NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime Read online

  Into this colorful and horrific world, Adam Worth slipped quickly and easily. At the age of twenty, now complete with his own criminal moniker, Little Adam became a pickpocket.

  “Picking pockets has been reduced to an art here, and is followed by many persons as a profession,” noted the author of Secrets of the Great City in 1868. “It requires long practice and great skill, but these, once acquired, make their possessor a dangerous member of the community.” Sophie Lyons, who became Worth’s close friend and sometime accomplice, described how Little Adam took to the apprentice criminal’s art: “Like myself and many other criminals who later achieved notoriety in broader fields, he first tried picking pockets. He had good teachers and was an apt pupil. His long, slender fingers seemed just made for the delicate task of slipping watches out of men’s pockets and purses out of women’s hand-bags.”

  As an apprentice pickpocket, Worth found himself in an intensely hierarchical world. The lowest level of pickpocket was a “thief-cadger,” inexperienced youngsters often virtually indistinguishable from beggars; of slightly more consequence were the “snatchers,” who, as the name implies, made no attempt to avoid detection but simply grabbed and ran, or “tailers,” who specialized in extracting silk handkerchiefs from tailcoat pockets. The most developed of the species was the “hook,” also known as a “buzzer,” for whom picking pockets was an art requiring considerable daring and manual dexterity. Nimble and inconspicuous, Worth began as a “smatter-hauler” or handkerchief thief, but soon the Civil War veteran graduated to a full-fledged “tooler,” a master of the art of “dipping.” Churches were particularly profitable hunting grounds, as were ferry stations, theaters, racecourses, political assemblies, stages, rat fights, and any other place containing large numbers of distracted people in close proximity.

  While lone pocket-dipping could be profitable, the most successful pickpockets worked in gangs, and Worth’s talents ensured that “it was not long before he had enough capital to finance other criminals.” Teaming up with some like-minded fellows, Worth now established a dipping syndicate, with himself as principal coordinator, banker, and beneficiary. It was, proclaimed Lyons, “the first manifestation of the executive ability which was one day to make him a power in the underworld,” a Napoleon of ne’er-do-wells.

  The technique for team-dipping, or “pulling,” was well established. A prosperous-looking “mark” is selected: he is then jostled or bumped by the “stall”; while the mark is thus distracted, the “hook” (sometimes known as the “mechanic”) quickly rifles or “fans” his pockets, immediately passing the proceeds to a “caretaker” or “stickman,” who then moves nonchalantly in another direction. Charles Dickens described the maneuver in Oliver Twist: “The Dodger trod under his toes, or ran upon his boot accidentally, while Charley Bates stumbled up against him behind: and in that one moment they took from him with extraordinary rapidity, snuff box, note-case, watchguard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket handkerchief, even the spectacle case.” The “mark,” in this case, was none other than Fagin himself, the paterfamilias of dippers.

  With his efficient team of purse snatchers, Worth was fast becoming a minor dignitary in the so-called swell mob, as the upper echelon of the underworld was known, and according to Lyons he soon acquired “plenty of money and a wide reputation for his cleverness in escaping arrest.” But no sooner had Worth’s criminal career begun to blossom than it came to a sudden and embarrassing halt. Late in 1864, Worth was arrested for filching a package from an Adams Express truck and summarily sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Sing Sing, the notoriously nasty New York jail just north of the city, on the banks of the Hudson River.

  Worth’s brief incarceration for bounty jumping had not prepared him for the extravagant horror of the “Bastille on the Hudson.” In 1825 the prison’s first warden, a spectacular and inventive sadist by the name of Elam Lynds, remarked, “I don’t believe in reformation of the adult prisoner … He’s a coward, a willful lawbreaker whose spirit must be broken by the lash.” In 1833 Alexis de Tocqueville described Sing Sing as a “tomb of the living dead,” so silent and cowed were its inmates.

