NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  Worth seems to have delighted in sailing as close to the wind as he could, and with every near-escape his contempt for the forces of law and order was confirmed and amplified. As the detectives Eldridge and Watts later recounted: “Once, after robbing a jewelry store in Boston, this daring burglar slipped out of the front door, only to meet a policeman face to face. Without an instant of tremor, this man of iron nerve politely saluted the officer and stepped back to re-open the door and coolly call to his confederate within: ‘William, be sure and fasten the door securely when you leave! I have got to catch the next car.’ So, indeed, he did, after bidding the officer a pleasant good night, but he hopped off the car, a few blocks beyond the store, slipped back stealthily, signalled to his confederate and both escaped with their booty.”

  An avid pupil, Worth appears to have found in Marm Mandelbaum both an ally and a role model. The easy way she farmed out criminal work to others, her lavish apartments and social graces, were precisely the sort of things he had in mind for himself. Above all, it was perhaps Marm who taught the lesson that being a “real gentleman” and a complete crook were not only perfectly compatible but thoroughly rewarding. Marm’s dinner table offered an atmosphere of illicit luxury, where superior crooks could enjoy the company of men and women of like lawless minds.

  Two of Marm’s guests in particular would play crucial although very different roles in Worth’s future. The first was Maximilian Schoenbein, “alias M. H. Baker, alias M. H. Zimmerman, alias The Dutchman, alias Mark Shinburn or Sheerly, alias Henry Edward Moebus (according to the Pinkerton files),” but most usually alias Max Shinburn, “a bank burglar of distinction who complained that he was at heart an aristocrat, and that he detested the crooks with whom he was compelled to associate.” For the next three decades, the criminal paths taken by Adam Worth and Max Shinburn ran in tandem. The two lawbreakers had much in common, and they came to loathe each other heartily.

  Shinburn was born on February 17, 1842, in the town of Ittlingen, Württemberg, where he was apprenticed to a mechanic before emigrating to New York in 1861. Styling himself “The Baron” from early in life, Shinburn later actually purchased the title of Baron Schindle or Shindell of Monaco with “the judicious expenditure of a part of his fortune.” Aloof, intelligent, and insufferably arrogant, the Baron cut a wide swath through New York low society. Even the police were impressed.

  Inspector Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department considered him “probably the most expert bank burglar in the country,” and Belgian police offered this description of the soigné, multilingual felon: “Speaks English with a very slight German accent. Speaks German and French. Always well dressed. He has a distinguished appearance with polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.” Shinburn’s looks were striking; he had “small blue penetrating eyes, long, straight nose, moustache and small imperial, both of brownish color mixed with gray, moustache twisted at the ends, pointed chin … at times wears a full beard and sometimes a moustache and chin whisker, in order to hide from view the pronounced dimple in chin.” His numerous encounters with the law and a youthful taste for dueling had left him with numerous other identifying features. After one arrest, a police officer noted these with grisly exactitude: “on back of left wrist … pistol shot wounds running parallel with each other and near the deformity in right leg … pistol or gunshot wound on left side … several small scars that look like the result of buck shot wounds; scar on left side of abdomen, appearing as though shot entered in the back and came through …” Shinburn’s fraudulent aristocratic claims were full of holes, and so was the rest of him.

  His criminal notoriety sprang principally from the invention of a machine which he maintained could reveal the combination of any safe: “a ratchet which, when placed under the combination dial of a safe, would puncture a sheet of calibrated paper when the dial stopped and started to move in the opposite direction. He would repeat this process until he had the entire combination.” According to other police sources, “his ear was so acute and sensitive that by turning the dial he could determine at what numbers the tumblers dropped into place.”

