The Napoleon of Crime (11 page)

On October 6, Mrs. Maginnis wrote:

Sir, I am obliged by your prompt attention to the disposal of the picture, and will take 70 for it, ready money, if the gentleman will give it, as I feel assured you will make the most you can of it.

Hoping you are in better health than when I last saw you, I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

Anne Maginnis

In the end, Bentley managed to persuade Mrs. Maginnis to let him keep the portrait for the sum of £56, one of the most advantageous deals he ever made. According to his grandson, Bentley “
never had the slightest doubt as to the genuineness of the picture; and to an artist it is obviously impossible for any copyist to success fully reproduce the swift, spontaneous touch of the greatest master of female portraiture.” The dealer carried the painting to London, where he cleaned it up and proudly displayed the
Duchess
to his admiring friends. “
The picture remained in my grandfather’s possession for some time, and my mother still remembers it hanging in the dining room of her old home in Sloane Street,” Goelze wrote.

Bentley subsequently agreed to sell the
Duchess
to his friend and fellow connoisseur, a silk merchant named Wynn Ellis—“characteristically declining to take any profit, so I have been told,” Goelze reported. “
Mr Bentley was the intimate friend and adviser of most of the great collectors during the early years of the late reign; but he made it a rule never to receive any remuneration for his services in assisting to form collections of pictures, a habit which I fear must in these days seem curiously Quixotic. The reason he gave was that in this way only could he prove his advice to be absolutely disinterested.”

Wynn Ellis (probably the painting’s fifth owner) started out in business in 1812 as a “
haberdasher, hosier and mercer” and ended up as owner of the largest silk business in London and a man of immense wealth, excellent taste, and profound views. As a Member of Parliament for Leicester and a Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire, where in 1830 he purchased a large estate called Ponsborne Park, Ellis advocated the repeal of the Corn Laws and considered himself an advanced liberal. But his most trenchant views happened to address a pastime dear to Adam Worth’s heart, for Wynn Ellis “
had an intense dislike of betting, horse-racing and gambling.” Ellis did not gamble on anything, and least of all on the great paintings which he purchased with his grand fortune. John Bentley, on the other hand, was a most canny art dealer who did not scruple to extract a tough bargain from an elderly schoolmistress. So, whatever his grandson’s claims and the demands of friendship, it would have been far more characteristic of the man had Bentley charged Ellis a small fortune for the painting. Sadly, we will never know how much profit Bentley made on his investment of £56, for the silk manufacturer—like other, later owners of the portrait—flatly declined to say what he had paid for it and allowed the rumor to circulate uncontradicted that he spent just 60 guineas on the purchase. Ellis sent the painting to be engraved by Robert Graves of Henry Graves & Co., and the result, simply identified as Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
, was published on February 24, 1870.

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 which had 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 lover of 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 January 8, 1875. Ellis was eighty-six years old and had amassed a fortune, it was estimated, little short of £600,000. 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 in Ellis’s will, and the rest of the vast collection was put up for auction. Gainsborough was then considered a modern artist and so the 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 in 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 May 6, 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.

EIGHT

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Worth

T
o 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 delights in 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 coveted. 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 a bit. With a high-mindedness that was becoming characteristic, Worth made no secret of his opinion that Shore was a drunken, womanizing idiot and declared him to be “
a big lunk head and laughing stock for everybody in England [who] knew nobody but a lot of three card monte men and cheap pickpockets.” He 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 Adeleine, 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—they may have shared them, one each, as they did 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 preexisting marriage and his children by another woman. Though she had few qualms about sharing her favors 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 yet 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, a shooting gallery, and a bowling green,” he also took apartments in the still more fashionable district of Mayfair, renting a large, well-appointed flat at 198, Piccadilly
for £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 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—had been selected by 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 pyramidal 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 house of crime.”

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 70’s 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 corner of the globe were planned in his luxurious home—and there, often, the final division of booty was made.” A particular specialty of Worth’s gang was stealing registered mail from the strongboxes carried by train and in the cross-Channel steamers. “
One robbery followed another 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 full of 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 men among 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, he was well over six feet, with a ferocious visage and colossal strength. Junka could carry even the largest safe on his back, and the safe could then be broken open at leisure. 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, labeled the image “
An unwilling photograph.”