  Clad in the distinctive striped prison garb instituted by Lynds, Worth was sent with the rest of the convicts to the prison quarries, where he was put in charge of preparing the nitroglycerin for blasting. Many years later, Worth recalled how he was instructed by the foreman to heat the explosive when it became cold and brittle in the freezing air. This he did, grateful for the chance to warm his hands, and was lucky not to be blown to pieces, for, as he frankly admitted, he “never had an idea at that time how dangerous it was.” Teaching hardened criminals how to handle nitroglycerin was not perhaps the brightest move on the part of the authorities, as Worth’s safecracking skills in later years so clearly proved.

  The man who had slipped his chains on the Potomac, who had made a craft out of desertion, was not going to suffer Sing Sing a moment longer than necessary, even though the prison’s guards, a breed of breathtaking brutality, had orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. As he worked, Worth calculated the movements of the guards, and after only a few weeks of prison life, he dropped out of sight while the guard shift was changing. He hid inside a drainage ditch, which “discharged itself inside the railway tunnel.” Under cover of night, according to a contemporary, “he managed to get a few miles down the river where there lay at a dock some canal boats,” in one of which, freezing and covered in mud, Worth hid, and “had the satisfaction a few hours after that, of having himself transported to New York City by a tug boat, which came up to fetch the canal boat in which he took refuge.” At dawn, as the tug approached its “lonely dock far up on the West side of the city,” Worth clambered into the water and swam back to shore. “He managed, although having his prison clothes on, to get to the house of an acquaintance, where he was provided with a suit of clothes.” He immediately plunged back into the protective anonymity of the Bowery.

  Worth’s later insouciance when recalling this escape belied what must have been a dreadful, if formative, experience. At barely twenty years of age, he had seen the worst the American penal system had to offer, and his contempt for authority was formidable. That Worth did not hesitate to plunge into a churning river at dead of night, clad in prison clothes and aware that apprehension might well mean death, reflected both his physical toughness and a growing faith in his own invincibility. So far from being reformed by his brief and unpleasant experience of prison, Worth concluded that the life of a “dip” did not offer sufficient rewards, given its perils, and the time had come to change direction, to up the stakes in his personal vendetta against society. Reuniting with some of his former gang, Worth began to expand his scope of operations to include minor burglaries and other property thefts as well as picking pockets. His “word was law with the little group of young thieves he gathered around him,” remembered Sophie Lyons. “He furnished the brains to keep them out of trouble and the cash to get them out if by chance they got in. Every morning they would meet in a little Canal Street restaurant to take their orders from him—at night they came back to hand him a liberal share of the day’s earnings.”

  So far, Worth’s activities had gone no further than what might be called disorganized crime. Henceforth, he would tread more carefully, delegating often and putting himself at risk only when the rewards, or promise of adventure, were greatest. His strict dominance over the gang was the first illustration of a power complex that would grow more pronounced with age. Criminals, it is fair to say, are not the most intellectual of people. Indeed, the class as a whole tends to be characterized by fairly intense stupidity. Worth’s highly intelligent approach to the business, and his ability to get results in the form of hard cash, was enough to ensure the obedience, even the reverence, of his underlings.

  Solvent for the first time in his life, Worth was determined to beat the odds at every level, and this soon led him to New York’s roulette wheels, gambling dens, and the faro tables—that extraordin
arily chancy game that was once the rage of gamblers and has since virtually disappeared. Betting heavily in the burgeoning belief that the more he dared, the more fortune would smile, he began to live the life of a “sportsman,” moving away from the grim Bowery dives to the brighter, more luxurious, but no less dissipated lights of uptown New York and the famously seedy glamour of the Tenderloin district.

  Worth’s native intelligence was not the only character trait to distinguish him from his fellow crooks. He was also notable for avoiding strong drink, at a time when alcoholism was endemic and heavy drinking virtually obligatory among the criminal classes. Perhaps still more strange, he regarded violence as uncouth, unnecessary, and, given his limited physical stature, unwise.

  Of the 68,000 people arrested in New York in 1865, 53,000 were charged with crimes of violence. Yet Worth made it a rule that force should play no part in any criminal enterprise that involved him, a rule he broke only once in his life. His rejection of alcohol and violence was itself part of a need to control, not just himself, but those within his power. Crooks who drank or fought made mistakes, and for that reason he steered clear of the established gangs, which were often little more than roving bands of pickled hoodlums at war with each other.

