NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  The intermediary, needless to say, was Patrick Sheedy acting on Worth’s behalf, and the partial information supplied to Scotland Yard was intended to achieve several objectives simultaneously: to suggest that the thief was dead; to allow Pinkerton to negotiate with Agnew’s for the return of the painting without appearing to compromise his principles; to insist that any exchange take place in America; and, above all, to ensure that no one was prosecuted. Both Sheedy and Worth were adamant on this point. The former framed this as a matter of artistic principle, insisting that “there should be nobody punished or injured … in order that the lost art treasure might be restored.”

  In Pinkerton’s words: “Sheedy took the position that the restoration of the picture to the art world was of great importance, and that it could only be done in the manner suggested, and that if anybody was to be punished, the picture would never be restored as far as he was concerned.” Such talk was probably a reflection of Worth’s views. Just months after the theft, he had congratulated himself on “advertising” the painting to a wider audience; only someone as self-flattering as Worth could have believed he was doing the world of art a favor by returning a masterpiece that he alone had seen for more than twenty years.

  In a letter dated June 26, 1899, Sir George Lewis advised the newly knighted Sir William Agnew of Scotland Yard’s opinion of the offer. “Inspector Froest thinks there really is substance in the communication which he has received … he suggests that Messrs. Pinkerton should be communicated with before incurring any expense. I naturally place the matter before you.” The art dealer was understandably cautious. His residual concern about appearing to condone a crime troubled him less than the suspicion that he might be about to pay dearly a second time for something that was technically his. Agnew’s monetary qualms were clearly more acute than his moral ones.

  As one cynic wryly observed later: “Would not a man offering to sell a coat which had been stolen be at once arrested by the first policeman who heard of the matter? They do things differently where a picture worth a small fortune is concerned.”

  “For the time being the matter hung fire,” according to Pinkerton, “on account of the amount involved for the return of the picture, and the attorneys (Lewis & Lewis) claiming that this must be a ruse on the part of some sharp American to best the Agnews.” The American detective was also guarded: “We must have a distinct understanding of how far you want us to go before we undertake to do anything at all,” he warned Agnew’s, who in turn had doubts about the honesty of “honest” Pat Sheedy, despite Pinkerton’s assurances that “he is not in any sense of the word a ‘crook’ but is a heavy betting man and undoubtedly knows many of the swell criminals. I believe he is sincere in what he says.”

  The two sides circled one another, with Worth and Sheedy on one side of the bargaining table, Agnew’s and Scotland Yard on the other, and the Pinkertons somewhere in the middle. Worth was the first to try to break the deadlock. Through Sheedy, he offered to return the picture for nothing if Agnew’s “would allow him the privilege of putting the picture on exhibition for four months.” Sheedy would garner the profits and then pass Worth the lion’s share. This was a ludicrous suggestion—and a measure of Worth’s chutzpah that he thought he could steal a valuable painting and then exhibit it—which was summarily rejected by Agnew’s. A month later Worth and Sheedy were back with another, equally bizarre idea: “If the Agnews would allow Sheedy to make a steel engraving of the picture, and let him control the plate … the picture would be restored.” As history had shown, the Duchess was an extraordinarily lucrative marketing tool and whoever controlled her image would own a most valuable investment. Again, Agnew’s rejected the offer, but the proposition had at least convinced the art dealer that he was in touch with someone who genuinely controlled the famous painting.

  To pass the time as negotiations dragged on, Worth put his mind to “laying down” a little criminal work for some colleagues. Early in 1900, Worth arranged for three notorious American crooks—Kid Macmanus, Brooklyn Johnny, and Fairy McGuire—to “cross the ocean” to London, bringing with them the latest safe-blowing techniques. “They may be the men using nitroglycerine and dynamite as published in the NY journal a short while ago in connection with a burglary,” reported one Pinkerton detective, but as usual nothing could be traced directly to Worth.

