The Napoleon of Crime (13 page)

So while Worth was making his way up in the world, Pinkerton was, in a sense, making his way down.

In some ways Worth was an archetypical product of his time: determined to better himself, caring little what moral compromises were made along the way, at once utterly upright and utterly corrupt. But while he was clearly in thrall to society and its rules, he was at the same time bitterly, implacably at war with them. He aped his bourgeois contemporaries, and stole from them, and all the time he despised them.

The view taken by Friedrich Engels that the most courageous people on society’s lowest economic rung become thieves in order to wage “
open war against the middle classes” has some truth in respect to Worth, for his imposture was an act of angry rebellion and disdain for the society from which he would be, whatever his strivings, a permanent outcast. It seems unlikely that Worth ever considered himself a social revolutionary, but the subversive implications of his actions were wholly intentional. If the quest for gentlemanly position was a central commandment of Victorian life, to claim that status fraudulently was social blasphemy, undermining the very hierarchy on which the elaborate Victorian sense of worldly order was built.

Indeed, 1874 saw the culmination of one of the most notorious cases of social imposture in British history, known as the “Tichborne Saga.” In April 1854, fully twenty years earlier, a steamer sailing from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool vanished without a trace, taking with it Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and extensive estates in Hampshire. Lady Tichborne, his mother, refused to believe her son had perished, and when in 1866 a man presented himself as her missing heir, she immediately clasped him to her breast. This was no easy task, because the original Roger Tichborne had been slim, dark, and well educated, whereas the pretender to his name was freckled, semi-literate, and weighed 340 pounds. “
I think my poor Roger confuses everything in his head, just as in a dream and I believe him to be my son,” Lady Tichborne maintained. And so, until her death, he remained, enjoying all the benefits of a prodigal son. In 1870, however, with the dowager Lady Tichborne out of the way, her relations filed a lawsuit for criminal impersonation against the bulky and, as matters turned out, entirely bogus baronet. The case caused a sensation and dragged on for years. One speech by the defense lasted fully two months. But finally in 1874, at the precise moment that Adam Worth was beginning to build his counterfeit life in London, the Claimant was exposed as Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. In the meantime, however, the vast impostor had become a focus for the popular resentment that bubbled just beneath the smooth surface of Victorian society. Seen as a “
victim of the richer classes, and of Queen Victoria” herself, Orton-Tichborne was a potent symbol of revolt. Thousands subscribed to a magazine in his defense, for “
by support of The Claimant the Tichbornites were expressing their opposition to the Establishment and their approval of a champion who appeared to challenge its codes and practices.” The magazine
Punch
characterized the attitudes of the Claimant’s supporters thus: “
I don’t care whether he is Roger Tichborne or Arthur Orton, I don’t like to see a poor man done out of his rights.”

The Tichborne case, which continued to arouse heated debate throughout the 1880s, vividly illustrated how the criminal appropriation of a superior station in this stratified society struck at the very core of comfortable Victorian assumptions. But it also showed how empowerment through fraud struck a chord with the thousands outside (i.e., beneath) the genteel upper stratum.

Worth’s spurious claims were all the more seditious for being as yet undetected, and he reveled in his double life, “
maintaining his guise of a well-heeled American and going nightly to a thieves hangout in the East End of London.” According to one account, “
he would change his fine clothes for humbler garb to confer with his criminal colleagues, then seek a railroad washroom to change back into his ‘gentleman’s clothes’ before stealing back to [his] bedroom as dawn was breaking.”

As he grew richer and more respectable, Worth was slowly evolving into that most familiar and feared of figures from Victorian literature: the double man, a Jekyll and Hyde who concealed his darker personality from the world, glorying equally in his real wickedness and his apparent probity. He had long ago buried the distinction between a life based in reality and the one of his own crooked invention. He had stolen the name of the most worthy gentleman he could find; he had robbed and forged himself a gleaming carapace of respectability, an exemplary existence that was in truth a dazzling counterfeit. The Victorians read Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterwork with delicious terror, for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—like Henry Raymond and Adam Worth—were the dark and light sides of man himself, shackled together in febrile contrast, and a chilling glimpse into the dark and daunting depths of their own natures.

