NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  “I feel as you do about Little Adam,” Robert replied.

  News of Worth’s death was filtering through the underworld grapevine, but the detective brothers decided to “keep the matter of his death secret for the present,” while agreeing that if the news broke and they were called on to comment, “we should leave his family out entirely.” It was only a matter of time, of course, until the press picked up the scent. As far back as 1893, when The Pall Mall Gazette had published its “exposé” of the imprisoned thief, Adam Worth alias Henry Raymond had been linked with the theft of Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire. When the painting reappeared in the hands of Morland Agnew there was again speculation about Worth’s role, but by then the thief had gone to ground, and since Morland Agnew did not know, and Pinkerton would not say he was involved, the story had petered out.

  On February 5, 1902, the London newspapers published a brief dispatch announcing the death of Adam Worth, alias Henry Raymond, and within hours journalists on both sides of the Atlantic began to put the pieces together. The Pinkertons were bombarded with requests to confirm or deny that the late criminal was really the Gainsborough thief. “I have a letter from Adam Worth stating I could make use of anything he told me, after he was dead,” William Pinkerton recorded, and finally, with evident reluctance, he decided to tell the full story. “I hated to say anything about him after his death, but thought it would be better for us to say something and have the thing right, than have the article given out by some detective, who knew nothing about it.” Journalists were an unreliable crew, he noted. “You cannot get a thing right for a newspaper man … if you write the facts down for him, he will change them about to suit himself.”

  On February 6, William Pinkerton summoned the increasingly persistent journalists to his Chicago office and delivered a prepared statement outlining Worth’s life, his trail of crime, his theft of the Gainsborough, and the detective’s part in its return, although not his close relationship with the late felon. The next morning the story, sensational even by the standards of the time, was published from coast to coast, detailing the events of Worth’s remarkable life with considerable accuracy, or, in Pinkerton’s words, “about as correct as a newspaper ever gets anything.”

  Reflecting the ambivalence toward crime that still exists today, the newspapers competed to pay tribute to a man who had robbed, forged, and conned his way through life. The adulatory tone of the obituaries was not so very far removed from that of other “great men,” such as the original Henry Raymond, whose breathless valediction had once caught Worth’s eye and provided him with the alias he took to his grave. The New York Sun called the Gainsborough theft “the most remarkable crime committed in the nineteenth century” and proclaimed that “the memories of the police of two continents do not go back to the time when he was ever an amateur. The authorities seem to be agreed that, in his criminal specialties, Worth had neither superior nor equal and, when he died, he left none worthy of his mantle.” The Evening Sun lauded him as “one of the most celebrated thieves in the criminal history of Europe and America.” The New York World, with peculiar civic pride, called him “one of the most remarkable crooks this city ever produced.”

  “He was personally very charming, and his charity was proverbial. Thousands of Americans have been helped by him,” noted Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American, while The Tribune recalled his title, as did so many others—“The Napoleon of Crime”—and mourned “the last of a really great band of high-grade criminals who operated in America and all the world … in all his work [he] aimed only at large game.” Even such august publications as The Times and The New York Times listed his achievements with undisguised awe.

  Perhaps the most telling, and certainly the best-informed assessment, came, not surprisingly, from the Pinkertons:

  In the death of Adam Worth there probably departed the most inventive and daring criminal of modern times … In all his criminal career, and all the various crimes he committed, he was always proud of the fact that he never committed a robbery where the use of firearms had to be resorted to, nor had he ever escaped, or attempted to escape from custody by force of jeopardizing the life of an officer, claiming that a man with brains had no right to carry firearms, that there was always a way, and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain. Among all the men Pinkertons have known in a lifetime, this man was the most remarkable criminal of them all.

  Worth had spent a lifetime stealing respectability and social elevation. With plundered lucre he made himself into the quintessential Victorian gentleman, complete with thoroughbred racehorses, grand houses, expensive yachts, and the most coveted painting of the age, before his fabulous fabricated existence fell apart. Worth had believed he could steal respect, and he was right, but not the way he had meant it. In death, he garnered the admiration and homage of the world, not for upholding the rules of Victorian respectability, but for secretly breaking every one.