  Later that year Worth packed up the painting and headed back to London himself, in a last bid to speed up negotiations. After another bout of subtle nudging between Pinkerton in Chicago and Worth in London, the detective finally believed he had brokered a deal with the English authorities. Then on January 16, 1901, Pinkerton reported, two years to the day after Worth had first approached him, “the Pinkertons received a cablegram from Supt. Swanson, Scotland Yard, instructing them to take up the matter of the stolen picture, and bring about its return, and the terms asked for by Worth would be accepted, providing it was the genuine picture, and an identifying witness would come forward immediately from England.” Precisely what Worth’s terms amounted to is unknown; all the parties were careful never to commit to paper the details of this dubious deal. The exchange was to take place in America. A lump payment in cash was clearly agreed upon, to be followed by the balance after delivery, as well as a guarantee of immunity from prosecution for all the parties involved. One contemporary said Worth “insisted that he should get at least £5,000 … and Pat Sheedy was to get for his efforts as negotiator a matter of £2,000.” According to Sheedy, Worth was paid $25,000 in cash. Agnew’s merely decided to accept the convenient fiction that the thief was dead.

  After months of haggling, events suddenly began to move at high speed. “Mr. Pinkerton at once communicated with Mr. Sheedy to locate Worth, and have him come to America.” Sheedy promptly sent messages to “one or two points” in London where he knew Worth could be found. “On receipt of the letter, Worth cabled Sheedy that he would come over on the first steamer,” using a false name and bringing, of course, the false-bottomed trunk and its precious cargo. “When it was known he had sailed, the Pinkertons cabled to London to have the identifying witness come to the United States.”

  The man selected for the crucial task of identifying the long-lost portrait was none other than C. Morland Agnew, Sir William Agnew’s son, who boarded the SS Etruria from Liverpool to New York on March 16, 1901, amid conditions of the utmost stealth. “It was a secret known only to the three partners in the firm”: Morland, his brother George, and his cousin, W. Lockett Agnew. Even old Sir William, who had purchased the painting back in 1876 and luckily happened to be cruising the Greek isles in his yacht, was not informed of the plan, “for fear, in his excitement, he should give it away.”

  “I have news compelling me to sail for New York,” Morland noted obliquely in his diary. He took his wife along, but even she seems to have been kept ignorant of the reason for the journey until it was under way. The trip was not a pleasant one. Just a day out of harbor, the Etruria was struck by a gale which flooded the stateroom, damaged many of the lifeboats, and so terrified the passengers that one committed suicide and another went berserk and had to be forcibly restrained. The state of Mrs. Agnew, as recorded by her husband, gives an accurate impression of the voyage: “Mother was rather nervous” (Day one). “Mother should not have come” (Day three). “I don’t think Mother likes it. She begins to wish we were home again” (Day five). “Mother is, unfortunately, very nervous” (Day six).

  Mother, as it happened, was extravagantly seasick throughout the voyage, a fact which does not seem to have prevented this stoical creature from eating every meal before promptly dispensing with it over the side of the vessel. “Here’s a nice business. What is to be done about Mother,” Morland wondered to his diary. Like every sensible British husband, he did nothing, and confined himself to complaining that he could get no exercise and had forgotten to bring his tobacco pouch. He passed the time by jotting down snobbish remarks about the dining habits of his fellow passengers: “These Yankees do eat
like pigs—at lunch today a woman was eating a sort of cream tart and pickled onions with it! No wonder she has been ill most of the voyage.” But even Morland later admitted: “I spent an exceedingly anxious time.” After a hideous, fog-bound nine-day voyage, they arrived in New York to be met by Robert Pinkerton, who told the Agnews that the handing over of the painting, if its authenticity was verified, would take place in Chicago. Despite this “damper to all the hopes I had raised when on board the Etruria,” the couple made the best of it by spending the night at the Waldorf. The next day they boarded the Lake Shore Express, finally arriving in Chicago on the afternoon of March 27. William Pinkerton, ruddy, spruced up, and thoroughly overexcited, met them at the station, and this “fine, well-set up man,” as Agnew described him, accompanied the exhausted, gray-faced couple to the Auditorium Hotel. Everything had gone according to plan, he assured them, and the exchange would take place the following day. “You will have the Duchess in the morning,” he announced over a large lunch, before offering to show them around the windy city in his carriage and pair. Agnew was already windy enough, at the prospect of what was about to take place. “Personally, I was too anxious about the morrow to think of doing any sight-seeing in Chicago,” he later said.

