NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  The jury had now heard five hours of riveting, if confusing, testimony, but it took them just a few minutes to reach a verdict. Worth was found guilty of robbery as charged and sentenced to seven years solitary confinement with hard labor. At 5 p.m. the court rose, and Worth, trying to demonstrate what little remained of his dignity, was led away to begin his sentence at the notorious Prison de Louvain.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Gentleman in Chains

  Prison life was hard on Worth, who had grown soft from his years of luxurious living in London, but it was made doubly so by the fact that Charley Bullard was not there to keep him company but Max Shinburn was. The authorities had agreed to reduce the Baron’s sentence in return for betraying Worth, but he still had another year to serve at the Prison de Louvain. As a convict of some eight years’ standing, Shinburn was a power to be reckoned with in the Liège jail, and he set about making Worth’s life a misery with that inhuman cruelty some prisoners reserve for their fellow inmates. According to the Pinkertons, Shinburn “had managed to curry favor with the prison officials, held a petty position over other prisoners, was overbearing and tyrannical, and did everything in his power to inflict punishment on his old friend and was the cause of numerous punishments being inflicted on Worth.” Before long, Worth was apprised of the Baron’s treachery. He had never liked Shinburn, but now his hatred blew white-hot.

  “He was a constant give-away on every prisoner in the prison,” Worth later ranted. “He was pigeon for the keepers.” Even the wardens were wary of him, for he was adept at “getting the keepers into trouble” by reporting on their activities to the head warden. In later years Worth would start frothing at the mere mention of Shinburn’s name. “Of all the dirty, despicable scoundrels that ever took up thieving as a profession, Max Shinburn was the worst of them all. He was the most thoroughgoing, thorough-paced scoundrel I ever knew in my life; he was without the rudiments of manhood in him,” Worth told Pinkerton, manhood, or rather gentlemanhood, being the quality he held most dear. “There was nothing from murder down that Shinburn would not do … he was the most despicable, lowbred scoundrel that ever lived … an over-bearing Dutch pig.” Worth finished this tirade by saying that he would “never get over” what his former associate had done to him, and this would “result sometime in his killing Shinburn if he ever got an opportunity.”

  Worth lapsed into the darkest depression, which deepened when news reached him from England of the fate of his family. Johnny Curtin, proving himself the bounder described by Sophie Lyons, repaid Worth’s loyalty with a stunning betrayal. Mrs. Raymond had learned from the newspapers that her husband, the respectable Henry Raymond, was in fact Adam Worth, a man who had committed virtually every crime imaginable and was now serving seven years’ hard labor in a Belgian jail. Left with two young children and suddenly abandoned by respectable society, Mrs. Raymond was more than unhappy, she was hysterical. The only person prepared to help her, it seemed, was Johnny Curtin, her husband’s dashing “business partner,” who, true to his deal with Worth, had rushed to her side. Over many months Curtin comforted the distraught woman, plied her with drink and laudanum, took over the running of the Clapham mansion and, finally, seduced her.

  Sophie Lyons was probably the source through which “rumors reached Worth of the undue intimacy of his wife and Curtin. He investigated the reports and found them true,” a discovery that left him “raging with indignation at his wife’s weakness and his friend’s treachery.” unmasked, imprisoned, and now cuckolded, Worth was powerless to stop the events taking place in London. Curtin had usurped Worth’s place in the marital bed and now he set about transferring the rest of his assets. Mrs. Raymond was no more capable of defending her money than her virtue, it seems, for she made no objection when Curtin pocketed the cash as he sold off the racehorses, the Brighton house, the Clapham mansion, and finally The Shamrock, which was purchased by the aristocrat Lord Lonsdale, who “entertained the Kaiser in the very cabin in which the stolen picture had formerly been hidden.” Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared in her life, Curtin vanished, taking with him every penny Worth owned.

  The strain was too much for Mrs. Raymond, by now an advanced and semicoherent alcoholic, penniless, homeless, and cast adrift for the second time in one year. Her “mind gave way under its weight of remorse” and she was taken, babbling, to a lunatic asylum, from which she never reemerged. The two children, a boy of six and a girl of three, were sent to live with John Worth and his wife in Brooklyn, where, Lyons claimed, “they grew to manhood and womanhood in ignorance of the truth about their father.”

