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

The man who had slipped his chains on the Potomac, who had made a craft out of desertion, was not going to suffer the horrors of Sing Sing a moment longer than necessary, even though the prison’s guards, a breed of breathtaking brutality, had orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. As he worked, Worth calculated the movements of the guards and after only a few weeks of prison life, he slipped out of sight while the guard-shift was changing and hid inside a drainage ditch, which ‘discharged itselfinside the railway tunnel’. Under cover of night, according to a contemporary, ‘he managed to geta few miles down the river where there lay at a dock some canal boats’, in one of which, freezing and covered in mud, Worth hid, and ‘had the satisfactiona few hours after that, of having himself transported to New York City by a tug boat, which came up to fetch the canal boat in which he took refuge.’ At dawn, as the tug approached its ‘lonely dockfar up on the West side of the city’, Worth clambered into the water and swam back to shore. ‘He managed, although having his prison clothes on, to get to the house of an acquaintance, where he was provided with a suit of clothes.’ He immediately plunged back into the ghastly but protective anonymity of the Bowery.

Worth’s later insouciance when recalling this escape belied what must have been a dreadful, if formative experience. At barely twenty years of age he had seen the worst the American penal system had to offer, and his contempt for authority was formidable. That Worth did not hesitate to plunge into a churning river at dead of night, clad in prison clothes and aware that apprehension might well mean death, reflected both his physical toughness and a growing faith in his own invincibility. So far from being reformed by his brief and unpleasant experience of prison, Worth concluded that the life of a ‘dip’ did not offer sufficient rewards, given its perils, and the time had come to change direction, to up the stakes in his personal vendetta against society. Reuniting with some of his former gang, Worth began to expand his scope of operations to include minor burglaries and other property thefts as well as picking pockets. His word ‘was law withthe little group of young thieves he gathered around him,’ remembered Sophie Lyons. ‘He furnishedthe brains to keep them out of trouble and the cash to get them out if by chance they got in. Every morning they would meet in a little Canal Street restaurant to take their orders from him – at night they came back to hand him a liberal share of the day’s earnings.’ So far Worth’s activities had gone no further than what might be called disorganized crime. Henceforth he would tread more carefully, delegating often and putting himself at risk only when the rewards, or promise of adventure, were greatest. His strict dominance over the rest of the gang was the first illustration of a power-complex that would grow more pronounced with age. Criminals, it is fair to say, are not the most intellectual of people. Indeed, the class as a whole tends to be characterized by fairly intense stupidity. Worth’s highly intelligent approach to the business, and his ability to get results in the form of hard cash, was enough to ensure the obedience, even the reverence, of his underlings.

Solvent for the first time in his life, Worth’s determination to beat the odds at every level soon led him to New York’s roulette wheels, gambling dens and the faro tables – that extraordinarily chancy game that was once the rage of gamblers and has since virtually disappeared. Betting heavily, in the burgeoning belief that the more he dared the more fortune would smile, he began to live the life of a ‘sportsman’, moving away from the grim Bowery dives to the brighter, more luxurious, but no less dissipated lights of uptown New York and the famously seedy glamour of the ‘Tenderloin’ district.

Worth’s native intelligence was not the only character trait to distinguish him from his fellow crooks. He was also notable for avoiding strong drink, at a time when alcoholism was endemic and heavy drinking virtually obligatory among the criminal classes. Perhaps still more strangely, he refused to countenance any form of violence, regarding it as uncouth, unnecessary and, given his limited physical stature, unwise. Of the 68,000 people arrested in New York in 1865, 53,000 were charged with crimes of violence. Yet Worth made it a rule that force should play no part in any criminal enterprise that involved him, a rule he broke only once in his life. His rejection of alcohol and violence was itself part of a need to control, not just himself, but those within his power. Crooks who drank or fought made mistakes, and for that reason he steered clear of the established gangs, which were often little more than roving bands of pickled hoodlums at war with each other. Worth was not content merely to organize his minions, he needed to rule, regulate and reward them as he clawed his way up through the underworld. A sober, resourceful, non-violent crook marshalling his forces amid a troop of ignorant, drunken brawlers, Worth was also exceptional for the scope of his criminal aspirations, or, to put it another way, his greed. Sophie Lyons took note of his ‘restless ambition’ as he began his ascent into the criminal upper classes.

One of America’s senior crooks later recorded that ‘the state of societycreated by the war between the North and the South produced a large number of intelligent crooks’ of varied talents, but in post-bellum New York bank robbers were considered an aristocracy of their own. James L. Ford, an expert on, by participation in, New York’s seamy side, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Such operationsas bank burglary were held in much higher esteem during the ‘sixties and ‘seventies than at present, and the most distinguished members of the craft were known by sight and pointed out to strangers.’ Allan Pinkerton, the father of Worth’s future adversary, in his 1873 book The Bankers, The Vault and The Burglars, observed that ‘instead of the clumsy, awkward, ill-looking rogue of former days, we now have the intelligent, scientific and calculating burglar, who is expert in the uses of tools, and a gentleman in appearance, who prides himself upon always leaving a “neat job” behind.’

Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin argued that ‘a successful banksneak requires to be well-dressed and to possess a gentlemanly appearance.’ Sophie Lyons concurred, noting also that a certain amount of professional snobbery pertained in the upper ranks of crime. ‘It was hardfor a young man to get a foothold with an organised party of bank robbers, for the more experienced men were reluctant to risk their chances of success by taking on a beginner.’

Without success Worth sought acceptance in such established bank-robbing cliques as that of George Leonidas Leslie, better known as ‘Western George’, which was responsible for a large percentage of the bank heists carried out in New York between the end of the war and 1884. Lyons first encountered Worth when he was ‘itching to getinto bank work’, specifically through her husband, Ned Lyons, a noted burglar. But the veteran crooks turned down all advances from the aspiring newcomer.

Worth needed a patron, someone to provide him with an entree to the criminal elite. He found one in the mountainous figure of ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum.

CONTEMPORARY WRITERS reached for superlatives when describing Fredericka, better known as ‘Mother’ or ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum: ‘The greatest crimepromoter of modern times’, the ‘most successful fencein the history of New York’ and the individual who ‘first put crimein America on a syndicated basis’ are just a few of the plaudits she garnered in a long career of unbroken dishonesty.