The Napoleon of Crime (39 page)

At 9:30 on the morning of March 28, Morland made his way to Pinkerton’s office and the two men set out for Chicago’s First National Bank to cash the all-important check for $3,000, presumably the first installment of the ransom. “
That’s a lot of money to carry around in Chicago,” piped up the impertinent bank clerk when Morland handed over his check. Morland pointed to the hefty detective standing behind him, one of the most instantly recognizable people in the city. A thief would have to be foolish indeed, or blind, to rob a man under the personal protection of the Eye. “Oh, I guess you’ll be all right then,” said the cashier.

By ten o’clock the cash, in used bills, had been deposited in Pinkerton’s safe, on the understanding that it would not be handed over unless or until Morland Agnew had the painting in his hand. The two men then returned to the Auditorium Hotel, rejoined “Mother,” whose seasickness had now been replaced by nervous sickness, and waited.

“
As the hour approached at which it was stated that the picture would be returned I noticed Mr. Pinkerton became more and more nervous, even more nervous than I was myself,” Morland recalled. Pinkerton’s reputation was on the line. Had Worth had second thoughts? Was this some elaborate ploy to humiliate the detectives? Was the ingenious crook even now persuading the staff back at his office to hand over the money, before vanishing with the painting again?

“
About a quarter of an hour before the time appointed,” Agnew wrote in his diary, “Mr. Pinkerton, myself and Mrs. Agnew adjourned to the room upstairs where it had been agreed that the picture would be delivered. The few minutes we spent behind that closed door were just a trifle nerve-shattering, I can assure you. I smoked a cigar to help the time along.” The conversation died. Pinkerton stared at his watch. Morland puffed to conceal his agitation. Mrs. Agnew retched quietly.

“
By and by there came a knock at the door,” Agnew recalled.

“ ‘Come in,’ said Mr. Pinkerton, and the door opened on the instant. An
adult messenger was standing in the doorway, carrying a brown paper roll in his arm. ‘Mr. Agnew?’ he queried. ‘Yes,’ I replied, and held out my hand. The messenger handed me the roll in silence, and, as if he had been charged to deliver the most commonplace message in the world, at once turned on his heel and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.”

The “adult messenger” was almost certainly Adam Worth himself in heavy disguise and brazen to the last, playing his last great role. If Pinkerton recognized him, and there is no direct evidence that he did, the detective successfully masked his surprise.

Worth slipped back to his rooms at the Briggs House hotel.

“
When he had gone,” wrote Morland, “I took out my knife, cut the string with which the paper was tied and there, lightly wrapped in cotton-wool, lay the long-lost Gainsborough. Two minutes sufficed to convince me that it was the Duchess.”

Her travels had not dimmed the
Duchess
’s radiance, although Morland noted the jagged edge of the canvas where Worth had snipped out pieces to prove his theft so many years earlier. “The face, which is of wonderful beauty, is unhurt and, mutilated as it is, the picture is still of immense value and the highest interest.”

Pinkerton “
watched his features closely, and saw his eyes fill up for a moment.”

“
I looked up at detective Pinkerton and told him of the picture’s authenticity. Instantly he shook my hand and congratulated me heartily. Until that moment he himself had not been sure that the picture which it had been arranged would be returned to me in his presence was the identical one stolen from our gallery a quarter of a century ago.”

“Mrs. Agnew was equally grateful,” Pinkerton recorded courteously, but he urged the expert “to make no mistake,” telling him “he must use every possible test, measurement, etc. on the picture before he decided the matter … he then applied the different tests which are made use of to tell genuine pictures,” before turning again to the practical policeman.

“
I am positive the picture is the original one stolen from my father’s gallery,” he said.

“
Well, I am glad it is alright,” the detective responded. “I had made up my mind if it turned out a fake to burn the thing and wash my hands of the whole business.”