By the year 1875, Adam Worth had settled comfortably into the personality of Henry Raymond, wealthier and further from the law’s clutches than he had ever been in his life. Then three blows fell in quick succession: Piano Charley Bullard, his partner in crime, who had been heading off the rails at considerable speed for years, wound up in an American jail; the core members of his gang—Elliott, Becker, Sesicovitch, and Chapman—were arrested and flung into a foreign prison; and finally, most devastatingly, Kitty Flynn, the woman he had helped to invent from nothing, developed a mind of her own.

NINE

Cold Turkey

F
or two years the Worth gang had been running a highly profitable forgery ring throughout Europe. The forgeries, usually circular letters of credit, were the work of the talented but unstable Charles Becker. Worth had high regard for the Scratch’s artistry and a commensurately low opinion of his dependability, considering him “
the biggest coward in the world.” As Worth once remarked: “How he kept his nerve and kept from squealing as long as he did was a mystery.” But despite his questionable temperament, Becker was one of the lynchpins of Worth’s organization, a forger of such brilliance that even Pinkerton admitted his reproductions of currency, bank drafts, and securities could withstand the most “
microscopic scrutiny.”

Passing off the counterfeits, or “passing the queer,” as it was known in underworld cant, was principally the work of Little Joe Elliott, a plausible, dandified rogue with “
a small black moustache and short bushy black hair” who never failed to convince bank clerks of his “bona fides,” despite seemingly in a state of permanent and chronic agitation. “
He has a very nervous manner and cannot sit still for a moment,” one contemporary noted. “His eyes are everywhere—continually jerking his arms and twitching movements generally.” The Russian Sesicovitch and the lugubrious Joe Chapman completed the four-man forgery gang as lookouts and backup men. “
Chapman had been trained as a bank clerk in Chicago, and his familiarity with banking customs was of essential service to his confederates.”

Late in 1874, Worth hit on a plan to pass off some forged letters of credit in Turkey, blithely assuming that the Turkish authorities would not recognize the fakes until the gang was safely back in London. Becker turned out some exquisite replicas of the credit letters of Coutts & Co., the London bankers, and Worth dispatched the team to Smyrna. Worth remained with Kitty in London. Bullard, characteristically, had vanished, having lost his remaining money at the card table. As Pinkerton later observed, “
Bullard was, like all thieves, a lavish scatterer of his wealth.”

The ruse got off to a good start, and the gang headed “
through the principal cities of France and Germany, leaving a trail of forged paper behind all the way to Smyrna.” Some $400,000 had been collected in various cities and “the bulk of the money had been sent to London,” before disaster struck. The foursome was arrested while trying to pass off a particularly large credit letter. They were tried in the British consular court, convicted of forgery, and sentenced to seven years’ hard labor in a Constantinople jail. John Shore of Scotland Yard was notified of the arrests and sent the Turkish police complete dossiers on each man; the Pinkertons announced that they planned to extradite the gang to the United States.

At first the gang was nonchalant in captivity, confident that the resourceful Worth would somehow get them out. “
Jail meant nothing to us as men of experience,” Becker insisted. “It was the country, not the jail that held us. We couldn’t get out of the country.” But gradually, as the weeks turned to months and the Turkish authorities simply ignored every entreaty—from Lydia Chapman, from Worth, and even from the American consul, who had been persuaded that the foursome had not had a fair trial—the seriousness of their plight began to sink in. Even Carlo Sesicovitch, a man of granite resilience by any standards, started to crumble. He wrote to his Gypsy mistress, “My Dearest Alima,” describing the unspeakable conditions in the jail, compared to which the toughest American prison appeared almost luxurious: “
I have had but bread once every twenty-four hours, no bed to sleep on but the bare plank floor, packed to the number of thirty-five or forty in a room not large enough for twenty. You can imagine the amount of filth and vermin there must exist. Actually the bread I eat would not suffice to feed the hungry bugs, fleas and lice which constantly gnaw at my naked flesh … There is little hope, so little hope.”