  At 9:30 on the morning of March 28, Morland made his way to Pinkerton’s office and the two men set out for Chicago’s First National Bank to cash the all-important check for $3,000, presumably the first installment of the ransom. “That’s a lot of money to carry around in Chicago,” piped up the impertinent bank clerk when Morland handed over his check. Morland pointed to the hefty detective standing behind him, one of the most instantly recognizable people in the city. A thief would have to be foolish indeed, or blind, to rob a man under the personal protection of the Eye. “Oh, I guess you’ll be all right then,” said the cashier.

  By ten o’clock the cash, in used bills, had been deposited in Pinkerton’s safe, on the understanding that it would not be handed over unless or until Morland Agnew had the painting in his hand. The two men then returned to the Auditorium Hotel, rejoined “Mother,” whose seasickness had now been replaced by nervous sickness, and waited.

  “As the hour approached at which it was stated that the picture would be returned I noticed Mr. Pinkerton became more and more nervous, even more nervous than I was myself,” Morland recalled. Pinkerton’s reputation was on the line. Had Worth had second thoughts? Was this some elaborate ploy to humiliate the detectives? Was the ingenious crook even now persuading the staff back at his office to hand over the money, before vanishing with the painting again?

  “About a quarter of an hour before the time appointed,” Agnew wrote in his diary, “Mr. Pinkerton, myself and Mrs. Agnew adjourned to the room upstairs where it had been agreed that the picture would be delivered. The few minutes we spent behind that closed door were just a trifle nerve-shattering, I can assure you. I smoked a cigar to help the time along.” The conversation died. Pinkerton stared at his watch. Morland puffed to conceal his agitation. Mrs. Agnew retched quietly.

  “By and by there came a knock at the door,” Agnew recalled.

  “ ‘Come in,’ said Mr. Pinkerton, and the door opened on the instant. An adult messenger was standing in the doorway, carrying a brown paper roll in his arm. ‘Mr. Agnew?’ he queried. ‘Yes,’ I replied, and held out my hand. The messenger handed me the roll in silence, and, as if he had been charged to deliver the most commonplace message in the world, at once turned on his heel and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.”

  The “adult messenger” was almost certainly Adam Worth himself in heavy disguise and brazen to the last, playing his last great role. If Pinkerton recognized him, and there is no direct evidence that he did, the detective successfully masked his surprise.

  Worth slipped back to his rooms at the Briggs House hotel.

  “When he had gone,” wrote Morland, “I took out my knife, cut the string with which the paper was tied and there, lightly wrapped in cotton-wool, lay the long-lost Gainsborough. Two minutes sufficed to convince me that it was the Duchess.”

  Her travels had not dimmed the Duchess’s radiance, although Morland noted the jagged edge of the canvas where Worth had snipped out pieces to prove his theft so many years earlier. “The face, which is of wonderful beauty, is unhurt and, mutilated as it is, the picture is still of immense value and the highest interest.”

  Pinkerton “watched his features closely, and saw his eyes fill up for a moment.”

  “I looked up at detective Pinkerton and told him of the picture’s authenticity. Instantly he shook my hand and congratulated me heartily. Until that moment he himself had not been sure that the picture which it had been arranged would be returned to me in his presence was the identical one stolen from our gallery a quarter of a century ago.”

  “Mrs. Agnew was equally grateful,” Pinkerton recorded courteously, but he urged the expert “to make no mistake,” telling him “he must use every possible test, measurement, etc. on the picture before he decided the matter … he then applied the different tests which are made use of to tell genuine pictures,” before turning again to the practical policeman.

  “I am positive the picture is the original one stolen from my father’s gallery,” he said.