  Worth was not content merely to organize his minions; he needed to rule, regulate, and reward them as he clawed his way up through the underworld. A sober, resourceful, nonviolent crook marshaling his forces amid a troop of ignorant, drunken brawlers, Worth was also exceptional for the scope of his criminal aspirations, or, to put it another way, his greed. Sophie Lyons took note of his “restless ambition” as he began his ascent into the criminal upper classes.

  One of America’s senior crooks later recorded that “the state of society created by the war between the North and the South produced a large number of intelligent crooks” of varied talents, but in post-bellum New York bank robbers were considered an aristocracy of their own. James L. Ford, an expert on—by participation in—New York’s seamy side, said in his memoirs: “Such operations as bank burglary were held in much higher esteem during the ’sixties and ’seventies than at present, and the most distinguished members of the craft were known by sight and pointed out to strangers.” Allan Pinkerton, the father of Worth’s future adversary, in his 1873 book The Bankers, the Vault and the Burglars, observed that “instead of the clumsy, awkward, ill-looking rogue of former days, we now have the intelligent, scientific and calculating burglar, who is expert in the uses of tools, and a gentleman in appearance, who prides himself upon always leaving a ‘neat job’ behind.”

  Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin argued that “a successful bank sneak requires to be well-dressed and to possess a gentlemanly appearance.” Sophie Lyons concurred, noting also that a certain amount of professional snobbery existed in the upper ranks of crime. “It was hard for a young man to get a foothold with an organized party of bank robbers, for the more experienced men were reluctant to risk their chances of success by taking on a beginner.”

  Without success, Worth sought acceptance in such established bank-robbing cliques as that of George Leonidas Leslie, better known as “Western George,” which was responsible for a large percentage of the bank heists carried out in New York between the end of the war and 1884. Sophie Lyons first encountered Worth when he was “itching to get into bank work,” specifically through her husband, Ned Lyons, a noted burglar. But the veteran crooks turned down all advances from the aspiring newcomer.

  Worth needed a patron, someone to provide him with an entrée to the criminal elite. He found one in the mountainous figure of Marm Mandelbaum.

  FOUR

  The Professionals

  Contemporary writers reached for superlatives when describing Fredericka, better known as “Mother” or Marm, Mandelbaum. “The greatest crime promoter of modern times,” the “most successful fence in the history of New York,” and the individual who “first put crime in America on a syndicated basis” are just a few of the plaudits she garnered in a long, unbroken career of dishonesty.

  Marm’s nickname was a consequence of her maternal attitude toward criminals of all types, for her heart was commensurate with her girth. She was an aristocrat of crime, but unlike the object of Worth’s later affections—namely, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire—Marm Mandelbaum was no oil painting. “She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a sharply curved mouth and extraordinarily fat cheeks, above which were small black eyes, heavy black brows and a high sloping forehead, and a mass of tightly rolled black hair which was generally surmounted by a tiny black bonnet with drooping feathers.”

  Like Worth, Fredericka had emigrated from Germany to the United States in her youth, arriving “without a friend or relative,” but far from defenseless. Sophie Lyons, who adored Marm, noted that “her coarse, heavy features, powerful physique, and penetrating eye were sufficient protection and chaperone for anyone,” adding unkindly (but no doubt accurately) that “it is not likely that anyone ever forced unwelcome attentions on this particular immigrant.”

  Soon after she got off the boat, the formidable Fredericka had fixed her beady eye on one Wolfe Mandelbaum, a haberdasher who owned a three-story building at 79 Clinton Street in the Kleine Deutschland section of Manhattan’s East Side. A weak and lazy fellow, Wolfe was “afflicted with chronic dyspepsia.” A few weeks of Fredericka’s voluminous but easily digestible cooking persuaded him to marry her, and “Mrs Mandelbaum forever afterward was the head of the house of Mandelbaum.”

