NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  As another contemporary recorded: “Crimes in every corner of the globe were planned in his luxurious home—and there, often, the final division of booty was made.” A particular specialty of Worth’s gang was stealing registered mail from the strongboxes carried by train and in the cross-Channel steamers. “One robbery followed another in quick succession … from two to five million francs were abstracted from the mails in this way.” To initiate these robberies, Worth relied on his trusted compatriots, preferring reliable American crooks to the more fickle British variety. Finding recruits was not hard, for, as one recorded, “the West End was full of Americans, bank robbers, safe smashers, forgers, con men and receivers.” Many years later Worth offered this opinion of the British criminal classes: “There were some men among the Englishmen who were really staunch, loyal fellows and could do good work and take a chance, but the majority of them were a lot of sticks.”

  The key figures of the Worth gang included the forgers Joe Chapman and Charles “the Scratch” Becker, Carlo Sesicovitch, the bad-tempered Russian, and Little Joe Elliott, whenever he could be persuaded to stop chasing chorus girls. To their number was added the imposing figure of Jack Junka Phillips, a vast and vastly stupid burglar, so named on account of his habit of carrying quantities of junk in his coat pockets. He was the only English crook to be admitted to the inner circle, a decision Worth would live to regret. Combining ignorance and treachery in almost equal degrees, Junka was a terrifying figure with a prognathous chin, long mutton-chop whiskers, and a face that might have been carved out of Parmesan cheese. A former wrestler, he was well over six feet, with a ferocious visage and colossal strength. Junka could carry even the largest safe on his back, and the safe could then be broken open at leisure. His daunting appearance made an excellent deterrent to the overinquisitive. There is a hilarious photograph in the Pinkerton archives of Junka, under arrest some years later, in full evening dress, tied to a post. Like a criminal Samson, Junka is straining at his bonds, his eyes screwed up in fury. The Pinkertons, with rare understatement, labeled the image “An unwilling photograph.”

  The scope of Worth’s operations was increased considerably by the purchase of a 110-foot yacht, requiring, it was later said, “a crew of twenty-five,” which he equipped lavishly and then used to ferry his criminal cohorts on a series of foreign expeditions. He named the vessel The Shamrock, in honor of his Irish love.

  In 1874 the gang set off for South America and the West Indies and in a single operation they looted $10,000 from a safe in a warehouse in Kingston, Jamaica, before slipping back out to sea. “This last exploit would have ended in his capture by a British gunboat which pursued him for twenty miles had his yacht not been a remarkably speedy craft,” said Lyons, who was apparently aboard at the time. The Colonial police in Kingston sent a report of the robbery to the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard. “Inspector Shore agrees with me this must be Adam Worth,” William Pinkerton wrote to his brother in New York. The hunch was accurate enough, but without proof they were powerless to pin him down.

  The yearning for respectability, for gentlemanly rank, was arguably the single strongest motivation in Victorian society; stronger, even, than the lust to acquire money, which was, for many Victorians and certainly for Worth, simply a means to that end. As the philosopher Herbert Spencer noted: “To be respectable means to be rich.” It was an age of immense snobbery at every level, of intense social consciousness, but also upward (and downward) mobility. A man could raise his position in the hierarchy, through work, wealth, or good fortune, and by the governing precepts of the day, he should. “Now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, un-reproached, with people once far above him,” wrote John Ruskin some years earlier, “it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was born in and everybody thinks it is his DUTY to try to be a ‘gentleman.’ ”

  Defining what it took to be a gentleman at the various levels of society was trickier, since, as Anthony Trollope observed in his Autobiography, any attempt to do so was doomed to failure, even though everyone would know what was meant by the term. One historian has written that a Victorian gentleman was “expected to be honest, dignified, courteous, considerate and socially at ease; to be disdainful of trade and … to uphold the tenets of ‘noblesse oblige.’ A gentleman paid his gambling debts, did not cheat at cards and was honourable towards ladies”—all of which qualities Worth displayed to the full, with the sole exception of the first: honesty. Added to this was the general perception that the less obvious industry a man expended and the greater his expenditure, the higher his rank on the social scale. As far as his neighbors and noncriminal associates could tell, Henry Raymond did not a hand’s turn of work and spent money at a rate that might have been suspicious had it not been so thoroughly satisfying to the Victorian sense of priorities. As Oscar Wilde remarked: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Worth built himself a shell of glittering wealth and possessions to hide his humble beginnings and crimes, and he remained a sober, even punctilious figure, laying on a lavish dance but watching his creation from one remove, forever an outsider, a prototype for Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.

