NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  The Tichborne case, which continued to arouse heated debate throughout the 1880s, vividly illustrated how the criminal appropriation of a superior station in this stratified society struck at the very core of comfortable Victorian assumptions. But it also showed how empowerment through fraud struck a chord with the thousands outside (i.e., beneath) the genteel upper stratum.

  Worth’s spurious claims were all the more seditious for being as yet undetected, and he reveled in his double life, “maintaining his guise of a well-heeled American and going nightly to a thieves hangout in the East End of London.” According to one account, “he would change his fine clothes for humbler garb to confer with his criminal colleagues, then seek a railroad washroom to change back into his ‘gentleman’s clothes’ before stealing back to [his] bedroom as dawn was breaking.”

  As he grew richer and more respectable, Worth was slowly evolving into that most familiar and feared of figures from Victorian literature: the double man, a Jekyll and Hyde who concealed his darker personality from the world, glorying equally in his real wickedness and his apparent probity. He had long ago buried the distinction between a life based in reality and the one of his own crooked invention. He had stolen the name of the most worthy gentleman he could find; he had robbed and forged himself a gleaming carapace of respectability, an exemplary existence that was in truth a dazzling counterfeit. The Victorians read Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterwork with delicious terror, for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—like Henry Raymond and Adam Worth—were the dark and light sides of man himself, shackled together in febrile contrast, and a chilling glimpse into the dark and daunting depths of their own natures.

  By the year 1875, Adam Worth had settled comfortably into the personality of Henry Raymond, wealthier and further from the law’s clutches than he had ever been in his life. Then three blows fell in quick succession: Piano Charley Bullard, his partner in crime, who had been heading off the rails at considerable speed for years, wound up in an American jail; the core members of his gang—Elliott, Becker, Sesicovitch, and Chapman—were arrested and flung into a foreign prison; and finally, most devastatingly, Kitty Flynn, the woman he had helped to invent from nothing, developed a mind of her own.

  NINE

  Cold Turkey

  For two years the Worth gang had been running a highly profitable forgery ring throughout Europe. The forgeries, usually circular letters of credit, were the work of the talented but unstable Charles Becker. Worth had high regard for the Scratch’s artistry and a commensurately low opinion of his dependability, considering him “the biggest coward in the world.” As Worth once remarked: “How he kept his nerve and kept from squealing as long as he did was a mystery.” But despite his questionable temperament, Becker was one of the lynchpins of Worth’s organization, a forger of such brilliance that even Pinkerton admitted his reproductions of currency, bank drafts, and securities could withstand the most “microscopic scrutiny.”

  Passing off the counterfeits, or “passing the queer,” as it was known in underworld cant, was principally the work of Little Joe Elliott, a plausible, dandified rogue with “a small black moustache and short bushy black hair” who never failed to convince bank clerks of his “bona fides,” despite seemingly in a state of permanent and chronic agitation. “He has a very nervous manner and cannot sit still for a moment,” one contemporary noted. “His eyes are everywhere—continually jerking his arms and twitching movements generally.” The Russian Sesicovitch and the lugubrious Joe Chapman completed the four-man forgery gang as lookouts and backup men. “Chapman had been trained as a bank clerk in Chicago, and his familiarity with banking customs was of essential service to his confederates.”

  Late in 1874, Worth hit on a plan to pass off some forged letters of credit in Turkey, blithely assuming that the Turkish authorities would not recognize the fakes until the gang was safely back in London. Becker turned out some exquisite replicas of the credit letters of Coutts & Co., the London bankers, and Worth dispatched the team to Smyrna. Worth remained with Kitty in London. Bullard, characteristically, had vanished, having lost his remaining money at the card table. As Pinkerton later observed, “Bullard was, like all thieves, a lavish scatterer of his wealth.”

  The ruse got off to a good start, and the gang headed “through the principal cities of France and Germany, leaving a trail of forged paper behind all the way to Smyrna.” Some $400,000 had been collected in various cities and “the bulk of the money had been sent to London,” before disaster struck. The foursome was arrested while trying to pass off a particularly large credit letter. They were tried in the British consular court, convicted of forgery, and sentenced to seven years’ hard labor in a Constantinople jail. John Shore of Scotland Yard was notified of the arrests and sent the Turkish police complete dossiers on each man; the Pinkertons announced that they planned to extradite the gang to the United States.

