1955, Billy Hill, Boss of Britain's Underworld, page 98:
One day we were in the Brighton mob-handed. There must have been at least thirty of us.
1969, London Charivari, volume 256:
So, if I were offered the Bouverie Street mob for a day I would deploy it as a private army—sometimes guerilla fashion, sometimes in direct assaults—to fight "mob handed," as the police say, some of the skirmishes in which I have failed single handed.
1973, Roger Busby, Pattern of Violence, page 79:
'No need to go mob-handed on a shake-out like this. These kids are still in their nappies. Just keep that thing switched off. I don't want any squawking radio screwing this up.'
1986, Anthony Gifford, The Broadwater Farm inquiry, page 48:
The police officers, because they are scared, rather than going in twos to investigate crime in the ordinary way, start to go mob-handed. Then those that are being investigated get the feeling that they are being victimised.
1992 November, Jonathan Bernstein, “SPINS”, in Spin, volume 8, number 8, page 116:
EMF sounds great. The premiere declaration of intent on the album is "They're Here," which water-cannons the listener from every conceivable angle: squirting acid-synth stabs, hefty Zep bass riffs, mob-handed choral assaults, and lead crooner James Atkin's unmistakable delivery, sounding as redolent as someone who's just run up 19 flights of stairs to report a mugging on the subway.
1994, Tony Parsons, Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture, Virgin Books, →ISBN, page 44:
They're mostly in their late teens or early twenties; wild and loud but without the glass-chucking violence so beloved by the mob-handed morons with a mile-wide yellow streak down their backs who contaminate gigs back in the good ol' Yew Kay.
'I didn't expect to see you today,' he went on, 'especially not mob-handed. Mind you, I don't remember a great deal about seeing you yesterday.'
2014 August 27, Charlie McCann, “Summer Times has the beating of Fahey’s four runners at Carlisle”, in Western Morning News[1]:
There is plenty of flat racing to sink our teeth into this afternoon with Carlisle staging a seven-race card, where Richard Fahey is mob-handed with no less than six runners, four in the second race, a maiden over six furlongs.
2009, Geoffrey R. Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey, 1583 to the Present, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, →ISBN, page 200:
How 'educational' this might prove, however, seems to have depended in some degree on the personalities involved and whether or not the visitors came singly or mob-handed.
2014 September 5, Boyd Tonkin, “Ashya King showed we still don’t know the limits of liberty”, in The Independent[2]:
The forces of the law waded in mob-handed when, it seems, they ought to have applied a lighter, more consensual touch.