NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  It might have impaired Morland Agnew’s humor somewhat, as he sat in a self-congratulatory mood at the captain’s table, to discover that there was one other person on board the Etruria, in addition to his wife, the purser, the captain, and the “well-known Catholic prelate,” who knew exactly what the art dealer had hidden away in his padded cupboard. Fellow passengers would later describe this man as “a decayed millionaire who crossed by the same boat,” a small, polite English gentleman who drank heavily, tipped the staff lavishly, and coughed horribly. Had he worn, for example, the attire of a messenger at Chicago’s Auditorium Hotel, then he would probably have caused the febrile Mrs. Agnew to have a heart attack, but the little man with the frock coat, gold chain, and pearl tie pin simply blended into the throng, notable only, perhaps, for the odd intensity with which he observed the art dealer and his wife.

  Pinkerton later assured Agnew that he had “arranged through our New York office to look the passengers on the steamer over on which you sailed to see that no American professional thieves were amongst them,” and out of offended pride he blasted as “positively untrue” the many subsequent reports stating that Adam Worth had boarded the Etruria to return to England in the company of the portrait he had just relinquished. But this was almost certainly the case. The painting portrayed, not just a grand duchess, but Worth’s grand hoax, his arrogant success, and his abject failure. Now, a fading shadow, he followed it home.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pierpont Morgan, the Napoleon of Wall Street

  While Adam Worth was accompanying the Gainsborough home for the last time, “going back to England as quietly as he arrived,” another ardent suitor for the lovely Duchess was in hot pursuit, a man who had more in common with Worth than he would ever have cared to admit.

  J. Pierpont Morgan, the Goliath of U.S. finance and perhaps the most powerful man in America, had long ago set his sights on the Duchess of Devonshire. A quarter-century earlier his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, had been prevented from purchasing the painting for his son when Worth “eloped” with it. Pierpont Morgan was determined to prevent the Duchess from slipping through his family’s hands a second time.

  In the intervening years, the wealth of the House of Morgan had swelled from enormous to immeasurable. According to one estimate, the combined fortune of the Morgan empire and its associated companies would soon be worth more “than the assessed value of all the property in the 22 states and territories west of the Mississippi.” In 1895 Morgan had organized a syndicate to support the U.S. gold reserve, thus stabilizing the American economy; he had forged America’s railways into a 33,000-mile network from coast to coast; he ran a company with 341 directorships in 112 corporations. In the same year that the Duchess was recovered, he had set up the U.S. Steel Corporation, the world’s largest financial conglomerate. There was nothing Morgan money could not do, and nothing Morgan money could not buy. Like a Renaissance prince, Morgan had crowned his stupendous fortune with an art collection beyond compare. From Paris to London to Luxor, he collected works of art like a magpie Ozymandias, buying up what ever caught his fancy, with barely a thought to the expense. The higher-brow cognoscenti whispered that his collecting was indiscriminate, the work of a barbarian with a bottomless bank account, but it would eventually become a hoard more magnificent and eclectic than any on earth.

  Before leaving New York with the Duchess on the Etruria, Morland Agnew had sent a message to the Morgan mansion asking if the millionaire was in the market for the painting his father had once tried to purchase. But the tycoon was away on business. Morgan’s friend Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts described Morgan’s reaction on returning to New York and learning that the Duchess was available once again.

  “His butler said that a representative of the Messrs. Agnew had called and that he had ‘The Duchess of Devonshire’ with him.

  “ ‘Where is he?’ asked Mr. Morgan. ‘I want to see him.’

  “ ‘He is just going to sail for home and is gone,’ the butler replied.”

  Morgan was not the sort to let the Atlantic stand in the way of his desires. “I was determined to have that picture and I took the next ship for England,” Morgan recalled.

  As he was rushing to disembark from New York, a cheeky young reporter spotted the financier and asked: “Going to London, Mr. Morgan, to teach the English how to invest their money?”

  “My boy,” Morgan replied, “the English know very well how to invest their money. It’s likely they’ll get some of mine before I come home.” Morgan had resolved to crown his collection with Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, whatever the price. Obtaining it would be a publicity coup of immense proportions, and thoroughly satisfy his dynastic pride.

  “The Napoleon of Wall Street,” as Morgan was dubbed by The Economist, was a direct contrast in physique to “The Napoleon of crime.” While Worth was small and sleek, Morgan was vast and corpulent, the financial mogul par excellence, with the eyes of a shark and a nose, afflicted with “acne rosacia,” which grew to the size and texture of an inflated raspberry. No organ in modern times has inspired crueller mockery than Morgan’s nose, with its changing crenellations. It was the sign to lesser beings that, for all his amassed power, Morgan was fallible. The tycoon, a sensitive and vain man, had his nose airbrushed to more discreet proportions in every photograph he could get his hands on.

  But, in other respects, Morgan and Worth were birds of a Victorian feather. Both for a time stood at the center of a vast network of men and resources: one purely criminal, the other financial; and both were less than scrupulous in how they obtained their money—wealth being, for each, an end in itself and a powerful narcotic. They never met, but their lives were eerie echoes of each other, one played out boldly on the stage of international finance, the other conducted in the hidden recesses of the underworld.

