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

Worth’s phenomenal success in these years is perhaps best described by the frankly admiring assessment of the Pinkertons, who considered him ‘the most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal known to modern times’. In an official history published many years later, the detectives recalled that ‘for years he perpetrated every form of theft – check forging, swindling, larceny, safe-cracking, diamond robbery, mail robbery, burglary of every degree, “hold ups” on the road and bank robbery – with complete immunity … His luxurious apartment at 198 Piccadilly, where he received in lavish style … became the meeting place of leading thieves of Europe and America. His home became the rendezvous for noted crooks all over the world, especially Americans, and he became a clearing house or “receiver” for most of the big robberies perpetrated in Europe. In the latter 70s and all through the 80’s, one big robbery followed after another; the fine “Italian hand” of Adam Worth could be traced, but not proven, to almost every one of them.’

As another contemporary recorded: ‘Crimes in every cornerof the globe were planned in his luxurious home – and there, often, the final division of booty was made.’ A particular speciality of Worth’s gang was stealing registered mail from the strongboxes carried by train and in the cross-Channel steamers. ‘One robbery followedanother in quick succession … from two to five million francs were abstracted from the mails in this way.’ To initiate these robberies Worth relied on his trusted compatriots, preferring reliable American crooks to the more fickle British variety. Finding recruits was not hard, for, as one recorded, ‘the West End was fullof Americans, bank robbers, safe smashers, forgers, con men and receivers’. Many years later Worth offered this opinion of the British criminal classes: ‘There were some menamong the Englishmen who were really staunch, loyal fellows and could do good work and take a chance, but the majority of them were a lot of sticks.’

The key figures of the Worth gang included the forgers Joe Chapman and Charles ‘the Scratch’ Becker, Carlo Sesicovitch, the bad-tempered Russian, and Little Joe Elliott, whenever he could be persuaded to stop chasing chorus girls. To their number was added the imposing figure of Jack ‘Junka’ Phillips, a vast and vastly stupid burglar, so named on account of his habit of carrying quantities of junk in his coat pockets. He was the only English crook to be admitted to the inner circle, a decision Worth would live to regret. Combining ignorance and treachery in almost equal degrees, Junka was a terrifying figure with a prognathous chin, long mutton-chop whiskers and a face that might have been carved out of parmesan cheese. A former wrestler, Junka’s main attributes were his height (well over six feet), his ferocious visage and colossal strength. He could carry even the largest safe on his back, which could then be broken open at leisure, while his daunting appearance made an excellent deterrent to the overinquisitive. There is a hilarious photograph in the Pinkerton archives of Junka, under arrest some years later, in full evening dress, tied to a post. Like a criminal Samson, Junka is straining at his bonds, his eyes screwed up in fury. The Pinkertons, with rare understatement, labelled the image ‘An unwilling photograph’.

The scope of Worth’s operations was increased considerably by the purchase of a 110-foot yacht requiring, it was later said, a crew of twenty-five, which he equipped lavishly and then used to ferry his criminal cohorts on a series of foreign expeditions. He named the vessel the Shamrock, in honour of his Irish love. In 1874 the gang set off for South America and the West Indies and in a single operation they looted ten thousand dollars from a safe in a warehouse in Kingston, Jamaica, before slipping back out to sea. ‘This last exploitwould have ended in his capture by a British gunboat which pursued him for twenty miles had his yacht not been a remarkably speedy craft,’ said Lyons, who was apparently aboard at the time. The Colonial police in Kingston sent a report of the robbery to the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard. ‘Inspector Shore agrees with methis must be Adam Worth,’ William Pinkerton wrote to his brother in New York. The hunch was accurate enough, but without proof they were powerless to pin him down.

The yearning for respectability, for gentlemanly rank, was arguably the single most strongly motivating urge in Victorian society; stronger, even, than the lust to acquire money which was, for many Victorians and certainly for Worth, simply a means to that end. As the philosopher Herbert Spencer noted, ‘to be respectablemeans to be rich’. This was an age of immense snobbery at every level, of intense social consciousness, but also upward (and downward) mobility. A man could raise his position in the hierarchy, through work, wealth or good fortune, and, by the governing precepts of the day, he should. ‘Now that a manmay make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproached, with people once far above him,’ wrote John Ruskin some years before, ‘it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was born in and everybody thinks it is his DUTY to try to be a “gentleman”.’

Defining quite what it took to be a gentleman at the various levels of society was rather trickier, since, as Anthony Trollope observed in his autobiography, any attempt to do so was doomed to failure even though everyone would know what was meant by the term. One historian has written that a Victorian gentleman was ‘expected to be honest, dignified, courteous, considerate and socially at ease; to be disdainful of trade and … to uphold the tenets of “noblesse oblige”. A gentleman paid his gambling debts, did not cheat at cards and was honourable towards ladies’ – all of which qualities Worth displayed to the full, with the sole exception of the first: honesty. Added to this was the general perception that the less obvious industry a man expended and the greater his expenditure, the higher his rank on the social scale. As far as his neighbours and non-criminal associates could tell, Henry Raymond did not a hand’s turn of work and spent money at a rate that might have been suspicious had it not been so thoroughly satisfying to the Victorian sense of priorities. As Oscar Wilde ironically observed, ‘it is only shallow peoplewho do not judge by appearances’. Worth built himself a shell of glittering wealth and possessions to hide his humble beginnings and crimes, and he remained a sober, even punctilious figure, laying on a lavish dance but watching his creation from one remove, forever an outsider, a prototype for Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.

With extraordinary ease he slipped into the life of an English gentleman, hosting grand dinner parties in the Mandelbaum tradition in his Piccadilly apartment and his Clapham mansion, both of which were now equipped with ‘costly furniture, bric-a-bracand paintings’ as well as rare books and expensive china. He mixed as easily with men and women of wealth and fashion as he did with the denizens of London’s underworld for, as the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, Sir Robert Anderson, later acknowledged, ‘he was a manwho could make his way in any company,’ effortlessly switching roles from the rich man of leisure to the criminal mastermind. While he lived like a prince, Worth also seems to have sought to improve his mind and knowledge of culture. ‘He became a studentof art and literature,’ Lyons noted, the better to play his role of man about town, but also out of a genuine interest in the finer things that could be obtained with others’ money.

Like any wealthy chap of a sporting disposition, Worth took an interest in the turf and purchased a string of ‘ten racehorses, and drove a pair of horses which fetched under the hammer £750’. To his Piccadilly neighbours Worth was a polite and evidently prosperous American, who entertained often and well, and had his suits made in Savile Row. To the frustrated Inspector Shore he was a permanent gall, for Worth always managed to stay a jump ahead by covering his tracks with infinite care and bribing sources within Scotland Yard to keep him abreast of Shore’s doings. One account even claims ‘he employed a staffof detectives and a solicitor, and his private secretary was a barrister.’ To his criminal colleagues Worth was a source of wonder, and regular income, whose largess was legendary: ‘When he had money, he was generous to a fault, never let a friend come to him a second time, and held out a helping hand to everybody in distress, whether in his mode of life or no,’ one associate later wrote, a view confirmed by the Pinkertons. ‘Anybody with whomhe had a speaking acquaintance could always come to him and receive assistance, when he had it in his power to give.’ In an oblique recognition of his own humble, and now wholly concealed, beginnings, he only ever stole from those who had money to spare and remained adamant that crime need not involve thuggery: the Pinkertons found it astonishing that ‘throughout his careerhe never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim’.