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

That expression had an electric effect on the newest arrivals to the Washington Hotel in January 1870. It was never clear which of the two felons first lost his heart to Kitty, but that both did so, and deeply, was accepted as fact by all their contemporaries. Sophie Lyons is characteristically blunt on the matter: ‘Bullard and Raymond[she uses Worth’s real name and his alias interchangeably] both fell madly in love with her.’

For the next month Kitty was besieged by these two very different suitors – the one small, dapper, almost teetotal and intense, the other tall, lugubrious and, as the Pinkertons put it, ‘inclined to live fastand dissipate’. Suddenly Kitty found herself being wined and dined on a scale that was lavish even beyond her own extravagant dreams and that stretched Liverpool’s resources to the limit. In spite of their amorous rivalry, the two crooks remained the closest of friends as they swept Kitty from one expensive candlelit dinner to another, as Bullard serenaded her and Worth did his best to persuade her that he, rather than his exotic partner, represented the more solid investment. ‘The race for her favourwas a close one,’ records the inquisitive Lyons, ‘despite the fact that Bullard was an accomplished musician [and] spoke several languages fluently.’ Finally Kitty gave in to Piano Charley’s entreaties, and agreed to marry him. Yet for Worth she always reserved a place in her heart and, for that matter, her bed.

Kitty Flynn became Mrs Charles H. Wells one spring Sunday. The ceremony was performed at the Washington Hotel and a large and curious crowd of Liverpudlians turned out to watch the toast of the city being driven away in a coach and four by her handsome American husband. Adam Worth was the best man and, Lyons reports, ‘to his creditit should be said that the bridal couple had no sincerer well-wisher than he.’ Worth had good reason for his equanimity since, although Kitty had agreed to marry Bullard, she seems to have been only too happy to share her favours with both men. If Bullard objected to this arrangement he did not say so. Indeed, he was hardly in a strong moral position to do so, for, unbeknown to Kitty, he was married already. It was not until some time later that Kitty discovered Bullard had a wife and two children living in America. Conceivably Worth used this information to blackmail Bullard into sharing his wife. But that was hardly his style, and as the relationship between the two crooks remained entirely amicable, it seems more likely that the accommodating Kitty Flynn, the broad-minded Bullard, and Worth, who never let convention get in the way of his desires, simply found a ménage à trois to be the most convenient arrangement for all parties.

While Kitty and Charley enjoyed a short honeymoon, Worth passed his time profitably by robbing the largest pawnshop in Liverpool of some twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery. The Pinkertons later gave a full account of the theft:

He looked aroundfor something in his line, and found a large pawnshop in that city which he considered worth robbing … he saw that if he could get plaster impressions of the key to the place he could make a big haul. After working cautiously for several days he managed to get the pawnbroker off his guard long enough to enable him to get possession of the key and make a wax impression: the result was that two or three weeks later the pawnbroker came to his place one morning and found all of his valuable pieces of jewelry abstracted from his safe, the store and vaults locked, but the valuables gone. M

The robbery caused a minor sensation in Liverpool, where crime was rife but large-scale burglary rare. The Pinkerton account was written many years later, but seems to be largely accurate. Most of the bonds stolen from the Boylston Bank had now been ‘worked back’ to their owners and the bank had therefore decided to call off the costly detective agency, rightly concluding that the thieves were now beyond reach. But the Pinkertons continued to keep tabs, via a network of informers, on American criminals living abroad. In the coming years their information on Adam Worth and his activities as Henry Raymond grew increasingly detailed.

Robbing pawnbrokers was easy game, and Worth was becoming restless for more challenging sport in new pastures. Kitty was also eager to find more glamorous surroundings and Bullard did not care much where he went so long as there was money and champagne in plentiful supply, and a piano near at hand. Worth showered Kitty with expensive gifts (including his stolen gems), bought her expensive clothes and connived and encouraged her in her determination to leave her lowly origins behind. With his stolen money, Worth sought to shape and remake Kitty just as he was reinventing himself. But grimy Liverpool was no place for a would-be lady, and the great shared fraud required a brighter backdrop. At the end of 1870 the trio packed up their belongings, including the still considerable remnants of the Boylston Bank haul, checked out of the Washington Hotel and headed for Paris, where the war between France and Prussia, the siege of Paris and the impending lawlessness of the Commune had rendered the French capital a particularly enticing venue for a brace of socially ambitious crooks and their shared moll.

PARIS FURNISHED stark evidence of that peculiar brand of double standards Worth would absorb and adapt: under the Second Empire, a woman could be arrested for smoking in the Tuileries gardens but personal immorality was almost de rigueur. The surface was magnificent, but corruption and libertinism were rampant. Entrepreneurs speculated, hedonists indulged and English visitors railed about the ‘badness of themorals’. The great gay façade of the Second Empire had come tumbling down with the crushing of the French armies by the Prussian military machine, and more than twenty thousand people had died in the horrific violence of the Commune that followed the crippling siege of the city. Worth, Bullard and Kitty travelled slowly south through England and then tarried in London to await the outcome of the bloody events taking place in Paris, before making their way across the Channel at the end of June 1871. They found a city exhausted and partially in ruins, disordered and vulnerable, but still glamorous in her devastation: a perfect spot from which to co-ordinate fresh criminal activities, with plenty to satisfy the trio’s extravagant tastes. As a later historian observed, ‘France is an astonishinglyresilient patient and now – shamefully defeated, riven by civil war, bankrupted by the German reparation demands and the costs of repairing Paris – she was to amaze the world and alarm her enemies by the speed of her recovery.’ Here, Worth saw, were rich pickings. His namesake Charles Frederick Worth, the famed couturier, had ‘bought up part ofthe wreckage of the Tuileries to make sham ruins in his garden’; now another Worth would also make his mark in the remnants of the devastated city, where, for the time being at least, the authorities were far too busy washing blood off the streets and piecing together the capital to pay much attention to the newly arrived triumvirate.

In later years Kitty would claim, unconvincingly, that she had no idea her husband and his partner were notorious international criminals. It must have been clear from the outset that her charming spouse and his friend were hardly respectable businessmen, since they paid for everything in wads of cash, did no work whatever and never discussed anything approaching legitimate business. Kitty’s part in the next stage of the drama indicates that she was involved in their criminal activities up to her shell-like ears.

With the remains of the money from the Boston robbery, Bullard and Worth purchased a spacious building at 2 rue Scribe, a part of the Grand Hotel complex next to the Opéra, under the name Charles Wells, and rented large and comfortable apartments nearby. The new premises, christened the American Bar, were refurbished in ‘palatial splendour’ at a cost of some seventy-five thousand dollars, with oil paintings, mirrors, and expensive glassware. American bartenders were imported to mix exotic cocktails of a type popular in New York but ‘which were, at that time, almost unknown in Europe’.