  With extraordinary ease he slipped into the life of an English gentleman, hosting grand dinner parties in the Mandelbaum tradition in his Piccadilly apartment and his Clapham mansion, both of which were now equipped with “costly furniture, bric-a-brac and paintings,” as well as rare books and expensive china. He mixed as easily with men and women of wealth and fashion as he did with the denizens of London’s underworld, for, as the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, Sir Robert Anderson, later acknowledged, “he was a man who could make his way in any company,” effortlessly switching roles from the rich man of leisure to the criminal mastermind. While he “lived like a prince,” Worth also seems to have sought to improve his mind and knowledge of culture. “He became a student of art and literature,” Lyons notes, the better to play his role of man about town, but also out of a genuine interest in the finer things that could be obtained with others’ money.

  Like any wealthy chap of a sporting disposition, Worth took an interest in the turf and purchased a string of “ten racehorses, and drove a pair of horses which fetched under the hammer £750.” To his Piccadilly neighbors Worth was a polite and evidently prosperous American, who entertained often and well, and had his suits made in Savile Row. To the frustrated Inspector Shore he was a permanent gall, for Worth always managed to stay a jump ahead by covering his tracks with infinite care and bribing sources within Scotland Yard to keep him abreast of Shore’s doings. One account even claims “he employed a staff of detectives and a solicitor, and his private secretary was a barrister.”

  To his criminal colleagues Worth was a source of wonder, and regular income, whose largess was legendary. “When he had money, he was generous to a fault, never let a friend come to him a second time, and held out a helping hand to everybody in distress, whether in his mode of life or no,” one associate later wrote, a view confirmed by the Pinkertons. “Anybody with whom he had a speaking acquaintance could always come to him and receive assistance, when he had it in his power to give.” In an oblique recognition of his own humble, and now wholly concealed, beginnings, he only ever stole from those who had money to spare and remained adamant that crime need not involve thuggery: the Pinkertons found it astonishing that “throughout his career he never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim.”

  Perfectly confident in his own abilities to avoid detection, Worth began to take ever greater risks and reap ever larger rewards. As he told his followers, “It’s just as easy to steal a hundred thousand dollars as a tenth of that sum … the risk is just as great. We’ll, therefore, go out for the big money always.” Many years later the forger Charles Becker was interrogated by the Pinkertons and gave this account of the gang’s philosophy. It is worth quoting in full, for it provides important clues to the strange double life of Adam Worth
:

  If you want to get on quickly you must be rich or you must make believe to be so. To grow rich you must play a strong game—not a trumpery, cautious one. No. No. If in the hundred professions a man can choose from and he makes a rapid fortune, he is denounced as a thief. Draw your own conclusions. Such is life. Moralists will make no radical changes, depend on that, in the morality of the world. Human nature is imperfect. Man is the same at the top, the middle or the bottom of society. You’ll find ten bold fellows in every million of such cattle who dare to step out and do things, who dare to defy all things, even your laws. Do you want to know how to wind up in first place in every struggle? I will tell you. I have traveled both roads and know. Either by the highest genius or the lowest corruption. You must either rush a way through the crowd like a cannon ball or creep through it like a pestilence. I use the cannon ball method.

  In its way, this was a peculiarly Victorian philosophy. Worth was (or considered himself to be) a superior being, equipped with greater resources for the Darwinian struggle for survival, which is, after all, a struggle without morals. Like many Victorians he considered the acquisition of wealth, and the respectability that went with it, to be a worthy goal in itself, but how the money was accumulated was, to Worth, a matter of the most profound indifference. The mere fact that he could dance one step ahead of the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard was proof that he ought to. None knew better than Worth that man is the same at the top, the middle, and the bottom of society, for he had visited all three. The morality of the time was a strange, malleable thing. “They pretended to be better than they were,” as one historian noted. “They passed themselves off as incredibly pious and moral; they talked noble sentiments and lived—quite otherwise.”

