The Napoleon of Crime (22 page)

FIFTEEN

Dishonor Among Thieves

W
orth prided himself on his loyalty to his minions, a lofty principle they repaid with egregious betrayal. Little Joe Elliott and Junka Phillips would never have agreed to help steal the Gainsborough had they foreseen they would not be richly compensated for their work, and Worth’s unexplained and unilateral decision to keep the painting for himself both confused and angered his partners in crime. To shut them up, Worth handed them both a wad of cash, knowing only too well that this was only a short-term solution. With the
Duchess
in his possession, he was an obvious target for blackmail, and Worth was enough of a realist to know that his fickle friends would sell him out if it suited their purposes. Just weeks after the theft, Little Joe was back demanding more money, explaining that he needed to go to America immediately. Once again, love was uppermost in Joe’s mind: he wanted to go back to his wife, and he wanted Worth to pay his passage. Knowing that he needed to keep Elliott sweet and concluding that he would be safer with his accomplice on the other side of the Atlantic, Worth consented.

Amazingly, Kate Castleton still had room in her heart for her husband, and the two were reunited. But if Kate remembered Elliott fondly, so did the New York Police Department, and in April 1877 he was arrested. On his way to the Tombs, the notorious New York lockup, Elliott briefly escaped, but was recaptured in Poughkeepsie. On the evidence of the Pinkertons, he was charged with “
being the perpetrator of a forgery amounting to $64,000 on the Union Trust Company in New York, having forged a New York Life Insurance Company check.” The Pinkertons also fingered him for robbing a Boston jeweler of $4,000 in uncut gems several years earlier. Little Joe was speedily tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing. With touching loyalty, Kate Castleton continued to visit her husband in prison; with equally profound disloyalty, Elliott decided that this was the moment to cash in on the Gainsborough theft by betraying Adam Worth.

According to the Pinkerton files: “
While in prison he sent for Mr. Robt. A. Pinkerton, and tried to make terms with him for his release, offering to restore the Gainsborough portrait, and told Mr. Pinkerton the history of the robbery and the names of the parties connected with it. These facts were communicated to Mr. John Shore, Superintendent of Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, London, England, and only confirmed what Mr. Shore and the London Police Department had then suspected concerning who the perpetrators of the deed were.”

Elliott’s treachery was little help to him, since he had no idea of the whereabouts of the painting and “
could not control it or deliver it, as he claimed he could, [so] the matter was abandoned.” Scotland Yard had more respect for Worth than to imagine he would be rash enough to keep the painting on his premises, so while Elliott’s testimony was a useful confirmation of their suspicions, it was insufficient to nail the thief. It is not clear precisely at what point the Pinkertons and Superintendent Shore of the Yard became convinced that Adam Worth, alias Henry Raymond, was responsible for the deed, for it appears that Elliott was not the only person passing on information to the authorities. “
Gradually certain facts leaked out in regard to the robbery,” the Pinkertons recorded, “which put the London police in possession of information as to who the perpetrators of the robbery were, but they had only hearsay evidence and no proof whatever. Every possible ingenuity was used by Scotland Yard detectives to find the hiding place of the picture and fasten the crime on the thieves, but all efforts failed.”

With Worth “
back at the old stand” in Piccadilly, as Shore wrote to Pinkerton, the Scotland Yard detective was growing more and more frustrated at his inability to bring the thief to book. “
He became such a ‘bugaboo’ to the English police that they eventually tried to drive him out by stationing a policeman in front of his door, and watching and reporting everyone who entered his house.” But to no avail. Inspector Shore’s extreme measures came close to police harassment; at least that was how Worth chose to interpret such efforts to interfere in the smooth running of his criminal network. Worth believed he still owed Shore for arresting his brother, and this sort of victimization was quite intolerable. The time had come “
to get even with him”; Inspector Shore would have to be removed. A more brutal and less sophisticated man than Worth might simply have arranged for the Scotland Yard detective to be knocked on the head one dark night and thrown into the Thames, but that was not Worth’s style. He planned a far more witty and humiliating fate for the irritating detective.

Superintendent Shore may have been a prominent and powerful man in Scotland Yard, and a dedicated if rather plodding policeman. But he was also, like most characters in this tale, a man of double standards. He might represent the strict moral face of the English constabulary, but he was also a notorious womanizer and frequenter of London’s brothels. Shore maintained that he went to such places only to gather information, but Worth, and even William Pinkerton, knew better. As the American detective delicately put it, “
Shore was in the habit of what we would call in this country ‘chasing chippies’; that is, running after girls of a low order.”