  “Adam Worth is dead,” proclaimed The New York Journal. “His demise marks the closing of a singular modern romance.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Inheritors

  Adam Worth’s great if dubious talents survived him. In August 1899, Kitty Flynn’s three daughters were out driving in the New Jersey countryside when their carriage became stuck on a railway line and was tragically demolished by an express train. Katherine Louise, Kitty’s younger daughter, and Juanita Terry, her child by Juan Terry, were both killed. But Lucy Adeleine, almost certainly Worth’s oldest child, who had married the eminently respectable Charles Trippe some years before, survived, along with her infant son, Juan.

  Juan Trippe, grandson of a career criminal, inherited the Terry fortune and went on to create Pan American Airways, once the most powerful airline in the world. His business methods were not so far removed from those of his grandfather. Gore Vidal, with a nod to Trippe’s criminal ancestry, called him “the robber baron of the airways.” Juan Trippe’s forty thousand employees merely referred to him as the “Great Dissembler.”

  The other, legitimate branch of the Worth family tree grew completely straight. Harry J. Raymond, Adam Worth’s son, started “at the bottom of the ladder” as an “office boy with the American Car & Foundry Co.,” on a salary of “only four dollars a week.” The teenager was soon rescued by none other than William Pinkerton, in fulfillment of the vow to his old friend. By means of the most benevolent subterfuge, the Eye sent Raymond a check for $700, pretending this was a debt owed by “a man in this city.” When the firm published a pamphlet recounting the life of Adam Worth, the proceeds were sent, anonymously, to the thief’s children. Nor did Pinkerton’s generosity end there. “We ought to be able to place you in a short time in a better position than the one you now hold,” the detective promised. A few months later, young Henry Raymond joined the detective firm which had chased his father and sometime namesake around the globe for half a century.

  William Pinkerton was deeply and permanently affected by Worth’s death. “Professional crime among intelligent men is largely extinct. We have no great burglars or forgers in the United States today,” he said sadly a month after the great criminal was buried. Instead of hunting down crooks, William Pinkerton was increasingly their protector and benefactor, sending magazines, money, Thanksgiving turkeys, and even clean underwear to men he had helped land in prison. Many former felons found employment in the Pinkerton Detective Agency. William forever mourned the loss of the old “gentleman thieves” like Adam Worth and blamed Hollywood gangster movies for being “a prime motivation for younger criminals.” He died in 1923 at the age of seventy-seven, leaving a fortune estimated at $15 million and prompting one oldtime thief to grumble that it was “quite obvious that he made more money out of crime than any of the people whom he hunted down.” The majority of mourners at his vast funeral in Chicago were members of the criminal fraternity, including that veteran thief, Sophie Lyons.

  La Dame de Lyons, as she was known to the Paris Sûreté, Sophie Lyons had become
a close friend of the Pinkertons as a consequence of her repeated arrests. In 1897, to the surprise of just about everyone who knew her, Lyons declared she was “turning respectable,” so she joined the staff of the New York World and became America’s first society gossip columnist. Her memoirs, published in 1913, were entitled Why Crime Does Not Pay but were clearly designed to prove the opposite and became an instant best-seller. Finally her past caught up with her. When she was some seventy years old, “three men called at her Detroit home” and clubbed her to death. The Pinkertons estimated Lyons had amassed more than $1 million from various forms of theft, larceny, extortion, con trickery, journalism, and real estate, the bulk of which she left “in trust for the education of the children of convicts.”