  Victorians strove to live outwardly “good” lives, and made much of the fact, yet they enjoyed behaving “badly” as much as any other society in any other period of human history.

  The contrast between outward protestations and actual behavior was particularly acute in the area of sexual morality, for while the prudish “official” line taken by most ethical commentators stressed home, hearth, and sex within marriage, or preferably not at all, the populace casually ignored most of these rules and appears to have enjoyed an interest in sex that was, if anything, even more obsessive than our own, precisely because it was so secretive. The Victorians, it should be remembered, were the first to publish pornography on an industrial scale. Worth’s own code of morality was a stern one, genuinely adhered to. He prided himself on a strict personal regime, abstained from strong drink, rose early, worked hard at his chosen profession, gave to charity, and may even have attended church, while he broke every law he could find and enriched himself with the wealth of others. If Worth held to a set of high-minded convictions that were utterly at variance with his actions, he was by no means alone. He would have enjoyed Wilde’s ironic quip in The Importance of Being Earnest: “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.”

  Sober, industrious, loyal, Worth was a criminal of principle, which he imposed on his gang with rigid discipline. With the exception of Piano Charley, drunks were excluded and violence was specifically forbidden. “A man with brains has no right to carry firearms,” he insisted, since “there was always a way and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain”; robberies were to be inflicted only on those who could afford them, and the division of spoils was to be fair. Myriad crooks and hangers-on owed him their livelihoods, yet Worth was no Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Then again, neither was Robin Hood.

  “It was his almost unbroken record of success in getting large amounts of plunder and escaping punishment for crimes that gave the underworld such confidence in him and made all the cleverest criminals his accomplices,” Sophie Lyons concluded.

  Worth delighted in his newfound position, elevated in both respectable society and the underworld. Slowly his confidence expanded into hubris. In the mid-1870s he met William Pinkerton again, on this occasion in the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, a noted meeting place for flâneurs and sporting men, but this time Worth felt so secure at the center of his criminal network that he could offer the American detective a compliment, while damning his English counterpart, Inspector Shore. The Scotland Yard detective, he said, “could thank God Almighty the Pinkertons were his friends or he would never have gotten above an ordinary street pickpocket detective.” Secretly William Pinkerton was inclined to agree, for the Agency had by now built up an extensive file on Worth and his doings, and without the regular flow of information from the United States, the British authorities would know even less than they did about the criminal network radiating out of London. “What he says is true,” Pinkerton reflected, “outside of our agency Shore would never have amounted to anything.”

  “How much flattery there was in all this I am not prepared to say, but will say for him he always treated me well in London. He tried to make me various presents,” William reported, adding quickly, “all of which I refused.”

  William had good reason to emphasize his incorruptibility. For all his growing prestige as a hard-minded and unbending upholder of the law, he was a complex man and in some ways an unlikely detective. Pinkerton projected a callous image. His job, he declared, was “to relentlessly hunt down train robbers if it means travelling the country 20 times,” and he claimed to loathe outlaws “with an unyielding passion.” His methods, and those of his detectives, were necessarily fairly brutal when he was dealing with such trigger-happy bandits as the Renos, the James brothers, and the “Wild Bunch”; if he was sometimes forced to shoot first and ask questions later, that was because he was dealing with men who tended to shoot without asking any questions at all. William was believed by many to have led the Pinkerton posse during the notorious raid on the James brothers’ cabin in January 1875, which ended in a tragic fiasco when a “bomb” was hurled into the building, resulting in the death of Jesse’s eight-year-old halfbrother and the maiming of the outlaws’ mother. Jesse James—who was, needless to say, elsewhere—vowed to kill the Pinkertons at the first opportunity.

