NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  Acting quickly, the pair dispatched the stolen securities to a New York lawyer, possibly either Howe or Hummel, with instructions to wait a few months and then sell back the bonds for a percentage of their face value and forward the proceeds in due course. At the time, this was an accepted method for recovering stolen property, winked at by the police, who often themselves helped to negotiate the return of the securities, to the advantage of both the owners and the thieves. “All [the robbers] need do is to make ‘terms’ which means give up part of their booty, and then devote their leisure hours to plan new rascalities,” noted The Boston Sunday Times, one of the few organs to raise objections to this morally dubious collusion. “There must be something radically wrong in the police system of the country when such transactions of [sic] these can repeatedly take place.”

  Worth and Bullard then hurriedly packed the remaining cash into false-bottom trunks, bid farewell to Marm Mandelbaum, Sophie Lyons, and New York, and took the train to Philadelphia, where the S.S. Indiana, bound for England, was waiting to take them, in style, to Europe and a new life. For this they would need new names, and in high spirits in their first-class cabin the pair discussed how they would reinvent themselves. Bullard elected to call himself Charles H. Wells and adopt a new persona as a wealthy Texan businessman. Worth’s choice of alias was inspired.

  That year had seen the untimely and much-lamented demise, on June 18, of Henry Jarvis Raymond, the founder-editor of The New York Times. Senator, congressman, political conscience, and stalwart moral voice of the age, Raymond had succumbed to “an attack of apoplexy” at the age of forty-nine and his passing was the occasion for some of the most solemn adulation ever printed. A single obituary of the great man described him as patriotic, wise, moderate, honorable, candid, generous-hearted, hard-working, frugal, conscientious, masterly, modest, courageous, noble, consistent, principled, cultivated, distinguished, lucid, kind, just, forbearing, even-tempered, sincere, moral, lenient, vivacious, enterprising, temperate, self-possessed, clear-headed, sagacious, eloquent, staunch, sympathetic, kindly, generous, just, suave, amiable, and upright. The New York Times ended its adjective-sodden paean to its founder by declaring that Raymond was “always the true gentleman … in fact, we never knew a man more completely guileless or whose life and character better illustrated the virtues of a true and ingenuous manhood.” The newspaper’s journalistic rivals agreed. The Evening Mail noted: “He was always a gentleman … true to his own convictions.” The Telegram called him “one of the brightest and most gentlemanly journalists the New World has ever produced,” while The Evening Post also noted “he was a gentleman in his manners and language.” The grave in exclusive Green-Wood Cemetery of this man of integrity, this ethical colossus, was marked with a forty-foot obelisk in honor of his achievements and virtue. “Contemporary opinion has rarely pronounced a more unanimous, more cordial or more emphatic judgment than in the case of the departed chief of The New York Times,” that paper declared.

  Worth, already hankering after respectability to go with his new wealth, had read these breathless accolades (few could avoid them), and the repeated references to the late Mr. Raymond’s “gentlemanliness” had lodged in his mind. Appropriating the name of such a man would be a rich and satisfying irony, not least because Worth, an avid collector of underworld gossip, may have known that the great moral arbiter of the age had himself led a double life of which his readers and admirers possessed not an inkling. Officially, on the night of his death, the worthy editor had “sat with his family and some friends until 10 o’clock, when he left them to attend a political consultation; and his family saw no more of him until he was discovered, about 2:30 the next morning, lying in the hallway unconscious and apparently dying.” The truth was rather more dubious, for in reality Henry Jarvis Raymond, man of virtue, had died of a sudden coronary while “paying a visit to a young actress.”

  Adam Worth now decided that, whether Henry J. Raymond resided in the heaven reserved for great men or in the purgatory of the adulterer, he did not need his name anymore. On the voyage to England he adopted this impressive alias (replacing Jarvis with Judson, in memory of the name he used for the Boston robbery) and kept it for the rest of his life. It was one of Worth’s wittiest and least recognized thefts.