  Pat Sheedy, the professional gambler who helped negotiate the return of the Gainsborough, cherished Worth’s memory and made excellent use of it. In 1905 he suddenly claimed that Worth had given him another stolen painting, The Magdalen by Murillo, which had been filched from a Mexican convent forty years earlier. “Worth knew a lot about pictures. He thought this was a finer work than the duchess,” the seedy Sheedy claimed. The Pinkertons were not fooled. “There is nothing in this,” Robert Pinkerton wrote. But such was Worth’s fame that others were prepared to believe the tale. The Murillo was purchased for $15,000 by one John Condon, the former owner of a betting parlor and the proprietor of the Harlem racetrack in Chicago. Condon said that the great Worth had once gambled at his establishment, and he now wished to possess the painting “for reasons of sentiment.” He clearly had not bought it for artistic reasons, since Condon was stone-blind.

  Charlie the Scratch Becker, the great forger whom police compared to “Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Whistler in artistic talent,” was finally nabbed in 1900 for a counterfeiting spree involving some forty banks. In 1903 he emerged from San Quentin prison in a thoroughly cheerful mood, having spent his imprisonment perfecting a new type of forgery-proof paper and ink which he intended to sell to the very banks he had been fleecing for decades. “I am what you call an artist,” he told the waiting journalists, adding that he would like to be thought of as America’s version of Benvenuto Cellini, the great Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith. Generous as ever, the Pinkertons tried to interest a number of banks and paper firms in Becker’s ineradicable ink and tamper-proof paper, but without success. He died in 1916, having spent the intervening years working, quite happily, as a Pinkerton guard, arresting pickpockets at the Chicago race course.

  Another recipient of Pinkerton’s benevolence was Max Shinburn, the Baron, who spent most of the rest of his life in prison, and all of it claiming to be someone else. In his spare time, which was copious, the mechanically gifted Shinburn worked on a new design for automobile wheels. Pestered by reporters to admit his identity, he snapped, “I don’t know the man … I’m not Shinburn; but unless they leave me alone I’ll tell some things myself that will create a sensation in certain quarters.” He was finally released on April 19, 1908, by which time he claimed to have “discovered the secret of perpetual motion [and] planned to spend the rest of his life, perfecting his extraordinary discovery.” Instead, like so many of his kind, he found himself dependent on the charity of the Pinkertons. William Pinkerton commissioned him to write a history of safecracking, entitled Safe Burglary—Its Beginning and Progress, which remains the definitive disquisition on the Victorian safe-blower’s art. “From the early fifties up until the present time the writer witnessed in the most practical manner the evolution of the safe,” Shinburn began with dry humor. The work turned out to be “so revealing and instructive to the novice criminal that its publication was forbidden.” This remarkable work has never left the Pinkerton archives. Pinkerton eventually found a job for the irascible, duplicitous, but endlessly entertaining rogue as a janitor when he became “absolutely down and out” and resorted to the indignity of selling “a whole lot of ghost stories to the papers” about Adam Worth, simply to survive. Max Shinburn died on February 13, 1916, at the John Howard Home for Reformed Prisoners in Boston, at the age of seventy-seven. Rivals in death, as in life, Max Shinburn, like Worth, finally made it to the Great White Way when his life was adapted for the Broadway stage in Alias Jimmy Valentine by Paul Armstrong.

  As for Adam Worth’s literary afterlife, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off both his hero and his antihero when Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty met, fought, and fell to their apparent deaths, “locked in each other’s arms,” over the Reichenbach Falls at the end of “The Final Problem.” Holmes came back to life; Moriarty did not. But as Conan Doyle observed, “Everything comes in circles, even Professor Moriarty … The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and it will again.”

  The art collection of the financier Pierpont Morgan increased exponentially as he grew older and richer. His homes contained “an immense and widening variety of beautiful things, which in due time were to include paintings, bronzes, terra cottas, jades, ivories, enamels, crystals, glass, tapestries, bas-reliefs, miniatures, snuff boxes, watches, Bibles, Church of England rituals, autographs, and of course books and manuscripts.” In 1904, at the age of sixty-seven, he became the benefactor, president, and guiding force behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, even though some compared him to a “tipsy dowager with unlimited credit moving down Fifth Avenue on a riotous shopping trip.”

