The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
description. Some of the worst professional criminals occupied positions of the greatest authority, for this was the era of Boss Tweed, probably the most magnificently venal politician New York has ever produced. Corruption and graft permeated the city like veins through marble, and those set in authority over the great, seething metropolis were often quite as dishonest as those they policed, and fleeced. As human detritus washed into lower Manhattan in the wake of the Civil War, the misery, and criminal opportunities, multiplied. In 1866 a Methodist bishop, Matthew Simpson, estimated that the city, with a total population of 800,000, included 30,000 thieves, 20,000 prostitutes, 3000 drinking houses and a further 2000 establishments dedicated to gambling. Huge wealth existed cheek by jowl with staggering poverty, and crime was endemic.
New York’s most famously bent lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, wrote a popular account of the wicked city, entitled In Danger, or Life in New York: A True History of the Great City’s Wiles and Temptations, which purported to be a warning against the perils of crime published in the interests of protecting the unwary. But it basically advertised the easy pickings on offer and provided a primer on the various methods of obtaining them, from blackmailing to card-sharping to safe-cracking. Howe and Hummel promised ‘elegant storehouses, crowded with the choicest and most costly goods, great banks whose vaults and safes contain more bullion than could be transported by the largest ship, colossal establishments teeming with diamonds, jewelry, and precious stones gathered from all the known and uncivilized portions of the globe – all this countless wealth, in some cases so insecurely guarded’. (The book was an instant best-seller and, according to one criminal expert, ‘became required reading for every professional or would-be law-breaker’.)
It was only natural that an ambitious and aspiring felon should make his way to New York and, once there, learn quickly. Determined to avoid returning to work as a mere clerk and hardened by his wartime experiences, Adam Worth took his place in the thieving throng. ‘On account of his acquaintance with bounty jumpers, he finally became associated with professional thieves and crooked people generally, and from that time on his career was one of wrong doing.’ Pinkerton glumly recounted.
Worth soon found himself in the Bowery district of Manhattan, an area of legendary seediness and home to a large and thriving criminal community which was divided, for the most part, into gangs: the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Slaughter Housers, the Buckaroos, the Whyos and more. Many of these gangsters were merely exceptionally violent thugs, whose criminal specialities extended no further than straightforward mugging, murder and mayhem, often inflicted on each other and usually carried out under the influence of prodigious quantities of alcohol laced with turpentine, camphor and any other intoxicant, however lethal, that happened to be on hand.
‘Most of the saloons never closed. Or if they did, for just long enough to be cleaned out and then to begin afresh drinking, fighting, cursing, gambling, and the Lord only knows what,’ recalled Eddie Guerin, a useless crook but successful memoirist who would eventually become Worth’s friend and colleague. The three thousand saloons noted by Bishop Simpson included such euphonious establishments as the Ruins, Milligan’s Hell, Chain and Locker, Hell Gate, the Morgue, McGurk’s Suicide Hall, Inferno, Hell Hole, Tub of Blood, Cripples’ Home and the Dump. But if the nomenclature of the dives was indicative of the immorality therein, the names of the clientele were still more telling: Boiled Oysters Malloy; Ludwig the Bloodsucker, a vampire who had hair ‘growing from every orifice’; Wreck Donovan; Piggy Noles; the pirate Scotchy Lavelle, who later employed Irving Berlin as a singing waiter in his bar; Eat-em-up Jack McManus; Eddie the Plague; Hungry Joe Lewis, who once diddled Oscar Wilde out of five thousand dollars at banco; Gyp the Blood; the psychotic Hop-Along Peter, who tended, for no reason anyone could explain, to attack policemen on sight; Dago Frank; Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her teeth to points and had sharp brass fingernails; Pugsy Hurley and Gallus Mag, a terrifying dame who ran the Hole-in-the-Wall saloon and periodically bit the ears off obstreperous customers and kept them in a pickling jar above the bar ‘pour encourager les autres’; Big Jack Zelig, who would, according to his own bill of fare, cut up a face for one dollar and kill a man for ten; Hoggy Walsh, Slops Connally and Baboon Dooley of the Whyos gang; One-Lung Curran, who stole coats from policemen; Goo Goo Knox; Happy Jack Mulraney, who killed a saloon keeper for laughing at the facial twitch which led to his sobriquet; brothel-keepers Hester Jane ‘the Grabber’ Haskins and Red Light Lizzie; and the unforgettable Sadie ‘the Goat’, a river pirate and leader of the Charlton Street Gang which occupied an empty gin mill on the East Side waterfront and terrorized farms along the Hudson River.
According to Herbert Asbury, whose 1928 Gangs of New York is probably the best book ever written on New York crime, ‘Sadie [the Goat] acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess money or valuables, to duck her head and butt him in the stomach, whereupon her male companion promptly slugged the surprised victim with a slung-shot and they then robbed him at their leisure.’ (For reasons unknown but not hard to imagine, Sadie fell foul of the formidable Gallus Mag of the Hole-in-the-Wall, who bit off her ear, as was her wont. But the story has a happy ending: the two women eventually became reconciled, whereupon gallant Gallus fished into her pickle jar, retrieved the missing organ and returned it to Sadie the Goat, who wore it in a locket around her neck ever after.)
Sophie Lyons, the self-styled ‘Queen of the Underworld’ whose remarkable memoirs are a crucial source of information on Worth’s life, was held by Asbury to be ‘the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced’. She eventually went straight, began writing her salacious, and partly fabricated accounts of New York low-life for the city newspapers, and ended up as America’s first society gossip columnist.
Into this colourful and horrific world, Adam Worth slipped quickly and easily. At the age of twenty, now complete with his own criminal moniker, Little Adam became a pickpocket.
‘Picking pockets has been reduced to an art here, and is followed by many persons as a profession,’ wrote the author of Secrets of the Great City in 1868. ‘It requires long practice and great skill, but these, once acquired, make their possessor a dangerous member of the community.’ Sophie Lyons, who became Worth’s close friend and sometime accomplice, described how Little Adam took to the apprentice criminal’s art: ‘Like myself and many other criminals who later achieved notoriety in broader fields, he first tried picking pockets. He had good teachers and was an apt pupil. His long, slender fingers seemed just made for the delicate task of slipping watches out of men’s pockets and purses out of women’s handbags.’
As an apprentice pickpocket, Worth found himself in an intensely hierarchical world. The lowest level of pickpocket was a ‘thief-cadger’, inexperienced youngsters often virtually indistinguishable from beggars; of slightly more consequence were the ‘snatchers’ who, as the name implies, made no attempt to avoid detection but simply grabbed and ran, or ‘tailers’, who specialized in extracting silk handkerchiefs from tail-coat pockets. The most developed of the species was the ‘hook’, also known as a ‘buzzer’, for whom picking pockets was an art requiring considerable daring and manual dexterity. Nimble and inconspicuous, Worth began as a ‘smatter-hauler’ or handkerchief thief, but soon the Civil War veteran graduated to become a fully-fledged ‘tooler’, a master of the art of ‘dipping’. Churches were particularly profitable hunting grounds, as were ferry stations, theatres, racecourses, political assemblies, stages, rat fights and any other place containing large numbers of distracted people in close proximity.
While lone pocket-dipping could be profitable, the most successful pickpockets worked in gangs and Worth’s talents ensured that ‘it was not long before he had enough capital to finance other criminals.’ Teaming up with some like-minded