The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
of banks and safes’, for which he inherited a taste from his grandfather, who was said to be a burglar ‘in a small way’. Bullard’s ‘dissipation and a restless craving for morbid excitement made him a “fly” [skilled] crook’ and later an uncommonly daring and wily burglar. In New York low society he was considered ‘one of the boldest operators that has ever handled a jimmy or drilled a safe’.
‘Bullard is a man of good education,’ recorded one admiring police report, ‘speaks English, French and German fluently, and plays on the piano with the skill of a professional.’ Raffish, refined and handsome, with a wispy goatee and limpid eyes, Bullard had three passions in life, each of which he indulged to the limit: women, music and gambling. Through constant practice on his baby grand, Piano Charley had developed such ‘delicacy of touch’ that he could divine the combination of a safe simply by spinning the tumblers, while his piano sonatas could reduce the hardest criminal to tears and lure the most chaste woman into bed.
‘An inveterate gamester’, perennially short of funds, often outrageously drunk but always charming, Bullard was one of the most romantic figures in the New York underworld. Under the benign eye of Marm Mandelbaum, he and Worth struck up an immediate rapport.
Piano Charley Bullard’s crime-sheet included jewel theft, train robbery and jail-breaking. Early in 1869 he teamed up with Max Shinburn and another professional thief, Ike Marsh, to break into the safe of the Ocean National Bank in Greenwich Village after tunnelling through the basement. The venture was said to have realized more than a hundred thousand dollars, almost all of which ended up in Shinburn’s pockets. ‘The robbers were nearly a month at the work, and the bank was ruined by the loss,’ the police reported. Later that year, on 4 May, Bullard had again conspired with Marsh to rob the Hudson River Railroad Express as it trundled from Buffalo in upstate New York along the New York Central Railroad to Grand Central Station. Knowing that the Merchant’s Union Express Co. used the train to transport quantities of cash, with the connivance of a bribed train guard they ‘concealed themselves in the baggage car … in which the safe was stored and rifled it of $100,000’. Bullard and Marsh then leaped off the train in the Bronx with the cash and negotiable securities stuffed into carpet bags. The guard was found bound and apparently unconscious, with froth dripping down his chin – this turned out to be soap, and the guard was immediately arrested.
The Pinkertons, whose reputation had expanded to the point where they were called in on almost every significant robbery, had traced the thieves to Toronto and found Ike and Charley living in high style in one of the city’s most expensive hotels. After a long court battle, Bullard was extradited to the United States and gaoled in White Plains, New York, to await trial. Using what little money remained to them, the Bullard family hired an expensive lawyer to defend their wayward son. Like Worth, Piano Charley never passed up a criminal opportunity and arranged for one of his many women friends to extract a thousand dollars (the entire fee) from his attorney’s pocket ‘as he was returning to New York on the train’.
It was almost certainly Marm Mandelbaum who decided that Piano Charley, whose music-making was such a popular feature of her dinner parties, should not be allowed to languish behind bars.
Worth, already a close friend of the gaoled man, was selected for the job of getting him out, along with Shinburn. It was the first and only time the two men would work together.
One week after he was imprisoned, Bullard’s friends dug through the wall of the White Plains gaol and set both Ike and Charley at liberty, whereupon the crooks promptly returned to New York City for a long, and in Bullard’s case staggeringly bibulous, celebration. The Baron was immensely pleased with himself. ‘Shinburn used to take more pride in the way he broke into the jail at White Plains, New York, to free Charley Bullard and Ike Marsh, two friends of his, than he did in some of his boldest robberies,’ Sophie Lyons recounted. But the immediate effect of the successful gaol break was to cement the burgeoning friendship between Bullard and Worth. Piano Charley had the sort of effortless elan and cultural veneer that Worth so deeply admired and sought to emulate. On the other hand, Worth was clever and calculating, qualities which the suave but foolish Bullard singularly lacked.
They decided to go into partnership.
THE BOYLSTON NATIONAL BANK in Boston was a familiar sight from Worth’s youth. The rich burghers of Boston believed their money was as safe as man could make it behind the bank’s grand façade, an imposing brick edifice at the corner of Boylston and Washington streets in the heart of the city. According to Sophie Lyons, Worth ‘made a tour of inspection of all the Boston banks and decided that the famous Boylston Bank, the biggest in the city, would suit him’. Max Shinburn would later claim to have had a hand in planning the robbery, but there is no evidence his expertise was either required or requested. Indeed, Shinburn’s exclusion from this ‘job’ may have been the original source of the enmity between him and Worth. Ike Marsh, Bullard’s rather dim Irish sidekick in the train-robbery caper, was brought in on the heist, which was, like all the best plans, perfectly straightforward. Posing as William A. Judson and Co., dealers in health tonics, the partners rented the building adjacent to the bank and erected a partition across the window on which were displayed ‘some two hundred bottles, containing, according to the labels mucilage thereon, quantities of “Gray’s Oriental Tonic”.’ ‘The bottles served a double purpose,’ the Pinkertons reported; ‘that of showing his business and preventing the public looking into the place.’ Quite what was in Gray’s Oriental Tonic has never been revealed since not a single bottle was ever sold.
After carefully calculating the point where the shop wall adjoined the bank’s steel safe, the robbers began digging. For a week, working only at night, Worth, Bullard and Marsh piled the debris into the back of the shop, until finally the ‘lining of the vault lay exposed’.
‘To cut through this was a work of more labor,’ the Boston Post later reported. ‘So very quiet was the operation that the only sound perceptible to the occupants of adjoining rooms was like that made by a person in the act of putting down a carpet with an ordinary tack hammer. The tools applied were [drill] bits or augers of about an inch in diameter, by means of which a succession of holes were drilled, opening into each other, until a piece of plate some eighteen inches by twelve had been removed. Jimmies, hammers and chisels were used as occasion required for the purpose of consummating the nefarious job.’ In the early hours of Sunday, 21 November 1869, Worth wriggled through the hole, lit a candle inside the bank safe and surveyed the loot. ‘The treasure was contained in some twenty-five or thirty tin trunks’, which Worth now handed back out to his accomplices one by one. ‘The trunks were pried open, their contents examined, what was valuable pocketed and what was not rejected.’ As dawn broke over Boston, the three thieves packed the swag into trunks labelled ‘Gray’s Oriental Tonic’, hailed a carriage to the station and boarded the morning train to New York.
At nine o’clock