Shore’s favorite brothel was run by one-legged Nellie Coffey, the widow of a burglar and pickpocket named Big Jack Casey who had been murdered some years before. Nellie had lost her leg in the New York riots, and now made her living, in Pinkerton’s words, by “
keeping a brothel or assignation house in the Borough, a low district of London.” On the side, for a consideration, she passed on useful information to John Shore, one of her most regular clients. They met often at a pub “
called the Rising Sun, at the head of Fleet Street in London, where they had private dining rooms … This woman had a fund of information and was very useful to him,” Pinkerton reported. “She told us everything that was going on around the drinking house of Bill Richardson, a resort for thieves, and all the gossip about London thieves.” Worth regarded underworld informers and Scotland Yard detectives as like species of vermin, so he now planned to put an end to Shore’s career and silence the overtalkative Nellie with a single blow.

Worth later told Pinkerton, in detail, of the plan by which he intended to rid himself of the persecuting Shore. “
He said they had gotten a broken down swell and located him at a neighboring place, paying his hotel bills, and had him there for weeks waiting an opportunity to catch Shore. This man was readied up to go and make a charge that a woman had robbed him of a piece of jewelry, which was supplied to him for this purpose, and some money. The woman was to have been traced to the house of Coffey, and an officer was to go into the house to arrest the woman and find her there with Shore. An exposure was to follow.” Shore would be disgraced, Coffey’s establishment would be closed, and Worth could carry on his nefarious business unimpeded.

The “old swell” was an elderly con man of good birth known to Worth for many years, who had recently fallen on hard times and taken to the bottle. For weeks Worth drilled the old thief in his role as a raffish gentleman who had fallen victim to a light-fingered whore. He deprived the old gent of alcohol and took him for long walks in London’s parks to clear his fuddled brain. And while Shore’s detectives were keeping watch on Worth’s movements, Worth’s spies were tailing the superintendent, with instructions to report back the moment Shore was seen going to Coffey’s brothel with a prostitute.

When word finally came that the detective was on his way to pegleg Nellie’s, Worth rushed to the hotel where his accomplice was being kept, only to find that the old man had left his post and repaired to a nearby pub, where he was now gloriously, incoherently plastered. So far from being able to give the police a convincing story, the ancient swell could not even stand up. As Worth later explained, with admirable detachment, “
he had got tired of waiting at his post and went off and got drunk.”

Instead of being angry, Worth seems to have found the entire episode hilarious. He paid off the old man, who, once sober, was most apologetic, and even told him he could keep the expensive suit he had bought him. Shore never knew how close he had come to disgrace, and although Worth made no further attempt to frame his adversary, the animosity continued to blaze between them.

Worth’s battle with Shore redoubled his determination to keep the Gainsborough, and he later claimed, not quite convincingly but as further proof of the link between his greatest theft and his hatred of the law, that “
had Supt. Shore treated him in a half-way decent manner that the picture would have gone back long ago.” William Pinkerton later asked Worth why he had expended so much energy trying to entrap a detective who was, after all, only doing his job. “
I told him I thought he was drawing a long bow on Shore,” Pinkerton recalled, but Worth’s response was adamant: Shore was an asinine, boozy sex maniac who “
would never have amounted to anything” without the Pinkertons to help him.

In spite of his prodigious generosity, when Worth felt he had been wronged or betrayed, he was implacable in exacting revenge; he regarded retribution as his right. One who learned this to his cost was the French banker Monsieur Meyer, who had caused the arrest of John Worth in 1876. Meyer had only been defending his interests, but Worth was deeply resentful, the more so when yet another of his associates was arrested as a result of Meyer’s vigilance. On a trip to Paris many years later, Worth was walking along the rue St.-Honoré when he passed the offices of Meyer & Co. Remembering the trouble Meyer had once caused him, Worth made some investigations and learned that the banker’s safe was a cinch to open and was, moreover, currently full. That night, 250,000 francs were stolen from Meyer’s vault. “
This robbery was perpetrated at night, the safe having been forced open with jimmies,” the Pinkertons reported. “Of this robbery Adam Worth was the originator, and it satisfied his vengeance as it ruined M. Meyer almost completely.”

