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

Ellis owned one of the finest art collections in England, and the great Gainsborough now took a prominent place in it. Did Wynn Ellis know for sure that ‘the painting whichhad been mutilated to hang above a foolish old woman’s smoke-grimed mantel shelf was … a pearl of rarest price? Some, subsequently, had their doubts. ‘There was… a very general belief among those interested in art matters, that not a few of the pictures [in the Wynn Ellis collection] bearing the names of distinguished English painters were copies or imitations.’ Had Wynn Ellis been too hasty in declaring the painting to be Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire? ‘Though a great loverof art he was not an infallible judge,’ one critic observed, ‘and it is recorded that his discovery that three imitation Turners had been foisted upon him at great prices led directly to his death’ – an event which took place on 8 January 1875, when Ellis was eighty-six years old and had amassed a fortune, it was estimated, little short of six hundred thousand pounds. His 402 paintings, along with ‘watercolour drawings, porcelain, decorative furniture, marbles &c.’ were left to the nation. The trustees of the National Gallery selected some forty-four old masters, as directed under the terms of Ellis’s will, and the rest of the vast collection was put up for auction. Gainsborough was then considered to be a modern artist and so that painting, too, was offered for sale by the auction house of Messrs Christie, Manson & Woods. After years in mysterious obscurity, Gainsborough’s Duchess was about to make her first public appearance for nearly a century, and tales of the charming Georgiana and her piquant history began to circulate once more in London’s salons. The auction was set for 6 May 1876, and suddenly the Duchess was all the rage again: where the Georgians had fallen in love with the rumbustious woman herself, the Victorians were about to be smitten by Georgiana’s portrait.

TO MARK THE FIRST STAGE of his transformation from the raffish boulevardier of the rue Scribe to the worthy gentleman of London, Adam Worth established himself, Kitty and Bullard in new and commodious headquarters south of the Thames, using the remaining profits from the sale of the American Bar and the stolen diamonds. Alerted by the Pinkertons and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard was already on guard and soon sent word to Robert Pinkerton, brother of William and head of the Pinkerton office in New York, that the resourceful Worth ‘now delightsin the more aristocratic name of Henry Raymond [and] occupies a commodious mansion standing well back on its own grounds out of the view of the too curious at the west corner of Clapham Common and known as the West Lodge.’ Bow-fronted and imposing, the West, or Western Lodge was built around 1800 and had previously been home to such notables as Richard Thornton, a millionaire who made his fortune by speculating in tallow on the Baltic Exchange, and more recently, in 1843, to Sir Charles Trevelyan: precisely the sort of social connections Worth was beginning to covet. The rest of the gang, including Becker, Elliott and Sesicovitch, lived in another large building leased by Joe and Lydia Chapman at 103 Neville Road, which Worth helped to furnish with thick red carpets and chandeliers.

Worth almost certainly knew that Scotland Yard was watching him but, since he entertained a low opinion of the British police in general and Inspector John Shore in particular, the knowledge seems to have worried him not one jot. With a high-mindedness that was becoming characteristic, Worth made no secret of his opinion that Shore was a drunken, womanizing idiot – ‘a big lunk headand laughing stock for everybody in England … he knew nobody but a lot of three-card monte men and cheap pickpockets’. Worth had come a long way in his own estimation since he too had been a lowly pickpocket on the streets of New York.

But while Worth was beginning to take on airs, styling himself as an elegant man about town, and while he set about laying the foundations for a variety of criminal activities, the original threesome was beginning to fall apart. Back in October 1870, Kitty had given birth to a daughter, Lucy Adeline, who would be followed, seven years later, by another, named Katherine Louise after her mother. The precise paternity of Kitty’s daughters has remained rather cloudy, for obvious reasons. Kitty herself may not have known for sure whether Bullard or Worth was the real father of her girls – conceivably they may have shared them, one each, as they did with everything else – but most of their criminal associates simply assumed that the children were Worth’s, as he seems to have done himself. William Pinkerton believed that Worth had simply taken over his partner’s conjugal rights when Bullard became too alcoholic to oblige. ‘Bullard, alias Wells, became very dissipated; his wife, in the meantime, had given birth to two children, daughters, who were in reality the children of Adam Worth,’ the detective stated.

More irascible and introverted with every drink, Bullard was no longer the carefree, dashing figure Kitty had fallen for at the Washington Hotel in Liverpool. He would vanish for long periods in London’s seamier quarters and then return, crippled with guilt and hangover, and play morosely on the piano for hours. To make matters worse, Kitty had learned of Bullard’s pre-existing marriage and his children by another woman. Though she had few qualms about sharing her favours with two men, Kitty was furious when she discovered Bullard was not only a depressing drunk but also a bigamist.

Aware of Kitty’s restlessness and hoping to keep her by dint of greater riches, Worth was now laying the groundwork for the most grandiose phase of his criminal career. In addition to the Clapham mansion, with its tennis courts, shooting gallery and bowling green, he also took apartments in the still more fashionable district of Mayfair, renting a large, well-appointed flat at 198 Piccadilly ‘for which he paid£600 a year’. The apartment was just a few hundred yards up the street from Devonshire House at number 74, where the duchess once entertained on such a lavish scale, and is now the Bradford & Bingley Building Society – precisely the sort of business Worth would once have had no hesitation in robbing. From here, with infinite care, Worth began masterminding a series of thefts, forgeries and other crimes.

Using his most trusted associates, he would farm out criminal work, usually on a contract basis and through other intermediaries, to selected men (and women) in the London underworld. The crooks who carried out these commissions knew only that the orders were passed down from above, that the pickings were good, the planning impeccable and the targets – banks, railway cashiers, private homes of rich individuals, post offices, warehouses – selected by the hand of a master-organizer. What they never knew was the name of the man at the top, or even of those in the middle of Worth’s pyramid command structure. Thus, on the rare but unavoidable occasions when a robbery went awry, Worth was all but immune, particularly when the judicious filtering of hush money down through the ranks of the organization ensured additional discretion at every level. Ever the control fanatic, Worth established his own form of omertà by the force of his personality, rigid attention to detail, strict but always anonymous oversight of every operation, and the expenditure of a portion of the profits to ensure, if not loyalty, then at least silence. He was happy to entertain senior underworld figures knowing, like a mafia godfather, that their survival depended on discretion as much as his, but the lesser felons who were his main source of income never knowingly saw his face. Before long the Piccadilly pad became an ‘international clearing houseof crime’.