The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">‘the first manifestation of the executive ability which was one day to make him a power in the underworld’, a Napoleon of ne’er-do-wells.
The technique for team-dipping or ‘pulling’, was well established. A prosperous-looking ‘mark’ is selected: he is then jostled or bumped by the ‘stall’; while the mark is thus distracted, the hook (sometimes known as the ‘mechanic’), quickly rifles or ‘fans’ his pockets, immediately passing the proceeds to a ‘caretaker’ or ‘stickman’, who then moves nonchalantly in another direction. Charles Dickens described the manoeuvre in Oliver Twist: ‘The Dodger trod under his toes, or ran upon his boot accidentally, while Charley Bates stumbled up against him behind: and in that one moment they took from him with extraordinary rapidity, snuff box, note-case, watchguard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket handkerchief, even the spectacle case.’ The ‘mark’, in this case, was none other than Fagin himself, the paterfamilias of dippers.
With his efficient team of purse-snatchers, Worth was fast becoming a minor dignitary in the so-called swell mob, as the upper echelon of the underworld was known, and according to Lyons he soon acquired ‘plenty of money and a wide reputation for his cleverness in escaping arrest’. But no sooner had Worth’s criminal career begun to blossom, than it came to a sudden and embarrassing halt. Late in 1864 Worth was arrested for filching a package from an Adams Express truck and summarily sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Sing Sing, the notoriously nasty New York gaol just north of the city on the banks of the Hudson River.
Worth’s brief incarceration for bounty jumping had not prepared him for the extravagant horror of the ‘Bastille on the Hudson’. In 1825 the prison’s first warden, a spectacular and inventive sadist by the name of Elam Lynds, remarked, ‘I don’t believe in reformation of the adult prisoner … He’s a coward, a willful lawbreaker whose spirit must be broken by the lash.’ In 1833 Alexis de Tocqueville had described Sing Sing as a ‘tomb of the living dead’, so silent and cowed were its inmates.
Clad in the distinctive striped prison garb instituted by Lynds, Worth was sent with the rest of the convicts to the prison quarries where he was put in charge of preparing the nitroglycerine for blasting. Many years later, Worth recalled how he was instructed by the foreman to heat the explosive when it became cold and brittle in the freezing air. This he did, grateful for the chance to warm his hands, and was lucky not to be blown to pieces for, as he frankly admitted, he ‘never had an idea at that time how dangerous it was’. Teaching hardened criminals how to handle nitroglycerine was not, perhaps, the brightest move on the part of the authorities, as Worth’s safe-cracking skills in later years so clearly proved.
The man who had slipped his chains on the Potomac, who had made a craft out of desertion, was not going to suffer the horrors of Sing Sing a moment longer than necessary, even though the prison’s guards, a breed of breathtaking brutality, had orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. As he worked, Worth calculated the movements of the guards and after only a few weeks of prison life, he slipped out of sight while the guard-shift was changing and hid inside a drainage ditch, which ‘discharged itself inside the railway tunnel’. Under cover of night, according to a contemporary, ‘he managed to get a few miles down the river where there lay at a dock some canal boats’, in one of which, freezing and covered in mud, Worth hid, and ‘had the satisfaction a few hours after that, of having himself transported to New York City by a tug boat, which came up to fetch the canal boat in which he took refuge.’ At dawn, as the tug approached its ‘lonely dock far up on the West side of the city’, Worth clambered into the water and swam back to shore. ‘He managed, although having his prison clothes on, to get to the house of an acquaintance, where he was provided with a suit of clothes.’ He immediately plunged back into the ghastly but protective anonymity of the Bowery.
Worth’s later insouciance when recalling this escape belied what must have been a dreadful, if formative experience. At barely twenty years of age he had seen the worst the American penal system had to offer, and his contempt for authority was formidable. That Worth did not hesitate to plunge into a churning river at dead of night, clad in prison clothes and aware that apprehension might well mean death, reflected both his physical toughness and a growing faith in his own invincibility. So far from being reformed by his brief and unpleasant experience of prison, Worth concluded that the life of a ‘dip’ did not offer sufficient rewards, given its perils, and the time had come to change direction, to up the stakes in his personal vendetta against society. Reuniting with some of his former gang, Worth began to expand his scope of operations to include minor burglaries and other property thefts as well as picking pockets. His word ‘was law with the little group of young thieves he gathered around him,’ remembered Sophie Lyons. ‘He furnished the brains to keep them out of trouble and the cash to get them out if by chance they got in. Every morning they would meet in a little Canal Street restaurant to take their orders from him – at night they came back to hand him a liberal share of the day’s earnings.’ So far Worth’s activities had gone no further than what might be called disorganized crime. Henceforth he would tread more carefully, delegating often and putting himself at risk only when the rewards, or promise of adventure, were greatest. His strict dominance over the rest of the gang was the first illustration of a power-complex that would grow more pronounced with age. Criminals, it is fair to say, are not the most intellectual of people. Indeed, the class as a whole tends to be characterized by fairly intense stupidity. Worth’s highly intelligent approach to the business, and his ability to get results in the form of hard cash, was enough to ensure the obedience, even the reverence, of his underlings.
Solvent for the first time in his life, Worth’s determination to beat the odds at every level soon led him to New York’s roulette wheels, gambling dens and the faro tables – that extraordinarily chancy game that was once the rage of gamblers and has since virtually disappeared. Betting heavily, in the burgeoning belief that the more he dared the more fortune would smile, he began to live the life of a ‘sportsman’, moving away from the grim Bowery dives to the brighter, more luxurious, but no less dissipated lights of uptown New York and the famously seedy glamour of the ‘Tenderloin’ district.
Worth’s native intelligence was not the only character trait to distinguish him from his fellow crooks. He was also notable for avoiding strong drink, at a time when alcoholism was endemic and heavy drinking virtually obligatory among the criminal classes. Perhaps still more strangely, he refused to countenance any form of violence, regarding it as uncouth, unnecessary and, given his limited physical stature, unwise. Of the 68,000 people arrested in New York in 1865, 53,000 were charged with crimes of violence. Yet Worth made it a rule that force should play no part in any criminal enterprise that involved him, a rule he broke only once in his life. His rejection of alcohol and violence was itself part of a need to control, not just himself, but those within his power. Crooks who drank or fought made mistakes, and for that reason he steered clear of the established gangs, which were often little more than roving bands of pickled hoodlums at war with each other. Worth was not content merely to organize his minions, he needed to rule, regulate and reward them as he clawed his way up through the underworld. A sober, resourceful, non-violent crook marshalling his forces amid a troop of ignorant, drunken brawlers, Worth was also exceptional for the scope of his criminal aspirations, or, to put it another way, his greed. Sophie Lyons took note of his ‘restless ambition’ as he began his ascent into the criminal upper classes.
One of America’s senior crooks later recorded that ‘the state of society created by the war between the North and the South produced