As if the avid attentions of Scotland Yard and his continuing feud with John Shore were not enough, Worth faced another problem rather closer to hand: Junka Phillips was demanding to know what had happened to the Gainsborough, and insisting that if Worth would not sell it, he would. “
From time to time [he] had borrowed money from Worth for his interest in it,” but the bulky burglar had started to dun Worth for cash on a regular basis, and his formerly submissive attitude was becoming positively intimidating. Finally Worth told him he had sold off the Gainsborough painting “
for a bagatelle,” handed him £50 as his share, and told him there would be no more. But Junka, who made up in persistence what he lacked in intelligence, was not to be put off.

On the basis of the Gainsborough theft, Junka regarded himself as a master criminal in his own right, and tried to persuade Worth to finance a job of his own devising. Worth, he said, should provide money to a pair of crooked clerks in a bond office in London, who would repay the investment by lifting redeemable bonds “
not out of the vaults but by stealing from other clerks.” The threat of what would happen if Worth failed to underwrite the scheme was implicit. For a master criminal like Worth, such “sneak thieving” was small-fry and, given that he knew neither of Junka’s clerks and must rely on Junka’s word alone for their competence, extremely risky. He therefore “
refused to have anything to do with it.” Junka was livid and told Worth he did not believe the Gainsborough had been sold. “
Phillips demanded that the picture be produced and he would pay his indebtedness, and buy out Worth’s interest.” Again Worth declined, but to calm the enraged thug he agreed to meet him a few days later at the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, where they could talk over the situation. When the day of the rendezvous arrived, Worth, “
suspecting treachery, secretly took a position, watched Phillips’s movements, and found that he was accompanied by two well known detectives from Scotland Yard. Under the circumstances, neither Worth nor the picture put in an appearance.” Through Joe Elliott’s treachery, John Shore was already aware of Junka’s role in the theft, and with promises of leniency, and a monetary reward, the Scotland Yard detective had persuaded Junka to help him trap Worth.

Incensed by Junka’s duplicity, Worth planned his revenge with studied care. He sent a message to the English thief’s home, saying he had been unavoidably delayed, and arranged to meet him the next day. When Junka arrived at the Criterion Bar, he was accompanied by “
a fighting man” and in a most belligerent mood. A little way down the bar, Worth caught sight of Inspector Greenham of Scotland Yard, one of Shore’s trusted deputies, in heavy disguise and wearing the unmistakable expression of a man who is drinking alone but is straining every muscle to overhear what is being said. Clearly Junka thought he could trick his former patron into making an admission in front of a witness. While the fighting man stood a little way off, Junka began to accuse Worth of involving him in the theft of the Gainsborough painting. Worth listened politely as Junka tried to prod him into talking about the robbery, but uttered not a word. Subtlety not being part of Junka’s makeup, the hoodlum finally did what came most naturally; as Worth later recalled, he “
commenced to abuse him and struck him.”

For the first and only time on record, Worth broke his own cardinal rule. “
He jumped up and struck Junka fair in the eye, and Junka slipped and fell, and while he was down he kicked him in the head four or five times.” Under any other circumstances, Worth would have made a discreet exit and settled with Junka later, but this was a far remove from any normal commercial exchange. An uncouth Philistine was attempting to deprive him of his beloved
Duchess
, and in an upsurge of chivalry, Worth leaped to her defense. Even the most pacific of men feel justified in resorting to violence when a woman’s honor is at stake. And no one could accuse Worth of cowardice. Weighing in at just five feet four and 150 pounds, Worth had probably never hit anyone before in his life on the understandable basis that he was likely to be thrashed in return. Six-foot-four Junka, on the other hand, was a former wrestler and prone to violence, who could break a safe open with his bare hands. The sight of the dapper little man beating seven bells out of this colossus clearly stunned the fighting man into passivity, for he offered no assistance to his companion, and it was not until Inspector Greenham intervened and Worth was
pulled off his unconscious former bodyguard and butler that the bout ended. Realizing that he had been rumbled, Inspector Greenham gave up any pretense at disguise and “
denounced him for striking an old man like Junka.” Worth hotly responded that it “
looked to him like Junka had Greenham there for the purpose of involving him in trouble.” With that, Worth dusted off his jacket and stalked haughtily out of the bar.