NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime Read online

  The elegant and pompous Max Shinburn became a regular patron. Like his former associates, the Baron had found it necessary to relocate to the Continent rather suddenly. Some two years earlier, to his intense embarrassment, he had been publicly arrested at an expensive hotel in Saratoga where he was “masquerading as a New York banker” and had been charged with the New Hampshire robbery committed in 1865. Police found $7,000 in stolen bonds in his pockets and, on searching his New York address, discovered “a complete workshop for the manufacture of burglar’s tools and wax impressions of keys.” Sentenced to ten years, the Baron had managed to escape from prison in Concord after nine months—a breakout considered “one of the most dashing and skillful planned in criminal history”—and then fled to Europe, where his safecracking skills were still in great demand. “With the money he made from his various burglaries, Shinburn is said to have left the country with nearly a million of dollars,” the Pinkertons reported.

  Shinburn had settled in Belgium, purchased an estate and an interest in a large silk mill, and formally declared himself to be the Baron Shindell, which “nobody cared to dispute.” His cosmopolitan existence included frequent visits to Paris and the American Bar, where the Baron liked to patronize his former criminal colleagues and spend “his money with an open hand.” Worth resented the intrusion of the “overbearing Dutch pig,” as he called him, somewhat inaccurately, but tolerated his presence for the sake of Piano Charley, who still owed the Baron a debt for springing him from jail.

  Sophie Lyons, who often traveled to Europe on business (entirely criminal in nature), was another familiar face at the American Bar, and soon a motley cluster of crooks, many of them familiars from the criminals’ New York days, began to orbit around the Paris club at a time when professional American bank robbers were migrating across the Atlantic in increasing numbers. “I could name a hundred men who got a good living at it [bank robbery] and then came over to Europe to try their luck. France used to be a particularly happy hunting ground,” wrote Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin.

  Out of the criminal flotsam eddying around Paris, an unscrupulous and unsavory bunch, Worth would eventually forge one of the most efficient and disciplined criminal gangs in history. Fresh from clearing out the First National Bank of Baltimore, for example, came Joseph Chapman and Charles the Scratch Becker.

  Chapman was a habitual lawbreaker with a long beard and soulful eyes who had, according to a contemporary account, “but one vice—forgery; and one longing passion—Lydia Chapman,” his wife and “one of the most beautiful women the underworld of the 1870s had ever known.” Becker, alias John Blosh, was a neurotic Dutch-born forger of wide renown who was said to be able to reproduce the front page of a newspaper with such uncanny verisimilitude that when he was finished no one, including Becker, could tell the original from the fake. Pinkerton considered him “the ablest professional forger in the world.”

  Other patrons at the American Bar included Little Joe Elliott (alias Reilly, alias Randall), a rat-like burglar of intensely romantic inclinations (“a great fellow for running after French girls,” Worth called him); Carlo Sesicovitch, a Russian-born thug with an ugly temper but an uncanny knack for disguise; his Gypsy mistress Alima; and several more criminals of note.

  But by no means all the clientele at the American Bar were rogues and miscreants. Many were simply visiting businessmen, “swell Americans who were not aware that the keepers of this saloon were American professional bank and safe burglars,” and tourists keen for some nightlife and a flutter at the roulette or faro tables. Their number even included some who had fallen victim to the club’s owners in earlier days.

  According to one police report, the American Bar “was visited by Mr. Sanford of the Merchant’s Express Co. while he was in Paris, but Mr. Sanford did not know until his return to New York that Wells was the man Bullard, who had robbed the company of $100,000” back in 1868. It was also said that visiting officials from Boston’s Boylston Bank spent an enjoyable evening at the club, little suspecting how the mahogany card tables and expensive furnishings had been financed.

