April 25, 2012 • 24 mins
Professor Moriarty was based on a real man: Adam Worth. After being falsely reported as dead during the Civil War, Worth began a life of crime. When Worth moved to London he began his Moriarty phase, but his peculiar criminal quirks led to his near ruin.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reboarding. And after our
episode on the real Sherlock Holmes, we have quite a
few people right in suggesting that we cover somebody else
(00:23):
from Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories. So it turns
out that just as Dr Joseph Bell helped inspire the
character of Sherlock Holmes, a master criminal named Adam Worth
helped inspire the character of Holmes's arch rival, the criminal
Professor Moriarty. And although he doesn't appear in that many
(00:44):
home stories and actually is only mentioned in a few more,
Professor Moriarty is almost a bye word for evil, genius,
and fiction. As Holmes himself tells Watson quote, the man
pervades London and no one has heard of him. He
is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer
of half that is evil, and of nearly all that
(01:05):
is undetected in this great city. He is a genius,
a philosopher, and abstract thinker. So if you've been watching
the new Sherlock television series, I think you have haven't
been well saw the first season. I haven't seen a
second well that's all I've seen to actually, but it
does have that dramatic conclusion, and I think it's pretty
hard to shake the show's version of a very erratic,
(01:27):
very young professor. But even if you're not familiar with
that character, you know you haven't read about him in
home stories, you haven't seen the TV version, the life
of Adam Worth will still strike a chord I think
with most of our listeners. He created a web of
crime that expanned over three continents, and he would dash
between the countries on his luxury yacht. He robbed banks,
(01:50):
diamond trucks, and post offices, all while maintaining the front
of a respectable gentleman. And he never used violence, which
is interesting. He's stuck to a strict criminals code. But
perhaps most strangely, he fell in love with a painting,
which we're gonna get to a little bit later. We will,
and we'll probably get to that more in the part
two of this episode. Adam Worth did so much stuff,
(02:13):
we're gonna stretch this one out a little bit, but
it's first worth noting here that just as quote No.
One had heard of Moriarty, the same as largely true
today of Adam Worth. I mean, you probably haven't heard
that name before. And most of the information on him
has been collected in a biography by Ben McIntyre called
The Napoleon of Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth,
(02:35):
Master Thief. But during his own day, even though he's
kind of an obscure figure today, during his own day,
Worth was actually a widely covered figure. And in fact,
you can still find the Pinkerton's National Detective Agencies pamphlet
on Worth online through Google scholar. It's one of the
best sources on his life because it combines his own
freely given account with the Pinkerton's decades of surveillance and research,
(03:00):
so it's not exactly autobiography. It's got a little factual
information in there too. It's funny though in a way,
Worth's obscurity almost makes him more intriguing. It's as though
he just kind of made a splash, left his literary
descendant and then just sort of slipped away, almost undetected
for the next century. Really, so Worth's first act of
(03:22):
slipping away like that probably happened when he was only
about fourteen years old. He was the son of a tailor.
He had immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Germany when he
was about five years old um and he ran away
when he was fourteen from his home, so he jumped
from Cambridge to Boston before taking his first and only
(03:43):
real job in New York City as a clerk. But
the desk job didn't really last that long because when
the Civil War started, Little Adam that was his his
street name, since he was only about five four or
five five, enlisted in the thirty fourth New York Light Artillery,
which was convened nunately enough commanded by a fellow German
who really took a liking to Little Adam and had
(04:05):
him promoted to sergeant at a remarkably fast pace. But
during his first major battle, which was the Second Battle
of bull Run, Sergeant Adam Worth was mortally wounded and
died weeks later at only age eighteen. Wait a minute, here,
that's a really short podcast. Is Well, actually it's not,
because it's unclear what happened, but Worth was likely wounded
(04:28):
and was sent to Georgetown to recover. After that, either
he swapped ideas Dick Whitman style or got his paperwork
in this processed regardless, being a dead man or supposedly
dead man meant that he could reenlist time and time again,
each time collecting as signing bounty and then just skidaddling
(04:48):
before the fighting started. Yeah, he became a professional bounty jumper,
which was something you could really do during the Civil War. Yeah,
but it didn't mean that you avoided conflict entirely. It
didn't always work out that neatly. Worth actually found himself
participating in the Battle of the Wilderness in May eighteen
sixty four, which, if you listen to our William Chester
(05:08):
Minor episode a couple of months ago, was a pretty harrowing,
scary battle when you probably would have hoped to have
missed if you were a professional bounty jumper. But Worth
also had no bones about switching sides. He wasn't just
sticking to Union only after he had worn out his welcome,
you know, he started to be recognized after doing this
(05:30):
a few times. He joined the Confederacy and then gradually
wound his way back to the Northern States before the
war's end, of course, going back to New York City,
and as we've discussed in earlier episodes, Wartime and postpell
in New York City was a really great time for criminals.
