NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  ONE

  The Elopement

  On a misty May midnight in the year 1876, three men emerged from a fashionable address in Piccadilly with top hats on their heads, money in their pockets, and burglary, on a grand scale, on their minds. At a deliberate pace the trio headed along the thoroughfare, and at the point where Piccadilly intersects with Old Bond Street, they came to a stop. Famed for its art galleries and antiques shops, the street by day was choked with the carriages of the wealthy, the well-bred, and the culturally well-informed. Now it was quite deserted.

  The three men exchanged a few words at the corner of the street before one slipped into a doorway, invisible beyond the dancing gaslight shadows, while the other two turned right into Old Bond Street. They made an incongruous pair as they walked on: one was slight and dapper, some thirty-five years in age, with long, clipped mustaches, and dressed in the height of modern elegance, complete with pearl buttons and gold watch chain. The other, ambling a few paces behind, was a towering fellow with grizzled mutton-chop whiskers, whose ill-fitting frock coat barely contained a barrel chest. Had anyone been there to observe the couple, they might have assumed them to be a rich man taking the night air with his unprepossessing valet after a substantial dinner at his club.

  Outside the art gallery of Thomas Agnew & Sons, at number 39, Old Bond Street, the two men paused, and while the aristocrat extinguished his cheroot and admired his own faint but stylish reflection in the glass, his brutish companion glanced furtively up and down the street. Then, at a word from his master, the giant flattened himself against the wall and joined his hands in a stirrup, into which the smaller man placed a well-shod foot, for all the world as if he were climbing onto a thoroughbred. With a grunt the big man heaved the little fellow up the wall and in a moment he had scrambled nimbly onto the window ledge some fifteen feet above the pavement. Balancing precariously, he whipped out a small crow bar, wrenched open the casement window, and slipped inside, as his companion vanished from sight beneath the gallery portal.

  The room was unfurnished and unlit, but by the faint glow from the pavement gaslight a large painting in a gilt frame could be discerned on the opposite wall. The little man removed his hat as he drew closer.

  The woman in the portrait, already famed throughout London as the most exquisite beauty ever to grace a canvas, gazed down with an imperious and inquisitive eye. Curls cascaded from beneath a broad-brimmed hat set at a rakish angle to frame a painted glance at once beckoning and mocking, and a smile just one quiver short of a full pout.

  The faint rumble of a night watchman’s snores wafted up from the room below, as the little gentleman unclipped a thick velvet rope that held the inquisitive public back from the painting during daylight hours. Extracting a sharp blade from his pocket, with infinite care he cut the portrait from its frame and laid it on the gallery floor. From his coat he took a small pot of paste, and using the tasseled end of the velvet rope, he daubed the back of the canvas to make it supple and then rolled it up with the paint facing outward to avoid cracking the surface, before slipping it inside his frock coat.

  A few seconds later he had scrambled back down his monstrous assistant to the street below. A low whistle summoned the lookout from his street corner, and with jaunty step the little dandy set off back down Piccadilly, the stolen portrait pressed to his breast and his two rascally companions trailing behind.

  The painted lady was Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, once celebrated as the fairest and wickedest woman in Georgian England. The painter was the great Thomas Gainsborough, who had executed this, one of his greatest portraits, around 1787. A few weeks before the events just recounted, the painting had been sold at auction for 10,000 guineas, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art, causing a sensation. Georgiana of Devonshire, née Spencer, was once again the talk of London, much as her great-great-great-grandniece Diana, Princess of Wales, née Spencer, would become in our age.

  During Georgiana’s lifetime, which ended in 1806, her admirers vied to pay tribute to “the amenity and graces of her deportment, her irresistible manners, and the seduction of her society.” Her detractors, however, considered her a shameless harpy, a gambler, a drunk, and a threat to civilized morals who openly lived in a ménage-à-trois with her husband and his mistress. No woman of the time aroused more envy, or provoked more gossip.

  The sale of Gainsborough’s great painting to the art dealer William Agnew in 1876 had been the occasion for a fresh burst of Georgiana mania. Gainsborough’s vision of enigmatic loveliness, and the extraordinary value now attached to it, became the talk of London. Victorian commentators, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, heaped praise once more on this icon of female beauty, while rehearsing some of the fruitier aspects of her sexual history.

  When the painting was stolen, the public interest in Gainsborough’s Duchess reached fever pitch. The painting acquired huge cultural and sexual symbolism. It was praised, reproduced, and parodied time and again, the Marilyn Monroe poster of its day, while Georgiana herself was again held up as the ultimate symbol of feminine coquetry.

  The name of the man who kidnapped the Duchess that night in 1876 was Adam Worth, alias Henry J. Raymond, wealthy resident of Mayfair, sporting gentleman about town, and criminal mastermind. At the time of the theft Worth was at the peak of his powers, controlling a small army of lesser felons in an astonishing criminal industry. Stealing the picture was an act of larceny, but also one of hubris and romance. Georgiana and her portrait represented the pinnacle of English high society. Worth, by contrast, was a German-born Jew raised in abject poverty in America who, through an unbroken record of crime, had assembled the trappings of English privilege and status, and every appearance of virtue. The grand duchess had died seventy years before Worth decided, in his own words, to “elope” with her portrait, beginning a strange, true Victorian love affair between a crook and a canvas.