  For three years the American Bar prospered and the peculiar ménage à trois of the owners continued, amazingly enough, without a hitch. Kitty Flynn, her telltale Irish brogue now quite evaporated, was becoming the gracious grande dame she had always hoped to be, even if half her admirers were thieves and con men. Bullard was happily consuming American cocktails in vast quantities, beginning his day when he opened his eyes in the late afternoon and ending it when he closed them, around dawn, usually face-down on the ivories of the club piano. “In the gay French capital he soon became a man of mark as a gambler and roué”—one pair of American detectives recorded—which was all Piano Charley had ever really wanted to be. Worth was also contented enough yet strangely restless. Serving drinks was profitable, while the gambling den was a standing invitation to show his hold over fate. But the Paris operation was hardly the grand criminal adventure he saw as his destiny. The demimonde thronging his card tables were glittering and amusing, to be sure, but he had more ambitious plans for himself and Kitty than merely the life of an upscale croupier and a club hostess.

  In the winter of 1873, a most unpleasant blot suddenly appeared on the horizon of the merry trio when William Pinkerton, the scourge of American criminals, wandered nonchalantly into the American Bar and ordered a drink. No man put the wind up the criminal fraternity more effectively than William Pinkerton. The detective had become a stout and florid man, whose ponderous frame belied his astonishing energy and his unparalleled talent for hunting down criminals. Pinkerton’s face was known to just about every crook in America, and so was his record as a man who had “waged a ceaseless war on train and bank holdup robbers and express thieves who infested the Middle West after the close of the Civil War.” The direct precursor of the modern FBI, the Pinkerton Agency was gaining international respect as a detective force, thanks in large part to William Pinkerton’s phenomenal energy. The West’s most notable outlaws knew only too well the discomfort of having the Pinkertons on their trail. “It was not unusual in those bandit chasing days for William Pinkerton to be days in the saddle, accompanied by courageous law officers searching the plains and hills of the Middle West tracking these outlaws to their hideouts,” one of the detective’s early admirers recalled. A man of great bonhomie and charm, Pinkerton could also be utterly ruthless, as many criminals had discovered at the expense of their liberty and, in some instances, their lives. “When Bill Pinkerton went after a man he didn’t let up until he had got him, if it cost him a million dollars he didn’t mind,” recalled Eddie Guerin.

  Many years later Worth, in an interview with William Pinkerton, feigned nonchalance when recalling the detective’s unexpected and unwelcome arrival at the American Bar. “We were rather troubled at what had brought you to the club,” Worth said. Frantic would have been a more accurate description.

  Worth recognized the burly detective at once and, opting as ever for the brazen approach, offered to buy him another drink. Pinkerton blithely accepted, knowing full well he was enjoying the hospitality of the Boylston Bank robber. It was a strange encounter between the arch-criminal and the man who had already spent five years, and would spend the next twenty-five, trying to put him in prison. They chatted awhile on the subject of mutual acquaintances, of which they had many on both sides of the law, until Pinkerton announced that he ought to be getting along. The two men shook hands, without ever having needed to introduce themselves.

  The moment Pinkerton left the premises, Worth summoned Piano Charley and a visiting ruffian known as Old Vinegar and set out into the rue Scribe to follow the American detective. “There was no intention to assault you,” Worth later assured Pinkerton. “We just wanted to get a good look at you.” Pinkerton was fully aware he was being tailed, and after leading the trio through the streets of Paris, he suddenly turned on them. Piano Charley, his nerves frayed with drink, “nearly dropped dead” with fright and the three bolted
in the opposite direction. “Old Vinegar went into hiding for weeks,” Worth later remarked with a laugh.

  He might not admit it, but Pinkerton’s surprise visit had rattled him. Worth was only partially reassured to discover, from a corrupt interpreter with the French police by the name of Dermunond, that the detective was not in pursuit of him and his partners but was in the pay of the Baltimore Bank and had his sights set on Joseph Chapman, Charles Becker, and Little Joe Elliott. Indeed, the informant warned, Pinkerton was already preparing extradition papers with the French authorities. Worth sent the message to his colleagues that they were in mortal danger and should on no account come to the bar. A few days later Pinkerton, accompanied by two French detectives, walked into another of the gang’s favored dives, a dance hall called the Voluntino, where Worth was dining with Little Joe Elliott. Worth happened to catch sight of the brawny detective as he came through the door, and rightly assuming the “entrances were guarded well,” he bundled Elliott upstairs to a private room, opened the window, and, holding Joe’s hands, dropped him fifteen feet into a courtyard below. “Joe made the drop alright and got up and hobbled away,” Worth recalled, but it had been another unpleasantly close escape.

