NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  Robert Pinkerton, William’s younger brother and head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency’s New York office.

  William Pinkerton in 1876, the year of the Gainsborough theft.

  An adept burglar and blackmailer of rat-like cunning, “Little” Joe Elliott was distinguished by his love of women in general, and actresses in particular.

  Kate Castleton, the pretty English-born actress and star of the American comic stage who had the singular misfortune to marry Joe Elliott twice.

  The “widow” Kitty Flynn, around the time she was being wooed by Cuban sugar millionaire Juan Pedro Terry. The marriage would transform her from a gangster’s moll into one of the richest and most litigious women in New York high society. (Courtesy: Katharine Sanford)

  Alonzo Henne, alias “Dutch Alonzo,” a small-time bank thief with “a great reputation for being a staunch fellow,” recruited by Worth in the 1880s.

  “Piano” Charley Bullard at the time of his arrest in 1884, after years of dissipation had taken their toll, leaving him a “grim cipher of the once-glamorous rake.”

  Adam Worth, alias Henry Judson Raymond. A rogues’ gallery photograph taken by Belgian police after his arrest in Liège in 1892.

  Maximilian Shinburn, alias “the Baron,” bogus aristocrat, safecracker, and Worth’s nemesis.

  Patrick Sheedy, a dubious gambler and “sporting man known throughout the world,” who acted as the go-between in negotiations between Worth and the Pinkertons over the stolen Gainsborough.

  J. Pierpont Morgan, fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector, who vowed to get his hands on Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, and did.

  Professor James Moriarty as drawn by Sidney Paget in The Strand magazine, December 1893. “He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head … his face protrudes forward and is forever oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.”

  “A personal contest between the two men ended … in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms … the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.” Sidney Paget’s illustration for The Strand, December 1893.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Moriarty Confesses to Holmes

  Worth had come to Chicago with the sole intention of opening negotiations for the return of the Gainsborough, which was now safely hidden in the old Saratoga trunk in McCoy’s Hotel. But while the two men talked, a confessional bond seemed to grow between the burly detective and the visibly aging thief. As Worth candidly admitted, he had never placed himself “in the hands” of another human being; his entire life had been devoted to controlling others. But now he did so utterly, to the man who should have arrested him on the spot. Instinct drew them together, for they had long inhabited the same universe, even if they traveled from opposite directions: the crook who was a man of honor; the man of principle who was now bending the law to its limit. It was a strange meeting of minds.

  Their “chat” lasted the rest of the day, and then long into the evening. They met again at Pinkerton’s office the next day, and the next. Instead of getting down to business, Worth found himself unburdening his past, partly out of vanity but partly, it seems, out of a need to explain and justify the strange, crooked paths his life had taken. He summoned up the extraordinary rogues’ gallery that was his acquaintance of the last forty years: Kitty Flynn, Piano Charley Bullard, the Scratch, Old Junka, and the loathed Shinburn, laying before Pinkerton “in gossiping frame of mind” a picaresque roster of the international criminal underworld, and his own distinguished role in it. Worth talked of his Civil War days, his experience of Sing Sing, his thievery in New York, Boston, London, and Paris, the robbery of the diamond convoy in South Africa, and, most crucially, the theft of Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, which he had jealously guarded for more than two decades but which now must be returned, to end the chapter. He was ill, he explained, perhaps dying. His words echoed his pathetic reverence for the object to which he had mortgaged his life and liberty: “The Lady should return home.”

  At the end of their three-day interview, Pinkerton was exhausted, exhilarated, and staggered by the sheer range of Worth’s exploits, and the strange combination of pride and melancholy with which he had recounted them. “I consider this man the most remarkable criminal of his day,” Pinkerton wrote after Worth had departed. “This was a most extraordinary meeting … We talked very freely about matters in Europe for the last twenty years, and without hesitation spoke of numerous robberies in which he had been engaged … he talked in a general way about almost every big robbery which had taken place in Europe, and his conversation was very interesting indeed.” In addition to his large heart, Pinkerton was blessed with a prodigious memory. When Worth slipped out of his office and vanished once more, Pinkerton sat down and committed to paper, sixteen sheets of it, the bizarre interview that had just taken place.

  Worth began his confession with some complimentary reminiscences, according to Pinkerton, saying “he had always fancied me and found that I was a man who kept his own counsel and that he had always felt a kindly feeling towards me. How much flattery there was in this I am not prepared to say.” There was some, certainly, but also genuine admiration. Worth recalled how he had tried to give the detective a number of presents, but these had always been turned down. In particular he remembered “a very handsome snuff box, a unique thing,” which he had wanted to send the detective “as a memento of old times,” but he had finally thought better of it, since it was “something that was so unique that it might attract attention.” It was also almost certainly stolen. Pinkerton maintained an incorruptible mien. “I told him I was glad he did not do it; that I did not want him to send me any presents.”

  “Were you afraid that I was trying to job [bribe] you?” Worth laughed.