  When word reached him of the tragedy, Worth exploded in despair and rage. Years later he was still “very bitter” about the role played in his life by Curtin, and prayed he “would never have a day’s luck” all the rest of his life. Mulling his misfortune and tormented by Shinburn, Worth sank ever more deeply into despair. Deprived of the ability to control events, Worth began to deteriorate. “The prison treatment in Belgium was brutal,” he later told Pinkerton. He was racked by pain from catarrh, and the ignorant hospital doctor performed a rustic operation on Worth’s nose “from the inside,” which made matters markedly worse, leaving Worth prey to violent nosebleeds and crippling headaches. “When I fell down with nervous prostration, I was three months in the hospital at one time, and they tried to get me out of the hospital and could not do it, and seared my back with hot irons,” he later told Pinkerton. His next nervous collapse consigned him to the prison hospital for another four months.

  A brief respite from at least one of the horrors of jail life came when the sadistic Shinburn, his chief tormentor, was finally released. The “document furnished by Max Shinburn to the Belgian Government … secured the incarceration of Worth and the liberation of its author,” the chief prison sneak, who had served only nine years, “considerably less than his full term.” The Belgian authorities almost immediately regretted the decision to set Shinburn free. Within a few months an investigating magistrate, fearing, rightly, that Shinburn would at once return to a life of crime, sent out another circular asking “all officers of the police kindly to acquaint him of all details concerning traces of Shoenbein [Shinburn] so that he may be pursued and that one may definitely establish whether this well-known bandit has been recently in Belgium.”

  A description was provided, suggesting that while Worth deteriorated rapidly in jail, the Baron had survived his prison experience without obvious damage to his soigné airs: “Always well dressed. Has a distinguished appearance because of his polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.” Shinburn, in fact, had left Belgium immediately upon his release, and after an operation to remove the telltale dimple in his chin, and hoping to “blot out his identity by the industrious circulation of a tale of his own death in Belgium,” he settled once more in New York.

  Shinburn did not enjoy his liberty for long, and no amount of crude surgery could disguise his distinctive manner. Reuniting with the New York criminal fraternity, he began “working on small banks and post offices in order to obtain the necessary capital to carry out his plans for a larger robbery.” Two months after $20,000 was extracted from the safe of the First National Bank in Middleburg, New York, Pinkerton’s detectives located Shinburn and began tailing him, but it was left to William Pinkerton himself to carry out the arrest, with the greatest possible fanfare. “In his residence was found a complete set of burglar’s tools, skeleton keys, lock picks and drills of all kinds; a bottle of nitro-glycerin and a syringe for forcing it into cracks of safe doors; pistols and soft-soled rubber shoes and other articles used by burglars,” the detectives reported. “Shinburn has undoubtedly been laying his plans for a big robbery.”

  “The arrest of Shinburne is undoubtedly the beginning of the end of his career,” Pinkerton pronounced. The ancient wound to the Baron’s leg had turned septic (he was “now obliged to use a silver tube in order to let out the pus that comes from the open wound,” Pinkerton
recorded ghoulishly), but at the age of sixty-two, the Baron had lost none of his élan. He was still “a man quiet in manner, of fine address, good appearance, suave, genteel dressed and would pass for a well-to-do foreigner … and a fluent talker when he desires to converse on any subject.” No amount of talking could help him now, however. He was tried in Middleburg and sentenced to another four years in prison. At the end of that term, he was immediately arrested for another, earlier crime, and he spent the next thirteen years in various American prisons, vigorously protesting his innocence.

  Worth, no stranger to Schadenfreude, was delighted to hear of Shinburn’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. He recalled that he was in his cell, “lying sick with nervousness,” when one of the wardens, who had also suffered from Shinburn’s sadism, came in to give him the “glorious news … that Pinkerton had captured the great Shoenbein, alias Shinburn.” As Worth later told Pinkerton, “that news had done him more good than all the doctors and all the medicine he ever could take.”

