NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime Read online

  Praise for

  The Napoleon of Crime

  “Adam Worth, the greatest thief of the 19th century, could have furnished the basis of a great novel. No need though: in The Napoleon of Crime, Ben Macintyre has given him a biography that reads like one.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Entertaining … This true-crime drama is as interesting for the personalities it captures as for the capers it dissects.”

  —Newsday

  “A carefully researched and smoothly narrated tale.”

  —Washington Post

  “Compelling.”

  —USA Today

  “Giving new meaning to the term ‘art appreciation,’ Ben Macintyre’s biography of Adam Worth could not be more imaginative, riveting, adventurous, or poignant if it were a work of fiction. Macintyre masterfully shows up the hypocrisy of Victorian society.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Engaging.”

  —Atlantic Monthly

  “Meticulously researched … this finely crafted, often entertaining account ultimately captures its subject.”

  —The Sun [UK]

  “Delightful, gripping, touching, exotic, people with highly colorful characters and written with humor and brilliant polish.”

  —James Lord, author of Some Remarkable Men

  “I wish, from this day forward, that everything I learn about history could be channeled through Ben Macintyre’s brilliant sensibility and elegant voice. The Napoleon of Crime is a joy and a revelation to read.”

  —Robert Olen Butler

  “A fascinating tale faultlessly told … thoroughly enjoyable.”

  —Eric Zencey, author of Panama

  “A good deal more thrilling than most thrillers.”

  —Daily Telegraph [UK]

  “A most remarkable and entertaining biography. It is a highly charged thriller, a moving love affair, a dramatic history of the Victorian criminal underworld, a noble tragedy.”

  —Independent on Sunday [UK]

  “[A] vastly entertaining saga … the ingenious details of his most memorable heists are hilariously recounted in a comic fashion by an author who expresses genuine affection and admiration for his flawed subject. This fascinating and amusing biography will delight true-crime buffs.”

  —Booklist

  “Macintyre … has composed a portrait as spiced with wit as its subject is colorful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

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  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Photographs of William Pinkerton, Adam Worth, Charles Bullard, Charles Becker, Max Shinburn, and Henne Alonzo courtesy of Pinkerton’s, Inc. Photographs of Kitty Flynn courtesy of Katharine Sanford. Excerpts from “Macavity the Mystery Cat” by T.S. Eliot, from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” with permission of Harcourt, Brace & Co. Excerpts from “Macavity the Mystery Cat” by T.S. Eliot reprinted in Canada with permission of Faber & Faber. Copyright © 1939 by T.S. Eliot, renewed by Esme Valerie Eliot.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ben Macintyre

  Excerpt from Operation Mincemeat copyright © 2010 by Ben Macintyre

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Harper Collins Publishers, London, and in hardcover in the United States by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York, in 1997, and in paperback in the United States by Delta, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88647-7

  v3.1

  For Kate

  Preface

  I had come to Los Angeles to cover the latest installment in the Rodney King case, that grimly defining saga of modern times. But I left the city with a very different tale of cops and robbers.

  The white Los Angeles policemen who had been filmed by an amateur cameraman beating up a black motorist were in court for a second time, stolidly proclaiming their innocence. It was confidently predicted that the city was on the verge of another riot. One afternoon, when the jury had retired to consider its verdict, I decided to drive out to the suburb of Van Nuys to explore the archives of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, thinking I might write an article for The Times about American law enforcement in another, sepia-tinted age, a world away from the thugs on trial downtown, or those in the ghetto who would take to the streets if they escaped justice again.

  The Pinkertons. The name itself summoned up hard lawmen with comic facial hair and six-shooters, riding out after the likes of Jesse James, the Reno gang, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Shown into the basement archive by a bored secretary popping bubble gum, I immediately realized there was far more here than could possibly be digested in a year, let alone an afternoon. The rows of cabinets literally overflowed with files, a testament to the painstaking methods of America’s earliest detectives. After an hour or so of random delving, I picked up a bound scrapbook, dated 1902. Leafing through it, I came across this fragment of newsprint:

  This is the story of Adam Worth. If a fiction writer could conceive such a story, he might well hesitate to write it for fear of being accused of using the wildly improbable.

  The sober, cold, technical judgment passed upon Adam Worth by the greatest thief-hunters of America and Great Britain is that he was the most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal ever known to modern times.