  As Worth relaxed, he began to describe, in no particular order, his many crimes. The Boylston Bank robbery, he reckoned, was so long ago that he was probably safe. “Of course you cannot tell,” he added nonchalantly. “I wouldn’t want to be tried on it, although thirty years have elapsed.” He described how he had sprung the members of his gang from the Turkish jail, how he and Bullard had set up the American Bar only to see it raided and closed on Pinkerton’s instigation. He shrugged and added, by way of no hard feelings, “I was beginning to recognize the fact that the American Bar would not be a success in the way I wanted.”

  From there Worth moved on to minute descriptions of the diamond convoy robbery, the Ostend train robbery, his narrow escape from the Montreal police, and the debacle in Liège. His memories were spiced with vitriol as he recalled the treachery of Junka Phillips and Little Joe Elliott, the cruelty of Shinburn, and what he perceived to be his hounding “like a human tiger” by John Shore of Scotland Yard. The ferocity that simmered in Worth erupted as he recalled the times he had been betrayed, and his solitary belief in his own virtue. “He is quite a roast in his way on most everybody,” Pinkerton observed.

  When the conversation turned to his own family, Worth grew mournful. Again he blamed others, and fate, describing how his former accomplice, Johnny Curtin, had seduced his wife, introduced her to drink and drugs, and stolen every penny she had. “I asked him where she was now,” Pinkerton wrote, “and he said with tears in his eyes that the poor little soul was in the insane asylum, crazy, and would never come out … he was very bitter.” With the talk of his family, Worth’s poise seemed to deflate. The “brutal” prison treatment in Belgium had left him a physical wreck, he explained. Every day he suffered from “hemorrhages in the head,” and he was rapidly losing weight.

  “He said he is going into the hands of a specialist as quick as he could to stop the hemorrhages; that if he does not have a hemorrhage every day he has terrific headaches; he blames it on the prison fare he got in Belgium. He said that he bled nearly half a pint of blood on Saturday morning,” Pinkerton told his brother.

  With a qu
ick piece of mental arithmetic Pinkerton worked out that the melancholy fellow before him by his own account had stolen more than four million dollars in the preceding thirty years. Where had all the money gone? “He said that he had lived recklessly, speculated, gambled, dissipated, and had ran through it, but he remarked to me that if he ever got hold of a couple hundred thousand dollars again that nobody would get it away from him: that he would come back, buy a home and settle down with his children.”

  Now thoroughly sorry for himself, Worth heaved a sigh. “I realize I am getting to be an old man, but there are one or two things I have yet to do that will get me sufficient money to provide for my family. That is all I have left to do. Then I shall quit.”

  Finally, after several hours of nostalgia, riveting for Pinkerton and therapeutic for himself, Worth had arrived at the crux: the matter of the Gainsborough. Yes, he admitted, he had stolen the painting and kept it all these years. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision intended to wangle his brother’s release from prison, but in the end it had changed his life. Worth was no longer reminiscing now, but haggling in earnest.

  “Of course I want to get some money out of it and I want you to get some money,” he went on. “I know you are an honorable man and that you will not make it any other way excepting legitimately, but I think it would be legitimate for you to make the money by restoring this picture to its owner,” he declared, and then sat back to observe the effects of this speech on the detective.

  But Pinkerton was not to be drawn into a deal so easily. “I told him … that under no circumstances could we undertake anything of the kind; that it would be against everything we ever did and against every principle on which our business was conducted.”

  Worth tried again with a little oblique flattery. “The great Supt. Byrnes would have given his finger nails to have the opportunity to do what I am offering you but who could trust that kind of swine; nobody will trust them.”

  Now Pinkerton gave some ground. “There might be other people in our business that would gladly attempt to do anything of that kind,” he conceded.

  For a while they discussed various possible intermediaries. Worth said his sister Harriet had married a legal man named Lefens, “a sort of office lawyer [who] drew up deeds and documents and things of that kind,” but he doubted his “brother-in-law had weight enough to do it.” Who would Pinkerton recommend? he countered cannily.

  “I told him there were plenty of people who did have weight enough to do it … that I would not advise Howe or Hummel or people of that kind who were liable to keep the whole proceeds of the matter or possibly tip him off to the police.”

  Worth abruptly changed tack, pretending to abandon the whole idea of returning the Gainsborough. “He said he was sorry that we could not see our way clear to take hold of the thing but that he thought I was right in the premises: that it might make a stir and place us in a bad light with the London police.” Now it was Pinkerton’s turn to make a move in the delicate minuet. “What condition is the painting in?” he asked, with as blasé a manner as he could muster. Worth replied, with equal insouciance, that “he was satisfied the picture was intact.” And what, continued the detective, of the stories that he “had recently heard of a picture being discovered in some lodgings which was moss-eaten and mildewed and which was supposed to be the picture of the Duchess of Devonshire?” Worth responded that he, too, had read such accounts and could not explain it except to say that “somebody was faking a painting and trying to put it off for the genuine one.”

  Deliberately wandering from the subject, Worth suddenly began talking of a burglar-alarm system he was currently working on. “He said sometime he would give me the result of something he is studying up in the way of burglar protection by electricity: it is unique and unheard of,” Pinkerton reported. If the detective found it unusual to be discussing the latest burglary-prevention devices with one of the world’s most wanted felons, his notes do not betray him.

