The Napoleon of Crime (6 page)

One of America’s senior crooks later recorded that “
the state of society created by the war between the North and the South produced a large number of intelligent crooks” of varied talents, but in post-bellum New York bank robbers were considered an aristocracy of their own. James L. Ford, an expert on—by participation in—New York’s seamy side, said in his memoirs: “
Such operations as bank burglary were held in much higher esteem during the ’sixties and ’seventies than at present, and the most distinguished members of the craft were known by sight and pointed out to strangers.” Allan Pinkerton, the father of Worth’s future adversary, in his 1873 book
The Bankers, the Vault and the Burglars
, observed that “
instead of the clumsy, awkward, ill-looking rogue of former days, we now have the intelligent, scientific and calculating burglar, who is expert in the uses of tools, and a gentleman in appearance, who prides himself upon always leaving a ‘neat job’ behind.”

Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin argued that “
a successful bank sneak requires to be well-dressed and to possess a gentlemanly appearance.” Sophie Lyons concurred, noting also that a certain amount of professional snobbery existed in the upper ranks of crime. “
It was hard for a young man to get a foothold with an organized party of bank robbers, for the more experienced men were reluctant to risk their chances of success by taking on a beginner.”

Without success, Worth sought acceptance in such established bank-robbing cliques as that of George Leonidas Leslie, better known as “Western George,” which was responsible for a large percentage of the bank heists carried out in New York between the end of the war and 1884. Sophie Lyons first encountered Worth when he was “
itching to get into bank work,” specifically through her husband, Ned Lyons, a noted burglar. But the veteran crooks turned down all advances from the aspiring newcomer.

Worth needed a patron, someone to provide him with an entrée to the criminal elite. He found one in the mountainous figure of Marm Mandelbaum.

FOUR

The Professionals

C
ontemporary writers reached for superlatives when describing Fredericka, better known as “Mother” or Marm, Mandelbaum. “
The greatest crime promoter of modern times,” the “
most successful fence in the history of New York,” and the individual who “
first put crime in America on a syndicated basis” are just a few of the plaudits she garnered in a long, unbroken career of dishonesty.

Marm’s nickname was a consequence of her maternal attitude toward criminals of all types, for her heart was commensurate with her girth. She was an aristocrat of crime, but unlike the object of Worth’s later affections—namely, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire—Marm Mandelbaum was no oil painting. “
She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a sharply curved mouth and extraordinarily fat cheeks, above which were small black eyes, heavy black brows and a high sloping forehead, and a mass of tightly rolled black hair which was generally surmounted by a tiny black bonnet with drooping feathers.”

Like Worth, Fredericka had emigrated from Germany to the United States in her youth, arriving “
without a friend or relative,” but far from defenseless. Sophie Lyons, who adored Marm, noted that “
her coarse, heavy features, powerful physique, and penetrating eye were sufficient protection and chaperone for anyone,” adding unkindly (but no doubt accurately) that “it is not likely that anyone ever forced unwelcome attentions on this particular immigrant.”

Soon after she got off the boat, the formidable Fredericka had fixed her beady eye on one Wolfe Mandelbaum, a haberdasher who owned a three-story building at 79 Clinton Street in the Kleine Deutschland section of Manhattan’s East Side. A weak and lazy fellow, Wolfe was “
afflicted with chronic dyspepsia.” A few weeks of Fredericka’s voluminous but easily digestible cooking persuaded him to marry her, and “
Mrs Mandelbaum forever afterward was the head of the house of Mandelbaum.”

While still nominally a haberdasher’s, the property on Clinton Street was turned by Marm into the headquarters of one of the largest fencing operations New York has ever seen. She started by selling the “
plunder from house to house,” and in a few years had built up a vast business which “
handled the loot and financed the operations of a majority of the great gangs of bank and store burglars.” Warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to hide the stolen goods, and the unscrupulous lawyers Howe and Hummel were on an annual retainer of five thousand dollars to ensure her continued liberty, principally through bribery, whenever “
the law made an impudent gesture in her direction.” Most of Marm’s business was fencing, but she was not above financing other crooks in their operations and was even said to have run a “Fagin School” in Grand Street, not far from police headquarters, “
where small boys and girls were taught to be expert pickpockets and sneak thieves.” A few outstanding pupils even went on to “
post-graduate work in blackmailing and confidence schemes.”