I mean great kind of being in quotation marks there. Um.
(05:51):
The area where Worth specifically settled, the Bowery, was a
very very tough part of town too. It was ruled
by gangs, filled with bars, people with characters with names
like Eddie the Plague or Ludwig the blood Sucker. Really,
my favorite part of McIntyre's book might be his details
about the gangs in the bars in post war New
(06:11):
York City. As with any other kind of trade, though,
Worth had to pretty much start at the bottom of
the criminal world. He started with pickpocketing. From there he
got good enough to have his own network of pickpockets
that were working for him. But he wasn't entirely out
of that game himself. In eighteen sixty four, he was
caught stealing a package and then arrested and sentenced to
(06:34):
three years of hard labor and sing sing and the
work he was doing was handling nitroglycerin, which was used
for blasting quarry So pretty hard, dangerous work. Yeah, And
unsurprisingly that kind of work didn't really appeal to Worth,
and so after only a few weeks, a very careful
patient observation where he acted like the model prisoner. He
(06:56):
disappeared during a guard change. Of course, you can imagine
these yards were heavily armed, but he just slipped off.
He hid in a drainage ditch, and then he gradually
worked his way down river until he could hide at
a dock among some canal boats, and then a few
hours later when the boats were tugged into the city,
where it jumped out swam ashore in the freezing cold,
(07:18):
and um found some friends so he could change out
of his prison stripes are really dangerous sounding escape. I mean,
it sounds kind of like a Shawshank style escape, but
you have to imagine that he was risking his life
by doing it for sure. After that he went back
to his life of crime. Obviously, pickpocketing, no matter how
a dept you are at it or how many people
(07:40):
work for you, will always be pretty small time. But
that's not so, as we've seen before with bank robbery
and safe breaking, which were Worth's next career goals. The
only problem was that safebreakers were, according to McIntyre, a
really elite bunch, so Worth needed some connections to get
into the safe breaking game, and he found one through
(08:02):
marm Mandelbaum, who was the ground um of New York
City crime and also a master fencer of stolen goods.
She not only took him under her wing, she fenced
twenty dollars and stolen bonds from Worth's first big heist.
Mandelbaum also introduced him to some lifelong friends like Charlie Bullard,
a well born piano player who could break safe and
(08:23):
also rob trains. And some longtime enemies are soon to
be longtime enemies, like Max Shinburne, who went as far
as to work at safe companies to stay on top
of his profession. So that's dedication. Yeah, Max seemed to
really be worth equal but also his arrival. So Worth
became best friends with Bullard or piano Charlie after Worth
(08:45):
and shin burn broke Piano Charlie out of jail, and
it seems like that would be the kind of thing
that would form a good bond of friendship between all
three of them. But as it turned out, Bullard Worth
became best friends. They decided they'd go into the crime
world together as partners. Shinburne was excluded from that arrangement,
maybe part of the reason why he and Worth ultimately
(09:07):
became rivals. Maybe Shinburn just didn't really like him. Whatever
it is, just remember that name Shinburn, because he's going
to pop up way way later in worst career. So
according to the Pinkerton's pamphlet, though, one of the quote
three redeeming features in the life of this lost human
creature was that quote, he was never guilty of violence.
