The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

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 (#litres_trial_promo)’.

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 exploit (#litres_trial_promo) would 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 me (#litres_trial_promo) this 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 respectable (#litres_trial_promo) means 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 man (#litres_trial_promo) may 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 people (#litres_trial_promo) who 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-brac (#litres_trial_promo) and 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 man (#litres_trial_promo) who 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 (#litres_trial_promo), Worth also seems to have sought to improve his mind and knowledge of culture. ‘He became a student (#litres_trial_promo) of 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 staff (#litres_trial_promo) of 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 whom (#litres_trial_promo) he 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 career (#litres_trial_promo) he never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim’.

Perfectly confident in his own abilities to avoid detection, Worth began to take even greater risks and reap ever larger rewards. As he told his followers, ‘It’s just as easy (#litres_trial_promo) to steal a hundred thousand dollars as a tenth of that sum … the risk is just as great. We’ll, therefore, go out for the big money always.’ Many years later the forger Charles Becker was interrogated by the Pinkertons and gave this account of the gang’s philosophy. It is worth quoting in full, for it provides important clues to the strange double life of Adam Worth:

If you want to get on (#litres_trial_promo) quickly you must be rich or you must make believe to be so. To grow rich you must play a strong game – not a trumpery, cautious one. No. No. If in the hundred professions a man can choose from he makes a rapid fortune, he is denounced as a thief. Draw your own conclusions. Such is life. Moralists will make no radical changes, depend on that, in the morality of the world. Human nature is imperfect. Man is the same at the top, the middle or bottom of society. You’ll find ten bold fellows in every million of such cattle who dare to step out and do things, who dare to defy all things, even your laws. Do you want to know how to wind up in first place in every struggle? I will tell you. I have traveled both roads and know. Either by the highest genius or the lowest corruption. You must either rush a way through the crowd like a cannon ball or creep through it like a pestilence. I use the cannon ball method.

In its way, this was a peculiarly Victorian philosophy. Worth was (or considered himself to be) a superior being, equipped with greater resources for the Darwinian struggle for survival, which is, after all, a struggle without morals. Like many Victorians he considered the acquisition of wealth, and the respectability that went with it, to be a worthy goal in itself, but how the money was accumulated was, to Worth, a matter of the most profound indifference. The mere fact that he could dance one step ahead of the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard was proof that he ought to. None knew better than Worth that man is the same at the top, the middle and the bottom of society, for he had visited all three. The morality of the time was a strange, malleable thing: ‘They pretended to be (#litres_trial_promo) better than they were,’ as one historian has observed. ‘They passed themselves off as incredibly pious and moral; they talked noble sentiments and lived – quite otherwise.’ Victorians strove to live outwardly ‘good’ lives, and made much of the fact, yet they enjoyed behaving ‘badly’ as much as any other society in any other period of human history. Worth’s own code of morality was a stern one, genuinely adhered to. He prided himself on a strict personal regime, abstained from strong drink, rose early, worked hard at his chosen profession, gave to charity and may even have attended church, while he broke every law he could find and enriched himself with the wealth of others. If Worth held to a set of high-minded convictions that were utterly at variance with his actions, he was by no means alone. He would have enjoyed Wilde’s quip in The Importance of Being Earnest:‘I hope you have not (#litres_trial_promo) been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.’

Sober, industrious, loyal, Worth was a criminal of principle, which he imposed on his gang with rigid discipline. With the exception of Piano Charley, drunks were excluded and violence was specifically forbidden. ‘A man with brains (#litres_trial_promo) has no right to carry firearms,’ he insisted, since ‘there was always a way (#litres_trial_promo) and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain’; robberies were to be inflicted only on those who could afford them, and the division of spoils was to be fair. Myriad crooks and hangers-on owed him their livelihoods, yet Worth was no Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Then again, neither was Robin Hood.

‘It was his almost unbroken (#litres_trial_promo) record of success in getting large amounts of plunder and escaping punishment for crimes that gave the underworld such confidence in him and made all the cleverest criminals his accomplices,’ Sophie Lyons concluded.

Worth delighted in his new-found position, elevated in both respectable society and the underworld. Slowly his confidence expanded into hubris. In the mid 1870s he met William Pinkerton again, on this occasion in the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, a noted meeting place for flâneurs and sporting men, but this time Worth felt so secure at the centre of his criminal network that he could offer the American detective a compliment, while damning his English counterpart, Inspector Shore. The Scotland Yard detective, he said, ‘could thank God Almighty (#litres_trial_promo)