The Napoleon of Crime (5 page)

It was only natural that an ambitious and aspiring felon should make his way to New York and, once there, learn quickly. Determined to avoid returning to work as a mere clerk and hardened by his wartime experiences, Adam Worth took his place in the thieving throng. “
On account of his acquaintance with bounty jumpers, he finally became associated with professional thieves and crooked people generally, and from that time on his career was one of wrong doing,” Pinkerton glumly recounted.

Worth soon found himself in the Bowery, in Manhattan, an area of legendary seediness and home to a large and thriving criminal community which was divided, for the most part, into gangs: the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Slaughter Housers, the Buckaroos, the Whyos, and more. Many of these gangsters were merely exceptionally violent thugs whose criminal specialties extended no further than straightforward mugging, murder, and mayhem, often inflicted on one another and usually carried out under the influence of prodigious quantities of alcohol laced with turpentine, camphor, and any other intoxicant, however lethal, that happened to be on hand.

“
Most of the saloons never closed. Or they did for just long enough to be cleaned out and then to begin afresh drinking, fighting, cursing, gambling, and the Lord only knows what,” recalled Eddie Guerin, a useless crook but a successful memoirist who would eventually become Worth’s friend and colleague. The three thousand saloons noted with distaste by Bishop Simpson and others in post-bellum New York included such euphonious establishments as the Ruins, Milligan’s Hell, Chain and Locker, Hell Gate, the Morgue, McGurk’s Suicide Hall, Inferno, Hell Hole, Tub of Blood, Cripples’ Home, and the Dump. But if the nomenclature of the dives was indicative of the immorality therein, the names of the clientele were still more telling: Boiled Oysters Malloy; Ludwig the Bloodsucker, a vampire who had hair “
growing from every orifice”; Wreck Donovan; Piggy Noles; the pirate Scotchy Lavelle, who later employed Irving Berlin as a singing waiter in his bar; Eat-em-up Jack McManus; Eddie the Plague; Hungry Joe Lewis, who once diddled Oscar Wilde out of $5,000 at banco; Gyp the Blood; the psychotic Hop-Along Peter, who tended, for no reason anyone could explain, to attack policemen on sight; Dago Frank; Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her teeth to points and had sharp brass fingernails; Pugsy Hurley and Gallus Mag, a terrifying dame who ran the Hole-in-the-Wall saloon and periodically bit the ears off obstreperous customers and kept them in a pickling jar above the bar, “pour encourager les autres”; Big Jack Zelig, who would, according to his own bill of fare, cut up a face for one dollar and kill a man for ten; Hoggy Walsh, Slops Connally, and Baboon Dooley of the Whyos gang; One-Lung Curran, who stole coats from policemen; Goo Goo Knox; Happy Jack Mulraney, who killed a saloonkeeper for laughing at the facial twitch which led to his sobriquet; brothelkeepers Hester Jane the Grabber Haskins and Red Light Lizzie, and the unforgettable Sadie the Goat, a river pirate and leader of the Charlton Street Gang, which occupied an empty gin mill on the East Side waterfront and terrorized farms along the Hudson River.

According to Herbert Asbury, whose 1928
Gangs of New York
is probably the best book ever written on New York crime, “
Sadie [the Goat] acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess money or valuables, to duck her head and butt him in the stomach, whereupon her male companion promptly slugged the surprised victim with a slung-shot and they then robbed him at their leisure.” (For reasons unknown but not hard to imagine, Sadie fell afoul of the formidable Gallus Mag of the Hole-in-the-Wall, who bit off her ear, as was her wont. But the story has a happy ending: the two women eventually became reconciled, whereupon gallant Gallus fished into her pickle jar, retrieved the missing organ, and returned it to Sadie the Goat, who wore it in a locket around her neck ever afterward.)

Sophie Lyons, the self-styled Queen of the Underworld, whose remarkable memoirs are a crucial source of information on Worth’s life, was held by Asbury to be “
the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced.” She eventually went straight, began writing her salacious and partly fabricated accounts of New York lowlife for the city newspapers, and ended up as America’s first society gossip columnist.

Into this colorful and horrific world, Adam Worth slipped quickly and easily. At the age of twenty, now complete with his own criminal moniker, Little Adam became a pickpocket.