(09:27):
Under no circumstances would he have anything to do with
anyone who was. So it kind of seems like if
that was your ideology, you're really anti violence, but you
are also a criminal, you probably wouldn't want to get
into bank robbery because, you know, as we've seen with
earlier podcast subjects, bying Clyde John Dillinger tends to be
(09:48):
a pretty violent business. But Worth had a really different
strategy of going around robbing banks, and that was as
we have already seen with his prison break his patients.
He and piano Charlie set their sites on the Boylston
National Bank in Boston, a respectable institution that was conveniently
next door to a barbershop that was for rent. So
(10:10):
the two men set at a health tonic store in
that barbershop space. Even stocking it with bottles and bottles
of Gray's Oriental Tonic to cover up the windows and
make the place look legit. Gradually they tunneled through the
wall to the steel safe, robbing it of money and securities,
and timing the whole thing so that it wasn't discovered
(10:31):
for the entire weekend. From this, they netted about one
fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars. And this high
profile robbery made it really dangerous for them to stay
in Boston or even in New York City. So McEntyre
presents the interesting option that they could have gone west,
you know, sort of an alternate take on history. But
instead they chose to go to Europe, specifically to Liverpool. Yeah.
(10:55):
He specifically, he mentioned that they probably realized they weren't
suited to living out with They weren't the cowboy type.
They liked fine things, and they were going to be
more comfortable in Europe. But when they moved to Liverpool,
they also took on new names. And Worth took his
from the recently deceased co founder of the New York Times,
(11:16):
whose named Henry Jarvis Raymond. He didn't take the name,
you know, completely, He changed the middle name Jarvis to Judson,
but still so strange to me that he would take
a famous name for his alias, the alias that most
of his life. You'd think you wouldn't want people to
You wouldn't want to attract extra attention by picking anything,
(11:38):
like you wouldn't want anybody ever asking like, oh are
you related to the New York Times Raymond, or or
asking you more questions than they needed to. Maybe he
just wanted to sound really respectable. Who knows. Regardless the
men that these two men, they lived it up in Liverpool,
they conducted some robberies. They both courted the same woman.
They courted, the seventeen year old Irish barmaid working at
(12:01):
their hotel, whose name was Kittie Flynn. Eventually, Kitty agreed
to marry Piano Charlie, although he was already married. She
didn't know that, but she and Worth carried on with
their relationship at the same time as well, and so
she became the most important living woman in Adam Worth's life. Yeah.
So by the end of eighteen seventy though, these three
(12:22):
who are all hanging out together, Kitty, Bullard and Worth
decided that they were ready for something new. So they
packed up and left Liverpool for Paris. Of course, the
Bloody Paris Commune was going on at the time, so
they really took their time getting there. But once they
were situated, they set up the American Bar and catered
(12:42):
to expatriots and really anybody who wanted to try real
New York style cocktails mixed by American bartenders. And I know,
I mentioned that mixology class that I went to recently,
and apparently cocktails like old fashioned kind of cocktails that
have a revival today. We're really an American kind of
(13:03):
original at the time until Prohibition or around that time
when lots of American bartenders started moving to Europe. So
this was something unique that Worth and Bullard and Kitty
were offering a real American style bar. It was a
luxurious place with a legitimate bar and a club room downstairs,
and also a ritzy gambling house upstairs. Whenever a raid
(13:26):
was imminent, the downstairs bartender could ring a buzzer, alerting
the upstairs and all of the gambling paraphernalia would suddenly disappear.
I mean, it almost sounds like a movie. It's going
straight out of a chain spawd movie. I think but
they seemed to all have their roles in the bar,
to which I found kind of amusing. Bullard mostly enjoyed
(13:47):
the drinks. He was turning into a bit of an
alcoholic by this point. He played the piano, though it
was kind of what he had wanted to do in life.
Kitty acted as hostess for the gambling upstairs area and
was a alliant conversationalist, would attract customers, and then Worth,
who didn't drink, ran the place kept the business in line.
