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

The American Bar was a two-pronged operation. The second floor of the building was fashioned into a sort of clubhouse for visiting Americans, complete with the latest editions of newspapers from the USA and pigeon-holes where expatriates could pick up their mail. ‘Americans were cordiallyinvited to use it as a meeting house,’ a spot where they could gather and enjoy American drinks, a quiet, sober and entirely respectable establishment. In the upper floors of the house, however, the scene was rather different. Here Worth and Bullard set up a full-scale, well-appointed and completely illegal gambling operation. By importing from America roulette croupiers and experts on baccarat, they gave the den a cosmopolitan sheen, but it was Kitty who turned out to be the principal lure for ‘her beauty andengaging manners attracted many American visitors’.

Pinkertons’ agents in Europe began keeping a watch on the place almost from the day the American Bar opened, and declared that it was fast becoming ‘the headquarters ofAmerican gamblers and criminals who here planned many of their European crimes,’ yet even the forces of the law were dazzled by the ample charms of the hostess. ‘Mrs Wells was abeautiful woman,’ the detectives later reported, ‘a brilliant conversationalist dressed in the height of fashion: her company was sought by almost all the patrons of the house.’ While gorgeous Kitty presided, a vision in silk and ringlets, the affableBullard played the piano and Worth carefully monitored the clientele. An alarm button was discreetly installed behind the bar ‘which the bar-tendertouched and which rung a buzzer in the gambling rooms above whenever the police or any suspicious party came in’. Within seconds of the alarm sounding, Worth could render the upper storeys of 2 rue Scribe as quiet and respectable as the lower ones. The Paris police ‘made two or threeraids on the house, but never succeeded in finding anything upstairs, except a lot of men sitting around reading papers, and no gambling in sight’. Worth also bribed the local police to tip him off when a raid might be expected.

The American Bar, the first American-style nightclub in Paris, was an instant success, a gaudy magnet in the ravaged and weary city, and the Parisians were ‘astonished by itsmagnificence. The place soon became a famous resort and was extensively patronized, not only by Americans, but by Englishmen: in fact, by visitors from all over Europe.’ Businessmen, bankers, tourists, burglars, forgers, convicts, counts, con men and counterfeiters were all equally welcome to enjoy the products of Worth’s superb chef, sip a cocktail, or, if they preferred, repair upstairs where the delightful Kitty would help them to lose their money at the gambling tables with such grace that they almost always came back for more. Word soon spread through the underworld that the American Bar was the best place in Europe to make contact with other criminals, arrange a job, or simply hide out from the authorities.

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 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 charged with the New Hampshire robbery committed in 1865. Police found seven thousand dollars in stolen bonds in his pockets and, on searching his New York address, discovered ‘a complete work shopfor 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 mostdashing and skillful planned in criminal history’ –and had fled to Europe, where his safe-cracking skills were still in great demand. ‘With the moneyhe made from his various burglaries, Shinburn is said to have left the country with nearly a million 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 bogus Baron liked to patronize his former criminal colleagues and spend his money ‘with an openhand’. 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 gaol.

Sophie Lyons, who often travelled 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 hundredmen 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 unsavoury 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 professionalforger 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 forrunning 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 whowere 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 Sanforddid 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 mightily, 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 capitalhe soon became a man of mark as a gambler and roue,’ which was all Piano Charley had ever really wanted to be. Worth was also contented enough, though 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 demi-monde thronging his card tables was 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.