The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre

      PARIS FURNISHED stark evidence of that peculiar brand of double standards Worth would absorb and adapt: under the Second Empire, a woman could be arrested for smoking in the Tuileries gardens but personal immorality was almost de rigueur. The surface was magnificent, but corruption and libertinism were rampant. Entrepreneurs speculated, hedonists indulged and English visitors railed about the ‘badness of the morals’. The great gay façade of the Second Empire had come tumbling down with the crushing of the French armies by the Prussian military machine, and more than twenty thousand people had died in the horrific violence of the Commune that followed the crippling siege of the city. Worth, Bullard and Kitty travelled slowly south through England and then tarried in London to await the outcome of the bloody events taking place in Paris, before making their way across the Channel at the end of June 1871. They found a city exhausted and partially in ruins, disordered and vulnerable, but still glamorous in her devastation: a perfect spot from which to co-ordinate fresh criminal activities, with plenty to satisfy the trio’s extravagant tastes. As a later historian observed, ‘France is an astonishingly resilient patient and now – shamefully defeated, riven by civil war, bankrupted by the German reparation demands and the costs of repairing Paris – she was to amaze the world and alarm her enemies by the speed of her recovery.’ Here, Worth saw, were rich pickings. His namesake Charles Frederick Worth, the famed couturier, had ‘bought up part of the wreckage of the Tuileries to make sham ruins in his garden’; now another Worth would also make his mark in the remnants of the devastated city, where, for the time being at least, the authorities were far too busy washing blood off the streets and piecing together the capital to pay much attention to the newly arrived triumvirate.

      In later years Kitty would claim, unconvincingly, that she had no idea her husband and his partner were notorious international criminals. It must have been clear from the outset that her charming spouse and his friend were hardly respectable businessmen, since they paid for everything in wads of cash, did no work whatever and never discussed anything approaching legitimate business. Kitty’s part in the next stage of the drama indicates that she was involved in their criminal activities up to her shell-like ears.

      With the remains of the money from the Boston robbery, Bullard and Worth purchased a spacious building at 2 rue Scribe, a part of the Grand Hotel complex next to the Opéra, under the name Charles Wells, and rented large and comfortable apartments nearby. The new premises, christened the American Bar, were refurbished in ‘palatial splendour’ at a cost of some seventy-five thousand dollars, with oil paintings, mirrors, and expensive glassware. American bartenders were imported to mix exotic cocktails of a type popular in New York but ‘which were, at that time, almost unknown in Europe’.

      The American Bar was a two-pronged operation. The second floor of the building was fashioned into a sort of clubhouse for visiting Americans, complete with the latest editions of newspapers from the USA and pigeon-holes where expatriates could pick up their mail. ‘Americans were cordially invited to use it as a meeting house,’ a spot where they could gather and enjoy American drinks, a quiet, sober and entirely respectable establishment. In the upper floors of the house, however, the scene was rather different. Here Worth and Bullard set up a full-scale, well-appointed and completely illegal gambling operation. By importing from America roulette croupiers and experts on baccarat, they gave the den a cosmopolitan sheen, but it was Kitty who turned out to be the principal lure for ‘her beauty and engaging manners attracted many American visitors’.

      Pinkertons’ agents in Europe began keeping a watch on the place almost from the day the American Bar opened, and declared that it was fast becoming ‘the headquarters of American gamblers and criminals who here planned many of their European crimes,’ yet even the forces of the law were dazzled by the ample charms of the hostess. ‘Mrs Wells was a beautiful woman,’ the detectives later reported, ‘a brilliant conversationalist dressed in the height of fashion: her company was sought by almost all the patrons of the house.’ While gorgeous Kitty presided, a vision in silk and ringlets, the affable Bullard played the piano and Worth carefully monitored the clientele. An alarm button was discreetly installed behind the bar ‘which the bar-tender touched and which rung a buzzer in the gambling rooms above whenever the police or any suspicious party came in’. Within seconds of the alarm sounding, Worth could render the upper storeys of 2 rue Scribe as quiet and respectable as the lower ones. The Paris police ‘made two or three raids on the house, but never succeeded in finding anything upstairs, except a lot of men sitting around reading papers, and no gambling in sight’. Worth also bribed the local police to tip him off when a raid might be expected.

      The American Bar, the first American-style nightclub in Paris, was an instant success, a gaudy magnet in the ravaged and weary city, and the Parisians were ‘astonished by its magnificence. The place soon became a famous resort and was extensively patronized, not only by Americans, but by Englishmen: in fact, by visitors from all over Europe.’ Businessmen, bankers, tourists, burglars, forgers, convicts, counts, con men and counterfeiters were all equally welcome to enjoy the products of Worth’s superb chef, sip a cocktail, or, if they preferred, repair upstairs where the delightful Kitty would help them to lose their money at the gambling tables with such grace that they almost always came back for more. Word soon spread through the underworld that the American Bar was the best place in Europe to make contact with other criminals, arrange a job, or simply hide out from the authorities.

      The elegant and pompous Max Shinburn became a regular patron. Like his former associates, the Baron had found it necessary to relocate to the Continent rather suddenly. Some years earlier, to his intense embarrassment, he had been publicly arrested at an expensive hotel in Saratoga where he was masquerading as a New York banker and charged with the New Hampshire robbery committed in 1865. Police found seven thousand dollars in stolen bonds in his pockets and, on searching his New York address, discovered ‘a complete work shop for the manufacture of burglar’s tools and wax impressions of keys’. Sentenced to ten years, the Baron had managed to escape from prison in Concord after nine months – a breakout considered ‘one of the most dashing and skillful planned in criminal history’ –and