After this strangely moving moment, the two men were all bustle once more. Agnew at once dispatched a cable to his partners, obliquely announcing: “Have Secured A Gainsborough,” so that they could insure the painting. His use of the indefinite article was quite intentional. The method by which the portrait had been recovered was irregular, to say the least, and Morland had no intention of tipping off the authorities to what had taken place until the Gainsborough was safely back in Old Bond Street.

“
Then we went to a shop close by the hotel, where Mr. Pinkerton purchased some waterproof paper and two light boards. With these I made the picture up into a flat parcel and handed it over to the great detective.”

Relieved and elated, Pinkerton took the Agnews for the promised tour of the city before loading them, and the wrapped picture, on the 5:30 p.m. Limited Express to New York after another exchange of thanks and congratulations. “Must lose no time getting out of the country,” Morland wrote in his diary.

The art dealer, by his own admission, “took no special precautions to safeguard the canvas.”

“
I hung it up on a peg in the compartment and when leaving it to go to the dining car for dinner simply told the Negro attendant to keep an eye on our things,” he wrote. Although the painting was now in the proper hands, Pinkerton was aware that the hands that had stolen it were still at large, and he was taking no risks. The attendant was in the pay of the detectives, with instructions to guard the door to the Agnews’ cabin with his life. A Pinkerton detective was stationed at the other end of the carriage, just in case Worth changed his mind and decided to steal the painting back.

“
On arriving in New York we were met by two of Pinkerton’s men, to them I entrusted the precious parcel and was informed that they would sleep in the same room with it that night and bring it aboard the
Etruria
the next morning. We put up at the Holland House that night and next day boarded the
Etruria
just before the advertised sailing time. In my state cabin I received the Gainsborough from Pinkerton’s men. There was a cupboard in the cabin which I first padded with pillows to make a soft resting place for the Gainsborough. That cupboard was my only safe during the voyage.”

Bursting with his news though pledged to silence, Agnew wrote to his daughter from the steamer on March 31, telling her the entire strange story. “
Some 25 years ago a very beautiful picture by Gainsborough—a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire—was sold in London and bought by my father for a great price. It was stolen, and the justices have been after it more or less ever since. We never expected to get the picture back, but when its recovery is known, it will of course create a great sensation and we shall have all the world wanting to see it. We dared not even tell Grandpa [Sir William] what I was coming after, lest he should let out the secret and upset the whole business. How excited he will be when he hears!” Pinkerton had kept his word not to reveal Worth’s existence. “The thieves are dead,” Morland wrote, “and there is no chance of getting anyone punished now.”

He also wrote to Pinkerton, expressing “
our grateful acknowledgement for the splendid services you have rendered to the world in general and to ourselves in particular in the recovery of this long lost work of art.” Pinkerton would later claim $593.35 for his trouble.

A few days into the voyage, Morland could keep his secret no longer. “
I told the Purser what I had with me and later on I revealed the secret to the Captain. They and a well-known Catholic prelate were the only people aboard the
Etruria
who knew what I had with me. They all had a look at the picture.” One reason for the elaborate secrecy was the lingering fear “that the picture might be stolen” again, but Morland had additional motives for keeping the story out of the newspapers for the time being: “
If the customs officers wanted to be disagreeable they could have demanded that duty be paid on the picture and while they probably would not have forced collection, it might have caused a great deal of unnecessary trouble and delay.” In the space of a week Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
had been secretly smuggled into America and then smuggled out again. It was to be her last transatlantic crossing for many years.

The Agnews’ return journey was calmer, but Mrs. Agnew’s nerves had still not recovered from the outward voyage. “
Mother and some of the ladies are singing hymns,” Agnew noted, while continuing to point out the social deficiencies of his fellow travelers. “There are not many nice people on board, but many Yankees of a very common sort. The way they talk is horrible, especially the girls, and they have not an idea of behaving.”

