The Napoleon of Crime (25 page)

On such special occasions Worth was prepared to participate in the action himself, but more usually he was content to be the financier, coordinator, and chief beneficiary of his schemes, leaving others to carry out the various forgeries, burglaries, and robberies that filled his bank account and inflated his ego. “
I made an average of £63,000 a year for three years,” he later bragged to an acquaintance. The English-born jailbird Eddie Guerin, fresh from the French penal colonies, visited Worth in London in 1887, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee, and was stunned to find his old friend and fellow felon transformed into a wealthy representative of the British upper class. “
If ever a man in this world could be pointed out as an exception to the rule that no crook ever makes money it was Adam Worth,” Guerin later mused. “He owned an expensive flat in Piccadilly, he entertained some of the best people in London, who never knew him for anything but an apparently rich man of a Bohemian nature.”

Sir Robert Anderson, the head of criminal investigation at Scotland Yard, rightly concluded that Worth’s criminal professionalism reflected a hatred of the Establishment just beneath his respectable veneer: “
he loved … to pit his skill and cunning against the resources of organised society; and this regardless, in some instances, at all events, of the actual pecuniary benefit accruing to himself.” Even Shinburn, in a rare moment of admiration, conceded that “
Raymond loved his work for its own sake: and although he lived in luxury and style, applied his energies to the last in organising crimes.”

Bank robbery remained a staple form of income and Worth made no secret of his belief that the bank he could not get into and the safe he could not crack had yet to be invented. “
From year to year the safemakers produced stronger and better safes, which they called burglar-proof safes,” Max Shinburn observed sardonically. “The crooks followed suit by inventing tools wherewith they were able to beat them … The Bankers of that period vied with each other to install burglarproof work in their banks, which they were ever ready to show with pride to their customers or to any passing crook.” On the pretext of wanting to place valuables under the protection of the latest technology, Worth would case the latest inventions and then pass the information on to his underlings, with the result that “
the burglar kept pace with the safemaker and was able to beat anything the latter could produce.”

It is easy to imagine Worth at the heart of this criminal web, “
one of the cleverest framers-up in the whole world,” in the words of a contemporary. Rich, cautious, and contented, he sits in a leather armchair, calculating his profits, his famous stolen painting always within reach, his icon of imposture. He flitted back and forth across the Atlantic at will, and while the London police sought to keep track of his movements he would often vanish completely for long periods.

“
It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco,” Oscar Wilde once observed, and, sure enough, early in 1886 the San Francisco chief of police reported that Worth had led “
a mob of all round crooks” to the West Coast for a fresh criminal spree. Knowing Worth’s refusal to brook betrayal of any sort, it seems clear he was as yet unaware of the perfidy of Little Joe Elliott, who had been released from prison the year before. Elliott now rejoined him, along with Dave Lynch and Dick Bradley, a brace of experienced thieves who had proved themselves in the past, and one Charlie Gleason, an elderly Australian convict. The gang made a rendezvous at Mulholland’s pub in New York City before heading West.

On January 9, this crew of “Eastern Experts” blew the safe of a Sacramento bank and extracted about $4,000. “
It was a clean job with no evidence to convict,” complained Captain I. W. Lees of the San Francisco Police Department to William Pinkerton. “Raymond seemed to be the moneyed man, and bought the Eastward bound tickets for the whole five. Joe [Elliott] also displayed at times, considerable money.”

After dividing the spoils, the gang broke up. Little Joe headed to Oakland to visit the parents of Kate Castleton, by whom he was still smitten, in the hope of a reconciliation with his former wife. “
He is still dead in love with Castleton and will show up wherever she is,” noted Guerin. “Castleton won’t have him, but Joe says she will weaken in the end.” She did. They remarried, but fought again—for Joe’s jealousy “
grew worse than ever.” This led to several embarrassing incidents, including one in which Joe “
slugged one of his wife’s admirers three times bigger than himself.” Finally they broke up for good and Joe became “absolutely reckless.” In 1889 Elliott was arrested in another forgery case and sentenced to fifteen years. As one criminal philosopher observed of the bizarre romance between the crook and the actress: “
It was surely the irony of fate that the first day he arrived in Auburn Prison to begin his term his beautiful wife should be starring at the local theater. The knowledge of it absolutely broke Joe’s heart; he never came out of jail alive.”