(14:07):
After a few years, though, the Paris police began raiding
the bar enough that it's scared off would be criminal customers,
and at the same time it made it really unpleasant
or cd for the respectable people who would come by.
So Worth pinched some diamonds off of a customer, sold
the bar and moved to London with Kitty, whom by
now he fathered one of two daughters with so running
(14:30):
a popular bar in a club sounds all well and
good for somebody like Adam Worth, but he really wanted
something more. He wanted respectability, and his quest for it
began the Moriarity phase of his career, which was of
course hands off but everywhere at the same time. You know,
he learned his lesson from getting put into sinc saying
(14:51):
about if you actually commit the crime yourself, you might
end up in jail. But we have to go through
some points of what it took to build up a
criminal empire like well, first of all, it took house.
Worth set himself, Kitty and the increasingly alcoholic Bullard up
in a comfy mansion south of the Thames, and it
was the epitome of gentlemanly living. He collected rare books
(15:14):
and decorated with fine paintings. He bought ten race horses
he even gave to charity. Secondly, they needed kind of
a home base. They needed a headquarters for their crime operation.
So to separate his life as a wealthy gentleman of
leisure from a busy master criminal, Worth also rented a
flat in Mayfair to plan his work from. Thirdly, and
(15:35):
perhaps most importantly, he needed a secret gang. So now
that he had pretty much determined to keep his own
hands out of crime, he needed some trusted delegates and
associates to work with. And even though he would still
personally plan and commissioned bank robberies, he'd plan railway and
steamer heighs because there was a lot of registered mail
(15:56):
being sent at the time he'd orchestrate post office robberies,
warehouse break ins. He wasn't always known to the people
who were committing those crimes. Something I think is is
kind of maybe more in line with how we think
of mob bosses or something today. But some associates had
privileged access to that Mayfair flat that you just mentioned
(16:17):
to Bolina, but others were anonymous. He never met with
them at all. He had his guys meet with them.
So it's easy also here to see the connection to
holmes description of Moriarty Sherlott Holmes description, he says, quote,
he sits motionless like a spider in the center of
its web. But that web has a thousand radiations, and
he knows well every quiver of each of them. So
(16:40):
there was one more thing that Worth needed to be
the master criminal exactly. He needed an escape. Specifically, his
escape was a luxury yacht, and for him it was
kind of a two first since it also added cashet
to Henry Raymond's gentlemanly image. The yaunt certainly helped stage
grab and go international rhimes. For example, of the Pinkerton's
(17:01):
rather dramatically described Worth leaving quote a trail of looted
cities behind him. But having a fast vote also helped
avoid the law. After a Kingston, Jamaica warehouse robbery, for example,
it even outran British ships, so that was a pretty
fast vote was a useful thing to have. But the
first serious tear in worth little web of crime here
(17:22):
I didn't occur until eighteen seventy four. So remember how
we quoted the Pinkerton's earlier. They had written that there
were three redeeming features in worse Life, one of which
was that he didn't use violence. Uh. The other was
that he never forsook a friend or accomplice, which was
something pretty clearly illustrated when a planned forgery went really
(17:46):
horribly wrong. So while robbing steamers of certified letters that
kind of thing was good work. You could make a
hefty profit on it. Forgery was really the Worth Gang's
bread and butter, mostly thanks to the talents of one
of his associates, to Charles the scratch Becker, who could
make these perfect looking letters of credit. Another crook, little
(18:08):
Joe Elliott, had the skills to pass off the fakes.
While Russian Carlosskovich and former Chicago bank clerk Joe Chapman
could also act as backups. But when the gang tried
to pass off letters of credit and Constantinople, they were
caught and they were convicted of forgery and sentenced to
seven years hard labor in a Constantinople prison. Now Worth
(18:29):
was pretty good at getting friends out of jail, either
through breaking them out, like like he did with shin Burn,
or through bribery, but this situation was different. Even a
yacht trip that he made to Constantinople with Chapman's desperate wife, Lydia,
proved fruitless. Finally, for unknown reasons, Becker, Elliott, and Sasakovitch
were all released. Yeah, and we should explain there too.
