A Gentleman and a Thief

Adam Worth, the greatest thief of the 19th century, could have furnished the basis of a great novel. No need though: In “The Napoleon of Crime--The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief,� British journalist Ben Macintyre has given him a biography that reads like one. Worth, a German-born American Jew who affected the manners and lifestyle of a Victorian English gentleman, became, in the words of his great adversaries, the Pinkerton detectives, “The most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal known to modern times.�

“Dangerous� needs to be defined here in terms of Victorian crime. Unlike the literary creation he inspired--Sherlock Holmes’ fiendish enemy, Professor Moriarty--Worth disdained violence. The man loved his work. He brought a class to his profession that few of his modern counterparts have approached, becoming the leading exponent of what Macintyre calls “wing-collar crime.� He never disposed of his most famous theft, the Gainsborough portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, largely because of his affection for it. Worth eventually returned the painting decades after the theft.

Most of Worth’s life was lived in shadows. In the words of Macintyre, he “made a myth of his own life, building a thick smoke screen of wealth and possession to cover a multitude of crimes,� crimes that resulted in the theft of cash, jewels and works of art that may have been worth the incredible sum, by Victorian standards, of $10 million.

Macintyre’s detective work in unearthing the details of his subject’s crimes is as exemplary as that of Worth’s lifelong nemesis, William Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Macintyre makes no apologies for his subject, who, refreshingly, made no apologies for himself.

Raised in poverty in openly anti-Semitic pre-Civil War Boston, Worth learned about social hypocrisy from the Brahmins whose society he desperately longed to share. He was a self-made man and a self-conscious criminal who “was acutely aware of the difference between right and wrong and evolved a code of behavior that he held with the same resolute conviction as would any pillar of society. . . . Adam Worth had plenty of time for morals; it was laws he disdained.�

The capital that initially financed Worth’s criminal career came from the Union and Confederate governments. Occasionally distinguishing himself in battle, Worth “bounty jumped� from army to army several times, pocketing the enlistment money each time. The university where he learned his trade was the New York underworld of the 1870s, among whose most prominent alumni were Boiled Oysters Molloy, Hungry Joe Lewis (who once swindled Oscar Wilde out of $5,000), Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Sadie the Goat and the legendary Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her teeth to sharp points and sometimes used razor-sharp fingernails. Worth not only survived this environment but flourished in it, largely because of an impeccable reputation for honesty and because he made money for his partners.

Eventually, Worth graduated to late Victorian London. The lower-class German American Jew from Boston might well have spent the rest of his life in English society as a Victorian sporting gentleman except for once serious character flaw: He loved to steal. His skill as a safecracker and jewel thief financed the life of a “Victorian gentleman who merged the highest moral principles with the lowest criminal cunning.�

In at least one celebrated case, he loved the thing he stole. Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait “The Duchess of Devonshire� was the most celebrated portrait of the most celebrated beauty of the time. Its theft shocked English society, which simply could not believe that such an object could be stolen from under the nose of Scotland Yard.

In most true crime stories, such a theft would make the rest of the book anticlimactic; in “The Napoleon of Crime,� it’s just the beginning. Here, with the instinct of a great mystery novelist, Macintyre kicks in with his twin themes: Worth’s infatuation with the portrait--which reminds him of his lifelong love, the Irish moll-turned-society dame, Kitty Foyle--and the two-decades-long battle of wits between Worth and the greatest detective of his time, Pinkerton. It spoils nothing for the reader to know that Pinkerton won, in more ways than one: Leaving behind an estate of more than $15 million, he “made more out of crime than any of the people whom he hunted down.� He also became the best friend and confidant of the man he hunted for more than two decades.

“When [Worth] died,� read an obit in the New York Sun, “he left none worthy of his mantle.� The New York Journal proclaimed: “Adam Worth is dead. His demise marks the closing of a singular modern romance.� Worth would have scoffed at their sentimentality. “You cannot get a thing right for a newspaper man,� he once told an interviewer. “If you write the facts down for him, he will change them about to suit himself.�

It was Adam Worth, of course, who often changed the facts of his life around to suit himself. Luckily, he finally found a biographer to set them right.