  He went to church often and opined on moral matters, but was he an enlightened financial genius protecting the capitalist world, or a greedy, self-serving potentate out to protect his own interests and those of his class? In his lifetime Morgan gave away much, and “his gifts were closely connected with his personal loyalties and affections,” but one painting for which he clearly felt an enduring personal affection, Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, never left his possession. When Morgan died on March 31, 1913, the great portrait was among the first objects claimed when Morgan’s children came to divide up his astonishing legacy.

  For years afterward, though, the Duchess of Devonshire languished in obscurity. In 1960 the Duchess was briefly displayed at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, but with that exception, the portrait was never again put on display by the Morgan heirs. Out of the public eye, the great Gainsborough slowly faded from memory, although the image lived on in a thousand prints and copies, busts, crumbling music-hall ballads, biscuit tins, and chinaware. Eventually the portrait passed to Mabel Satterlee Ingalls, Morgan’s last surviving grandchild. It was hung, periodically, in Mrs. Ingalls’s New York apartment, but mostly the Duchess was kept in a cupboard. Mrs. Ingalls, it was said, did not think the alluring portrait “quite respectable.” Mabel Ingalls died on December 28, 1993, at the age of ninety-two, and her heirs elected to put the painting up for sale at Sotheby’s in London.

  The auction took place on July 13, 1994. Sotheby’s salesroom was packed and buzzing when the portrait was unveiled and placed on the block for the first time since the extraordinary sale at Christie’s more than a century earlier. The bidding was brisk. A Mr. Smith sat impassively before the portrait, and despite a number of “sporting bids from the back of the room,” he raised his paddle in response to every one. Someone, it was clear, was determined to gain possession of the portrait, regardless of the price. After a few tense minutes, the implacable Mr. Smith raised his arm for the last time and Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire was knocked down for £265,500.

  Far more remarkable than the price was the buyer. With the auction over, flushed and visibly relieved, the bidder revealed himself to be Nicholas Smith of Curry & Co., solicitor and designated proxy for none other than the present Duke of Devonshire.

  The Lady, to quote Adam Worth, was returning home.

  The return of the Duchess to Chatsworth on July 22, 1994, was triumphal. The duke’s staff, local pensioners, and their spouses were invited to attend the unveiling and drink a toast to the prodigal duchess.

  “It was just such a wonderful, extraordinary story
, I felt we had to have the painting here,” said the duke, reclining amid the old leather and rare volumes in the study of Chatsworth. Beyond the window, the acres of the ducal estate rolled into the Derbyshire distance, and below, in the grand dining room, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was holding court once again, as waves of tourists ebbed and flowed around her. With the portrait cleaned and restored, the twinkle in her eye seemed brighter than ever. “She was a wicked’un, they say,” announced a Derbyshire accent, with approbation and authority.

  Soon after the sale, the painting was subjected to a barrage of tests by the Tate Gallery, and the results were intriguing. “There is no technical evidence to doubt that the central section is basically by Gainsborough,” Rica Jones of the Tate concluded cautiously. X-rays revealed an earlier hat beneath the duchess’s ostrich-feather extravaganza, one very similar to the hat in one of Gainsborough’s drawings for the Richmond Water Walk. Technical research suggested that the visible hat may have been “put in by someone else fairly early in the painting’s history,” while “the ground, the paint mixtures, the type of lay-in, the layered structure on the remnant strips and, most importantly, the shape of the earlier hat, which relates to a bona fide drawing, all point to an origin in [Gainsborough’s] studio.”

  So as far as science can tell, the painting is most likely by Gainsborough, and probably depicts Georgiana, but there can never be complete certainty. Throughout its checkered history, observers have seen what they want to see in this painting: Adam Worth saw Kitty Flynn, or a man-made symbol of perfect female beauty, or a badge of his own criminal prestige; Pierpont Morgan saw power; some saw Georgiana of Devonshire, others Elizabeth Foster. But it may well be that the subject of the portrait was someone else entirely, a mysterious, unknown woman elevated into a grand duchess.