  The gang got a welcome, if only temporary, reprieve when Pinkerton was called away to help investigate a series of forgeries perpetrated on the Bank of England. Pinkerton accurately identified the forgeries as the work of brothers Austin and George Bidwell, “two well known American forgers and swindlers” who also happened to be two of Worth’s regulars. While the Pinkertons were busy chasing the Bidwells (Austin was arrested in Cuba, George in London), Joe Chapman and the others slipped out of Paris and went into hiding.

  By now Worth had concluded that the days of the American Bar were numbered. During his brief visit to the club, Pinkerton had correctly guessed that some sort of early-warning system was in place to alert the gamblers upstairs of an impending raid. On his return to the United States, he informed the Paris police of this hunch and began pestering the Sûreté to do something about the nest of foreign criminals flourishing in the rue Scribe. Even the French police, sluggish through bribery, were propelled into action when Pinkerton provided detailed case histories of Worth, Bullard, Shinburn, Chapman, Becker, Elliott, Sophie Lyons, and many of the bar’s other regulars. The following May, Worth was again tipped off by Dermunond to an imminent raid and managed to remove all evidence of gambling just minutes before the police burst in. But the attentions of the Sûreté were proving bad for business, particularly among the jittery criminal clientele. “The respectable people did not patronize it, and it soon went to the dog,” Pinkerton recorded triumphantly.

  With profits declining, Worth decided to improve matters in his traditional way, by stealing a bag of diamonds from a traveling dealer who had carelessly left them on the floor as he stood at a roulette table. It was a spur-of-the-moment larceny—Worth cashed a check for the diamond salesman and distracted him while Little Joe Elliott crept under the table and substituted a duplicate bag for the one containing the diamonds. The theft netted some £30,000 worth of gems, and it was Worth himself “who insisted on the police being called in and the place searched from top to bottom. But he did not suggest that they look at a near-by barrel of beer, at the bottom of which reposed the precious jewels.” In spite of this elaborate bluff, the diamond dealer demanded that the club manager be arraigned on a charge of robbery. At a preliminary hearing Henry Raymond, playing the part of an enraged foreign businessman whose good name was being dragged in the mud, demanded that he be allowed to cross-examine his accuser and so confused the merchant by bombarding him with angry questions that the poor man was unable to remember clearly whether he had had the bag with him in the first place. Worth was released, but the theft, while lucrative enough, sealed the fate of the American Bar.

  “The robbery startled all Paris, and was the means of attracting suspicion to the house [which] lost prestige and soon went to pieces.” Pinkerton had been recruiting international support in his bid to close the American Bar; most notably, Inspector John Shore of Scotland Yard in London. Shore had been receiving reports for some time of a clutch of criminals operating out of Paris, and he, too, began to demand that the Paris police shut down the establishment once and for all. Through his spies, Worth learned that the English policeman was putting pressure on the French authorities, and his alarm redoubled. It was the first time Shore and Worth had crossed swords.

  “The place was finally raided by the police,” Pinkerton reported, but this time the Sûreté were not going to be beaten by Worth’s alarm system. “The bar-tender was seized as soon as they entered, and rushing upstairs, they found the gambling in full blast.” Worth and Kitty, by lucky chance, were not in the building at the time, but “Wells [Bullard] and others [a pair of unfortunate croupiers] were arrested and charged with maintaining a gambling house, but were admitted to bail.” Bullard, the nominal owner of the bar, skipped bail and fled to London, leaving Worth and Kitty to sort out what remained of the business.

