy prison terms; having been sent down for a modest couple of years in the late 1950s, in 1961 Scott was jailed for three years and, in 1964, a further five. In his memoirs he confessed to "an obscene passion for larceny," but made no excuses, recognising that he could have made a comfortable living by honest means. Barring one incident in which he broke a policeman's nose as he struggled to get away, Scott had no convictions for violence, which he considered "an anathema." He characterised himself as "a man who has made all the mistakes that vanity, envy and greed create." Like Raffles, the gentleman thief of Edwardian fiction, Scott in his heyday lived high on the hog, frittering away his fortune on flashy cars, luxury homes and fast women. He escorted a string of glamorous girlfriends, including the model Jackie Bowyer ("a great sport"), whom he met in 1963 and who became the second of his four wives. His criminal career was the basis of the film He Who Rides a Tiger (1965), in which Tom Bell played the Scott character and Judi Dench his long-suffering girlfriend. Scott himself was serving a prison sentence in Dartmoor at the time and profited little from the film. He ended up broke, reflecting ruefully that "I gave all my money to head waiters and tarts." Declared bankrupt, owing creditors £440,000, he lived on benefits of £60 a week in a council flat in Islington. A son survives him. Peter Scott, born February 18 1931, died March 17 2013