  Such incidents added to William’s mystique, but his forbidding reputation was only partly deserved. Pinkerton protected the Establishment (such as it was), but the big detective always preferred underworld company to the marshals, railroad owners, mining magnates, and sheriffs that were his colleagues and employers on the right side of the law. “Uppermost in their mind is how they can kill you and go free,” William declared of the outlaw breed, but one of the more intriguing aspects of William’s character is that he got on so well with many of the criminals he hunted, jailed and, not infrequently, sent to the gallows. In Chicago he was often to be found at Mike McDonald’s saloon, The Store, a notorious hangout for villains. He was there to gather gossip and memorize the names and faces of the city’s criminal and sporting fraternities, but he also found such people more congenial than the straitlaced men of importance with whom his father and more conventional brother consorted. Many of his closest friends were gamblers, dubious exotics such as John Ringling of circus fame, and politicians of uncertain honesty.

  Pinkerton was, Shinburn declared, “a good mixer.” Too good for the tastes of his puritanical father, who reckoned that William was overfriendly with people of suspicious character. Allan Pinkerton watched his older son’s fraternizing, his drinking, his traveling, and his tendency to spend lavishly, with a hard Scottish eye. The stern patriarch talked of sending William on a “water cure” to improve his liver and morals, and instructed the agency accountant that if his son did not rein in his spending he was to be put on an allowance “and nothing more.” William ignored the remonstrances, and the rows were furious.

  So while Worth was making his way up in the world, Pinkerton was, in a sense, making his way down.

  In some ways Worth was an archetypical product of his time: determined to better himself, caring little what moral compromises
were made along the way, at once utterly upright and utterly corrupt. But while he was clearly in thrall to society and its rules, he was at the same time bitterly, implacably at war with them. He aped his bourgeois contemporaries, and stole from them, and all the time he despised them.

  The view taken by Friedrich Engels that the most courageous people on society’s lowest economic rung become thieves in order to wage “open war against the middle classes” has some truth in respect to Worth, for his imposture was an act of angry rebellion and disdain for the society from which he would be, whatever his strivings, a permanent outcast. It seems unlikely that Worth ever considered himself a social revolutionary, but the subversive implications of his actions were wholly intentional. If the quest for gentlemanly position was a central commandment of Victorian life, to claim that status fraudulently was social blasphemy, undermining the very hierarchy on which the elaborate Victorian sense of worldly order was built.

  Indeed, 1874 saw the culmination of one of the most notorious cases of social imposture in British history, known as the “Tichborne Saga.” In April 1854, fully twenty years earlier, a steamer sailing from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool vanished without a trace, taking with it Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and extensive estates in Hampshire. Lady Tichborne, his mother, refused to believe her son had perished, and when in 1866 a man presented himself as her missing heir, she immediately clasped him to her breast. This was no easy task, because the original Roger Tichborne had been slim, dark, and well educated, whereas the pretender to his name was freckled, semi-literate, and weighed 340 pounds. “I think my poor Roger confuses everything in his head, just as in a dream and I believe him to be my son,” Lady Tichborne maintained. And so, until her death, he remained, enjoying all the benefits of a prodigal son. In 1870, however, with the dowager Lady Tichborne out of the way, her relations filed a lawsuit for criminal impersonation against the bulky and, as matters turned out, entirely bogus baronet. The case caused a sensation and dragged on for years. One speech by the defense lasted fully two months. But finally in 1874, at the precise moment that Adam Worth was beginning to build his counterfeit life in London, the Claimant was exposed as Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. In the meantime, however, the vast impostor had become a focus for the popular resentment that bubbled just beneath the smooth surface of Victorian society. Seen as a “victim of the richer classes, and of Queen Victoria” herself, Orton-Tichborne was a potent symbol of revolt. Thousands subscribed to a magazine in his defense, for “by support of The Claimant the Tichbornites were expressing their opposition to the Establishment and their approval of a champion who appeared to challenge its codes and practices.” The magazine Punch characterized the attitudes of the Claimant’s supporters thus: “I don’t care whether he is Roger Tichborne or Arthur Orton, I don’t like to see a poor man done out of his rights.”