The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
href="#litres_trial_promo">‘A man with brains has no right to carry firearms,’ he insisted, since ‘there was always a way and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain’; robberies were to be inflicted only on those who could afford them, and the division of spoils was to be fair. Myriad crooks and hangers-on owed him their livelihoods, yet Worth was no Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Then again, neither was Robin Hood.
‘It was his almost unbroken record of success in getting large amounts of plunder and escaping punishment for crimes that gave the underworld such confidence in him and made all the cleverest criminals his accomplices,’ Sophie Lyons concluded.
Worth delighted in his new-found position, elevated in both respectable society and the underworld. Slowly his confidence expanded into hubris. In the mid 1870s he met William Pinkerton again, on this occasion in the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, a noted meeting place for flâneurs and sporting men, but this time Worth felt so secure at the centre of his criminal network that he could offer the American detective a compliment, while damning his English counterpart, Inspector Shore. The Scotland Yard detective, he said, ‘could thank God Almighty
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