  Adam Worth, in a life of crime covering almost half a century, looted at least $2,000,000, and most probably as much as $3,000,000.

  He cruised through the Mediterranean on a steam yacht with a crew of 20 men, and left a trail of looted cities behind him.

  He was caught only once, and then through a blunder by a stupid confederate.

  He ruled the shrewdest criminals, and planned deeds for them with craft that bade defiance to the best detective talent in the world.

  The police of America and Europe were eager to take him for years, and for years he perpetrated every form of theft—check-forging, swindling, larceny, safe-cracking, diamond robbery, mail robbery, burglary of every degree, “hold-ups” on the road and bank robbery—under their very noses with complete immunity.

  There were three redeeming features in the life of this lost human creature.

  He worshiped his family and regarded and treated his loved ones as something sacred. His wife never knew that he was a criminal. His children are living in the United States today in complete ignorance of the fact that their father was the master-thief of the civilized world.

  He never was guilty of violence, and would have nothing to do under any circumstances with any one who did.

  He never forsook a friend or accomplice.

  Because of that loyalty he once rescued his band of forgers from a Turkish prison an
d then from Greek brigands, reducing himself to beggary to do it.

  Because of that loyalty he became “The Man Who Stole the Gainsborough.”

  The reason for that theft will be told here for the first time. Until now, all who knew it were under binding obligations of silence. The motive that caused the deed was unique in the history of modern crime.

  And Adam Worth, who had millions, who once flipped coins for £100 a toss, who at one time had an interest in a racing stable, had a steam yacht and a fast sailing yacht, died a few weeks ago as he had begun—a poor, penniless thief.

  He towered above all other criminals of his time; he was so far in advance of them that the man who hunted him weakened before his masterful intellect; but the inexorable fate that pursues the breaker of moral law caught him and finished him at last where the man-made law was powerless.

  When Adam Worth died he was as much a mystery—aside from certain officials and detective inspectors of Scotland Yard, the Pinkertons, and a very few American police officials—even to the great majority of the police officials of the world as he had been throughout his life. If he had not become prominent recently as the man who stole and returned the Gainsborough portrait, the public probably never would have heard of him at all. Only a very few of the most able detectives of the world knew him even by sight. Still less knew anything about him. The story that follows is an absolute and minutely exact history, verified in every particular and vouched for by the men who spent almost half a century in trying to hunt him down.

  Nothing in this history is left to conjecture.

  The rest of the promised article, infuriatingly, had not been pasted into the book. Time and again I read this clipping, extravagant in its claims even by the journalistic standards of the day, and a small L.A. riot of excitement began building somewhere in the back of my mind. Then my electronic pager sounded, bringing me hurtling back to the present with the news that a verdict in the Rodney King trial was imminent. By the next afternoon, two of the cops had been found guilty, the inhabitants of South Central Los Angeles had obligingly decided not to go on a rampage, and I was back in Van Nuys, combing the Pinkerton archive for every scrap of material I could find on Adam Worth. The detectives, I soon learned, had hunted Worth across the world for decades with dogged perseverance, and the result was a wealth of documentation: six complete chronological folders, tied together with string and bulging with photographs, letters, newspaper articles, and hundreds of memos by the Pinkerton detectives, each one written in meticulous copperplate and relating a tale even more intriguing and peculiar than the nameless Sunday Oregonian writer had implied.

  For Adam Worth, it transpired, was far more than simply a talented crook. A professional charlatan, he was that most feared of Victorian bogeymen: the double man, the charming rascal, the respectable and civilized Dr. Jekyll by day whose villainy emerged only under cover of night. Worth made a myth of his own life, building a thick smokescreen of wealth and possessions to cover a multitude of crimes that had started with picking pockets and desertion and later expanded to include safecracking on an industrial scale, international forgery, jewel theft, and highway robbery. The Worth dossiers revealed a vivid rogues’ gallery of crooks, aristocrats, con men, molls, mobsters, and policemen, all revolving around this singular man. In minute detail the detectives described his criminal network, radiating out of Paris and London and stretching from Jamaica to South Africa, from America to Turkey.

  I left the Pinkerton archive elated but tantalized. The material was vast but incomplete. Like any sensible crook anxious to avoid detection, Worth had not written his memoirs and had left behind only a handful of coded letters. My initial researches had raised more questions than they answered. How had Worth evolved his contradictory moral code? How had he escaped capture for so many years? How had he transformed himself from a penniless German-Jewish emigrant from Cambridge, Massachusetts, into an English milord in the aristocratic heart of London?