  Again Pinkerton dragged Worth back, indirectly, to the matter of the Gainsborough, by offering to lend him cash. “I asked him how he was fixed and if he needed any money. He said not at all. I told him not to be backward; that if he did need some money I would be willing to advance it to him. He said I was very kind indeed; that I was the first policeman who had ever offered to do anything of that kind, but he did not need the money.” To reinforce the point, he pulled out a wallet and asked Pinkerton to change a $100 bill, making sure the detective spotted seven or eight such notes in his billfold.

  After a little more badinage, Worth raised the subject of the Gainsborough again. “He said he would think over what attorneys to get and he would probably adopt my suggestion of returning to the Agnews the picture of the Duchess of Devonshire.” Worth disingenuously added that “he would gladly give it up without cost of any kind but there were other people interested to whom he had advanced money from time to time for the purpose of keeping them quiet. He did not say who they were, but led me to infer that they were Englishmen.”

  It was a most subtle exchange between two veteran poker players. Pinkerton was determined to show Worth that he was not about to be manipulated, but he also made it clear that if Worth could find some reliable intermediary or negotiate an exchange in such a way that the Pinkertons’ reputation would not be sullied, then they had the basis for a deal. In Pinkerton’s own words, “under no circumstances would he do anything that the authorities at Scotland Yard did not acquiesce in.” But if the English police were agreeable, that was another matter. Worth made it clear that he, and only he, had control of the painting; that any treachery on Pinkerton’s part would mean the deal was off; with his wallet full of cash, he was not about to settle for a cut-price transaction. The two men understood each other perfectly. It only remained to set a symbolic seal on this tentative deal, and it came, oddly enough, in the shape of a small dog.

  “I got talking to him about dogs,” reported Pinkerton, the avid dog fancier, “and he said he was very anxious to get a fox-terrier pup for his little boy and girl. I told him I would give him one in a couple of weeks from now, that he could leave me his address and I would send it to him.”

  With this pledge of Pinkerton’s good intentions and a promise to be in touch, either in person or through Sheedy, Worth finally rose to take his leave.

  “Before going away I asked him for an address where I would send the pup to and he said he would drop me a line and let me know. In parting with him he said if he could ever do me any favor on earth, outside of going right out and being a policeman, he wanted me to call on him. He said I had been very nice indeed, and he appreciated my kindness.”

  The two men, now firm friends and soon to be partners in a most unlikely and shady business, shook hands warmly and Adam Worth wandered off into the Chicago night. He said he was taking the 9:20 train for New York that evening, but Pinkerton did not even trouble to have him tailed. “He seemed in good faith in everything he was doing, and if he thought I had broken faith with him, I would only scare him away.”

  An agreement, albeit unspoken, had been struck. William immediately wrote to his brother, outlining his extraordinary conversation with Worth. “Now, I do not know whether we will have any business with this man in the future or not … but I make this request, not to give him up to anybody or to allow anybody to know that we are aware he is in the country. I would not have him fall into the hands of the police or anybody else after he has acted in the way he has to me for anything in the world, and I want whoever reads this letter to be especially instructed that nothing must be said of this man and no search made for him.” Once his hunter, Pinkerton had become Worth’s protector.

  “I really and truly think I can handle this man,” Pinkerton told his brother—scenting, perhaps, the immense public-relations possibilities should he pull off the return of the great Gainsborough. “I believe I can make this man useful to us at some time.”

  The next day a cable arrived at Pinkerton’s office, bearing
salutations from Henry J. Raymond from an address in Brooklyn. A fortnight after that, two young children were astonished and delighted when a fox-terrier puppy arrived, from an anonymous benefactor, on their uncle’s doorstep in Brooklyn.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Bellboy’s Burden

  With so many intermediaries involved, the negotiations throughout 1899 over the return of the Gainsborough to Agnew’s were necessarily protracted. The Pinkertons lost no time in contacting Superintendent Donald Swanson of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, who passed the information on to Inspector of Detectives Frank C. Froest—John Shore having left the force, to “chase chippies” in retirement down at peg-leg Nelly Coffey’s brothel. As Pinkerton noted: “New Scotland Yard had been working on the case for a great many years [and] had practically got the same information which we had, but without the proof, or without the means of effecting a conviction of the thieves.”

  True to his word, Pinkerton left out any mention of Worth or Sheedy in his communications with the English police, although Scotland Yard was well aware of whom they were dealing with, albeit at an elaborate distance. Inspector Froest contacted Agnew’s solicitor, Sir George Lewis, and laid out the version of the facts Pinkerton had chosen to relay to him. A reliable individual had approached Mr. Pinkerton, the English policeman explained. This man had been contacted by “a rich American,” mortally ill, who knew where the stolen painting was and wanted to help return it before he died. The intermediary “suggests that the matter should be placed in the hands of Messrs. Pinkerton … although he does not desire to receive the reward he suggests it is believed that the reward may have to be paid to someone,” Froest reported.