(18:51):
I mean it was definitely from worth influence and the
money he had been pouring in to trying to secure
their relief, but it wasn't anything that was officially arranged.
He didn't know, Okay, my guys are supposed to get
out on this day, because I've paid enough money for
that to happen. It just happened one day. The three
(19:12):
guys were let out. Chapman, though, had gotten into a
little fight with one of the other gang members and
had been placed in another part of the prison when
this release was finally secured. So he was in the
wrong place, of the wrong time, and nothing that Worth
did could secure his release too, so he had to
serve out the rest of his sentence, and consequently, while
(19:35):
he was doing that, his wife was murdered in her home,
likely by Seth Covic. Meanwhile, Piano Charlie had gone back
to the States and was arrested for the Boylston Bank
robbery of the sixties. He was sentenced to twenty years
in prison. Kitty had gone back as well, along with
her daughters, but not to be near Bullard. She went
out on her own and opened a boarding house in
(19:56):
New York City. So Worth himself was broke at this point,
after paying out all that money to get his guys
out of prison, he was also sands a gang and
without his love. But Worth wasn't completely done yet. His
best and boldest heist was still ahead of him, and
we're gonna talk a little more about that in the
next actually a lot more about that in the next episode,
(20:18):
and that was running away with the Duchess Duchess of Devonshire,
or at least the super famous oil painting of her.
So we'll save the details of Worths elopement as he
liked to call it, for the next episode, as well
as his career as a South African diamond thief and
his downfall because we told you remember that name, shin Burn.
(20:39):
And of course we're gonna talk a little bit more
about that jump to literary notoriety thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle,
our favorite podcast Cameo Guy, So definitely stay tuned for that.
And I think in the meantime, let's do a little
listener mail. So we've received a lot of mail about
(21:01):
our episode on the Errants Tobacco Collection, and as we requested,
you know, a lot of people are sending in their
own collections. We're gonna do a little collecting ourselves, collect
few these emails and store them up for the future
listener mail. But I wanted to go ahead and read
this message we got from Paul. He said, you mentioned
the Honus Wagner card in the Errant's collection. That didn't
(21:22):
mention the tobacco collection or the story behind it. Honess
Wagner was a short stop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in
the early twentieth century. He was one of the original
five indectees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some
people argue that he was the greatest all round player
of all time. In any case, his baseball card, the
T two six, is one of the most valuable baseball
(21:45):
cards in the world. I think that's the part that
we mentioned in the in the podcast. At the time,
baseball cards were sold with tacks, cigarettes and chewing tobacco.
Wagner refused to endure such products and was concerned that
children would buy the tobacco products in order to get
the cards and then use the tobacco, so he refused
to be depicted on a card. Consequently, there are only
(22:06):
fifty to sixty known to exist in the entire world,
and are in high demand because of how good a
player he is, as well as because of their rarity.
So pretty neat. When we were researching The Errant's episode,
I mentioned Honus Wagner to my dad and he told
me a little bit about this rare baseball card, but
I didn't know that. Um, the scarcity is because he
(22:28):
didn't want to be associated with tobacco products. What a
what a modern kind of thing? Yeah, well, I wonder
how he feels about being associated with the collection for
all time. Now, I guess he doesn't get to say
in it. No he doesn't. He just is the most
famous baseball card. So I guess not too bad of
a consolation prize. Absolutely so. Um again, maybe a last
(22:50):
chance to send us some book collection if you have
before we launch into that listener mail um, and of
course any other suggestions you have. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at
Misston History, and we're on Facebook. And if you want
to learn a little bit more about some of the
I don't know, maybe we shouldn't say if you want
(23:10):
to learn a little bit more, maybe if you just
want like a poor word, or yes, maybe you just
want a passing knowledge of some of the criminal activities
we've discussed on today's podcast. We do have an article
called how lock Picking Works that we get some flag
four once in a while, but if you want to know,
you can check it out. You might get lost out
of locked out of your house one day, or something,
(23:31):
but use it for good, use it for good, not evil.
