The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
Charles Becker and Little Joe Elliott. Indeed, the informant warned, Pinkerton was already preparing extradition papers with the French authorities. Worth sent the message to his colleagues that they were in mortal danger and should on no account come to the bar. A few days later Pinkerton, accompanied by two French detectives, walked into another of the gang’s favoured dives, a dance hall called the Voluntino, where Worth was dining with Little Joe Elliott. Worth happened to catch sight of the brawny detective as he came through the door, and rightly assuming the ‘entrances were guarded well’, he bundled Elliott upstairs to a private room, opened the window and, holding Joe’s hands, dropped him fifteen feet into a courtyard below. ‘Joe made the drop alright and got up and hobbled away,’ Worth recalled, but it had been another unpleasantly close escape.
The gang got a welcome, if only temporary, reprieve when Pinkerton was called away to help investigate a series of forgeries perpetrated on the Bank of England. Pinkerton accurately identified the forgeries as the work of brothers Austin and George Bidwell, ‘two well-known American forgers and swindlers’, who also happened to be two of Worth’s regulars. While the Pinkertons were busy chasing the Bidwells (Austin was arrested in Cuba, George in London), Joe Chapman and the others slipped out of Paris and went into hiding.
By now Worth had concluded that the days of the American Bar were numbered. During his brief visit to the club, Pinkerton had correctly guessed that some sort of early-warning system was in place to alert the gamblers upstairs of an impending raid. On his return to the United States he informed the Paris police of this hunch, and began pestering the Sûreté to do something about the nest of foreign criminals flourishing on the rue Scribe. Even the French police, sluggish through bribery, were pushed into action when Pinkerton provided detailed case histories of Worth, Bullard, Shinburn, Chapman, Becker, Elliott, Sophie Lyons and many of the bar’s other regulars. The following May, Worth was again tipped off by Dermunond of an imminent raid and managed to remove all evidence of gambling just minutes before the police burst in. But the attentions of the Sûreté were proving bad for business, particularly among the jittery criminal clientele. ‘The respectable people did not patronize it, and it soon went to the dog,’ Pinkerton recorded triumphantly.
With profits declining, Worth decided to improve matters in his traditional way, by stealing a bag of diamonds from a travelling dealer who had carelessly left them on the floor while he stood at a roulette table. It was a spur of the moment larceny – Worth cashed a cheque for the diamond salesman and distracted him while Little Joe Elliott crept under the table and substituted a duplicate bag for the one containing the diamonds. The theft netted some thirty thousand pounds’ worth of gems, and it was Worth himself ‘who insisted on the police being called in and the place searched from top to bottom. But he did not suggest that they look at a nearby barrel of beer, at the bottom of which reposed the precious jewels’. In spite of this elaborate bluff, the diamond-dealer demanded that the club manager be arraigned on a charge of robbery. At a preliminary hearing Henry Raymond, playing the part of an enraged foreign businessman whose good name was being dragged in the mud, demanded that he be allowed to cross-examine his accuser and so confused the merchant by bombarding him with angry questions that the poor man was unable to remember clearly whether he had had the bag with him in the first place. Worth was released, but the theft, while lucrative enough, sealed the fate of the American Bar.
‘The robbery startled all Paris, and was the means of attracting suspicion to the house [which] lost prestige and soon went to pieces.’ By now Pinkerton had begun recruiting international support in his bid to close the American Bar, most notably Inspector John Shore of Scotland Yard in London. Shore had been receiving reports for some time of a clutch of criminals operating out of Paris and he, too, began to demand that the Paris police shut down the establishment once and for all. Through his spies, Worth learned that the English policeman was putting pressure on the French authorities and his alarm redoubled. It was the first time Shore and Worth had crossed swords.
‘The place was finally raided by the police,’ Pinkerton reported, but this time the Sûreté were not going to be beaten by Worth’s alarm system. ‘The bar-tender was seized as soon as they entered, and rushing upstairs, they found the gambling in full blast.’ Worth and Kitty, by lucky chance, were not in the building at the time, but ‘Wells [Bullard] and others [a pair of unfortunate croupiers] were arrested and charged with maintaining a gambling house, but were admitted to bail.’ Bullard, the nominal owner of the bar, skipped bail and fled to London, leaving Worth and Kitty to sort out what remained of the business.
Worth later told Pinkerton that he had already decided the bar would ‘never again be a success the way he wanted it’, and the club was sold to an ‘English betting man or bookmaker named Jack Ballentine’ who kept it going for two more years before the American Bar was finally closed.
Pinkerton later wrote, on Worth’s authority, that ‘the ruction which I kicked up was the means of ruining Bullard in Paris, driving him out, breaking up the bar and sending, as he termed it, all of them on the bum.’ But rather than resenting Pinkerton’s rude intrusion into his affairs, Worth seems to have admired Pinkerton’s detective efforts. ‘Afterwards when we met in London [he said] that he had always fancied me and found that I was a man who kept his own counsel and that he had always felt a kindly feeling towards me,’ Pinkerton wrote. They might be on opposite sides of the law, but the thief and the detective had already developed a healthy respect for one another’s talents, which would eventually blossom into a most unlikely friendship.
So far from being ‘on the bum’, Worth was still a substantially wealthy man. The breaking up of the American Bar simply closed one chapter in his life and opened another. He increasingly craved, for himself and the aspiring Kitty, if not genuine respectability, then at least its outward trappings and, at the age of just thirty-one, he could afford them.
There was really only one destination for a man of social and criminal ambition, and that was London, centre of the civilized world, where the gentlemanly ideal had been elevated to the status of a religion, abounding with wealth and, therefore, felonious opportunity.
Victorian Britain was reaching the pinnacle of its Greatness, and smugness. ‘The history of Britain is emphatically the history of progress,’ declared the intensely popular writer T.B. Macaulay. ‘The greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe.’ A similar note of patriotic omnipotence was struck earlier by the historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway, nothing can resist us. We war with rude nature, and by our restless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.’ For a crook at war with the natural order, such heady recommendations were irresistible. Huge spoils, and the social elevation they brought with them, were precisely what Worth had in mind.
Piano Charley was already across the Channel, operating under the cover of a wine salesman and steadily drinking a large proportion of his supposed wares. Worth, Kitty and the rest of the gang packed up what was left from the American Bar – the chandeliers, brass fittings and oil paintings – and merrily headed back across the Channel to the great English metropolis.
The upper floors of what was once Worth’s gambling den are now the bedrooms of the Grand Hotel Intercontinental, one of the most expensive hotels in Paris. But still more appropriately, given the next phase of Worth’s life, the door to number 2 rue Scribe now leads into ‘Old England’, the chain of stores where one can still buy all the appurtenances,