It might have impaired Morland Agnew’s humor somewhat, as he sat in a self-congratulatory mood at the captain’s table, to discover that there was one other person on board the
Etruria
, in addition to his wife, the purser, the captain, and the “well-known Catholic prelate,” who knew exactly what the art dealer had hidden away in his padded cupboard. Fellow passengers would later describe this man as “
a decayed millionaire who crossed by the same boat,” a small, polite English gentleman who drank heavily, tipped the staff lavishly, and coughed horribly. Had he worn, for example, the attire of a messenger at Chicago’s Auditorium Hotel, then he would probably have caused the febrile Mrs. Agnew to have a heart attack, but the little man with the frock coat, gold chain, and pearl tie pin simply blended into the throng, notable only, perhaps, for the odd intensity with which he observed the art dealer and his wife.

Pinkerton later assured Agnew that he had “
arranged through our New York office to look the passengers on the steamer over on which you sailed to see that no American professional thieves were amongst them,” and out of offended pride he blasted as “
positively untrue” the many subsequent reports stating that Adam Worth had boarded the
Etruria
to return to England in the company of the portrait he had just relinquished. But this was almost certainly the case. The painting portrayed, not just a grand duchess, but Worth’s grand hoax, his arrogant success, and his abject failure. Now, a fading shadow, he followed it home.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Pierpont Morgan, the Napoleon of Wall Street

W
hile Adam Worth was accompanying the Gainsborough home for the last time, “
going back to England as quietly as he arrived,” another ardent suitor for the lovely
Duchess
was in hot pursuit, a man who had more in common with Worth than he would ever have cared to admit.

J. Pierpont Morgan, the Goliath of U.S. finance and perhaps the most powerful man in America, had long ago set his sights on the
Duchess of Devonshire
. A quarter-century earlier his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, had been prevented from purchasing the painting for his son when Worth “eloped” with it. Pierpont Morgan was determined to prevent the
Duchess
from slipping through his family’s hands a second time.

In the intervening years, the wealth of the House of Morgan had swelled from enormous to immeasurable. According to one estimate, the combined fortune of the Morgan empire and its associated companies would soon be worth more “
than the assessed value of all the property in the 22 states and territories west of the Mississippi.” In 1895 Morgan had organized a syndicate to support the U.S. gold reserve, thus stabilizing the American economy; he had forged America’s railways into a 33,000-mile network from coast to coast; he ran a company with 341 directorships in 112 corporations. In the same year that the
Duchess
was recovered, he had set up the U.S. Steel Corporation, the world’s largest financial conglomerate. There was nothing Morgan money could not do, and nothing Morgan money could not buy. Like a Renaissance prince, Morgan had crowned his stupendous fortune with an art collection beyond compare. From Paris to London to Luxor, he collected works of art like a magpie Ozymandias, buying up what ever caught his fancy, with barely a thought to the expense. The higher-brow cognoscenti whispered that his collecting was indiscriminate, the work of a barbarian with a bottomless bank account, but it would eventually become a hoard more magnificent and eclectic than any on earth.

Before leaving New York with the
Duchess
on the
Etruria
, Morland Agnew had sent a message to the Morgan mansion asking if the millionaire was in the market for the painting his father had once tried to purchase. But the tycoon was away on business. Morgan’s friend Bishop William Lawrence of Massachusetts described Morgan’s reaction on returning to New York and learning that the
Duchess
was available once again.

“
His butler said that a representative of the Messrs. Agnew had called and that he had ‘The Duchess of Devonshire’ with him.

“ ‘Where is he?’ asked Mr. Morgan. ‘I want to see him.’

“ ‘He is just going to sail for home and is gone,’ the butler replied.”

Morgan was not the sort to let the Atlantic stand in the way of his desires. “
I was determined to have that picture and I took the next ship for England,” Morgan recalled.

As he was rushing to disembark from New York, a cheeky young reporter spotted the financier and asked: “
Going to London, Mr. Morgan, to teach the English how to invest their money?”

“My boy,” Morgan replied, “the English know very well how to invest their money. It’s likely they’ll get some of mine before I come home.” Morgan had resolved to crown his collection with Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, whatever the price. Obtaining it would be a publicity coup of immense proportions, and thoroughly satisfy his dynastic pride.