“
Picking pockets has been reduced to an art here, and is followed by many persons as a profession,” noted the author of
Secrets of the Great City
in 1868. “It requires long practice and great skill, but these, once acquired, make their possessor a dangerous member of the community.” Sophie Lyons, who became Worth’s close friend and sometime accomplice, described how Little Adam took to the apprentice criminal’s art: “
Like myself and many other criminals who later achieved notoriety in broader fields, he first tried picking pockets. He had good teachers and was an apt pupil. His long, slender fingers seemed just made for the delicate task of slipping watches out of men’s pockets and purses out of women’s hand-bags.”

As an apprentice pickpocket, Worth found himself in an intensely hierarchical world. The lowest level of pickpocket was a “thief-cadger,” inexperienced youngsters often virtually indistinguishable from beggars; of slightly more consequence were the “snatchers,” who, as the name implies, made no attempt to avoid detection but simply grabbed and ran, or “tailers,” who specialized in extracting silk handkerchiefs from tailcoat pockets. The most developed of the species was the “hook,” also known as a “buzzer,” for whom picking pockets was an art requiring considerable daring and manual dexterity. Nimble and inconspicuous, Worth began as a “smatter-hauler” or handkerchief thief, but soon the Civil War veteran graduated to a full-fledged “tooler,” a master of the art of “dipping.” Churches were particularly profitable hunting grounds, as were ferry stations, theaters, racecourses, political assemblies, stages, rat fights, and any other place containing large numbers of distracted people in close proximity.

While lone pocket-dipping could be profitable, the most successful pickpockets worked in gangs, and Worth’s talents ensured that “
it was not long before he had enough capital to finance other criminals.” Teaming up with some like-minded fellows, Worth now established a dipping syndicate, with himself as principal coordinator, banker, and beneficiary. It was, proclaimed Lyons, “
the first manifestation of the executive ability which was one day to make him a power in the underworld,” a Napoleon of ne’er-do-wells.

The technique for team-dipping, or “pulling,” was well established. A prosperous-looking “mark” is selected: he is then jostled or bumped by the “stall”; while the mark is thus distracted, the “hook” (sometimes known as the “mechanic”) quickly rifles or “fans” his pockets, immediately passing the proceeds to a “caretaker” or “stickman,” who then moves nonchalantly in another direction. Charles Dickens described the maneuver in
Oliver Twist:
“
The Dodger trod under his toes, or ran upon his boot accidentally, while Charley Bates stumbled up against him behind: and in that one moment they took from him with extraordinary rapidity, snuff box, note-case, watchguard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket handkerchief, even the spectacle case.” The “mark,” in this case, was none other than Fagin himself, the paterfamilias of dippers.

With his efficient team of purse snatchers, Worth was fast becoming a minor dignitary in the so-called swell mob, as the upper echelon of the underworld was known, and according to Lyons he soon acquired “
plenty of money and a wide reputation for his cleverness in escaping arrest.” But no sooner had Worth’s criminal career begun to blossom than it came to a sudden and embarrassing halt. Late in 1864, Worth was arrested for filching a package from an Adams Express truck and summarily sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Sing Sing, the notoriously nasty New York jail just north of the city, on the banks of the Hudson River.

Worth’s brief incarceration for bounty jumping had not prepared him for the extravagant horror of the “Bastille on the Hudson.” In 1825 the prison’s first warden, a spectacular and inventive sadist by the name of Elam Lynds, remarked, “
I don’t believe in reformation of the adult prisoner … He’s a coward, a willful lawbreaker whose spirit must be broken by the lash.” In 1833 Alexis de Tocqueville described Sing Sing as a “
tomb of the living dead,” so silent and cowed were its inmates.

Clad in the distinctive striped prison garb instituted by Lynds, Worth was sent with the rest of the convicts to the prison quarries, where he was put in charge of preparing the nitroglycerin for blasting. Many years later, Worth recalled how he was instructed by the foreman to heat the explosive when it became cold and brittle in the freezing air. This he did, grateful for the chance to warm his hands, and was lucky not to be blown to pieces, for, as he frankly admitted, he “
never had an idea at that time how dangerous it was.” Teaching hardened criminals how to handle nitroglycerin was not perhaps the brightest move on the part of the authorities, as Worth’s safecracking skills in later years so clearly proved.