  The perfidious Curtin also got his comeuppance. Having seduced Worth’s wife and taken his money, Curtin had settled in disguise and under a false name in Woburn Place, where, in May, he was arrested by two Scotland Yard detectives for a string of unsolved crimes. “A well-known criminal, named John Curtin, who appeared to be wearing a wig, was charged with failing to report himself under the Prevention of Crimes Act,” The Daily Telegraph reported. “In a drawer in the prisoner’s room they found a six-chambered revolver, fully loaded, and some jewelry”—presumably the remaining property of poor, mad, destitute Mrs. Raymond. Worth eventually came to hear of Curtin’s well-deserved fate, but any rise in his spirits was short-lived. Within a year, yet another cruel blow landed. Both the muses who had inspired his black but poetic life were no more.

  For years the monumental Marm Mandelbaum, who had taught Worth the essentials of what might be called wing-collar crime, had continued to prosper as the den mother of New York thieves. Much of the property looted during the great Chicago fire of 1871 had found its way into and then out of her warehouses, at a tidy profit. But even the crooked lawyers William Howe and Abraham Hummel had been unable to help her, once District Attorney Peter B. Olney, one of the few honest law-enforcement officials in New York, decided her reign must come to an end. With the help of the Pinkertons, Olney set a trap with some silk he knew Marm had marked out for theft by her cohorts. On raiding her “offices,” the Pinkertons found not only the stolen silk but enough evidence to put her away forever. “It did not seem possible that so much wealth could be assembled in one spot,” one journalist reported. “There seemed to be enough clothes to supply an army. There were trunks filled with precious gems and silverware. Antique furniture was stacked against a wall and bars of gold from melted jewelry settings were stacked under newspapers. There were scales of every description to weigh diamonds.”

  Within hours, “the District Attorney procured several indictments charging her with grand larceny and receiving stolen goods,” and Marm Mandelbaum’s trial was set for December of that year. Released on $21,000 bail, Marm instructed Bill Howe to bribe her out of trouble, but for once the lawyer was pessimistic. Reforming and uncharacteristically honest elements had taken control of New York government and matters looked distinctly gloomy, he explained. So Marm Mandelbaum packed her bags with more than $1 million in cash, it was said, and fled to Canada. The Pinkertons soon tracked her down in Toronto, but she was untouchable under existing extradition laws. The great lady laughed all the way to the bank, particularly after “her bondsman succeeded in transferring the property pledged for her bail to her possession by means of backdated documents.”

  Early in 1894, after ten years of splendid and opulent exile, the mighty Marm Mandelbaum, now weighing a heroic 350 pounds, finally passed away at the age of seventy-six. Fredericka’s mammoth coffin was carried, with considerable difficulty, back to New York, where she was buried with all the pomp worthy of a woman of such astonishing criminal talents. At the funeral, it was reported, several mourners had their pockets picked.

  Marm Mandelbaum had been Worth’s first inspiration and role model, and her death affected him deeply. Still more crushing was the news that Kitty Flynn, his Turquoise, whom he had not seen for several years, but of whom, if Lyons, the Pinkertons, and every one of his criminal associates are to be believed, he forever cherished fond memories, had died of Bright’s disease in New York on March 13, 1894, at the age of forty-one. Hers had been a truly remarkable life, and the New York newspapers had a field day with her obituary. “SHE WAS ONCE A BARMAID,” screamed the New York World. “Kate Louise Flynn Bullard Terry Dies, Leaving Millions to Her Three Little Daughters. TWO ARE A BURGLAR’S CHILDREN. The History of a Pretty Girl’s Adventurous Life and Final Marriage to a Wealthy Sugar Planter.”

  Kitty had been ailing for several weeks and quietly passed away in her home at 102 West 74th Street. Her daughters, who were staying in Paris with their uncles, Emilio and Francisco Terry, were summoned by her physician, Dr. Clark Wright, but were “on the ocean” when Kitty breathed her last. Eight-year-old Juanita Theresa, Juan Pedro’s daughter, was now the heiress to some $5 million of his money, while “the older daughters, children of the bigamous burglar … will inherit something like $1,000,000,” The World estimated.

