The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
imagination released him to a world of grand dinners, fine apparel and civilized conversation.
In the Harvard students who paraded through Cambridge, the immigrant Jewish urchin had ample opportunity to observe the outward show of wealth and privilege. The brighter the penny, he saw, the easier the counterfeit. Ashamed of his lowly origins, frustrated by impecunity, the young Worth clearly felt himself to be the equal of the finest of the young gentlemen strutting Boston Common. Their wealth and sophistication provoked ambivalent feelings, of envy, resentment and anger, but also of admiration and desire. Worth resolved to ‘better’ himself.
America, then as now, promised all things to all men, even if it did not always deliver. It was a time when ‘ambition’, as Cardinal Newman wrote, ‘sets everyone on the lookout to succeed and to rise in life, to amass money, to gain power, to depress his rivals, to triumph over his hitherto superiors, to affect a consequence and a gentility which he had not before’. Worth shared those aspirations, and would eventually realize them. His methods alone would set him apart from other ‘self-made men’, for what others had earned, inherited or bought, he would simply steal, winning respectability by robbery, effrontery and fraud. Where his father had toiled to make clothes for the vanity of rich men, Worth would spin himself the dazzling outfit of a pretender, from pilfered cloth.
But it would be wrong to see the young Worth as merely a creature of immorality, a natural-born wrecker of the social fabric. From an early age he espoused many of the worthiest principles: loyalty to family and friends, the virtues of hard work, perseverance, generosity, charity and courage. As he entered his teens Little Adam was already evolving into a character of many and conflicting parts: selfish, greedy and generous to a fault, at once ruthless and romantic. He regarded his fellow men, and particularly his social superiors, with undiluted cynicism, yet he would never swindle a friend, rob a poor man or harm the harmless. He was acutely aware of the difference between right and wrong and evolved a code of behaviour that he held with the same resolute conviction as would any pillar of society, while he turned society’s codes upside down. Adam Worth had plenty of time for morals; it was laws he disdained. The hard, uncertain circumstances of Worth’s early life left him with the deeply held conviction that it was possible to be a ‘good’ man, at least in his own estimation, while pursuing a life of calculated deceit.
As he emerged from a deprived childhood into an adolescence that offered little better, Worth took the fateful decision to rid himself of his first, unglamorous life. At the age of fourteen, Worth ran away from home, leaving behind his humble parents and their status as social outcasts. The idea of a career in crime and imposture may not yet have formed in his young mind, but Worth already knew what he did not want. He never again set foot inside his childhood home, but a need for family love, and perhaps also for the strong father-figure that his own father never was, marked the rest of his restless existence.
After some months of leading ‘a vagabond life in the city of Boston’, he drifted to New York where he took, for the first and only time, an honest job as a clerk ‘in one of the leading stores in New York City’. Worth never offered any details of this brief flirtation with paid work, master criminals being notoriously touchy about that sort of thing, and the experiment was, anyway, cut short by the start of the American Civil War. At the age of seventeen, the store clerk from Massachusetts promptly abandoned the tedious job of filling in ledgers, and joined a New York regiment in the Union Army preparing to march south for battle.
Worth’s name first appears in the register of the 34th New York Light Artillery, better known as the Flushing or ‘L’ Battery, which assembled in Long Island. He was officially mustered into the regiment in New York City on 28 November 1861, and received a ‘bounty of $1,000’, according to Pinkerton. Many young recruits inflated their ages upon joining up, to appear more mature than they were and thus hasten possible promotion. The seventeen-year-old Worth gave his age as twenty, his first recorded lie.
The commander of the Flushing Battery was a German-born shoemaker named Jacob Roemer, who had emigrated to New York in 1839. Captain Roemer was a fussy, irascible man with a thrusting beard, crossed eyes and the bristling face of a natural martinet. Vain, blustering and courageous to the point of insanity, many years later Roemer wrote a massively self-inflating memoir, apparently designed to prove that the author himself was primarily responsible for winning the war. Young Worth, Roemer’s fellow countryman by birth, seems to have caught the eye of his commander, for he was soon promoted to corporal and then, on 30 June 1862, to the rank of sergeant in command of his own cannon and five men. Worth was well on his way to becoming a successful soldier, but he had by now fallen into bad, and thoroughly congenial, company. ‘He became associated with some wild companions, whom he had met at dances and frolics’ while in New York, Pinkerton later recorded.
The life of the Flushing Battery was anything but frolicsome. For several months, the soldiers drilled on Long Island, learning to wheel the field guns under the obsessively critical inspection of Captain Roemer. Then, in early summer, Captain Jacob Roemer, five commissioned officers, Sergeant Adam Worth, 150 men, no horses, 12 baggage mules and a laundry woman packed up and headed south to join the rest of the Union Army under the command of that dithering incompetent, General Pope, deservedly one of the least remembered generals of the entire Civil War. In Washington they drilled some more, around the unfinished Capitol building. Worth clearly hated every moment, and even Roemer admitted that Camp Barry was a ‘mud hole’.
‘All we wanted was a chance to prove our devotion and our loyalty to our country,’ the prickly and patriotic Roemer wrote. Worth already had other ideas. Indeed, his first taste of army life compounded a blossoming disrespect for authority.
During the early part of August the Union Army and the Confederates, under the command of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, warily circled each other in the fields and hills of Virginia. The Flushing Battery took part in several violent skirmishes, but it was not until late August that Roemer’s men tasted the full horror of battle when the two sides met head on, for the second time in the war, near the stream known as Bull Run.
On the evening of 28 August, thanks largely to Captain Roemer’s absurd determination to cover himself and his men in glory and blood, the Flushing Battery found itself engaged at close quarters with the enemy in the middle of Manassas valley. Roemer enjoyed every moment. ‘Shot and shell flew thick and fast,’ he recalled, as the gunners fired off 207 rounds and somehow beat the enemy back. ‘I was triumphant,’ wrote Roemer. One of his terrified lieutenants, however, was found hiding under a bush and had to be removed, gibbering, from the field. The battery commander was in his element, belting around the battlefield expecting, perhaps even hoping, to be shot by the enemy and leaving a trail of appropriately heroic last words as he went. On the 30th he gave a pep-talk to his troops. ‘Boys, it is no longer of any use to keep from you what may be in store for us,’ he announced gleefully. ‘Before the sun sets to-night, many of you may have given up your lives; perhaps I myself will have to, but all I have to say is – Die like men; do not run like cowards. Stick to your guns, and, with the help of God and our own exertions, we may get through. Forward march.’ What Worth made of Roemer’s epic oratory may be deduced from his subsequent actions.
A few hours later L Battery was caught up in the fiercest engagement so far. ‘Bullets, shot and shell fell like hail in a heavy storm … bullets were dropping all around and shells were ploughing up the ground. Men were tumbling, horses were falling and it certainly looked as though “de kingdom was a-comin”,’ recalled Roemer, who had his horse shot from under him and received, to his transparent delight, a flesh wound in the right thigh. Finally the enemy retreated. The Union Army was soundly defeated at Bull Run, but the unstable Captain Roemer regarded the battle as an immense personal victory.
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