The man who had slipped his chains on the Potomac, who had made a craft out of desertion, was not going to suffer Sing Sing a moment longer than necessary, even though the prison’s guards, a breed of breathtaking brutality, had orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. As he worked, Worth calculated the movements of the guards, and after only a few weeks of prison life, he dropped out of sight while the guard shift was changing. He hid inside a drainage ditch, which “
discharged itself inside the railway tunnel.” Under cover of night, according to a contemporary, “
he managed to get a few miles down the river where there lay at a dock some canal boats,” in one of which, freezing and covered in mud, Worth hid, and “
had the satisfaction a few hours after that, of having himself transported to New York City by a tug boat, which came up to fetch the canal boat in which he took refuge.” At dawn, as the tug approached its “
lonely dock far up on the West side of the city,” Worth clambered into the water and swam back to shore. “
He managed, although having his prison clothes on, to get to the house of an acquaintance, where he was provided with a suit of clothes.” He immediately plunged back into the protective anonymity of the Bowery.

Worth’s later insouciance when recalling this escape belied what must have been a dreadful, if formative, experience. At barely twenty years of age, he had seen the worst the American penal system had to offer, and his contempt for authority was formidable. That Worth did not hesitate to plunge into a churning river at dead of night, clad in prison clothes and aware that apprehension might well mean death, reflected both his physical toughness and a growing faith in his own invincibility. So far from being reformed by his brief and unpleasant experience of prison, Worth concluded that the life of a “dip” did not offer sufficient rewards, given its perils, and the time had come to change direction, to up the stakes in his personal vendetta against society. Reuniting with some of his former gang, Worth began to expand his scope of operations to include minor burglaries and other property thefts as well as picking pockets. His “word
was law with the little group of young thieves he gathered around him,” remembered Sophie Lyons. “
He furnished the brains to keep them out of trouble and the cash to get them out if by chance they got in. Every morning they would meet in a little Canal Street restaurant to take their orders from him—at night they came back to hand him a liberal share of the day’s earnings.”

So far, Worth’s activities had gone no further than what might be called disorganized crime. Henceforth, he would tread more carefully, delegating often and putting himself at risk only when the rewards, or promise of adventure, were greatest. His strict dominance over the gang was the first illustration of a power complex that would grow more pronounced with age. Criminals, it is fair to say, are not the most intellectual of people. Indeed, the class as a whole tends to be characterized by fairly intense stupidity. Worth’s highly intelligent approach to the business, and his ability to get results in the form of hard cash, was enough to ensure the obedience, even the reverence, of his underlings.

Solvent for the first time in his life, Worth was determined to beat the odds at every level, and this soon led him to New York’s roulette wheels, gambling dens, and the faro tables—that extraordinarily chancy game that was once the rage of gamblers and has since virtually disappeared. Betting heavily in the burgeoning belief that the more he dared, the more fortune would smile, he began to live the life of a “sportsman,” moving away from the grim Bowery dives to the brighter, more luxurious, but no less dissipated lights of uptown New York and the famously seedy glamour of the Tenderloin district.

Worth’s native intelligence was not the only character trait to distinguish him from his fellow crooks. He was also notable for avoiding strong drink, at a time when alcoholism was endemic and heavy drinking virtually obligatory among the criminal classes. Perhaps still more strange, he regarded violence as uncouth, unnecessary, and, given his limited physical stature, unwise.

Of the 68,000 people arrested in New York in 1865, 53,000 were charged with crimes of violence. Yet Worth made it a rule that force should play no part in any criminal enterprise that involved him, a rule he broke only once in his life. His rejection of alcohol and violence was itself part of a need to control, not just himself, but those within his power. Crooks who drank or fought made mistakes, and for that reason he steered clear of the established gangs, which were often little more than roving bands of pickled hoodlums at war with each other.

Worth was not content merely to organize his minions; he needed to rule, regulate, and reward them as he clawed his way up through the underworld. A sober, resourceful, nonviolent crook marshaling his forces amid a troop of ignorant, drunken brawlers, Worth was also exceptional for the scope of his criminal aspirations, or, to put it another way, his greed. Sophie Lyons took note of his “
restless ambition” as he began his ascent into the criminal upper classes.