Ben Macintyre - The Napoleon of Crime - The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

Two of Marm’s guests in particular would play crucial although very different roles in Worth’s future.

The first was Maximilian Schoenbein, ‘alias M. H. Baker, alias M. H. Zimmerman, alias “The Dutchman”, alias Mark Shinburn or Sheerly, alias Henry Edward Moebus,’ but most usually alias Max Shinburn, ‘a bank burglarof distinction who complained that he was at heart an aristocrat, and that he detested the crooks with whom he was compelled to associate’. For the next three decades the criminal paths taken by Adam Worth and Max Shinburn ran in tandem. The two law-breakers had much in common, and they came to loathe each other heartily.

Shinburn was born on 17 February 1842, in the town of Ittlingen, Württemberg, where he was apprenticed to a mechanic before emigrating to New York in 1861. Styling himself ‘the Baron’ from early in life, Shinburn later actually purchased the title of Baron Schindle or Shindell of Monaco with ‘the judiciousexpenditure of a part of his fortune’. Aloof, intelligent and insufferably arrogant, the Baron cut a wide swathe through New York low society. Even the police were impressed.

Inspector Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department considered him ‘probably the most expertbank burglar in the country’, while Belgian police offered this description of the soigne, multilingual felon: ‘Speaks English with avery slight German accent. Speaks German and French. Always well dressed. He has a distinguished appearance with polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.’ Shinburn’s looks were striking; he had ‘small blue penetratingeyes, long, straight nose, moustache and small imperial, both of brownish colour mixed with grey, moustache twisted at the ends, pointed chin … at times wears a full beard and sometimes a moustache and chin whisker, in order to hide from view the pronounced dimple in chin.’ His numerous encounters with the law and a youthful taste for duelling had left him with numerous other identifying features. After one arrest, a police officer noted these with grisly exactitude: ‘on back of leftwrist … pistol shot wounds running parallel with each other and near the deformity in right leg … pistol or gunshot wound on left side … several small scars that look like the result of buck shot wounds; scar on left side of abdomen, appearing as though shot entered in the back and came through …’ Shinburn’s fraudulent aristocratic claims were full of holes, and so was the rest of him.

His criminal notoriety sprang principally from the invention of a machine which he maintained could reveal the combination of any safe: ‘a ratchet which, when placed under the combination dial of a safe, would puncture a sheet of calibrated paper when the dial stopped and started to move in the opposite direction. He would repeat this process until he had the entire combination.’ According to other police sources, ‘his ear was soacute and sensitive that by turning of the dial he could determine at what numbers the tumblers dropped into place.’

With his mechanical training, Shinburn also perfected a set of light and powerful safe-cracking tools which he was prepared to sell on to others for a price. ‘Shinburn revolutionizedthe burglar’s tools and put them on a scientific basis,’ recorded Sophie Lyons. The better to perfect his safe-busting technique, the Baron ‘for some timetook employment under an assumed name in the works of the Lilly Safe Co. [whose] safes and vaults were considered among the best and most secure.’ But not for long. Leaving a trail of empty safes in his wake, Shinburn was eventually penalized by his own competence and the Lilly safe ‘came into suchdisrepute, that the company was forced into liquidation’.

‘The safe I can’t open hasn’t been built,’ Shinburn once boasted to Sophie Lyons.

By the time Worth encountered Shinburn in the mid 1860s, the latter had developed a name for himself as a man of importance among the bank-robbing fraternity by cleaning out the Savings Bank in Walpole, New Hampshire. Worth was ambivalent about the Baron. He admired his dandified dress and envied his reputation, but found his endless braggadocio and air of superiority unbearable.

Far more to Worth’s taste was another dark luminary of the underworld and Mandelbaum protege, Charles W. Bullard, a languid and alluring criminal playboy better known as ‘Piano’ Charley. The scion of a wealthy family from Milford which could trace its ancestry to a member of George Washington’s staff, Bullard ‘had a good commonschool education’, inherited a large fortune from his father while still in his teens and had gone to the bad, immediately and extravagantly. Having squandered his inheritance, Bullard briefly tried his hand in the butcher’s trade but gave up the occupation and ‘devoted his abilityto the robbing of banks and safes’, for which he inherited a taste from his grandfather, who was said to be a burglar ‘in a small way’. Bullard’s ‘dissipation and a restlesscraving for morbid excitement made him a “fly” [skilled] crook’ and later an uncommonly daring and wily burglar. In New York low society he was considered ‘one of the boldestoperators that has ever handled a jimmy or drilled a safe’.

‘Bullard is a manof good education,’ recorded one admiring police report, ‘speaks English, French and German fluently, and plays on the piano with the skill of a professional.’ Raffish, refined and handsome, with a wispy goatee and limpid eyes, Bullard had three passions in life, each of which he indulged to the limit: women, music and gambling. Through constant practice on his baby grand, Piano Charley had developed such ‘delicacy of touch’ that he could divine the combination of a safe simply by spinning the tumblers, while his piano sonatas could reduce the hardest criminal to tears and lure the most chaste woman into bed.

‘An inveterate gamester’, perennially short of funds, often outrageously drunk but always charming, Bullard was one of the most romantic figures in the New York underworld. Under the benign eye of Marm Mandelbaum, he and Worth struck up an immediate rapport.

Piano Charley Bullard’s crime-sheet included jewel theft, train robbery and jail-breaking. Early in 1869 he teamed up with Max Shinburn and another professional thief, Ike Marsh, to break into the safe of the Ocean National Bank in Greenwich Village after tunnelling through the basement. The venture was said to have realized more than a hundred thousand dollars, almost all of which ended up in Shinburn’s pockets. ‘The robbers werenearly a month at the work, and the bank was ruined by the loss,’ the police reported. Later that year, on 4 May, Bullard had again conspired with Marsh to rob the Hudson River Railroad Express as it trundled from Buffalo in upstate New York along the New York Central Railroad to Grand Central Station. Knowing that the Merchant’s Union Express Co. used the train to transport quantities of cash, with the connivance of a bribed train guard they ‘concealed themselvesin the baggage car … in which the safe was stored and rifled it of $100,000’. Bullard and Marsh then leaped off the train in the Bronx with the cash and negotiable securities stuffed into carpet bags. The guard was found bound and apparently unconscious, with froth dripping down his chin – this turned out to be soap, and the guard was immediately arrested.

The Pinkertons, whose reputation had expanded to the point where they were called in on almost every significant robbery, had traced the thieves to Toronto and found Ike and Charley living in high style in one of the city’s most expensive hotels. After a long court battle, Bullard was extradited to the United States and gaoled in White Plains, New York, to await trial. Using what little money remained to them, the Bullard family hired an expensive lawyer to defend their wayward son. Like Worth, Piano Charley never passed up a criminal opportunity and arranged for one of his many women friends to extract a thousand dollars (the entire fee) from his attorney’s pocket ‘as he was returningto New York on the train’.