  With his mechanical training, Shinburn also perfected a set of light and powerful safecracking tools which he was prepared to sell to others for a price. “Shinburn revolutionized the burglar’s tools and put them on a scientific basis,” recorded Sophie Lyons. The better to perfect his safe-busting technique, the Baron “for some time took employment under an assumed name in the works of the Lilly Safe Co. [whose] safes and vaults were considered among the best and most secure.” But not for long. Leaving a trail of empty safes in his wake, Shinburn was eventually penalized through his own competence and the Lilly safe “came into such disrepute that the company was forced into liquidation.”

  “The safe I can’t open hasn’t been built,” Shinburn once boasted to Sophie Lyons.

  By the time Worth encountered Shinburn in the mid-1860s, the latter had developed a name for himself as a man of importance among the bank-robbing fraternity by cleaning out the Savings Bank in Walpole, New Hampshire. Worth was ambivalent about the Baron. He admired his dandified dress and envied his reputation, but found his braggadocio and his air of superiority unbearable.

  Far more to Worth’s taste was another dark luminary of the underworld, and a Mandelbaum protégé, Charles W. Bullard, a languid and alluring criminal playboy better known as Piano Charley. The scion of a wealthy family from Milford which could trace its ancestry to a member of George Washington’s staff, Bullard “had a good common school education,” inherited a large fortune from his father while still in his teens, and had gone to the bad immediately and extravagantly. Having squandered his inheritance, Bullard briefly tried his hand in the butcher’s trade but gave up the occupation and “devoted his ability to the robbing of banks and safes,” for which he inherited a taste from his grandfather, who was said to be a burglar “in a small way.” Bullard’s “dissipation and a restless craving for morbid excitement made him a ‘fly’ [skilled] crook” and later an uncommonly daring and wily burglar, and in New York low society he was considered “one of the boldest operators that has ever handled a jimmy or drilled a safe.”

  “Bullard is a man of good education,” recorded one admiring police report, “speaks English, French and German fluently, and plays on the piano with the skill of a professional.” Raffish, refined, and handsome, with a wispy goatee and limpid eyes, Bullard had three passions in life, each of which he indulged to the limit: women, music, and gambling. Through constant practice on his baby grand, Piano Charley had developed such “delicacy of touch” that he could divine the combination of a safe simply by spinning the tumblers, while his piano sonatas could reduce the hardest criminal to tears and lure the most chaste woman into bed. “An inveterate gamester,” perennially short of funds, often outrageously drunk, but always charming, Bullard was a romantic figure in the New York underworld. Under the benign eye of Marm Mandelbaum, he and Worth established an immediate rapport.

  Piano Charley Bullard’s crime sheet included jewel theft, train robbery, and jailbreaking. Early in 1869 he teamed up with Max Shinburn and another professional thief, Ike Marsh, to break into the safe of the Ocean National Bank in New York’s Greenwich Village after tunneling through the basement. The venture was said to have realized more than $100,000, almost all of which ended up in Shinburn’s pockets. “The robbers were nearly a month at the work, and the bank was ruined by the loss,” the police reported.

  Later that year, on May 4, Bullard had again conspired with Marsh to rob the Hudson River Railroad Express as it trundled from Buffalo in upstate New York along the New York Central Railroad to Grand Central Station. Knowing that the Merchant’s Union Express Co. used the train to transport quantities of cash, with the connivance of a bribed train guard they “concealed themselves in the baggage car … in which the safe was stored and rifled it of $100,000.” Bullard and Marsh then leaped off the train in the Bronx with the cash an
d negotiable securities stuffed into carpet bags. The guard was found bound and apparently unconscious, with froth dripping down his chin—this turned out to be soap, and the guard was immediately arrested.

  The Pinkertons, whose reputation had expanded to the point where they were called in on almost every significant robbery, had traced the thieves to Toronto and found Ike and Charley living in high style in one of the city’s most expensive hotels. After a long court battle, Bullard was extradited to the United States and jailed in White Plains, New York, to await trial. Using what little money remained to them, the Bullard family hired an expensive lawyer to defend their wayward son. Like Worth, Piano Charley never passed up a criminal opportunity and arranged for one of his many women friends to extract $1,000 (the entire fee) from his attorney’s pocket “as he was returning to New York on the train.”