Marm Mandelbaum is first listed in police records in 1862, and over the next two decades she is estimated to have handled between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 worth of stolen property. Criminals adored her. As the celebrated thief Banjo Pete Emerson once observed, “
she was scheming and dishonest as the day is long, but she could be like an angel to the worst devil so long as he played square with her.” As the fame, fortune, and waistline of Mrs., soon to be the widow, Mandelbaum (Wolfe’s dyspepsia having returned with a vengeance) grew, so too did the extravagance of her life-style and her social ambitions. The two floors above her center of operations “
were furnished with an elegance unsurpassed anywhere in the city; indeed many of her most costly draperies had once adorned the homes of aristocrats, from which they had been stolen for her by grateful and kind-hearted burglars.” There Marm Mandelbaum held court as an underworld
saloniste
, and “
entertained lavishly with dances and dinners which were attended by some of the most celebrated criminals in America, and frequently by police officials and politicians who had come under the Mandelbaum influence.”

“
I shall never forget the atmosphere of ‘Mother’ Mandelbaum’s place,” Sophie Lyons recalled wistfully, for here congregated not merely burglars and swindlers, but bent judges, corrupt cops, and politicians at a discount, all ready to do business. Such criminal notables as Shang Draper and Western George came to sit at Marm’s feet, and she repaid their homage by underwriting their crimes, selling their loot, and helping those who fell afoul of the law. In a profession not noted for its generosity, Marm was an exception, retaining “
an especial soft spot in her heart for female crooks” and others who might need a helping hand up the criminal ladder. Marm was an equal-opportunities employer and a firm believer that gender was no barrier to criminal success, a most enlightened view for the time, of which she was herself the most substantial proof. She did not, however, brook competition, and when one particularly successful thief called Black Lena Kleinschmidt stole a fortune, moved to Hackensack (more fashionable then than now), and began putting on airs and giving dinner parties, Marm was livid. She was thoroughly delighted when Black Lena was exposed as a jewel thief and jailed after one of her dinner guests noticed his hostess was wearing an emerald ring stolen from his wife’s handbag a few weeks earlier. “
It just goes to prove,” Marm Mandelbaum sniffed, “that it takes brains to be a real lady.”

At the time that Worth was desperately seeking a way into the criminal big leagues, Marm Mandelbaum was an established legend and arguably the most influential criminal in America. “
The army of enemies of society must have its general, and I believe that probably the greatest of them all was ‘Mother’ Mandelbaum,” observed Sophie Lyons, who had taken a shine to young Worth and probably introduced him into Marm Mandelbaum’s charmed criminal circle.

Worth became a regular at the Mandelbaum soirées, and it was almost certainly under her tutelage that he made his first, disappointing foray into bank robbery. In 1866 Worth and his brother John broke into the Atlantic Transportation Company on Liberty Street in New York and spent several hours attempting to blow open the safe, before leaving in frustration as dawn broke. Lyons recounts his “
great disgust” at the failed heist.

Undaunted, Worth, after a year of organizing some lesser thefts, and now working alone, pulled off his first major robbery by stealing $20,000 in bonds from an insurance company in his home town of Cambridge. Marm Mandelbaum, who could fence anything, from stolen horses to carriages to diamonds, obligingly sold them at a portion of their face value—giving Worth her customary ten percent and pocketing the rest. He was hardly made a rich man by the robbery, but it was a start, and the minor coup effectively “
established him as a bank burglar” among his peers. Before long, Worth had gained a reputation as “
a master hand in the execution of robberies,” and stories of his “sang-froid” began to circulate in the underworld.