  At first the gang was nonchalant in captivity, confident that the resourceful Worth would somehow get them out. “Jail meant nothing to us as men of experience,” Becker insisted. “It was the country, not the jail that held us. We couldn’t get out of the country.” But gradually, as the weeks turned to months and the Turkish authorities simply ignored every entreaty—from Lydia Chapman, from Worth, and even from the American consul, who had been persuaded that the foursome had not had a fair trial—the seriousness of their plight began to sink in. Even Carlo Sesicovitch, a man of granite resilience by any standards, started to crumble. He wrote to his Gypsy mistress, “My Dearest Alima,” describing the unspeakable conditions in the jail, compared to which the toughest American prison appeared almost luxurious: “I have had but bread once every twenty-four hours, no bed to sleep on but the bare plank floor, packed to the number of thirty-five or forty in a room not large enough for twenty. You can imagine the amount of filth and vermin there must exist. Actually the bread I eat would not suffice to feed the hungry bugs, fleas and lice which constantly gnaw at my naked flesh … There is little hope, so little hope.”

  Back in London, Worth was beside himself with anxiety. Sophie Lyons thought the “reason for his leadership was his unwavering loyalty to his friends. Raymond [Worth] never ‘squealed’—he never deserted a friend. When one of his associates ran afoul of the law he would give as freely of his brains and money as if his own liberty was at stake.” Whatever the mythologizing of his contemporaries, it does seem that Worth felt a moral obligation to protect and defend the rascals and louts who were his minions. The Pinkertons regarded the fact that he “never forsook a friend or accomplice” as his principal redeeming trait.

  After the men had endured several months of incarceration, Worth made his move. Accompanied by Lydia Chapman, he sailed on The Shamrock to Constantinople, “in the guise of an American millionaire taking a grand tour,” and set about engineering the release of his underlings. As a plan it was hardly sophisticated, simply employing the oldest but most reliable form of criminal persuasion: bribery, on a vast scale. Worth never admitted how much money he handed over to the Turkish jailers, officials, and judges, but finally he told Lydia that he had done all he could, and the dejected pair returned to London. Worth kept up a steady flow to various venal Turkish officials, and eventually, one January morning, Becker, Elliott, and Sesicovitch were ejected from prison as suddenly and violently as they entered it, and found themselves on the streets of Constantinople penniless, filthy, and free. Years later Worth told Pinkerton “that it was he who took the money to Constantinople which effected the release of Little Joe Reilly [Elliott], Becker and Sesicovitch from the prison; that he arranged all the details of the work.”

  Chapman, however, was not so lucky. Some days earlier the bearded forger had fallen out with Elliott, whom he unfairly accused of trying to cut a deal with Scotland Yard. A fight had ensued, and Chapman was isolated in another wing of the prison at the critical moment when the jail doors, oiled by bribery, opened. Worth and the increasingly hysterical Lydia did everything they could to liberate the las
t member of the gang. He employed an expensive lawyer, sent letters to the American consul, George Baker, and bombarded Chapman’s jailers with enough money to make them rich men, but to no avail. Chapman finally told Lydia to forget him and return to America, advice she ignored, pining away in her house in Neville Road and making futile trips to Constantinople to plead with her husband’s jailers.

  Unwilling to linger a moment longer than necessary in Turkey, the three other members of the gang had set off overland for London but had to run yet another horrifying gauntlet before they made it home. According to the Pinkerton files, “while passing through Asia Minor they were captured by Greek bandits, who, in spite of the fact that their captives were fugitives from prison, held them for ransom.” The bandits finally allowed Little Joe to head for London; his companions would not be released until he returned with more money. But they omitted to provide Elliott with traveling expenses. “The only thing that Reilly [Elliott] had to pawn were his gold teeth,” Worth later recalled. “He pawned these and with the money which he got for them he bought a cheap ticket and worked his way over to London.” Worth raised another two thousand pounds, “which money Little Joe took back and delivered to the bandits, and effected the liberation of his comrades.”

  If the Turkish escapade was an impressive example of honor among thieves, its final episode revealed quite another side of criminal life. Back in London, the volatile Sesicovitch and his Gypsy mistress, using the names William and Louise Wallace, moved in with Lydia Chapman in her new home at 46, Maude Grove, Chelsea. Before long, Sesicovitch was dunning Lydia for money, claiming her husband had diddled him out of his share of the profits from the original forgery. Sesicovitch told Lydia he “needed money from her with which to defray … expenses on a trip to Australia for the purpose of committing forgeries there.” He was apparently under the mistaken belief that Chapman’s wife “was possessed of considerable money and jewelry,” and his demands became increasingly threatening. Lydia Chapman, who now went by the name of Mrs. Porter, in turn tried to persuade Sesicovitch to return once again to Constantinople to try to free her husband.

  A few months later the body of Lydia Chapman, apparently dead from poison, was found in her elegant home. Perhaps she had committed suicide, but Scotland Yard, and for that matter Adam Worth, was convinced that the sinister Sesicovitch had had a hand in her death. The Yard even named Sesicovitch and his mistress as the murderers, alleging that, because Lydia had refused to part with the money for the Australian caper, “a scheme had been concocted for the purpose of robbing her [and] that in order to rob her they had dosed her with some narcotic, her death resulting therefrom.” William Pinkerton was still more specific, insisting that “her death at the hands of Carlos Sescovitch was brought about by her having heart disease, and the shock which she got when Sescovitch tried to chloroform her and steal her jewelry.”