  Like Worth, Morgan had viewed the American Civil War as an opportunity not for glory but for financial gain. The crook had faked his own death at the Battle of Bull Run, apparently by substitution, and Morgan had executed a similar maneuver. When he was drafted after the Battle of Gettysburg, Morgan, like many of his class, simply paid a proxy $300 to take his place, afterwards referring to him as “the other Pierpont Morgan.” The other Adam Worth, in all probability, was buried in a Washington cemetery. Where Worth had made money from the war by “bounty jumping,” Morgan did so by underwriting a highly dubious deal to buy some five thousand Hall carbine rifles at $3.50 apiece, which were resold to the government at six times their original price. Even the banker’s most objective biographer admits that Morgan, like Worth, “saw the Civil War as an opportunity for profit, not service.”

  The Hall carbine affair was by no means the last in which Morgan’s ethical approach to business would be questioned, but in the era of the robber barons, he was not alone in voicing one set of moral principles and following another. As one historian has written: “This was a day of corruption on a grand scale. It was a time when the Drews, Vanderbilts, and Goulds could use a railroad as a toy and rob it of money … when members of Congress and legislators could be bought, not once, but again and again.”

  Morgan and Worth reflected their times, in different arenas, but with similar philosophies, for both were pirates in the old tradition. Indeed, Morgan might be descended from the aristocratic Spencers, but he also claimed the bloodthirsty Elizabethan pirate Sir Henry Morgan as one of his ancestors. It was only appropriate that he should name his succession of vast sailing yachts the Corsair, for that is precisely what he was himself.

  Both men were Anglophiles, generous to a fault, with a similar business philosophy: increase profits by centralizing, rationalizing, and cutting out unnecessary and debilitating competition. Morgan and Worth shared another trait peculiar to their time—a firm and well-founded belief that great wealth could buy the veneration of their fellow men. Both bought respect with “other people’s money,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase. Both purchased large houses with every luxury, an
d sleek sailing ships—those badges of wealth that once caused Morgan to observe pompously that “anybody who even has to think about the cost had better not get one.” Even in his heyday, Worth could never match the opulence of Morgan’s life-style, yet his instincts were the same: so to dazzle the beholder with affluence that the soul of the man within passed unquestioned.

  One Morgan biographer, Frederick Lewis Allen, caught Worth’s aspirations perfectly when he described, in reference to his subject, what made the average Victorian multimillionaire tick: “The man who had accumulated great wealth sought both to establish or secure his place among the elect by indulging in those forms of ‘conspicuous waste’ which found favor among the privileged, and to enrich his own life according to whatever tastes he possessed or could acquire. He tended, in Western civilization, to want to have his womenfolk admirably attired and outfitted; to want to have a fine house full of luxurious appointments and rare and lovely things; and to want to give magnificent parties … he might even add a yacht, the very symbol of luxury … If his tastes were sporting, he could now engage in those forms of sport which traditionally required the most retainers, such as grouse shooting, or were expensively speculative, as was the maintenance of a racing stable. But none of these exercises of wealth quite satisfied his sensibilities, if he had any; were there not in life finer qualities than these? There were the arts … He could collect the well certified art of the European past, thus simultaneously exercising the talent for acquisition that had made him rich, stimulating and satisfying his appetite for beauty … and appeasing his own sense of financial prudence … and if he were an American, he could have as well the added inner satisfaction of bringing to American shores a treasure trove.”

  Morgan had no alias to hide behind, but the contrast between his pronouncements and his actions was fairly remarkable. Just as there were two Worths, “there were two Pierponts,” in the words of one historian, “the proper banker and the sensualist—yoked together under extreme pressure.”

  Both men were given to fits of sanctimony, and like Worth, Morgan considered himself a creature of the highest righteousness, the only man of honor among a rabble of thieves. In fact, again like Worth, he was greedy, vain, touched by megalomania, and blissfully unaware of, or at least unwilling to face, these facts. His father once gave Morgan this advice: “Never under any circumstances do an action which could be called in question if known to the world.” Morgan’s principle, and that of Worth, was closer to: “Do whatever you want, and so long as you maintain a consistent front, the world remains in ignorance.”

  In addition to having the ear of kings and potentates the world over, Pierpont Morgan assumed a direct communication with God. His will begins with a passage of lordly self-commendation that sounds suspiciously like a direct order to the Almighty to arrange admission to heaven forthwith: “I commit my soul into the hands of my Saviour, in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood He will present it faultless before my Heavenly Father; and I entreat my children to maintain and defend, at all hazard and at any cost of personal sacrifice, the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ, once offered, and through that alone.”

  To all outward appearances, Pierpont Morgan was a pillar of the church, a dedicated family man, and a self-appointed guardian of public morality. As a member of the board of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, he was instrumental in helping to cancel a performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome on the grounds that the plot was too racy for general consumption. In 1873 he helped to found the Society for the Suppression of Vice, to root out depravity, gambling, and other moral evils among the lower orders. Under the moral crusader Anthony Comstock, the Society set about reforming public morality with a vengeance, covering up nude statues, wrecking the New Orleans lottery, and trying to ban the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

  Privately, if not always discreetly, Morgan philandered like a priapic goat and “generally behaved himself in a way that would have drawn writs and summonses from the vice-baiting Anthony Comstock.” The steadfastly married man of virtue who so arrogantly presented his eternal soul to Heaven was sexually incontinent to an almost pathological degree, and his taste for and generosity toward actresses inspired at least one good joke against the red-faced Lothario. One actress remarks that she recently got a pearl out of an oyster. “That’s nothing,” her companion replies. “I got a whole diamond necklace out of a lobster.” The original Henry Raymond of The New York Times would have recognized the double standard here, as would the man who filched his good name.

  However one regards Morgan’s morals in business, the stark contrast between his public image and his private behavior is impressive. But there is no evidence that this double life tweaked his conscience any more than Worth’s troubled his, for both knew only too well how to “smile, and smile, and be a villain.” And while both men existed in a world of moral duality, they were also incurable romantics.

  In 1861 Morgan, then aged twenty-four, fell in love with one Amelia Sturgis, “a high-minded young girl of good New England ancestry … with beautiful teeth.” No sooner had their courtship started than Mimi, as she was called, began to display all the symptoms of advanced consumption. Morgan had to carry his fiancée downstairs and prop her up during a marriage service that was moving and tragic. She died in Nice four months later. When Morgan returned home after burying his young wife, one of his first acts was to buy an oil painting, the first of thousands, which depicted “a young and delicate looking woman” by George F. Baker. This touching “reminiscence of Mimi” hung in Morgan’s library until his death. Worth stole his Duchess and Morgan built his stupendous collection on a similar foundation of failed love and emotional deprivation.

  Many years and countless paintings later, Morgan resolved to add Georgiana to his vast collection. Perhaps, as in Worth’s case, the act of ownership had become an end in itself, more important than any other consideration, as “is true of all collecting,” John Fowles once observed. “It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.”

  Gainsborough’s Duchess held a special attraction for Pierpont Morgan. His determination to own the painting Junius Morgan had wanted to buy for him may well have been “a deeply sentimental homage to his father.” But he also seems to have been personally touched, as so many had been, by the ravishing looks of the sitter. For a man who knew a fair bit about amorous conquests, buying the image widely considered one of the most beautiful in the world was the ultimate challenge, a gallant conquest. Gainsborough’s Georgiana, moreover, was blowsy, flirtatious, and had that unmistakable “come-hither” glint in her eye. The Duchess was Morgan’s sort of woman.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Return of the Prodigal Duchess

  On the afternoon of April 8, 1901, Morland Agnew arrived in Liverpool with the Duchess, and so did Adam Worth, with Pierpont Morgan bringing up the rear in his own craft just a few hours later. The London papers had been tipped off to the story, and a few enterprising reporters even hired small boats in an unsuccessful effort to get to the art dealer and extract a quote from him before he made land. “Down the gangway from the Etruria came Mr. Morland Agnew, with a lady by his side, a flat, sealed parcel in his arm, an anxious look on his face.” He announced that he had “nothing to say,” and did likewise at Euston.

  That evening the London newspapers carried a telegram announcing the return of the painting. The Daily Express reported both the recovery of the Duchess and the arrival of Pierpont Morgan on its front page, with drawings of both the beauty and the beast, but making no connection between the two. “Mr J. Pierpont Morgan, the great American trust maker, who arrives in England today, is certainly not the sort of man to take a trip across the Atlantic for mere pleasure; and speedy developments may be looked for,” the press promised. In its fawning profile, the Express did note Morgan’s “fondness and keen appreciation of art” and concluded “Mr Morgan’s vaulting
ambition is tempered with a certain nobleness, for he aims at the betterment of the race … always using money as an instrument and not as an aim. It is a goal worthy of a great mind.” The arrival of Adam Worth—another great mind whose acquisitiveness was also tempered by a certain nobility—passed unnoticed.

  The portrait was dispatched under guard to Agnew’s London bank, where it was inspected by the firm’s experts in art restoration, who pronounced that “save for the slightest trace of a scar on the rim of the hat, the picture is perfect; the face, hands and body of the portrait are absolutely untouched.” The Times declared it to be “in a beautiful state of preservation.” Old Sir William Agnew, who had been kept in ignorance of the negotiations lest he blab, was still on the Aegean when he heard the news. Although he had retired from active dealing in 1895, Sir William at once turned his boat around and headed for London to view the prize he had bought and lost a quarter century before. “Father telegraphs his delight at the news and that he is coming back,” Morland noted.

  True to his word, Pinkerton had kept Worth’s secret and, although pressed by reporters, would say only, with impressive inaccuracy, “that the thief fought for the North during the rebellion with distinction, and the finish of the struggle found him promoted to a lieutenancy.” The Central News Agency reported categorically that “the police in both England and America have the strongest reasons for believing that the actual thieves are dead.”