  TWO

  A Fine War

  Fourteen years earlier, at the end of August 1862, the armies of the Union and the Confederacy had come to grips in a muddy Virginia field and blasted away at each other for two days in an encounter known to history as the Second Battle of Bull Run, one of the bloodiest engagements of the American Civil War.

  According to official war records, more than three thousand soldiers died in that carnage, including one Adam Worth, who was just eighteen at the time.

  Bull Run was the scene of Worth’s first death and first reincarnation. Reports of his death were, of course, greatly exaggerated. Far from perishing on the Virginia battlefields, the young Worth survived the war in excellent health with a new identity, a deep aversion to bloodshed, and a wholly new career as an impostor stretching out before him. The Civil War almost destroyed America, but after the bloodletting the country fashioned itself anew, and so did Worth. Over the next forty years he would vanish and then reappear under a new name with a regularity and ease that baffled the police of three continents.

  Worth was notoriously reticent when it came to discussing the years before his strange renaissance at Bull Run—the better, perhaps, to preserve the myriad myths that clustered around them. Some later accounts insisted that he was the product of a wealthy Yankee family and an expensive education, a gentleman criminal in the Raffles tradition. Another stated, categorically and without corroboration, that “his father was a Russian Pole and his mother a German.” The great detective William Pinkerton, a man who came to know Worth better than any other, insisted that he was the child of a rich Massachusetts burgher who had sent his son to a private academy to learn an honest business, only to see him seduced into crime by bad company in the stews of New York. “Had he continued an upright life, he undoubtedly would have become famous as a businessman,” the worthy Pinkerton lamented. Another important figure in Worth’s life, a notorious thief and gangster’s moll named Sophie Lyons, concurred in the belief that Worth had come from good stock, reporting that he was “born of an excellent family and well educate
d, [but] formed bad habits and developed a passion for gambling.”

  Worth himself was the last person to deny such glamorous beginnings, which were, like so many aspects of his existence, a very considerable distance from the truth. Adam Worth (or Wirth, or even, occasionally, Werth) was born in 1844 somewhere in eastern Germany. His father and mother were German Jews who emigrated to the United States when Worth was just five years old. Speaking no English and almost destitute, Worth père set up shop as a tailor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No other details about Worth’s mother and father have survived, but one may surmise that their parenting skills, particularly in the area of ethical guidance, were distinctly lacking: not only did Adam Worth take to crime at an early age, but his younger brother, John, quickly followed suit, and his sister, Harriet, continued the family tradition by marrying a more than usually crooked lawyer.

  Worth’s first lesson in swindling was apparently learned in a Cambridge school playground. Pinkerton liked to tell the story of how Worth “entered school when six years of age, and was very soon after, as he himself stated, drawn into a trade with a boy larger than himself, who offered to give him a brand-new penny for two old ones.” The child Worth, finding the newly minted coin a more attractive object than his two old ones, agreed to the swap and returned home to show his father, who “gave him a most unmerciful whipping,” thus “impressing on him the value of the new penny as against his two old ones.”

  “From that day until his death, no one, be he friend or foe, honest or dishonest, Negro or Indian, relative or stranger, ever got the better of Adam Worth in any business transactions, regular or irregular,” Pinkerton concluded.

  The young Worth grew up, or rather did not grow up, to be small in stature, measuring between five feet four and five feet five, according to police records. Contemporaries made much of his lack of height, and his criminal colleagues, who were nothing if not literal when it came to the allocation of sobriquets, called him “Little Adam.” In reality, for an age when human beings were appreciably smaller than they are now, he was not much below average height, but it suited the purposes of those who could not help admiring him to make our man out to be a midget, for thus his evil-doing was magnified and his ability to thwart authority appeared the more remarkable. When the Scotland Yard detective Robert Anderson called him “the Napoleon of the criminal world,” he was referring not only to the man’s nefarious accomplishments and criminal stature but also to his lack of inches. The undersized Worth quickly developed an out-sized Napoleonic complex.

  Worth’s height was the first physical feature noted by the various detectives, policemen, crooks, and lovers who came into contact with him. The second was his eyes, which were dark, almost black, penetrating voids beneath shaggy eyebrows, suggestive of intelligence and determination. When he became enraged, which was seldom, they bulged unpleasantly. He had thick hair, which he wore short and combed to one side, a prominent curved nose, and, in later life, a long mustache which curled across his cheeks to meet a pair of mighty side-whiskers.

  If Worth’s tough childhood left him with a cynical determination to outdo his peers by guile, it also seems to have imbued him with an intense romanticism. As his father scraped together a living to keep his brood alive in the malodorous hovel that was the Worth family home, his oldest son’s imagination released him to a world of grand dinners, fine apparel, and civilized conversation.