  It was almost certainly Marm Mandelbaum who decided that Piano Charley, whose music-making was such a popular feature of her dinner parties, should not be allowed to languish in jail. Worth, already a close friend, was selected for the job of getting him out, along with Shinburn. It was the first and only time the two men would work together.

  One week after he was imprisoned, Bullard’s friends dug through the wall of the White Plains jail and set both Ike and Charley free, whereupon the crooks promptly returned to New York City for a long, and in Bullard’s case staggeringly bibulous, celebration. The Baron was immensely pleased with himself. “Shinburn used to take more pride in the way he broke into the jail at White Plains, New York, to free Charley Bullard and Ike Marsh, two friends of his, than he did in some of his boldest robberies,” Sophie Lyons recounted.

  But the immediate effect of the successful jail break was to cement the burgeoning friendship between Bullard and Worth. Piano Charley had the sort of effortless élan and cultural veneer that Worth so deeply admired and sought to emulate. On the other hand, Worth was clever and calculating, qualities which the suave but foolish Bullard singularly lacked.

  They decided to go into partnership.

  FIVE

  The Robbers’ Bride

  The Boylston National Bank in Boston was a familiar sight from Worth’s youth. The rich burghers of Boston believed their money was as safe as man could make it behind the grand façade of the bank, an imposing brick edifice at the corner of Boylston and Washington streets in the heart of the city. According to Sophie Lyons, Worth “made a tour of inspection of all the Boston banks and decided that the famous Boylston Bank, the biggest in the city, would suit him.” Max Shinburn would later claim to have had a hand in planning the robbery, but there is no evidence his expertise was either required or requested. Indeed, Shinburn’s exclusion from this “job” may have been the original source of the enmity between him and Worth. Ike Marsh, Bullard’s rather dim Irish sidekick in the train-robbery caper, was brought in on the heist, which was, like all the best plans, perfectly straightforward.

  Posing as William A. Judson and Co., dealers in health tonics, the partners rented the building adjacent to the bank and erected a partition across the window on which were displayed some two hundred bottles, containing, according to the labels mucilaged thereon, quantities of “Gray’s Oriental Tonic.” “The bottles served a double purpose,” the Pinkertons reported, “that of showing his business and preventing the public looking into the place.” Quite what was in Gray’s Oriental Tonic has never been revealed, since not a single bottle was ever sold.

  After carefully calculating the point where the shop wall adjoined the bank’s steel safe, the robbers began digging. For a week, working only at night, Worth, Bullard, and Marsh piled the debris into the back of the shop, until finally the lining of the vault lay exposed.

  “To cut through this was a work of more labor,” The Boston Post later reported. “So very quiet was the operation that the only sound perceptible to the occupants of adjoining rooms was like that made by a person in the act of putting down a carpet with an ordinary tack hammer. The tools applied were [drill] bits or augers of about an inch in diameter, by means of which a succession of holes were drilled, opening into each other, until a piece of plate some eighteen inches by twelve had been removed. Jimmies, hammers and chisels were used as occasion required for the purpose of consummating the nefarious job.” In the early hours of Sunday, November 21, 1869, Worth wriggled through the hole, lit a candle inside the bank safe, and surveyed the loot. “The treasure was contained in some twenty-five or thirty tin trunks,” which Worth now handed back out to his accomplices one by one. “The trunks were pried open, their contents examined, what was valuable pocketed and what was not rejected.” As dawn broke over Boston, the three thieves packed the swag into trunks labeled “Gray’s Oriental Tonic,” hailed a carriage to the station, and boarded the morning train to New York.