You can find it on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
stu Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house. Stuff Works iPhone app
(23:54):
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. Eat In
Drink
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reboarding. And after our
episode on the real Sherlock Holmes, we have quite a
few people right in suggesting that we cover somebody else
(00:23):
from Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories. So it turns
out that just as Dr Joseph Bell helped inspire the
character of Sherlock Holmes, a master criminal named Adam Worth
helped inspire the character of Holmes's arch rival, the criminal
Professor Moriarty. And although he doesn't appear in that many
(00:44):
home stories and actually is only mentioned in a few more,
Professor Moriarty is almost a bye word for evil, genius,
and fiction. As Holmes himself tells Watson quote, the man
pervades London and no one has heard of him. He
is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer
of half that is evil, and of nearly all that
(01:05):
is undetected in this great city. He is a genius,
a philosopher, and abstract thinker. So if you've been watching
the new Sherlock television series, I think you have haven't
been well saw the first season. I haven't seen a
second well that's all I've seen to actually, but it
does have that dramatic conclusion, and I think it's pretty
hard to shake the show's version of a very erratic,
(01:27):
very young professor. But even if you're not familiar with
that character, you know you haven't read about him in
home stories, you haven't seen the TV version, the life
of Adam Worth will still strike a chord I think
with most of our listeners. He created a web of
crime that expanned over three continents, and he would dash
between the countries on his luxury yacht. He robbed banks,
(01:50):
diamond trucks, and post offices, all while maintaining the front
of a respectable gentleman. And he never used violence, which
is interesting. He's stuck to a strict criminals code. But
perhaps most strangely, he fell in love with a painting,
which we're gonna get to a little bit later. We will,
and we'll probably get to that more in the part
two of this episode. Adam Worth did so much stuff,
(02:13):
we're gonna stretch this one out a little bit, but
it's first worth noting here that just as quote No.
One had heard of Moriarty, the same as largely true
today of Adam Worth. I mean, you probably haven't heard
that name before. And most of the information on him
has been collected in a biography by Ben McIntyre called
The Napoleon of Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth,
(02:35):
Master Thief. But during his own day, even though he's
kind of an obscure figure today, during his own day,
Worth was actually a widely covered figure. And in fact,
you can still find the Pinkerton's National Detective Agencies pamphlet
on Worth online through Google scholar. It's one of the
best sources on his life because it combines his own
freely given account with the Pinkerton's decades of surveillance and research,
(03:00):
so it's not exactly autobiography. It's got a little factual
information in there too. It's funny though in a way,
Worth's obscurity almost makes him more intriguing. It's as though
he just kind of made a splash, left his literary
descendant and then just sort of slipped away, almost undetected
for the next century. Really, so Worth's first act of
(03:22):
slipping away like that probably happened when he was only
about fourteen years old. He was the son of a tailor.
He had immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Germany when he
was about five years old um and he ran away
when he was fourteen from his home, so he jumped
from Cambridge to Boston before taking his first and only
(03:43):
real job in New York City as a clerk. But
the desk job didn't really last that long because when
the Civil War started, Little Adam that was his his
street name, since he was only about five four or
five five, enlisted in the thirty fourth New York Light Artillery,
which was convened nunately enough commanded by a fellow German
who really took a liking to Little Adam and had
(04:05):
him promoted to sergeant at a remarkably fast pace. But
during his first major battle, which was the Second Battle
of bull Run, Sergeant Adam Worth was mortally wounded and
died weeks later at only age eighteen. Wait a minute, here,
that's a really short podcast. Is Well, actually it's not,
because it's unclear what happened, but Worth was likely wounded
(04:28):
and was sent to Georgetown to recover. After that, either
he swapped ideas Dick Whitman style or got his paperwork
in this processed regardless, being a dead man or supposedly
dead man meant that he could reenlist time and time again,
each time collecting as signing bounty and then just skidaddling
(04:48):
before the fighting started. Yeah, he became a professional bounty jumper,
which was something you could really do during the Civil War. Yeah,
but it didn't mean that you avoided conflict entirely. It
didn't always work out that neatly. Worth actually found himself
participating in the Battle of the Wilderness in May eighteen
sixty four, which, if you listen to our William Chester
(05:08):
Minor episode a couple of months ago, was a pretty harrowing,
scary battle when you probably would have hoped to have
missed if you were a professional bounty jumper. But Worth
also had no bones about switching sides. He wasn't just
sticking to Union only after he had worn out his welcome,
you know, he started to be recognized after doing this
(05:30):
a few times. He joined the Confederacy and then gradually
wound his way back to the Northern States before the
war's end, of course, going back to New York City,
and as we've discussed in earlier episodes, Wartime and postpell
in New York City was a really great time for criminals.