Worth seems to have delighted in sailing as close to the wind as he could, and with every near-escape his contempt for the forces of law and order was confirmed and amplified. As the detectives Eldridge and Watts later recounted: “
Once, after robbing a jewelry store in Boston, this daring burglar slipped out of the front door, only to meet a policeman face to face. Without an instant of tremor, this man of iron nerve politely saluted the officer and stepped back to re-open the door and coolly call to his confederate within: ‘William, be sure and fasten the door securely when you leave! I have got to catch the next car.’ So, indeed, he did, after bidding the officer a pleasant good night, but he hopped off the car, a few blocks beyond the store, slipped back stealthily, signalled to his confederate and both escaped with their booty.”

An avid pupil, Worth appears to have found in Marm Mandelbaum both an ally and a role model. The easy way she farmed out criminal work to others, her lavish apartments and social graces, were precisely the sort of things he had in mind for himself. Above all, it was perhaps Marm who taught the lesson that being a “real gentleman” and a complete crook were not only perfectly compatible but thoroughly rewarding. Marm’s dinner table offered an atmosphere of illicit luxury, where superior crooks could enjoy the company of men and women of like lawless minds.

Two of Marm’s guests in particular would play crucial although very different roles in Worth’s future. The first was Maximilian Schoenbein, “alias M. H. Baker, alias M. H. Zimmerman, alias The Dutchman, alias Mark Shinburn or Sheerly, alias Henry Edward Moebus (according to the Pinkerton files),” but most usually alias Max Shinburn, “
a bank burglar of distinction who complained that he was at heart an aristocrat, and that he detested the crooks with whom he was compelled to associate.” For the next three decades, the criminal paths taken by Adam Worth and Max Shinburn ran in tandem. The two lawbreakers had much in common, and they came to loathe each other heartily.

Shinburn was born on February 17, 1842, in the town of Ittlingen, Württemberg, where he was apprenticed to a mechanic before emigrating to New York in 1861. Styling himself “The Baron” from early in life, Shinburn later actually purchased the title of Baron Schindle or Shindell of Monaco with “
the judicious expenditure of a part of his fortune.” Aloof, intelligent, and insufferably arrogant, the Baron cut a wide swath through New York low society. Even the police were impressed.

Inspector Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department considered him “
probably the most expert bank burglar in the country,” and Belgian police offered this description of the soigné, multilingual felon: “
Speaks English with a very slight German accent. Speaks German and French. Always well dressed. He has a distinguished appearance with polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.” Shinburn’s looks were striking; he had “
small blue penetrating eyes, long, straight nose, moustache and small imperial, both of brownish color mixed with gray, moustache twisted at the ends, pointed chin … at times wears a full beard and sometimes a moustache and chin whisker, in order to hide from view the pronounced dimple in chin.” His numerous encounters with the law and a youthful taste for dueling had left him with numerous other identifying features. After one arrest, a police officer noted these with grisly exactitude: “
on back of left wrist … pistol shot wounds running parallel with each other and near the deformity in right leg … pistol or gunshot wound on left side … several small scars that look like the result of buck shot wounds; scar on left side of abdomen, appearing as though shot entered in the back and came through …” Shinburn’s fraudulent aristocratic claims were full of holes, and so was the rest of him.

His criminal notoriety sprang principally from the invention of a machine which he maintained could reveal the combination of any safe: “
a ratchet which, when placed under the combination dial of a safe, would puncture a sheet of calibrated paper when the dial stopped and started to move in the opposite direction. He would repeat this process until he had the entire combination.” According to other police sources, “
his ear was so acute and sensitive that by turning the dial he could determine at what numbers the tumblers dropped into place.”

With his mechanical training, Shinburn also perfected a set of light and powerful safecracking tools which he was prepared to sell to others for a price. “
Shinburn revolutionized the burglar’s tools and put them on a scientific basis,” recorded Sophie Lyons. The better to perfect his safe-busting technique, the Baron “
for some time took employment under an assumed name in the works of the Lilly Safe Co. [whose] safes and vaults were considered among the best and most secure.” But not for long. Leaving a trail of empty safes in his wake, Shinburn was eventually penalized through his own competence and the Lilly safe “
came into such disrepute that the company was forced into liquidation.”