  Early the next year, two wealthy Americans swaggered into the Washington Hotel in Liverpool and announced they would be occupying the best rooms in the house indefinitely, since they were on an extended business trip. The pair were dressed in the height of fashion, with frock coats, silk cravats, and canes. Two Yankee swells fresh off the boat and keen for entertainment, Mr. Henry J. Raymond, merchant banker, and Mr. Charles H. Wells, Texan businessman, headed for the hotel bar to toast their arrival in the Old World. Mr. Raymond drank to the future; Mr. Wells, as usual, drank to excess.

  Behind the bar of the Washington Hotel, as it happened, their future was already waiting in the highly desirable shape of Miss Katherine Louise Flynn, a seventeen-year-old Irish colleen with thick blond hair, enticing dimples in all the right places, and a gleam in her eye that might have been mistaken for availability but was probably rather closer to raw ambition. This remarkable woman had been born into Dublin poverty and had fled her humble origins at fifteen, determined even at that early age that hers would be a very different lot. Hot-tempered, vivacious, and sharp as a tack, Kitty craved excitement and longed for travel, cultured company, and beautiful things. Specifically, she understood the value of money, and wanted lots of it.

  Mercenary is an unkind word. Kitty Flynn was simply practical. The squalor and deprivation of her early years had left her with a healthy respect for the advantages of wealth and a determination to do whatever was necessary, within reason, to obtain them. In her present situation this involved enduring, and blowing back, the good-natured and flirtatious chaff of the hotel’s regular drinkers. But when these same patrons overstepped the mark and were foolhardy enough to suggest that Kitty might like to consider some more intimate after-hours entertainment, they were left in no doubt, by way of a stream of vivid Irish invective, that the barmaid considered herself destined for rather greater delights than they could offer. The steamer from Dublin to Liverpool had been the first stage in Kitty’s planned journey to fortune and respectability; her current job as a hotel barmaid was but a way station along the route. The arrival of Messrs. Raymond and Wells opened up new and enticing vistas. Knights in shining armor were few and far between in Liverpool, and two wealthy Americans with money to burn were clearly the next best thing.

  “She was an unusually beautiful girl—a plump, dashing blond of much the same type [as the actress] Lillian Russell was years ago,” recounted Sophie Lyons. She was, like all the best barmaids, buxom. Her blond hair curled into ringlets reaching to the middle of her back and were arranged in such a way that they appeared to have exploded from the back of her head. Her features were delicate, her nose snubbed, her lips full, but it was her eyes, startlingly blue and slightly distended, that tended to reduce her admirers to putty. In certain lights she looked like nothing so much as an exceptionally attractive frog—which was only appropriate, since Kitty would shortly embark on a career in which, as in the fairy tale, she would be kissed by a variety of princes, charming and otherwise. In the best surviving portrait of her (a colored version of a picture by the French photographer Félix Nadar), Kitty Flynn is wearing an expression that hovers between flirtatious and simply wicked.

  That expression had an electric effect on the newest arrivals to the Washington Hotel in January 1870. It was never clear which of the two felons first lost his heart to Kitty, but that both did so, and deeply, was accepted as fact by all their contemporaries. Sophie Lyons is characteristically blunt on the matter: “Bullard and Raymond [she uses Worth’s real name and his alias interchangeably] both fell madly in love with her.”

  For the next month Kitty was besieged by these two very different suitors—the one small, dapper, almost teetotal, and intense; the other tall, l
ugubrious, and, as the Pinkertons put it, “inclined to live fast and dissipate.” Suddenly Kitty found herself being wined and dined on a scale that was lavish beyond her most extravagant dreams and that stretched Liverpool’s resources to the limit. In spite of their amorous rivalry, the two crooks remained the closest of friends as they swept Kitty from one expensive candlelit dinner to another, as Bullard serenaded her and Worth did his best to persuade her that he, rather than his exotic partner, represented the more solid investment. “The race for her favor was a close one,” records the inquisitive Lyons, “despite the fact that Bullard was an accomplished musician [and] spoke several languages fluently.” Finally Kitty gave in to Piano Charley’s entreaties and agreed to marry him. Yet for Worth she always reserved a place in her heart and, for that matter, her bed.