Back in London, Worth was beside himself with anxiety. Sophie Lyons thought the “reason for his leadership was his
unwavering loyalty to his friends. Raymond [Worth] never ‘squealed’—he never deserted a friend. When one of his associates ran afoul of the law he would give as freely of his brains and money as if his own liberty was at stake.” Whatever the mythologizing of his contemporaries, it does seem that Worth felt a moral obligation to protect and defend the rascals and louts who were his minions. The Pinkertons regarded the fact that he “
never forsook a friend or accomplice” as his principal redeeming trait.

After the men had endured several months of incarceration, Worth made his move. Accompanied by Lydia Chapman, he sailed on
The Shamrock
to Constantinople, “
in the guise of an American millionaire taking a grand tour,” and set about engineering the release of his underlings. As a plan it was hardly sophisticated, simply employing the oldest but most reliable form of criminal persuasion: bribery, on a vast scale. Worth never admitted how much money he handed over to the Turkish jailers, officials, and judges, but finally he told Lydia that he had done all he could, and the dejected pair returned to London. Worth kept up a steady flow to various venal Turkish officials, and eventually, one January morning, Becker, Elliott, and Sesicovitch were ejected from prison as suddenly and violently as they entered it, and found themselves on the streets of Constantinople penniless, filthy, and free. Years later Worth told Pinkerton “
that it was he who took the money to Constantinople which effected the release of Little Joe Reilly [Elliott], Becker and Sesicovitch from the prison; that he arranged all the details of the work.”

Chapman, however, was not so lucky. Some days earlier the bearded forger had fallen out with Elliott, whom he unfairly accused of trying to cut a deal with Scotland Yard. A fight had ensued, and Chapman was isolated in another wing of the prison at the critical moment when the jail doors, oiled by bribery, opened. Worth and the increasingly hysterical Lydia did everything they could to liberate the last member of the gang. He employed an expensive lawyer, sent letters to the American consul, George Baker, and bombarded Chapman’s jailers with enough money to make them rich men, but to no avail. Chapman finally told Lydia to forget him and return to America, advice she ignored, pining away in her house in Neville Road and making futile trips to Constantinople to plead with her husband’s jailers.

Unwilling to linger a moment longer than necessary in Turkey, the three other members of the gang had set off overland for London but had to run yet another horrifying gauntlet before they made it home. According to the Pinkerton files, “
while passing through Asia Minor they were captured by Greek bandits, who, in spite of the fact that their captives were fugitives from prison, held them for ransom.” The bandits finally allowed Little Joe to head for London; his companions would not be released until he returned with more money. But they omitted to provide Elliott with traveling expenses. “
The only thing that Reilly [Elliott] had to pawn were his gold teeth,” Worth later recalled. “He pawned these and with the money which he got for them he bought a cheap ticket and worked his way over to London.” Worth raised another two thousand pounds, “
which money Little Joe took back and delivered to the bandits, and effected the liberation of his comrades.”

If the Turkish escapade was an impressive example of honor among thieves, its final episode revealed quite another side of criminal life. Back in London, the volatile Sesicovitch and his Gypsy mistress, using the names William and Louise Wallace, moved in with Lydia Chapman in her new home at 46, Maude Grove, Chelsea. Before long, Sesicovitch was dunning Lydia for money, claiming her husband had diddled him out of his share of the profits from the original forgery. Sesicovitch told Lydia he “
needed money from her with which to defray … expenses on a trip to Australia for the purpose of committing forgeries there.” He was apparently under the mistaken belief that Chapman’s wife “
was possessed of considerable money and jewelry,” and his demands became increasingly threatening. Lydia Chapman, who now went by the name of Mrs. Porter, in turn tried to persuade Sesicovitch to return once again to Constantinople to try to free her husband.

A few months later the body of Lydia Chapman, apparently dead from poison, was found in her elegant home. Perhaps she had committed suicide, but Scotland Yard, and for that matter Adam Worth, was convinced that the sinister Sesicovitch had had a hand in her death. The Yard even named Sesicovitch and his mistress as the murderers, alleging that, because Lydia had refused to part with the money for the Australian caper, “
a scheme had been concocted for the purpose of robbing her [and] that in order to rob her they had dosed her with some narcotic, her death resulting therefrom.” William Pinkerton was still more specific, insisting that “
her death at the hands of Carlos Sescovitch was brought about by her having heart disease, and the shock which she got when Sescovitch tried to chloroform her and steal her jewelry.”