After a tense and dangerous “
dispute with the baggage man” in San Francisco, who tried and failed to get Worth to open his trunk (containing the
Duchess
), Worth had headed back East and recrossed the Atlantic. He did not travel directly to London, however, but disembarked at Ostend, where, by prearrangement, he met up with a group of his men, including Gleason and old John Carr.

Two weeks later, the gang struck again, this time lying in wait for a tram car transporting jewels and cash from Brussels to Ostend. When the tram stopped briefly in a siding, Worth’s gang “
twisted the lock off the car and got into the mail car and took the funds, which amounted to something like two million francs.” The Belgian police moved with surprising swiftness, and Worth was astonished and enraged to find himself among the dozens of potential suspects rounded up for questioning. Once again, bluster pulled him through: why, he asked his interviewers, would he bother to be involved in such a crime when, as a wealthy London sporting gentleman, he was winning a fortune at the card table? He showed evidence of his latest winnings as proof, and the police, with some reluctance but convinced of Worth’s affluence, allowed him to leave on the next boat for England—where the stolen money was waiting.

That same year the pregnant Kitty briefly suspended her trail of litigation in New York and also returned to Europe to settle with Juan Pedro in Paris. Their six years of marriage had been happy, and wildly self-indulgent, punctuated by expensive foreign trips, the sole purpose of which was the conspicuous display and disbursement of their wealth. There was nothing Worth, or for that matter the Prince of Wales, could teach Kitty about the pleasures of extravagance. Soon after taking a large apartment in the center of Paris, the Terrys received the news of the death of old Thomaso Terry. The Irish-Venezuelan adventurer turned Cuban-American magnate had finally succumbed to gout, leaving an estate worth some $50 million. With his share of the inheritance added to his already considerable fortune, Juan Pedro was now worth some $6 million. Sadly, he did not live to spend more of it or to enjoy his child. On October 17, 1886, the debonair Juan Pedro Terry, who had loved Kitty for her feisty personality and sharp tongue, inexplicably died while on a trip to Menton.

Now a widow and seven months pregnant, Kitty was distraught, though suddenly immensely wealthy in her own right. In his will Juan Pedro left Kitty one-fifth of his estate, the rest to be invested in securities, preferably U.S. government bonds, from which Kitty would derive the income until their unborn child came of age and inherited the lot. A baby daughter, Juanita Teresa, was born in Paris two months after Juan Pedro’s death. As soon as the child was old enough to travel, Kitty collected her money and headed back to New York with the avowed intention of spending it. Worth had no doubt heard of Kitty’s bereavement and windfall, for he continued to keep tabs on her every movement, but with a fortune of her own, a young daughter, and courtiers lining up by the score, she was now further from his reach than ever.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful criminal in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife. Worth had begun to tire of the bachelor life and yearned for the respectability of a solid Victorian marriage. One of the recipients of Worth’s fabled generosity was a poor but genteel widow who lived with her two daughters in Bayswater, where Worth had briefly taken lodgings. “
He became, in time, much attached to this woman and her children, and lavished every luxury on them, including the education of the girls in the best French schools. For years the family never suspected their benefactor was a criminal, but supposed him to be a prosperous diamond importer”—which, in a manner of speaking, he was.

When the older daughter’s education was completed, Worth asked for her hand in marriage, and was accepted with alacrity. Sophie Lyons, who was periodically employed by Worth to carry out petty thefts and other criminal work, did not think much of his choice. “
She was a beautiful woman, but a weak, clinging sort of creature—very different from strong self-willed Kitty. Although passionately fond of her, Raymond’s attitude towards her was always that of the devoted father rather than the loving husband.”