  “Well, I am glad it is alright,” the detective responded. “I had made up my mind if it turned out a fake to burn the thing and wash my hands of the whole business.”

  After this strangely moving moment, the two men were all bustle once more. Agnew at once dispatched a cable to his partners, obliquely announcing: “Have Secured A Gainsborough,” so that they could insure the painting. His use of the indefinite article was quite intentional. The method by which the portrait had been recovered was irregular, to say the least, and Morland had no intention of tipping off the authorities to what had taken place until the Gainsborough was safely back in Old Bond Street.

  “Then we went to a shop close by the hotel, where Mr. Pinkerton purchased some waterproof paper and two light boards. With these I made the picture up into a flat parcel and handed it over to the great detective.”

  Relieved and elated, Pinkerton took the Agnews for the promised tour of the city before loading them, and the wrapped picture, on the 5:30 p.m. Limited Express to New York after another exchange of thanks and congratulations. “Must lose no time getting out of the country,” Morland wrote in his diary.

  The art dealer, by his own admission, “took no special precautions to safeguard the canvas.”

  “I hung it up on a peg in the compartment and when leaving it to go to the dining car for dinner simply told the Negro attendant to keep an eye on our things,” he wrote. Although the painting was now in the proper hands, Pinkerton was aware that the hands that had stolen it were still at large, and he was taking no risks. The attendant was in the pay of the detectives, with instructions to guard the door to the Agnews’ cabin with his life. A Pinkerton detective was stationed at the other end of the carriage, just in case Worth changed his mind and decided to steal the painting back.

  “On arriving in New York we were met by two of Pinkerton’s men, to them I entrusted the precious parcel and was informed that they would sleep in the same room with it that night and bring it aboard the Etruria the next morning. We put up at the Holland House that night and next day boarded the Etruria just before the advertised sailing time. In my state cabin I received the Gainsborough from Pinkerton’s men. There was a cupboard in the cabin which I first padded with pillows to make a soft resting place for the Gainsborough. That cupboard was my only safe during the voyage.”

  Bursting with his news though pledged to silence, Agnew wrote to his daughter from the steamer on March 31, telling her the entire strange story. “Some 25 years ago a very beautiful picture by Gainsborough—a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire—was sold in London and bought by my father for a great price. It was stolen, and the justices have been after it more or less ever since. We never expected to get the picture back, but whe
n its recovery is known, it will of course create a great sensation and we shall have all the world wanting to see it. We dared not even tell Grandpa [Sir William] what I was coming after, lest he should let out the secret and upset the whole business. How excited he will be when he hears!” Pinkerton had kept his word not to reveal Worth’s existence. “The thieves are dead,” Morland wrote, “and there is no chance of getting anyone punished now.”

  He also wrote to Pinkerton, expressing “our grateful acknowledgement for the splendid services you have rendered to the world in general and to ourselves in particular in the recovery of this long lost work of art.” Pinkerton would later claim $593.35 for his trouble.

  A few days into the voyage, Morland could keep his secret no longer. “I told the Purser what I had with me and later on I revealed the secret to the Captain. They and a well-known Catholic prelate were the only people aboard the Etruria who knew what I had with me. They all had a look at the picture.” One reason for the elaborate secrecy was the lingering fear “that the picture might be stolen” again, but Morland had additional motives for keeping the story out of the newspapers for the time being: “If the customs officers wanted to be disagreeable they could have demanded that duty be paid on the picture and while they probably would not have forced collection, it might have caused a great deal of unnecessary trouble and delay.” In the space of a week Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire had been secretly smuggled into America and then smuggled out again. It was to be her last transatlantic crossing for many years.

  The Agnews’ return journey was calmer, but Mrs. Agnew’s nerves had still not recovered from the outward voyage. “Mother and some of the ladies are singing hymns,” Agnew noted, while continuing to point out the social deficiencies of his fellow travelers. “There are not many nice people on board, but many Yankees of a very common sort. The way they talk is horrible, especially the girls, and they have not an idea of behaving.”