The Napoleon of Crime (28 page)

For the first time in several years, and for reasons best known to himself, Worth decided to carry out this theft personally rather than delegating the job to others, but obviously he needed accomplices. He recruited two known crooks, Johnny Curtin, a fugitive American bank robber whom he summoned from England, and Dutch Alonzo Henne, a local sneak thief with a solid underworld reputation. Curtin was a plausible but wholly unreliable rogue of saturnine good looks and long brown whiskers, whose charm was matched only by his avarice. The forty-two-year-old Curtin had served time for various crimes in Chicago, Sing Sing, and the Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, and had a reputation as “
one of the most notorious burglars and shoplifters in America,” before crossing the Atlantic in 1886 with two other criminals, as the police reported, to “
make a tour of the continent, as they had considerable work laid out for them by Adam Worth, a noted receiver of stolen goods to whom all the American thieves go, on their arrival in London, for points.” Curtin had won Worth’s admiration and approval some months before when he was arrested while attempting to pass off a forged check and then swallowed the evidence en route to the police station.

Big Dutch Alonzo, one of the most villainous-looking men in Europe, was brought along as backup. He might appear terrifying, but, as Worth later reflected bitterly, “
Alonzo, in spite of the fact that he had a great reputation for being a staunch fellow, and everything of that kind, was the biggest coward that ever lived when it came to doing anything daring.”

For several days Worth coached his partners in their appointed roles: Curtin was to be the legman, ready to whisk off the bag which Worth would fill from the express-van strongbox, while Alonzo would act as lookout. The day before the robbery, Worth purchased a padlock identical to the one on the wagon strongbox, and a new overcoat, should a quick disguise become necessary. On the morning of October 5, 1892, the trio set out, and in its early stages the plan ran smoothly. At 9:30 a.m. the driver climbed down from the coach to deliver a strongbox to a Monsieur Comblen at 31, Boulevard Frère Orban, while his boy disappeared up a side street to make the bogus delivery. Worth, as he later recounted, “
jumped on the seat and tore the lock off” the van’s strongbox and “
in less time than this takes to write,” as one paper later reported, emptied the contents into a small sack.

“
Alonzo was to be on the lookout to give the signal one way and Curtin the other, but when he looked about he saw both of them walking away.” Either Worth’s reflexes were going, or greed had got the better of him, for instead of taking to his heels at once, he “
got off the van with as many packages as he could carry in his arms and started up the street.” The reason for the disappearance of both Curtin and Alonzo was immediately apparent. Just as the robbery was taking place, one “
Monsieur Decorty, a railway employee, happened to be passing who noticed the event.” Worth’s two accomplices saw Decorty staring with his mouth open, and scrammed. The railwayman recovered from his surprise “and,
seeing the malefactor running away, set off in pursuit crying ‘Stop! Thief!’ ”

At precisely that moment, the van driver returned to his vehicle and “
he too set off after the robber.” For a middle-aged man, Worth could put on a good turn of speed when the occasion demanded, as this one clearly did. “
The fugitive already had a considerable distance on his pursuers,” one newspaper later reported, “which he gradually increased.” Meanwhile, police officer Charbonnier had heard the shouting and he, too, joined the chase. Worth’s age, countless expensive dinners, and the weight of his haul soon made it an unequal race. Realizing the pursuers were gaining ground, Worth “
hastened to rid himself of the objects he had just stolen, hurling them onto the pavement and making a bee-line for the rue Saint-Veronique,” where he hoped to hide in the crowd. As Worth ruefully explained to Pinkerton years later, he was “
two blocks away” from the scene of the crime before he was tackled from behind by the far younger and fitter policeman, who, aided by two more citizens and panting from the chase, clapped him in handcuffs.

Arrogant to the last, Worth tried to brazen it out. His name was Edward Grey (which the police transcribed as Edouard Grau), he said, from London, England, and he demanded to be released immediately. His spontaneous choice of alias may conceivably have been a reference to Charles Grey, the Duchess of Devonshire’s onetime lover. But the Belgian police were cannier than their French Canadian counterparts had been a few years earlier, and were not going to be put off so easily when, as the magistrate put it, they had him “en flagrant délit de vol,” red-handed.

In its edition of the following day,
La Gazette de Liège
described the attempted robbery as “
an audacious coup, brilliantly planned” and allowed some sly racism to intrude on its reporting. “Grau is a strong fellow, with a vigorous and intelligent air. His face, of the characteristic Semitic type, is furnished with a dark mustache which, like his hair, is beginning to turn gray. It appears almost certain that he is lying in his declarations and that he has given a false name. He has given contradictory responses to other questions.”
Le Soir
noted that “
he was dressed in gentlemanly fashion and carried on him a considerable amount of Belgian cash,” and
La Meuse
pointed to his “
conventional attire” and noted that “all his effects carry the marks of British makers.”

When his hotel room was searched and business cards found embossed with the name Henry Raymond and his London address, he admitted he had been living under that name for twenty-five years. Next, the police produced the burglar’s tool from the scene of the crime, “
the extremely solid ‘Pince Monseigneur’ [crow bar], wrapped in a leather sheath, which had been used for the theft.” Worth now spun the baffled police a remarkable tale: he was, he said, a fifty-two-year-old mechanic, originally from Munich, who had come to Belgium via “Cologne, Mulhouse, Strasbourg and other German and Swiss towns.” The burglar’s tool he had purchased from a blacksmith in Aix the previous week. Hoping to put his interrogators off the scent, he offered them a sop, saying he had not worked for two years in London but had lived on the proceeds from a few petty thefts. Prior to that, he claimed, he had worked legitimately as a diamond salesman for the firm of Wynert & Co. in London. One moment he admitted carrying out the robbery of the wagon, the next he denied it. Deprived of sleep, he began to contradict himself.

“
There is evidence to suggest that we are in the presence of a bold bandit who has strong motives for staying completely mute,”
La Gazette
reported as the interrogation continued, adding: “Grau is a Jew, but whether German, English or American, remains unknown.”

For two days the police hammered Worth with repeated questions. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Where did you last work?” Exhausted, Worth finally lost his temper and he told the Belgian police superintendent he would rather die than say anything else. “
If you knew the truth I would be put away in prison for eternity,” he growled, with a flash of the ego he could never suppress. Realizing that he had already said too much, at this point Worth clammed up and, despite the alternate threats and inducements of the police, he declined to utter another word. “
He refuses to disclose his identity for family reasons,” the police reported. In this, if nothing else, Worth was being perfectly honest, for his principal concern seems to have been to prevent his wife from finding out about his predicament. Despite the evident treachery of his accomplices, Worth insisted he had acted alone. “
With the loyalty for which he was famous Raymond [Worth] steadfastly refused to reveal the identity of the confederate to whose folly he owed his own arrest, and Curtin escaped to England,” the starry-eyed Sophie Lyons later wrote. In fact, it appears that Worth’s refusal to finger his accessory was directly intended to protect his family, since he had asked Curtin to look after his wife and children in the event of his arrest.

All of which left the authorities in a quandary. Inquiries made at the Guillermins railway station revealed that “
this individual had been seen several times over the previous weeks, wandering around the shopping areas. A sub-conductor had even seen him the week before, closely following a delivery wagon in the quai de Fragnée.” The man in their custody was plainly a criminal of some sort, but precisely what sort it was impossible to tell; Worth had hoped to come away from the van robbery with up to “
a million francs or $200,000,” but in fact the packages he had stolen also contained “
valuable state papers,” which raised the possibility that he might be a spy. “
The official value of the papers is 60,000 francs, but the real value is a great deal more,” one newspaper stated; others estimated the contents of the box were worth at least half a million francs, given their importance.

Five days after Worth’s arrest, he “
continued to maintain an almost complete silence [and] as for the question of whether he carried out this brazen robbery with the aid of accomplices or whether he planned it alone, that too remains unknown … the robber continues to pretend his name is Edouard Grau.” Finally, the investigating magistrate at the Liège High Court, Théodore de Corswarem, took the step of circulating to European and American police forces a description of the suspect, complete with Bertillion measurements and a photograph, along with a request for information.

“
This fellow speaks and writes very good English,” Corswarem advised, “as well as German and French with an English accent. He is stout, strong and of a sanguine temperament, hair cut short, side whiskers and mustache in the Russian style, whiskers completely gray, moustache less so, brown eyes, high forehead, prominent nose.” While Worth had lavished money on racing horses and champagne parties, he had clearly neglected his dentistry. “Teeth irregular and discolored,” wrote the Belgian judge. “On the right side of the upper jaw one tooth is missing and one is decayed, on the same side of the lower jaw another tooth is missing and another decayed, on left side of upper jaw the two little molars are missing and the first big molar is very much decayed,” and so on. Since Worth was still resolutely refusing to open his mouth for any other reason, his teeth were almost the only solid evidence the Belgian police had to go on. The circular concluded with a plea from Judge Corswarem to his “legal colleagues and all police officials to do their utmost to establish the man’s identity, find out his antecedents and anything else concerning this person, and to communicate them as soon as possible.”

The authorities were beginning to panic, for, as a contemporary noted, “
neither the police nor the detectives knew him. The evidence against him was not very strong. He stood a good chance of being acquitted.” A week after his arrest, as it became ever clearer that the authorities were still in the dark, Worth’s spirits began to lift and he regained his voice, dropping boastful hints and taunting his captors, in the apparent belief that he would not be prosecuted and might as well have some fun. “
Interrogated on the subject of his nationality, he said that if they really wanted to know they had only to look back over the history of an important and celebrated robbery committed, some time ago, on the railway at Ostende de Malines.” The Belgian journalists picked up the scent. “
Investigations have been made in this quarter,” reported
La Meuse
. “If he is one of the perpetrators of this robbery, which we remember, there is every reason to believe that this bold bandit is an Englishman. He has retained his ‘sangfroid’ throughout, and is enjoying himself thoroughly at the trouble his anonymity has caused the investigating magistrates.”

While the Belgian police waited to hear from their colleagues in Europe and the United States, word reached them that an elderly criminal by the name of Max Shinburn, currently imprisoned in the local jail, was only too anxious to identify the miscreant. The Baron, it seems, “
had got hold of the newspaper containing an account of the arrest [and] from the description he suspected that the prisoner was his intimate enemy, Adam Worth … He lost no time in communicating with the authorities [and] made a bargain with them which was doubly advantageous to him inasmuch as it secured his own release and convicted the man he hated.”

Shinburn laid out Worth’s striking criminal history in lavish detail, noting virtually every theft he had carried out or commissioned since the Civil War. The resulting document, which remains in the Pinkerton archives, was a masterpiece of treachery, hypocrisy, and revenge. Over the years Shinburn had learned from Charley Bullard the complete details of his rival’s career, and he now provided the astonished Belgian police with chapter and verse on the Boylston Bank robbery, the American Bar, the South African robbery, and even the theft of the Gainsborough portrait, which “
had never passed out of Worth’s hands and is to this day under his control.” Shinburn noted, with only slight geographical inaccuracy, that Worth “
lives in extravagant style in a house in Piccadilly above the store of Fordham [sic] and Mason,” and conceded that “Adam Worth is without doubt the most successful burglar of the present time … no one has ever got the best of him; on the other hand, he has the reputation of having got the best of everybody in his line of work with whom he has ever had any transaction.”

Warming to his betrayal, Shinburn then launched into what can only be described as wholesale character assassination. “
His policy is to deal with weak men in his line of business, [with] whom he may do as he likes without question; this is evident in looking over the men with whom he has been connected. He does not recognize the principle of honesty among thieves, and he has never been in a job where he has not taken some mean advantage of his pals. This he may have been entitled to do in consequence of always having been the head and soul of every job he has been into, but, if so, it ought to have been understood before the job was undertaken.” Worth’s alleged treachery included substituting poor-quality diamonds for good ones when dividing spoils, “weeding the swag,” and generally diddling his accomplices out of their fair share.