The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
a man would be a rich and satisfying irony, not least because Worth, an avid collector of underworld gossip, may have known that the great moral arbiter of the age had himself led a double life of which his readers and admirers possessed not an inkling. Officially, on the night of his death, the worthy editor had ‘sat with his family and some friends until 10 o’clock, when he left them to attend a political consultation; and his family saw no more of him until he was discovered, about 2.30 the next morning, lying in the hallway unconscious and apparently dying.’ The truth was rather more dubious, for in reality Henry Jarvis Raymond, man of virtue, had died of a sudden coronary while ‘paying a visit to a young actress’. Adam Worth now decided that, whether Henry J. Raymond resided in the heaven reserved for great men or in the purgatory of the adulterer, he did not need his name anymore. On the voyage to England he adopted this impressive alias (replacing Jarvis with Judson, in memory of the name he used for the Boston robbery) and kept it for the rest of his life. It was one of Worth’s wittiest and least recognized thefts.
Early the next year, two wealthy Americans swaggered into the Washington Hotel in Liverpool and announced they would be occupying the best rooms in the house indefinitely, since they planned an extended business trip. The pair were dressed in the height of fashion with frock coats, silk cravats and canes. Two Yankee swells fresh off the boat and keen for entertainment, Mr Henry J. Raymond, merchant banker, and Mr Charles H. Wells, Texan businessman, headed for the hotel bar to toast their arrival in the Old World. Mr Raymond drank to the future, Mr Wells, as usual, drank to excess.
Behind the bar of the Washington Hotel, as it happened, their future was already waiting in the highly desirable shape of Miss Katherine Louise Flynn, a seventeen-year-old Irish colleen with thick blonde hair, enticing dimples in all the right places and a gleam in her eye that might have been mistaken for availability but was probably rather closer to raw ambition. This remarkable woman had been born into Dublin poverty and had fled her humble origins at fifteen, determined even at that early age that hers would be a very different lot. Hot-tempered, vivacious and sharp as a tack, Kitty craved excitement and longed for travel, cultured company and beautiful things. Specifically, she understood the value of money, and wanted lots of it.
Mercenary is an unkind word. Kitty Flynn was simply practical. The squalor and deprivation of her early years had left her with a healthy respect for the advantages of wealth and a determination to do whatever was necessary, within reason, to obtain them. In her present situation this involved enduring, and blowing back, the good-natured and flirtatious chaff of the hotel’s regular drinkers. But when these same patrons overstepped the mark and were foolhardy enough to suggest that Kitty might like to consider some more intimate after-hours entertainment, they were left in no doubt, by way of a stream of vivid Irish invective, that the barmaid considered herself destined for rather greater delights than they could offer. The steamer from Dublin to Liverpool had been the first stage in Kitty’s planned journey to fortune and respectability; her current job as a hotel barmaid was but a way-station along the route. The arrival of Messrs Raymond and Wells opened up new and enticing vistas. Knights in shining armour were few and far between in Liverpool, and two wealthy Americans with money to burn were clearly the next best thing.
‘She was an unusually beautiful girl – a plump, dashing blonde of much the same type [as the actress] Lillian Russell was years ago,’ recounted Sophie Lyons. She was, like all the best barmaids, buxom. Her blonde hair curled into ringlets reaching to the middle of her back, which were arranged in such a way that they appeared to have exploded from the back of her head. Her features were delicate, her nose snubbed, her lips full, but it was her eyes, startlingly blue and slightly distended, that tended to reduce her admirers to putty. In certain lights she looked like nothing so much as an exceptionally attractive frog: which was only appropriate since Kitty would shortly embark on a career in which, as in the fairy tale, she would be kissed by a variety of princes, Charming and otherwise. In the best surviving portrait of her (a coloured version of a picture by the great French photographer Felix Nadar) Kitty Flynn is wearing an expression that hovers between flirtatious and simply wicked.
That expression had an electric effect on the newest arrivals to the Washington Hotel in January 1870. It was never clear which of the two felons first lost his heart to Kitty, but that both did so, and deeply, was accepted as fact by all their contemporaries. Sophie Lyons is characteristically blunt on the matter: ‘Bullard and Raymond [she uses Worth’s real name and his alias interchangeably] both fell madly in love with her.’
For the next month Kitty was besieged by these two very different suitors – the one small, dapper, almost teetotal and intense, the other tall, lugubrious and, as the Pinkertons put it, ‘inclined to live fast and dissipate’. Suddenly Kitty found herself being wined and dined on a scale that was lavish even beyond her own extravagant dreams and that stretched Liverpool’s resources to the limit. In spite of their amorous rivalry, the two crooks remained the closest of friends as they swept Kitty from one expensive candlelit dinner to another, as Bullard serenaded her and Worth did his best to persuade her that he, rather than his exotic partner, represented the more solid investment. ‘The race for her favour was a close one,’ records the inquisitive Lyons, ‘despite the fact that Bullard was an accomplished musician [and] spoke several languages fluently.’ Finally Kitty gave in to Piano Charley’s entreaties, and agreed to marry him. Yet for Worth she always reserved a place in her heart and, for that matter, her bed.
Kitty Flynn became Mrs Charles H. Wells one spring Sunday. The ceremony was performed at the Washington Hotel and a large and curious crowd of Liverpudlians turned out to watch the toast of the city being driven away in a coach and four by her handsome American husband. Adam Worth was the best man and, Lyons reports, ‘to his credit it should be said that the bridal couple had no sincerer well-wisher than he.’ Worth had good reason for his equanimity since, although Kitty had agreed to marry Bullard, she seems to have been only too happy to share her favours with both men. If Bullard objected to this arrangement he did not say so. Indeed, he was hardly in a strong moral position to do so, for, unbeknown to Kitty, he was married already. It was not until some time later that Kitty discovered Bullard had a wife and two children living in America. Conceivably Worth used this information to blackmail Bullard into sharing his wife. But that was hardly his style, and as the relationship between the two crooks remained entirely amicable, it seems more likely that the accommodating Kitty Flynn, the broad-minded Bullard, and Worth, who never let convention get in the way of his desires, simply found a ménage à trois to be the most convenient arrangement for all parties.
While Kitty and Charley enjoyed a short honeymoon, Worth passed his time profitably by robbing the largest pawnshop in Liverpool of some twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery. The Pinkertons later gave a full account of the theft:
He looked around for something in his line, and found a large pawnshop in that city which he considered worth robbing … he saw that if he could get plaster impressions of the key to the place he could make a big haul. After working cautiously for several days he managed to get the pawnbroker off his guard long enough to enable him to get possession of the key and make a wax impression: the result was that two or three weeks later the pawnbroker came to his place one morning and found all of his valuable pieces of jewelry abstracted from his safe, the store and vaults locked, but the valuables gone. M
The robbery caused a minor sensation in Liverpool, where crime was rife but large-scale burglary rare. The Pinkerton account was written many years later, but seems to be largely accurate. Most of the bonds stolen from the Boylston Bank had now been ‘worked back’ to their owners and the bank had therefore decided to call off the costly detective agency, rightly concluding that the thieves were now beyond reach. But the Pinkertons continued to keep tabs, via a network of informers, on American criminals living abroad. In the coming years their information on Adam Worth and his activities as