  The crime was never solved, but Worth refused to have anything more to do with the Russian, whom he had long mistrusted. Sesicovitch returned to America and opened a drinking parlor beneath Booth’s Theatre in New York. Two years later, in April 1878, under the alias Dugan, Sesicovitch was arrested for forgery in Cincinnati. He was identified by Robert Pinkerton when Pinkerton was informed that “the first and second fingers of [his] left hand are off at the second joint, and that a little piece of the thumb of the left hand is missing,” the consequence of an earlier accident. “I have no doubt that [Dugan] and Carlo Sesicovitch, alias ‘Charles Gandy,’ alias ‘William Wallace,’ alias ‘Howard Adams,’ alias ‘John Hoare’ are identical.” The man who probably killed Lydia Chapman eventually died in prison, but that was little comfort to her husband. It was not until 1881 that Chapman, still mourning his lovely moll, was finally released from the Turkish jail, having “served his full sentence,” a man broken in health and spirit.

  The drawn-out Turkish saga and Lydia’s death had exhausted Worth and seriously reduced his finances. To make matters worse, the original partnership of Little Adam, Piano Charley, and pretty Kitty had finally disintegrated for good. Worth had never forsaken Charley Bullard or declined to provide the “loans” he demanded with ever increasing frequency, but the pianist’s temper had soured and his taste for unnecessary risk-taking had grown. To Worth’s further annoyance, Bullard was still on friendly terms with Max Shinburn, the haughty safecracker. Some said Worth’s fury had been ignited by the Baron’s attentions to his beloved Kitty. Shinburn’s advances got nowhere, but anyone who looked at her, indeed anything that disturbed Worth’s regulated universe, provoked his ire.

  While Worth was still trying to sort out the Turkish affair, Bullard went on one of his boozy jaunts and idiotically wound up in New York. “With Raymond’s cool, calculating brain no longer there to guide him, Bullard became reckless and fell into the hands of the police,” wrote Sophie Lyons. Piano Charley was promptly identified, arrested, tried for the Boylston Bank robbery of 1869, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment at the state penitentiary in Concord, Massachusetts.

  Kitty, already estranged from her rapscallion, bigamous husband, bored with life in London, promptly headed to New York herself, despite Worth’s entreaties, taking both daughters and, for old times’ sake, the paintings, mirrors, mahogany tables, and crystal ware that had once adorned the American Bar in Paris. In New York she pawned some of the jewelry lavished on her by Worth, sent the girls to expensive schools, and opened a boarding house for fashionable gentlemen, where her social talents and striking looks soon attracted an appreciative clientele. Like many gentlewomen in reduced circumstances, she hired herself out as a ladies’ companion, while waiting for an opportunity to scale the next rung up the ladder to fortune and fame.

  Worth was devastated by Kitty’s defection. So far, he had managed to keep an iron control on every aspect of his life, but the one thing he desired most had now slipped from his grasp. He remained obsessed with Kitty, not least because her two daughters were almost certainly his. In her memoirs the indefatigable Sophie Lyons, who was plainly a little jealous of Kitty, is as categorical on this point as she is on most matters pertaining to Worth’s emotional state. “ ‘How’s Kate?’ would be his first question whenever we met in London. He would eagerly ask about her health, how she looked, and how were the two children, which we all knew were Raymond’s.” The elderly burglar Eddie Guerin agreed, describing how Worth talked constantly of “an old sweetheart of whom he remained passionately fond to the end of his days,” and whose loss was “a canker continually eating at his heart.”

  Worth begged Kitty to return to London and marry him, but she declined. “Had this woman become Raymond’s wife I am confident that the whole course of his life would have been changed, and that the world would have something to remember him for besides an unbroken record of crime,” Lyons opined, with a hypocritical piety characteristic of the age. This was probably nonsense, since Kitty surely knew all about Worth’s criminal enterprises, and while she never actively took part, she seems to have made no effort to reform him. But on one aspect of the strange relationship between Adam Worth and Kitty Flynn, Lyons was surely right: “He never forgot the winsome Irish barmaid who had won his heart.” She had loved him, too, but she had chafed under his control, refusing to ornament the gilded frame he had fashioned for her. As blithe and reckless as Worth was intense and calculating, Kitty had provided a vital counterpoint in his life, yet she fluttered out of it as gaily as she had wandered in.

  They corresponded amicably and met often in the ensuing years. In time Kitty would repay him for helping to set her on the crooked path to upward mobility, but the love affair between Adam Worth and Kitty Flynn was over, at least in fact.

  TEN

  A Great Lady Holds a Reception

  In the spring of 1876 Worth, like anyone else who bothered to open a newspaper, read of the mounting excitement surrounding the auction of Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire.