The Napoleon of Crime (29 page)

Authors: Ben Macintyre

Tags: #Biography, #True Crime, #Non Fiction

BOOK: The Napoleon of Crime

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Pointing out that he had “
known Worth, alias Raymond, since his boyhood days,” the Baron even saw fit to spice his perfidy with some more personal remarks: Worth’s appearance is “
rather Jewish,” Shinburn sniffed, and he is “
very fond of wearing much flash looking but valuable jewelry, especially a number of diamond, ruby and emerald rings on his fingers … his legs are what is termed bow-legged.” Not knowing that Ned Wynert was dead and William Megotti in jail, Shinburn included Worth’s erstwhile associates in his diatribe, which concludes with a sparkling piece of hypocrisy: “
It may be said with truth that this trio of thieves are the most unprincipled towards their own kind that exist at the present day, and it is to be hoped that they will soon have meted out to them their just deserts by an often outraged law.”

The representatives of the Belgian law were not so much outraged as stunned by the unexpected windfall, but as they pondered whether to believe Shinburn’s claims, corroboration arrived from other quarters. Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department politely suggested that the description fitted that of Adam Worth, the Boylston Bank robber and, in his own words, “the most famous criminal of all.” This was followed by another missive from an elated Superintendent John Shore of Scotland Yard, which sealed Worth’s fate. Shore would dearly have liked to catch Worth himself, but this was the next best thing, and he offered the Belgian authorities everything he knew about Worth’s life and crimes, including the Gainsborough robbery. The result was closer to a personal denunciation than an objective package of evidence and, as Worth himself put it, somewhat ruefully, “
Shore blistered me from one end of the line to the other and made me as bad as possible” in the eyes of the Belgian authorities.

The people who knew most about Adam Worth, the Pinkertons, maintained a complete silence, making no attempt to provide de Corswarem with the volumes of information they possessed on his activities, an omission for which Worth would be eternally, demonstrably grateful. As he later told Pinkerton, and Pinkerton told his brother, “
he expected every day to see a report from this country from our agency in regard to him, and he knew that it must have been my influence that stopped the report. I did not say yes or know [sic] in regard to this, but let him go on thinking so.” In fact, William insisted, “
we were not called on for the report.” This was patently untrue, for the Belgian authorities had lost no time in contacting the largest detective agency in the United States and, indeed, a copy of de Corswarem’s circular is in the Pinkertons’ archives to this day. On November 3, 1892, William Pinkerton wrote to John Shore, thanking him for forwarding a copy of Worth’s photograph. “
To tell the truth he has changed so that I would hardly have known him … He is growing very old and does not look like the dapper chap he was when I saw him in London eighteen or nineteen years ago. Should the Judge of Instruction call for any particulars I have no doubt that Robert in my absence will supply him with anything he wants.” Shore also made a point of writing to Robert Pinkerton, who promptly replied, stating, “
I will write to the Judge of Instruction at Liège, Belgium, advising him as to what I know about Adam Worth.” But he did not, and neither did William.

It seems likely, then, that Worth was correct in his supposition that the Pinkertons had decided not to provide the Belgians with the agency file on Worth. Pinkerton and Worth had met at least twice, in the American Bar in Paris and later in the Criterion Bar in London; the Eye turned a blind eye. Today, this would be considered scandalous, but then law enforcement ran on a less rigid basis. William Pinkerton upheld the law, but in a highly personalized way, and he was not above bending the rules if circumstances, or individuals, required it. On such shifting sands was the rock of Victorian morality built. Pinkerton did not give up Worth for the simple reason that he liked him, respected his talents, and knew he was in scalding-hot water.

“
I know what your institution has done,” Worth told Pinkerton many years later, “and I know they had an opportunity of knocking me at the time I was in Belgium during my trouble in Liège.” It was, he said, “
a debt of gratitude that he could never get over.” Eventually, Worth would repay Pinkerton in full, by providing him with the most celebrated detective coup of his career.

TWENTY

The Trial

E
ven without the Pinkertons’ help, the Belgian authorities now had enough information on Worth to be confident of a successful prosecution, and a trial date was set for the following spring. The Belgian press excitedly advertised the forthcoming attraction: “
Session of 20 and 21st March—the affair of the theft from the mail wagon by the Englishman Adam Wirth, alias ‘The Prince of the Safecrackers.’ Defending attorney: Jules Janson.”

Word that Henry Raymond, the prominent London gentleman, had been unmasked as Adam Worth, international criminal, quickly spread to both the English and the American press. “
Henry Raymond, a well known sporting man, was arrested on a railway train at Liège, Belgium … while stealing bonds valued at £4,000,” the
New York World
reported. “He lived in high style in London, enjoying the proceeds of many larcenies … and belongs to a clique of American thieves well-known to Paris and New York detectives. He figures in Inspector Byrnes’s book on criminals as Adam Worth.”
The Daily Telegraph
noted that “
the man Wirth … was a member of a notorious band of American thieves, two of the members of which were tried at Liège in 1884 for breaking into the Modera Bank at Verviers. Wirth, who was concerned in some of the most daring bank robberies of recent years, passed under various aliases, and was known to the American police during his stay in the United States as the ‘Prince of Cracksmen.’ He spent considerable time in London, where he lived in extravagant style, and acted as the receiver of an international agency of thieves.” The press had yet to establish a connection between Adam Worth and the stolen Gainsborough, but Inspector Shore lost no time in telling William Agnew that the search for the
Duchess
might soon be over. The Scotland Yard detective arranged a meeting with the art dealer and laid the known facts before him.

Thus it was that, as Worth sat gloomily awaiting trial in a fetid jail cell, he received word that none other than the American consul had arrived to visit him. The official “
claimed to represent a prominent police official in America, and offer[ed] to pay him $3,000 and effect his liberation from imprisonment for information that would lead to the recovery of the Gainsborough portrait.” The official Agnew’s history, perhaps not surprisingly, makes no mention whatever of this offer, but there is little doubt the art dealer was behind it. Worth, however, “
declined to have anything to do with the matter, claiming that he knew nothing about the picture, and that all stories to the contrary were false.”

Soon another, more credible offer arrived. Worth’s own solicitor told him he had been contacted by the “
English authorities” and claimed to bring “
word from the Home Secretary in Belgium that his release would follow the return of the picture.” Again Worth flatly refused not only to make such a deal but to “
admit to his own lawyer that he knew anything whatever about the picture.” The lawyer pleaded with him, but Worth was adamant.

Perhaps, as Pinkerton surmised, he feared the offers were merely a ruse, for it is hard to see how a London art dealer (however well connected) could have prevented the Belgian authorities from bringing to trial a man with an extensive criminal record who had been caught committing a major robbery. Worth was clearly in the most desperate straits of his career, but his refusal to cooperate in any way with either the “English authorities” or this nameless “prominent police official” suggests a willful obstinacy as much as caution. The painting was in a Boston warehouse, but during the seventeen years that Worth had traveled the world with his
Duchess
in his trunk, his yacht, and his bed, an extraordinary bond had grown between them which meant far more to him than money, more, even, than his freedom.

During her lifetime, Georgiana had bewitched a generation. Long after her death, through images like the Gainsborough, the strange power of her personality continued to seize the public imagination. Through his theft of the painting, Worth had become the custodian of that myth, attached, even shackled to Gainsborough’s duchess by a psychological covenant he would not and perhaps could not break. Worth’s double life had crashed around him, but he still had the painting, the last symbol of the grand con trick he had played so well. With the duchess on his arm, as it were, he had swaggered through gilded halls undetected; she had been his passport to high society, and the hurdle that held him from it. The law and the world might now know him as Adam Worth—rogue, impostor, villain, and liar—but for as long as he had the
Duchess
he was still, in his own perception, Henry J. Raymond, worthy gentleman and mighty thief. A photograph taken by the prison authorities early in 1893 says much about Worth’s state of mind. Tieless but in a suit, a handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, he stares directly at the camera, a picture of arch defiance, controlled and deeply menacing.

To the intense frustration of William Agnew, no doubt, Worth vigorously denied any knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts. The
Duchess
was his badge of superiority and invincibility, proof that he remained as ever one step ahead, and he now penned numerous letters, in elaborate code, to his allies, lawyers, and friends, requesting help in his predicament. Many replied, also using code and false names, sending money, moral support, and the latest underworld gossip. Each letter was intercepted and scrutinized by the baffled Belgian prison authorities. From his wife and her appointed protector, Johnny Curtin, there was an ominous and total silence, but succor did arrive from another, poignant quarter.

Kitty Flynn—the widow Terry—now wrote regularly to her former lover, sending large amounts of money with cheering messages. She signed herself “Turquoise.” Already a dab hand in legal matters, she also helped to organize Worth’s defense. Somehow the authorities rumbled the true identity of Turquoise and, perhaps through Shinburn, learned of Kitty’s strange amatory history connecting Worth and Bullard. The police quizzed Worth closely on his relationship with Kitty, but the thief, gallant as ever, staunchly denied they had ever been lovers. When it was suggested otherwise, he angrily refused to discuss the matter further. An English gentleman, even one exposed as a fraud, does not discuss his love affairs.

As the trial date approached, Worth’s defending lawyer, Jules Janson, paid a visit to his notorious client and set the exceedingly bleak prospects before him. The police, Janson pointed out, had a mountain of evidence indicating that Edouard Grau, alias Adam Worth, alias Henry Raymond, was a career criminal of rare distinction. As for the robbery in question, the prosecutors had assembled several reliable witnesses, not to mention a record of Worth’s incautious remarks while in custody. The lawyer’s advice to Worth was stark: admit to robbing the mail wagon, but deny everything else emphatically, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Worth should claim the admissions he had already made were extracted under duress. Above all, Janson recommended, play down the “Prince of Cracksmen” stuff. Somewhat chastened, Worth agreed.

On the morning of March 20, 1893, the Liège court of assizes was packed with lawyers and members of the public “
eager to see the defendant who has been the subject of such extraordinary publicity.” Sleepy, comfortable, bourgeois Liège had never seen a case like it. Eastern Belgium was not noted for crime: the occasional domestic assault and a little corruption was about the most its courts expected to deal with from one end of the year to the next. A mysterious, dangerous, many-named international thief attempting a daylight robbery in one of the city’s busiest streets was a rare treat indeed. Reporters for the Liège newspapers jostled for the best view as Monsieur Beltjens, the portly public prosecutor, swaggered into court, looking supremely confident. Worth followed, in manacles, but doing his best to keep up appearances. Six months of imprisonment had taken a toll, and as he stood in the dock it was noted that he had “
lost much of his gentlemanly bearing.” On Janson’s advice, Worth had reluctantly shaved off his handlebar mustaches and, “
deprived of the magnificent whiskers which had furnished his face, the accused had singularly lost his dapper appearance.” As the newspaper
La Meuse
observed: “
This is no longer the gentleman of last October: but if the face has lost some of its earlier distinction, the man has nonetheless retained his polite and correct manner.” Monsieur Beltjens may have done his homework, but Worth was also prepared for the coming tussle and determined not to be outdone in the matter of courtroom politesse.

The proceedings were short, confusing, and often hilarious, as Worth tergiversated, trying to throw Beltjens off with a combination of charm, equivocation, calculated self-incrimination, and straightforward perjury.