  At nine o’clock on Monday morning, fully twenty-four hours later, bank officials opened the safe and were “fairly thunderstruck at the scene which met their gaze.” The entire collection of safe-deposit boxes, and with them the solid reputation of the Boylston National Bank of Boston, was gone.

  THE BOSTON POST

  TUESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 23, 1869

  Yesterday morning Boston was startled. There is no discount on the word. A robbery of such magnitude as that of the Boylston National bank—amounting to from $150,000 to $200,000, in fact—which was perpetrated sometime between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning, is something quite out of the ordinary run in the municipal affairs of this city, and nearly if not quite too much for ready credence. But the robbery stands indisputably a robbery; and, taken as an exploit, considered in its aspect as a job, as one artist considers the work of another, it is one of the most adroit which it has ever been the fortune or misfortune of the press to record. The almost uniformly successful manner in which this class of burglary has been carried on throughout the country during the past few months may lead to the inference that the party or parties in the present case will escape the arm of the law, although it is true that the prime originator is as well known as any criminal need to be. The infinite cleverness with which his operations have been conducted from beginning to end, indicate him to be a man of no ordinary ability, and it seems very probable that, having so far succeeded in eluding police, he may escape altogether. Should he do so, he will find himself a richer man, even, than he had perhaps anticipated … The name by which the criminal is known is William A. Judson.

  The Boston Post, barely able to suppress its admiration, was conservative in its estimate. The Pinkertons believed that “nearly one million dollars in money and securities” had been stolen by Worth and his accomplices, a sum confirmed by Sophie Lyons. In the premises of William A. Judson and Co. police found “a dozen bushels or more of bricks and mortar,” about thirty disemboweled tin trunks, and two hundred bottles of Gray’s Oriental Tonic. For a week the Boylston Bank robbery was Boston’s sole topic of conversation. “Everyone continues to talk about the robbery of Boylston Bank,” The Boston Post reported gloomily a few days later. “But nobody—or nobody that has anything real to say—communicated anything new. On all sides it is admitted to be a very neat job, all the way from the Oriental Tonic clear through to the Bank safe.”

  It was indeed Worth’s neatest job to date. Yet the very success of the venture, the huge amount of money involved, and the stated determination of the authorities to track down the thieves (spurred on by a reward of twenty percent of the haul) left Worth and Bullard with an obvious dilemma. To stay in New York and attempt to “work back the securities” in the traditional way was to invite trouble, since even Marm Mandelbaum would think twice about fencing such hot property. They could take the cash, abandon the securities, and head west, where the frontier states offered obscurity and where the law was, at best, partially administered. But Worth and Bullard, with their taste for expensive living and sophisticated company, were hardly the stuff of which cowboys are made, and the prospect of spending their ill-gotten gains in some dusty prairie town where th
ey might be murdered for their money was less than appealing.

  A more attractive alternative was to make for Europe, where extradition was unlikely and where wealthy Americans were welcomed with open arms and few questions were asked. Big Ike Marsh had already decided to take early retirement with his share of the loot. He returned to Ireland via Baltimore and Queenstown, and was received in Tipperary with grand ceremony, a local boy made good or, rather, bad. In the end, the Pinkertons reported, “he gambled, drank and did everything he should not have done, and eventually returned to America for more funds.” Poor Ike was arrested while trying to rob another bank in Wellesborough, sentenced to twenty years’ solitary confinement in eastern Pennsylvania, and ended his life “an old man, broken down in health, dependent on the charity of friends.”

  Worth and Bullard rightly surmised that the Pinkertons would be called in after such a large robbery. Indeed, just a week after the bank heist, the detectives had already traced the thieves and their spoil to New York, and documents in the Pinkerton archives indicate that Bullard and Worth, thanks to some loose talk in criminal circles, were the prime suspects. The news that they were wanted men rapidly reached the fugitives themselves. “Those damned detectives will get on to us in a week,” Bullard warned Worth. “I don’t want to be playing the Piano in Ludlow Street [jail].”