The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
the money he made from his various burglaries, Shinburn is said to have left the country with nearly a million dollars,’ the Pinkertons reported.
Shinburn had settled in Belgium, purchased an estate and an interest in a large silk mill, and formally declared himself to be the Baron Shindell, which ‘nobody cared to dispute’. His cosmopolitan existence included frequent visits to Paris and the American Bar, where the bogus Baron liked to patronize his former criminal colleagues and spend his money ‘with an open hand’. Worth resented the intrusion of the ‘overbearing Dutch pig’, as he called him, somewhat inaccurately, but tolerated his presence for the sake of Piano Charley, who still owed the Baron a debt for springing him from gaol.
Sophie Lyons, who often travelled to Europe on business (entirely criminal in nature), was another familiar face at the American Bar, and soon a motley cluster of crooks, many of them familiars from the criminals’ New York days, began to orbit around the Paris club at a time when professional American bank robbers were migrating across the Atlantic in increasing numbers. ‘I could name a hundred men who got a good living at it [bank robbery] and then came over to Europe to try their luck. France used to be a particularly happy hunting ground,’ wrote Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin.
Out of the criminal flotsam eddying around Paris, an unscrupulous and unsavoury bunch, Worth would eventually forge one of the most efficient and disciplined criminal gangs in history. Fresh from clearing out the First National Bank of Baltimore, for example, came Joseph Chapman and Charles ‘the Scratch’ Becker. Chapman was a habitual lawbreaker with a long beard and soulful eyes who had, according to a contemporary account, ‘but one vice – forgery; and one longing passion – Lydia Chapman,’ his wife, and ‘one of the most beautiful women the underworld of the 1870s had ever known’. Becker, alias John Blosh, was a neurotic Dutch-born forger of wide renown who was said to be able to reproduce the front page of a newspaper with such uncanny verisimilitude that when he was finished no one, including Becker, could tell the original from the fake. Pinkerton considered him ‘the ablest professional forger in the world’.
Other patrons at the American Bar included ‘Little’ Joe Elliott (alias Reilly, alias Randall), a rat-like burglar of intensely romantic inclinations (‘a great fellow for running after French girls,’ Worth called him), Carlo Sesicovitch, a Russian-born thug with an ugly temper but an uncanny knack for disguise, his Gypsy mistress Alima, and several more criminals of note.
But by no means all the clientele at the American Bar were rogues and miscreants. Many were simply visiting businessmen, ‘swell Americans who were not aware that the keepers of this saloon were American professional bank and safe burglars’, and tourists keen for some nightlife and a flutter at the roulette or faro tables. Their number even included some who had fallen victim to the club’s owners in earlier days. According to one police report, the American Bar was visited by Mr Sanford of the Merchant’s Express Co. while he was in Paris, ‘but Mr Sanford did not know until his return to New York that Wells was the man Bullard, who had robbed the company of $100,000’ back in 1868. It was also said that visiting officials from Boston’s Boylston Bank spent an enjoyable evening at the club, little suspecting how the mahogany card tables and expensive furnishings had been financed.
For three years the American Bar prospered mightily, and the peculiar ménage à trois of the owners continued, amazingly enough, without a hitch. Kitty Flynn, her telltale Irish brogue now quite evaporated, was becoming the gracious grande dame she had always hoped to be, even if half her admirers were thieves and con men. Bullard was happily consuming American cocktails in vast quantities, beginning his day when he opened his eyes in the late afternoon and ending it when he closed them, around dawn, usually face down on the ivories of the club piano. ‘In the gay French capital he soon became a man of mark as a gambler and roue,’ which was all Piano Charley had ever really wanted to be. Worth was also contented enough, though strangely restless. Serving drinks was profitable, while the gambling den was a standing invitation to show his hold over fate, but the Paris operation was hardly the grand criminal adventure he saw as his destiny. The demi-monde thronging his card tables was glittering and amusing, to be sure, but he had more ambitious plans for himself, and Kitty, than merely the life of an upscale croupier and a club hostess.
In the winter of 1873, a most unpleasant blot suddenly appeared on the horizon of the merry trio when William Pinkerton, the scourge of American criminals, wandered nonchalantly into the American Bar and ordered a drink. No man put the wind up the criminal fraternity more effectively than William Pinkerton. The detective had become a stout and florid man, whose ponderous frame belied his astonishing energy and an unparalleled talent for hunting down criminals. Pinkerton’s face was known to just about every crook in America, and so was his record as a man who had ‘waged a ceaseless war on train and bank holdup robbers and express thieves who infested the Middle West after the close of the Civil War’. The direct precursor of the modern FBI, the Pinkerton Agency was gaining international respect as a detective force, thanks in large part to William Pinkerton’s phenomenal energy. The West’s most notable outlaws – Jesse James and his brother Frank, the murderous Reno brothers and the legendary Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – knew only too well the discomfort of having Pinkerton on their trail. ‘It was not unusual in those bandit-chasing days for William Pinkerton to be days in the saddle, accompanied by courageous law officers searching the plains and hills of the Middle West tracking these outlaws to their hideouts.’ A man of great bonhomie and charm, Pinkerton could also be utterly ruthless, as many criminals had discovered at the expense of their liberty and, in some instances, their lives. ‘When Bill Pinkerton went after a man he didn’t let up until he had got him, if it cost him a million dollars he didn’t mind,’ recalled Eddie Guerin.
Many years later, Worth, in an interview with William Pinkerton, feigned nonchalance when recalling the detective’s unexpected and unwelcome arrival at the American Bar. ‘We were rather troubled at what had brought you to the club,’ Worth said. Frantic would have been a more accurate description.
Worth recognized the burly detective at once and, opting as ever for the brazen approach, offered to buy him another drink. Pinkerton accepted. It was a strange encounter between the arch-criminal and the man who had already spent five years, and would spend the next twenty-five, trying to put him in prison. They chatted awhile on the subject of mutual acquaintances, of which they had many on both sides of the law, until Pinkerton announced that he ought to be getting along. The two men shook hands, without ever having needed to introduce themselves.
The moment Pinkerton had left the premises, Worth summoned Piano Charley and a visiting ruffian known as ‘Old Vinegar’ and set out into the rue Scribe to follow the American detective. ‘There was no intention to assault you,’ Worth later assured Pinkerton. ‘We just wanted to get a good look at you.’ Pinkerton was fully aware he was being tailed and after leading the trio through the streets of Paris for a little way, he suddenly rounded on them. Piano Charley, his nerves frayed with drink, ‘nearly dropped dead’ with fright and the three bolted in the opposite direction. ‘Old Vinegar went into hiding for weeks,’ Worth later remarked with a laugh.
He might not admit it, but Pinkerton’s surprise visit had badly rattled him. Worth was only partially reassured to discover, from a corrupt interpreter with the French police by the name of Dermunond, that the detective was not in pursuit of