Definition of "cracksman"

The fraudulent clerk and the flash “cracksman” interchanged experiences.

1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life, Penguin, published 2009, page 52

She was frankly disappointed. For some reason she had thought to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp.

1914, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter III, in Nobody, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 1915

The bank cracksmen who looted the national bank at Northampton were traced by a piece of wrapping paper picked up in an abandoned schoolhouse.

1916, Melville Davisson Post, “The Man Hunters”, in The Saturday Evening Post‎