  One mystery intrigued me more than all the others. In the early summer of 1876, at the height of his criminal powers, Worth stole from a London art gallery, in the dead of night, The Duchess of Devonshire, Thomas Gainsborough’s famous portrait and then the most expensive painting ever sold. What had possessed him? And why, still more bizarrely, had he kept the great painting, in secret, for the next twenty-five years? The Gainsborough portrait, I was already certain, held the key to unlocking the secret of Adam Worth.

  California proved to be only the first stop on a long trail. Slowly I assembled a fuller picture, from letters, diaries, published memoirs by other criminals, newspaper accounts, and the archives of Scotland Yard, the Paris Sûreté, Agnew’s art gallery, and Chatsworth House. Other, quite unexpected discoveries followed.

  Worth invented his own life as a dramatic romance. When the Portland Oregonian had talked of his piquant history as the very stuff of fiction, the newspaper was telling the literal truth. The English detective Sherlock Holmes was already a household name when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first learned of Worth’s villainous deeds. The great English writer, it turns out, had used Worth as the model for none other than Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s evil, art-collecting adversary, and one of the most memorable criminals in literature. Conan Doyle was not alone in his debt to Worth, for writers as diverse as Henry James and Rosamund De Zeer Marshall, an author of wartime bodice-rippers, also found inspiration in Worth’s activities.

  My quarry led me on some unlikely pilgrimages: to the grand building in Piccadilly near Fortnum & Mason’s that was Worth’s criminal headquarters; to the Civil War battlefield where he first reinvented himself; to the London art gallery where he stole his most prized possession, and to a room in Sotheby’s auction house where, for the first time, I encountered that indelible image face-to-face. As I write, from the Paris office of The Times (London), I can look across the Place de l’Opéra to the Grand Hotel, where Worth ran an illegal casino and held court with his mistress in the 1870s. I am still not sure whether I have been following Worth for the last four years or whether he has been shadowing me.

  I had set off to hunt down “The Greatest Thief of Modern Times.” What I found turned out to be an unlikely reflection of those times, and our own: a Victorian gentleman and master thief who merged the highest moral principles with the lowest criminal cunning. What follows is a story that has never been told before; it is a story of dual personalities, double standards, and heroic hypocrisy.

  This is the story of Adam Worth.

  Adam Worth was the Napoleon of the criminal world. None other could hold a candle to him.

  —Sir Robert Anderson, Head of Criminal Investigation, Scotland Yard, 1907

  He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider at the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized … the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected.

  —Sherlock Holmes on Professor Moriarty, in The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

  —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Chapter One - The Elopement

  Chapter Two - A Fine War

  Chapter Three - The Manhattan Mob

  Chapter Four - The Professionals

  Chapter Five - The Robbers’ Bride

  Chapter Six - An American Bar in Paris

  Chapter Seven - The Du
chess

  Chapter Eight - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Worth

  Chapter Nine - Cold Turkey

  Chapter Ten - A Great Lady Holds a Reception

  Chapter Eleven - A Courtship and a Kidnapping

  Chapter Twelve - A Wanted Woman

  Photo Insert 1

  Chapter Thirteen - My Fair Lady

  Chapter Fourteen - Kitty Flynn, Society Queen

  Chapter Fifteen - Dishonor Among Thieves

  Chapter Sixteen - Rough Diamonds

  Chapter Seventeen - A Silk Glove Man

  Chapter Eighteen - Bootless Footpads

  Chapter Nineteen - Worth’s Waterloo

  Chapter Twenty - The Trial

  Chapter Twenty-one - Gentleman in Chains

  Chapter Twenty-two - Le Brigand International

  Chapter Twenty-three - Alias Moriarty

  Chapter Twenty-four - Atonement

  Photo Insert 2

  Chapter Twenty-five - Moriarty Confesses to Holmes

  Chapter Twenty-six - The Bellboy’s Burden

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Pierpont Morgan, the Napoleon of Wall Street

  Chapter Twenty-eight - Return of the Prodigal Duchess

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Nemo’s Grave

  Epilogue: The Inheritors

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Excerpt from Operation Mincemeat