Lyons, who clearly carried a torch for Worth herself, clung to the belief that Worth never truly loved anyone but Kitty Flynn, and she was surely right. He was fond and protective of his young, rather feeble wife, and resolved that she should never learn of his true character, but after the loss of Kitty and, perhaps just as powerfully, his acquisition of Georgiana, Worth seemed to have lost his capacity for powerful emotional bonds, let alone genuine love. He seldom discussed his wife, even in his most confessional moments. To Pinkerton he referred to her in terms of wardship rather than marriage, as “
one of the little girls that lived in the lodgings where I used to live when I first came to London.” Indeed, most details concerning Mrs. Henry Raymond, including her name, remain mysterious, but in time she bore Worth two children, a son and a daughter, in 1888 and 1891, in blissful ignorance of her husband’s dishonesty. Theirs was not a grand passion such as Worth had known with Kitty, but by all accounts he was “
devotedly attached to her and squandered money on her in every way.” Worth still believed money could assuage all desires, and the marriage was another stark expression of his strange, fraudulent priorities: even to his wife he maintained an impenetrable mask of respectability, believing that, by so doing, he was behaving in a moral manner and protecting her from harm. When she finally discovered the truth, the effects were, inevitably, tragic.

Worth moved out of his bachelor apartment in Piccadilly and began to live full-time in the West Lodge by Clapham Common, a more appropriate home for a wealthy family man, “
standing in fine grounds of its own, and boasting a numerous but mysterious company of guests and a retinue of servants. Every one of them was his tried confederate; and none but such ever gained entry into the premises.”

Marriage seems to have subtly altered Worth’s attitude toward his stolen painting. Hitherto the portrait had never been far from his grasp: in London, he would sometimes stash it “
under the roof of a summer house at his place at Clapham Park”; while traveling, it came with him in the false-bottomed trunk, and when aboard
The Shamrock
“
he hid it in the chartroom amongst the logs.” The thought of surrendering the painting never crossed his mind, but he plainly felt uncomfortable keeping it in the marital home and so, at the end of 1886, he set out with the
Duchess
in his trunk to find her new and safe accommodation in America. It seems unlikely that the new Mrs. Raymond ever set eyes on her husband’s peculiar keepsake.

Taking with him “
the proceeds from the big Tramway robbery at Ostend,” and posing as a London bond broker traveling in the grandest possible style, Worth took the Allen Line ship for Canada with the
Duchess
, a cache of diamonds, and additional cash stashed in the bottom of his trunk. The trip was nearly a disaster, for unbeknown to Worth another criminal, a Swedish thief called Adolph Sprungley, was also on the boat.

In mid-Atlantic, Sprungley began breaking into passengers’ cabins and liberating them of various valuables while they dined, causing consternation on board. Worth did not want Sprungley, or for that matter the Canadian authorities, to find what was in the bottom of his trunk, so he decided to disembark at Rimouski and travel the rest of the way to Montreal by train.

The police, however, had carefully examined the ship’s manifest for any passengers making a sudden change of plan, and were waiting in Montreal when Worth’s train arrived. Spotting the Mounties as his carriage pulled in, Worth moved quickly and prised away one of the boards of the train carriage. He had deposited most but not all of the diamonds and cash in the partition when the train came to a halt. Mr. Raymond, protesting vehemently, was escorted from the platform to a waiting room. Bizarrely, the Canadian police failed to uncover the Gainsborough, but they did find the few gems remaining in his pockets and immediately arrested him as the steamship thief and impounded the diamonds.

Worth later recounted that “
he made a great bluff and demanded a solicitor and telegraphed to London for a firm of solicitors for reference.” Finally, with great reluctance, the French-Canadian police let him go, less, as he claimed, because he had “
scared them out of the thing” than because Worth’s diamonds did not match any of the items stolen from the ship. The gems were confiscated and Worth happily paid a fine for failing to declare them.

The police grudgingly apologized for detaining the now gracious Mr. Raymond, and firmly told him to leave the country immediately. But Worth was not heading south without the rest of his valuables. According to the Pinkertons, “
after his liberation, Worth succeeded in tracing the car on which he had left the jewelry, having taken the number of it, and when the car was put in the yard for the night, he entered it and regained possession of the missing diamonds, which he afterwards safely smuggled into the United States.” Delighted to have won his liberty, and generous as ever, Worth even gave a small diamond ring to the Pinkerton detective, George Skeffington, who had interrogated him but obligingly failed to recognize him in the Canadian jail. Worth “
would have given him more but was afraid of tipping his hand off as being a crook if he gave too much.” The scrape had cost him “
several thousand dollars’ worth” of diamonds, a small price to pay for his freedom. “
At a small cost of a few thousand I was able to save my principal,” or the bulk of his hoard, he later boasted.