  Kitty Flynn became Mrs. Charles H. Wells one spring Sunday. The ceremony was performed at the Washington Hotel and a large and curious crowd of Liverpudlians turned out to watch the toast of the city being driven away in a coach and four by her handsome American husband. Adam Worth was the best man and, Lyons reports, “to his credit it should be said that the bridal couple had no sincerer well-wisher than he.” Worth had good reason for his equanimity, since, although Kitty had agreed to marry Bullard, she seems to have been only too happy to share her favors with both men. If Bullard objected to this arrangement, he did not say so. Indeed, he was hardly in a strong moral position to do so, for, unbeknown to Kitty, he was married already. It was not until some time later that Kitty discovered Bullard had a wife and two children in America. Conceivably, Worth used this information to blackmail Bullard into sharing his wife. But that was hardly his style, and as the relationship between the two crooks remained entirely amicable, it seems more likely that the accommodating Kitty Flynn, the broad-minded Bullard, and Worth, who never let convention get in the way of his desires, simply found a ménage à trois to be the most convenient arrangement for all parties.

  While Kitty and Charley enjoyed a short honeymoon, Worth passed his time profitably by robbing the largest pawnshop in Liverpool of some £25,000 worth of jewelry. The Pinkertons later gave a full account of the theft:

  He looked around for something in his line, and found a large pawnshop in that city which he considered worth robbing … he saw that if he could get plaster impressions of the key to the place he could make a big haul. After working cautiously for several days he managed to get the pawnbroker off his guard long enough to enable him to get possession of the key and make a wax impression: the result was that two or three weeks later the pawnbroker came to his place one morning and found all of his valuable pieces of jewelry abstracted from his safe, the store and vaults locked, but the valuables gone.

  The robbery caused a minor sensation in Liverpool, where crime was rife but large-scale burglary rare. The Pinkerton account was written many years later, but seems to be largely accurate. Most of the bonds stolen from the Boylston Bank had now been “worked back” to their owners and the bank had therefore decided to call off the costly detective agency, rightly concluding that the thieves were now beyond reach. But the Pinkertons continued to keep tabs, via a network of informers, on American criminals living abroad. In the coming years their information on Adam Worth and his activities as Henry Raymond grew increasingly detailed.

  Robbing pawnbrokers was easy game, and Worth was becoming restless for more challenging sport in new pastures. Kitty was also eager to find more glamorous surroundings, and Bullard did not care much where he went so long as there was money and champagne in plentiful supply, and a piano near at hand. Worth showered Kitty with expensive gifts (including his stolen gems), bought her expensive clothes, and connived and encouraged her in her determination to leave her lowly origins behind. With his stolen money, Worth sought to shape and remake Kitty just as he was reinventing himself. But grimy Liverpool was no place for a would-be lady, and the great shared fraud required a brighter backdrop.

  At the end of 1870 the trio packed up their belongings, including the still considerable remnants of the Boylston Bank haul, checked out of the Washington Hotel, and headed for Paris, where the war between France and Prussia, the siege of Paris, and now the lawlessness of the Commune had rendered the French capital a particularly enticing venue for a brace of socially ambitious crooks and their shared moll.

  SIX

  An American Bar in Paris

  Paris furnished stark evidence of that peculiar brand of double standards Worth would absorb and adapt: under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–70), a woman could be arrested for smoking in the Tuileries Gardens, but personal immorality was almost de rigueur. The surface was magnificent, but corruption and libertinism were rampant. Entrepreneurs speculated, hedonists indulged, and English visitors railed about the “badness of the morals.” But the great gay façade of the Second Empire came tumbling down with the crushing of the French armies by the Prussian military machine.

  The crippling siege of Paris, starting in 1870, was followed by the Commune, that remarkable and violent political experiment in which an insurrectionary countergovernment seized power, imposing a form of collective leadership and such radical policies as free speech, compulsory education, and cooperative ownership of businesses. The Commune lasted just three months, from March to May 1871, when the Communards were brutally crushed by the government’s forces. More than twenty thousand Parisians were killed in the ensuing repression.

