The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
href="#litres_trial_promo">‘fairly thunderstruck at the scene which met their gaze’. The entire collection of safe-deposit boxes, and with them the solid reputation of the Boylston National Bank of Boston, was gone.
THE BOSTON POST
TUESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 23, 1869
Yesterday morning Boston was startled. There is no discount on the word. A robbery of such magnitude as that of the Boylston National bank – amounting to from $150,000 to $200,000, in fact – which was perpetrated sometime between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning, is something quite out of the ordinary run in the municipal affairs of this city, and nearly if not quite too much for ready credence. But the robbery stands indisputably a robbery; and, taken as an exploit, considered in its aspect as a job, as one artist considers the work of another, it is one of the most adroit which it has ever been the fortune or misfortune of the press to record. The almost uniformly successful manner in which this class of burglary has been carried on throughout the country during the past few months may lead to the inference that the party or parties in the present case will escape the arm of the law, although it is true that the prime originator is as well known as any criminal need to be. The infinite cleverness with which his operations have been conducted from beginning to end, indicate him to be a man of no ordinary ability, and it seems very probable that, having so far succeeded in eluding police, he may escape altogether. Should he do so, he will find himself a richer man, even, than he had perhaps anticipated … The name by which the criminal is known is William A. Judson.
The Boston Post, barely able to suppress its admiration, was conservative in its estimate. The Pinkertons believed that ‘nearly one million dollars in money and securities’ had been stolen by Worth and his accomplices, a sum confirmed by Sophie Lyons. In the premises of William A. Judson and Co. police found ‘a dozen bushels or more of bricks and mortar’, about thirty disembowelled tin trunks and two hundred bottles of Gray’s Oriental Tonic. For a week the Boylston Bank robbery was Boston’s sole topic of conversation. ‘Everyone continues to talk about the robbery of Boylston Bank,’ the Boston Post reported gloomily a few days later. ‘But nobody – or nobody that has anything real to say – communicated anything new. On all sides it is admitted to be a very neat job, all the way from the Oriental Tonic clear through to the Bank safe.’
It was indeed Worth’s neatest job to date, yet the very success of the venture, the huge amount of money involved and the stated determination of the authorities to track down the thieves (spurred on by a reward of 20 per cent of the haul) left Worth and Bullard with an obvious dilemma. To stay in New York and attempt to ‘work back the securities’ in the traditional way was to invite trouble since even Marm Mandelbaum would think twice about fencing such hot property. They could take the cash, abandon the securities and head west, where the frontier states offered obscurity and where the law was, at best, partially administered. But Worth and Bullard, with their taste for expensive living and sophisticated company, were hardly the stuff of which cowboys are made, and the prospect of spending their ill-gotten gains in some dusty prairie town where they might be murdered for their money was less than appealing. A more attractive alternative was to make for Europe, where extradition was unlikely and wealthy Americans were welcomed with open arms, and few questions were asked. Big Ike Marsh had already decided to take early retirement with his share of the loot. He returned to Ireland via Baltimore and Queenstown, and was received in Tipperary with grand ceremony, a local boy made good or, rather, bad. In the end, the Pinkertons reported, ‘he gambled, drank and did everything he should not have done, and eventually returned to America for more funds.’ Poor Ike was arrested while trying to rob another bank in Wellesborough, sentenced to twenty years’ solitary confinement in Eastern Pennsylvania and ended his life ‘an old man, broken down in health, dependent on the charity of friends’.
Worth and Bullard rightly surmised that the Pinkertons would be called in after such a large robbery. Indeed, just a week after the bank heist, the detectives had traced the thieves and their spoil to New York and documents in the Pinkerton archives indicate that Bullard and Worth, thanks to some loose talk in criminal circles, were the prime suspects. The news that they were wanted men rapidly reached the fugitives themselves. ‘Those damned detectives will get on to us in a week,’ Bullard warned Worth. ‘I don’t want to be playing the Piano in Ludlow Street [gaol].’
Acting quickly, the pair dispatched the stolen securities to a New York lawyer, possibly either Howe or Hummel, with instructions to wait a few months and then sell back the bonds for a percentage of their face value and forward the proceeds in due course. At the time this was an accepted method for recovering stolen property, winked at by the police, who often helped to negotiate the return of securities themselves, to the advantage of both the owners and the thieves. ‘All [the robbers] need do is to make “terms” which means give up part of their booty, and then devote their leisure hours to plan new rascalities,’ noted the Boston Sunday Times, one of the few organs to raise objections to this morally dubious collusion. ‘There must be something radically wrong in the police system of the country when such transactions of [sic] these can repeatedly take place.’
Worth and Bullard then hurriedly packed the remaining cash into false-bottomed trunks, bid farewell to Marm Mandelbaum, Sophie Lyons and New York, and took the train to Philadelphia where the S.S. Indiana, bound for England, was waiting to take them, in style, to Europe and a new life. For this they would need new names, and in high spirits in their first-class cabin the pair discussed how they would reinvent themselves. Bullard elected to call himself Charles H. Wells and adopt a new persona as a wealthy Texan businessman. Worth’s choice of alias was inspired.
That year had seen the untimely and much-lamented demise, on 18 June, of Henry Jarvis Raymond, the founder-editor of the New York Times. Senator, congressman, political conscience and stalwart moral voice of the age, Raymond had succumbed to ‘an attack of apoplexy’ at the age of forty-nine and his passing was the occasion for some of the most solemn adulation ever printed. A single obituary of the great man described him as: patriotic, wise, moderate, honourable, candid, generous-hearted, hard-working, frugal, conscientious, masterly, modest, courageous, noble, consistent, principled, cultivated, distinguished, lucid, kind, just, forbearing, even-tempered, sincere, moral, lenient, vivacious, enterprising, temperate, self-possessed, clear-headed, sagacious, eloquent, staunch, sympathetic, kindly, generous, just, suave, amiable and upright. The New York Times ended this adjective-sodden paean to its founder by declaring that Raymond was ‘always the true gentleman … in fact, we never knew a man more completely guileless or whose life and character better illustrated the virtues of a true and ingenuous manhood.’ The newspaper’s journalistic rivals agreed: the Evening Mail noted, ‘He was always a gentleman … true to his own convictions.’ The Telegram called him ‘one of the brightest and most gentlemanly journalists the New World has ever produced’, while the Evening Post also noted ‘he was a gentleman in his manners and language.’ The grave in the exclusive Green-Wood Cemetery of this man of integrity, this ethical colossus, was marked with a forty-foot obelisk in honour of his achievements and virtue. ‘Contemporary opinion has rarely pronounced a more unanimous, more cordial or more emphatic judgment than in the case of the departed chief of the New York Times,’ that paper declared.
Worth, already hankering after the respectability to go with his new wealth, had read these breathless accolades (few could avoid them) and the repeated references to the late Mr Raymond’s ‘gentle-manliness’