  In the Harvard students who paraded through Cambridge, the immigrant Jewish urchin had ample opportunity to observe the outward shows of wealth and privilege. The brighter the penny, he saw, the easier the counterfeit. Ashamed of his lowly origins, frustrated by impecunity, the young Worth clearly felt himself to be the equal of the fine young gentlemen strutting Boston Common. Their wealth and sophistication provoked ambivalent feelings of envy, resentment, and anger, and also of admiration and desire. Worth resolved to “better” himself.

  Among the student body in the 1850s, for example, was Henry Adams, just a few years Worth’s senior, but a young man so far his social superior as to represent a wholly different species. Wealthy, aristocratic, sophisticated, the scion of one of America’s oldest and grandest families, bloodstock of Presidents, “never in his life,” as Adams noted in his Education, “would he have to explain who he was.” But Adams also knew that his ancient class was under threat from just such as Worth. “Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him.” Reflecting on the advantages of his birth, Adams observed that “probably no child, born in the same year, held better cards than he,” and wondered “whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked.” The hand dealt to Adam Worth contained no such aces. But with an instinct and energy second to none, he resolved to mark the deck himself.

  America, then as now, promised all things to all men, even if it did not always deliver. It was a time when “ambition,” as Cardinal Newman wrote, “sets everyone on the lookout to succeed and to rise in life, to amass money, to gain power, to depress his rivals, to triumph over his hitherto superiors, to affect a consequence and a gentility which he had not before.” Worth shared those aspirations, and would eventually realize them. His methods alone would set him apart from other “self-made men,” for what others had earned, inherited, or bought, he would simply steal, winning respectability by robbery, effrontery, and fraud. Where his father had toiled to make clothes for the vanity of rich men, Worth would spin himself the dazzling outfit of a pretender, from pilfered cloth.

  But it would be wrong to see the young Worth as merely a creature of immorality, a natural-born wrecker of the social fabric. From an early age he espoused many of the worthiest principles: allegiance to family and friends, the virtues of hard work, perseverance, generosity, charity, and courage. As he entered his teens, Little Adam was already evolving into a character of many and conflicting parts: selfish, greedy and also generous to a fault, at once ruthless and sentimental. He regarded his fellowmen, and particularly his social superiors, with undiluted cynicism, yet he would never swindle a friend, rob a poor man, or harm the harmless. He was acutely aware of the difference between right and wrong and evolved a code of behavior that he held with the same resolute conviction as would any pillar of society, while turning society’s codes upside down. Adam Worth had plenty of time for morals; it was laws he disdained. The hard, uncertain circumstances of Worth’s early life left him with the deep conviction that it was possible to be a “good” man, at least in his own estimation, while pursuing a life of calculated deceit.

  The “Old Boston” described by Henry James and others was probably the most socially divided city in the United States, where power and money were still retained by a handful of white, Protestant families of Anglo-Saxon lineage with a genetic tendency toward snobbery, self-consciousness, and genteel self-righteousness. Boston is the only place in America with a name for its own uppercaste, but the puritanical elite of Boston Brahmins with its “serious poetry [and] profound religion,” which “knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards” and nothing else, was already being undermined by the immigrant invasion. Worth could only gaze from an unbridgeable distance on the Boston power elite, the handful of city gentry communicating only with their peers and the Almighty, having utterly expunged their own ordinary immigrant origins. As one wit observed later:

  So this is dear old Boston,

  The Land of the Bean and the Cod

  Where the Cabots talk only to Lowells

  And the Lowells talk only to God.

  If the snooty, anglophile Brahmins stood at the pinnacle of Boston’s social scale, Worth represented precisely the other extreme.

  As Henry James later observed in The Bostonians, this was “a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canti
ng age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.” There was something fraudulent and hollow in the Brahmins’ social superiority. This may have enraged the young Worth, excluded from their civilized ranks, but it also inspired him. As Henry Adams noted: “The Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing.”

  As he emerged from a deprived childhood into an adolescence that offered little better, Worth took the fateful decision to rid him self of his first, unglamorous life. At the age of fourteen, he ran away from home, leaving behind his humble parents and their status as social outcasts. The idea of a career in crime and imposture may not yet have formed in his young mind, but Worth knew what he did not want. He never again set foot inside his childhood home, but a need for family love, and perhaps also for the strong father figure that his own father never was, marked the rest of his restless existence.

  After some months of leading “a vagabond life in the city of Boston,” he drifted to New York, where he took, for the first and only time, an honest job as a clerk “in one of the leading stores in New York City.” Worth never offered any details of this brief flirtation with paid work, master criminals being notoriously touchy about that sort of thing, and the experiment was, anyway, cut short by the start of the Civil War. At the age of eighteen, the store clerk from Massachusetts promptly abandoned the tedious job of filling in ledgers and joined a New York regiment in the Union Army, preparing to march south for battle.

  Worth’s name first appears in the register of the 34th New York Light Artillery, better known as the Flushing or “L” Battery, which assembled in Long Island. He was officially mustered into the regiment in New York City on November 28, 1861, and received a “bounty of $1,000,” according to Pinkerton. Many young recruits inflated their ages upon joining up, to appear more mature than they were and thus hasten possible promotion. The seventeen-year-old Worth gave his age as twenty, his first recorded lie.