  When Kitty’s will was examined, however, matters turned out to be rather different. Juanita, as Kitty pointed out in her will, “was already well provided for.” And the entire estate to be divided between her elder daughters, after debts had been taken into consideration, amounted to just $5,000. Kitty had managed to spend more than one million dollars in less than eight years, and died almost as poor as she had started out. Her taste for prolonged litigation was surely part of the explanation. According to one source, the rest of her fortune was “squandered … on finery and whims.” The dissipation of the Juan Pedro Terry legacy was a magnificent, and entirely typical, act of profligacy by the self-made Grande Dame, of which both her late husband and her former lover would have entirely approved. Despite being left almost nothing, her elder daughters did not go hungry. Lucy Adeleine, now twenty-three years old, was appointed Juanita’s guardian by the surrogate court, and in time both she and Katherine Louise would make excellent marriages, becoming the society women their mother had always aspired to be.

  Kitty’s determination to invent and reinvent herself (and to be reinvented by others) had first endeared her to Worth, a community of spirit that lay at the core of the only human love affair he had ever known. Together they had emerged from nowhere to become persons of substance; Kitty, like Worth, had carved herself a place in the world with other people’s money. Kitty married her money; Worth stole his; but they were in many ways birds of a feather, co-conspirators in the great fraud of Victorian morality and appearances.

  Yet there was an integrity to Kitty which Worth, in common with so many Victorians, signally lacked. Worth had managed to convince everyone, including himself, that his vast wealth made him a better person, a morally superior being, even though his means to that end were resolutely dishonest. Kitty had been equally steely-eyed in her determination to reach the top by using her manifest talents; yet, while this had led her into some dubious company, she had not lied, cheated, or stolen to get there. Kitty, like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, had remained faithful to her rumbustious character and gave not a fig that the world knew it. Such personal honesty was beyond Worth’s grasp, which was perhaps why he loved her, and envied her, to the death, and beyond.

  Kitty Flynn, the girl from the Dublin slums, was buried in the Terry family mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, the most exclusive graveyard in New York, with an imperious view over New York harbor to the skyline of Manhattan. “It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon the Fifth Avenue, to take his airing in the Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood,” The New York Times once noted. Kitty would have been delighted at her final resting place; she never disguised her desire for distinction
, or her willingness to do whatever it took to get there. She had chaffed with seamen in Liverpool, danced with shysters and crooks in Paris, flirted with the rich bachelors of Manhattan, and ended up an enchanting, litigious queen of society, the richest of the rich, consort of princes, magnates, and tycoons, but always the same woman at heart. And now she lay in Green-Wood, the Irish colleen with the merry eyes, laughing at them all. Her final neighbors were illustrious ones. Not far away lies Lola Montez, another famed consort whose lovers included Franz Liszt, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and Alexandre Dumas, and one of her nearest neighbors in the vast cemetery is Henry J. Raymond, founder of The New York Times and pillar of the Establishment, whose good name had been stolen by her bad lover in perpetuity.

  “She had lived enough history to make most women old before their youth,” pronounced the New York Herald, but she had remained young.

  Many years before she died, Adam Worth had lost his onetime lover and spiritual partner in their strange dance, and although she spurned him, he had perhaps retained something of her in the fascinating Gainsborough portrait that bore her willful, wileful gaze. Now, with her mortal passing, the last gossamer link was gone. His wife was mad, his lover and his friends were dead, his children across an ocean. The horses, yachts, books, furniture, shooting parties, and respectable acquaintances had all gone, too, along with his health and strength, and all Worth had to show, or not to show, was a gorgeous painting gathering dust in a distant warehouse vault, as completely incarcerated as he was himself.

  Worth would eventually attain literary immortality as Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and his partner gained her own niche in popular culture. The story of how Kitty Flynn posthumously made it to Hollywood is almost as peculiar as her own picaresque life story. The year 1945, one half century after Katherine Louise Flynn Bullard Terry was laid to rest, saw the publication of Kitty, the latest romantic novel by Rosamund de Zeer Marshall, author of such bodice-ripping romps as The General’s Wench, Rogue Cavalier, and Laird’s Choice.