  Worth later told Pinkerton that he had already decided the bar would “never again be a success the way he wanted it,” and the building was sold to an “English betting man or bookmaker named Jack Ballentine,” who kept it going for two more years before the American Bar was finally closed.

  Pinkerton later wrote, on Worth’s authority, that “the ruction which I kicked up was the means of ruining Bullard in Paris, driving him out, breaking up the bar and sending, as he termed it, all of them on the bum.” But rather than resenting Pinkerton’s rude intrusion into his affairs, Worth seems to have admired Pinkerton’s detective efforts. “Afterwards when we met in London [he said] that he had always fancied me and found that I was a man who kept his own counsel and that he had always felt a kindly feeling towards me,” Pinkerton wrote. They might be on opposite sides of the law, but the thief and the detective had developed a healthy respect for each other’s talents which would eventually blossom into a most unlikely friendship.

  So far from being “on the bum,” Worth was still a wealthy man. The breaking up of the American Bar simply closed one chapter in his life. He increasingly craved, for himself and the aspiring Kitty, if not genuine respectability, then at least its outward trappings, and at the age of just thirty-one he could afford them.

  There was really only one destination for a man of social and criminal ambition, and that was London, center of the civilized world, where the gentlemanly ideal had been elevated to the status of a religion, abounding with wealth and therefore felonious opportunity.

  Victorian Britain was reaching the pinnacle of its greatness, and smugness. “The history of Britain is emphatically the history of progress,” declared the intensely popular writer T. B. Macaulay at the dawn of the Victorian era. “The greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe.” A similar note of patriotic omnipotence was struck earlier in the century in an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle: “We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway, nothing can resist us. We war with rude nature, and by our restless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.” For a crook at war with the natural order, such heady recommendations were irresistible. Huge spoils, and the social elevation they brought with them, were precisely what Worth had in mind.

  Piano Charley was already across the Channel, operating under the cover of wine salesman and steadily drinking a large proportion of his supposed wares. Worth, Kitty, and the rest of the gang packed up what was left from the American Bar—the chandeliers, brass fittings, and oil paintings—and merrily headed back across the Channel to the great English metropolis.

  The upper floors of what was once Worth’s gambling den are now the bedrooms of the Grand Hôtel Intercontinental, one of the most expensive hotels in Paris. Still more appropriately, given the next phase of Worth’s life, the door to number 2, rue Scribe now leads into “Old England,” a chain of stores where
one can still buy all the appurtenances, from monogrammed riding boots to top hats, of a pukka English gent.

  SEVEN

  The Duchess

  By coincidence, or fate, in 1875 Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was also about to make a triumphant public reappearance in the English capital after long years in hiding.

  Georgiana Spencer (pronounced George-ayna) was just seventeen in 1774 when she married William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire. The duke, one of the richest and oddest men in England, was also, by popular assent, one of the luckiest, for the eldest daughter of John, first Earl of Spencer, was considered the most beautiful and accomplished woman in the nation. Poets praised her to the heavens, the Prince of Wales fawned on her, and painters vied with one another to depict her charms. Her detractors were equally emphatic, portraying her as an aristocratic slattern whose hats were too tall and whose morals were too low. Everyone had an opinion on Georgiana.

  Thomas Gainsborough began his celebrated painting of the duchess around the year 1787, and it was no easy commission, even for the great portraitist. There was something about the pucker of her lips, the hint of a smirk, playful and suggestive, that defied reproduction. Or perhaps it was simply the captivating presence of the sitter herself, “then in the bloom of youth,” that baffled the master. Gainsborough’s frustration mounted as he drew and redrew Georgiana’s mouth, trying to catch that fleeting, flirting expression, “but her dazzling beauty, and the sense which he entertained of the charm of her looks, and her conversation, took away that readiness of hand and happiness of touch which belonged to him in ordinary moments.” Finally he lost his temper. “Drawing his wet pencil across a mouth which all who saw it considered exquisitely lovely, he said, ‘Her Grace is too hard for me!’ ”