  While still nominally a haberdasher’s, the property on Clinton Street was turned by Marm into the headquarters of one of the largest fencing operations New York has ever seen. She started by selling the “plunder from house to house,” and in a few years had built up a vast business which “handled the loot and financed the operations of a majority of the great gangs of bank and store burglars.” Warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to hide the stolen goods, and the unscrupulous lawyers Howe and Hummel were on an annual retainer of five thousand dollars to ensure her continued liberty, principally through bribery, whenever “the law made an impudent gesture in her direction.” Most of Marm’s business was fencing, but she was not above financing other crooks in their operations and was even said to have run a “Fagin School” in Grand Street, not far from police headquarters, “where small boys and girls were taught to be expert pickpockets and sneak thieves.” A few outstanding pupils even went on to “post-graduate work in blackmailing and confidence schemes.”

  Marm Mandelbaum is first listed in police records in 1862, and over the next two decades she is estimated to have handled between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 worth of stolen property. Criminals adored her. As the celebrated thief Banjo Pete Emerson once observed, “she was scheming and dishonest as the day is long, but she could be like an angel to the worst devil so long as he played square with her.” As the fame, fortune, and waistline of Mrs., soon to be the widow, Mandelbaum (Wolfe’s dyspepsia having returned with a vengeance) grew, so too did the extravagance of her life-style and her social ambitions. The two floors above her center of operations “were furnished with an elegance unsurpassed anywhere in the city; indeed many of her most costly draperies had once adorned the homes of aristocrats, from which they had been stolen for her by grateful and kind-hearted burglars.” There Marm Mandelbaum held court as an underworld saloniste, and “entertained lavishly with dances and dinners which were attended by some of the most celebrated criminals in America, and frequently by police officials and politicians who had come under the Mandelbaum influence.”

  “I shall never forget the atmosphere of ‘Mother’ Mandelbaum’s place,” Sophie Lyons recalled wistfully, for here congregated not merely burglars and swindlers, but bent judges, corrupt cops, and politicians at a discount, all ready to do business. Such criminal notables as Shang Draper and Western George came to sit at Marm’s feet, and she repaid their homage by underwriting their crimes, selling their loot, and helping those who fe
ll afoul of the law. In a profession not noted for its generosity, Marm was an exception, retaining “an especial soft spot in her heart for female crooks” and others who might need a helping hand up the criminal ladder. Marm was an equal-opportunities employer and a firm believer that gender was no barrier to criminal success, a most enlightened view for the time, of which she was herself the most substantial proof. She did not, however, brook competition, and when one particularly successful thief called Black Lena Kleinschmidt stole a fortune, moved to Hackensack (more fashionable then than now), and began putting on airs and giving dinner parties, Marm was livid. She was thoroughly delighted when Black Lena was exposed as a jewel thief and jailed after one of her dinner guests noticed his hostess was wearing an emerald ring stolen from his wife’s handbag a few weeks earlier. “It just goes to prove,” Marm Mandelbaum sniffed, “that it takes brains to be a real lady.”

  At the time that Worth was desperately seeking a way into the criminal big leagues, Marm Mandelbaum was an established legend and arguably the most influential criminal in America. “The army of enemies of society must have its general, and I believe that probably the greatest of them all was ‘Mother’ Mandelbaum,” observed Sophie Lyons, who had taken a shine to young Worth and probably introduced him into Marm Mandelbaum’s charmed criminal circle.

  Worth became a regular at the Mandelbaum soirées, and it was almost certainly under her tutelage that he made his first, disappointing foray into bank robbery. In 1866 Worth and his brother John broke into the Atlantic Transportation Company on Liberty Street in New York and spent several hours attempting to blow open the safe, before leaving in frustration as dawn broke. Lyons recounts his “great disgust” at the failed heist.

  Undaunted, Worth, after a year of organizing some lesser thefts, and now working alone, pulled off his first major robbery by stealing $20,000 in bonds from an insurance company in his home town of Cambridge. Marm Mandelbaum, who could fence anything, from stolen horses to carriages to diamonds, obligingly sold them at a portion of their face value—giving Worth her customary ten percent and pocketing the rest. He was hardly made a rich man by the robbery, but it was a start, and the minor coup effectively “established him as a bank burglar” among his peers. Before long, Worth had gained a reputation as “a master hand in the execution of robberies,” and stories of his “sang-froid” began to circulate in the underworld.