  Worth, Bullard, and Kitty traveled slowly south through England and then tarried in London to await the outcome of the bloody events taking place in Paris, before making their way across the Channel at the end of June 1871. They found a city exhausted and partially in ruins, disordered and vulnerable, but still glamorous in her devastation: a perfect spot from which to coordinate fresh criminal activities, with plenty to satisfy the trio’s extravagant tastes. As a later historian observed, “France is an astonishingly resilient patient and now—shamefully defeated, riven by civil war, bankrupted by the German reparation demands and the costs of repairing Paris—she was to amaze the world and alarm her enemies by the speed of her recovery.” Here, Worth saw, were rich pickings. His namesake Charles Frederick Worth, the great couturier, had “bought up part of the wreckage of the Tuileries to make sham ruins in his garden”; now another Worth would also make his mark in the remnants of the devastated city, where, for the time being at least, the authorities were far too busy washing blood off the streets and piecing together the capital to pay much attention to the newly arrived triumvirate.

  In later years Kitty would claim, unconvincingly, that she had no idea her husband and his partner were notorious international criminals. It must have been clear from the outset that her charming spouse and his friend were hardly respectable businessmen, since they paid for everything in wads of cash, did no work whatever, and never discussed anything approaching legitimate business. Kitty’s part in the next stage of the drama indicates that she was involved in their criminal activities up to her shell-like ears.

  With the remains of the money from the Boston robbery, Bullard and Worth purchased a spacious building at 2, rue Scribe, a part of the Grand Hotel complex near the Opéra, under the name Charles Wells, and rented large and comfortable apartments nearby. The new premises, christened the American Bar, were refurbished, according to William Pinkerton, in “palatial splendor” at a cost of some $75,000 (the equivalent, amazingly, of more than $300,000 today) with oil paintings, mirrors, and expensive glassware. American bartenders were imported to mix exotic cocktails of a type popular in New York but “which were, at that time, almost unknown in Europe.”

  The American Bar was a two-pronged operation. The second floor of the building was fashioned into a sort of clubhouse for visiting Americans, complete with the latest editions of U.S. newspapers and pigeonholes where expatriates could pick up their mail. “Americans were cordially invited to use it as a meeting house,” a spot where they could gather and enjoy American drinks, a quiet, sober, and entir
ely respectable establishment. In the upper floors of the house, however, the scene was rather different. Here Worth and Bullard set up a full-scale, well-appointed, and completely illegal gambling operation. By “importing from America roulette croupiers and experts on baccarat,” they gave the den a cosmopolitan sheen, but it was Kitty who turned out to be the principal lure, for “her beauty and engaging manners attracted many American visitors.”

  The Pinkertons’ agents in Europe began keeping a watch on the place almost from the day the American Bar opened, and declared that it was fast becoming “the headquarters of American gamblers and criminals who here planned many of their European crimes.” Yet even the forces of the law were dazzled by the ample charms of the hostess. “Mrs. Wells was a beautiful woman,” the detectives later reported, “a brilliant conversationalist dressed in the height of fashion: her company was sought by almost all the patrons of the house.”

  While gorgeous Kitty presided, a vision in silk and ringlets, the affable Bullard played the piano and Worth carefully monitored the clientele. An alarm button was discreetly installed behind the bar “which the bar-tender touched and which rung a buzzer in the gambling rooms above whenever the police or any suspicious party came in.” Within seconds, Worth could render the upper stories of 2, rue Scribe as quiet and respectable as the lower ones. The Paris police “made two or three raids on the house, but never succeeded in finding anything upstairs, except a lot of men sitting around reading papers, and no gambling in sight.” Worth also bribed the local police to tip him off when a raid might be expected.

  The American Bar, the first American-style nightclub in Paris, was an instant success, a gaudy magnet in the ravaged and weary city, and the Parisians were “astonished by its magnificence. The place soon became a famous resort and was extensively patronized, not only by Americans, but by Englishmen: in fact, by visitors from all over Europe.” Businessmen, bankers, tourists, burglars, forgers, convicts, counts, con men, and counterfeiters were all equally welcome to enjoy the products of Worth’s superb chef, sip a cocktail, or, if they preferred, repair upstairs, where the delightful Kitty would help them lose their money at the gambling tables with such grace that they almost always came back for more. Word soon spread through the underworld that the American Bar was the best place in Europe to make contact with other criminals, arrange a job, or simply hide out from the authorities.