I mean great kind of being in quotation marks there. Um.
(05:51):
The area where Worth specifically settled, the Bowery, was a
very very tough part of town too. It was ruled
by gangs, filled with bars, people with characters with names
like Eddie the Plague or Ludwig the blood Sucker. Really,
my favorite part of McIntyre's book might be his details
about the gangs in the bars in post war New
(06:11):
York City. As with any other kind of trade, though,
Worth had to pretty much start at the bottom of
the criminal world. He started with pickpocketing. From there he
got good enough to have his own network of pickpockets
that were working for him. But he wasn't entirely out
of that game himself. In eighteen sixty four, he was
caught stealing a package and then arrested and sentenced to
(06:34):
three years of hard labor and sing sing and the
work he was doing was handling nitroglycerin, which was used
for blasting quarry So pretty hard, dangerous work. Yeah, And
unsurprisingly that kind of work didn't really appeal to Worth,
and so after only a few weeks, a very careful
patient observation where he acted like the model prisoner. He
(06:56):
disappeared during a guard change. Of course, you can imagine
these yards were heavily armed, but he just slipped off.
He hid in a drainage ditch, and then he gradually
worked his way down river until he could hide at
a dock among some canal boats, and then a few
hours later when the boats were tugged into the city,
where it jumped out swam ashore in the freezing cold,
(07:18):
and um found some friends so he could change out
of his prison stripes are really dangerous sounding escape. I mean,
it sounds kind of like a Shawshank style escape, but
you have to imagine that he was risking his life
by doing it for sure. After that he went back
to his life of crime. Obviously, pickpocketing, no matter how
a dept you are at it or how many people
(07:40):
work for you, will always be pretty small time. But
that's not so, as we've seen before with bank robbery
and safe breaking, which were Worth's next career goals. The
only problem was that safebreakers were, according to McIntyre, a
really elite bunch, so Worth needed some connections to get
into the safe breaking game, and he found one through
(08:02):
marm Mandelbaum, who was the ground um of New York
City crime and also a master fencer of stolen goods.
She not only took him under her wing, she fenced
twenty dollars and stolen bonds from Worth's first big heist.
Mandelbaum also introduced him to some lifelong friends like Charlie Bullard,
a well born piano player who could break safe and
(08:23):
also rob trains. And some longtime enemies are soon to
be longtime enemies, like Max Shinburne, who went as far
as to work at safe companies to stay on top
of his profession. So that's dedication. Yeah, Max seemed to
really be worth equal but also his arrival. So Worth
became best friends with Bullard or piano Charlie after Worth
(08:45):
and shin burn broke Piano Charlie out of jail, and
it seems like that would be the kind of thing
that would form a good bond of friendship between all
three of them. But as it turned out, Bullard Worth
became best friends. They decided they'd go into the crime
world together as partners. Shinburne was excluded from that arrangement,
maybe part of the reason why he and Worth ultimately
(09:07):
became rivals. Maybe Shinburn just didn't really like him. Whatever
it is, just remember that name Shinburn, because he's going
to pop up way way later in worst career. So
according to the Pinkerton's pamphlet, though, one of the quote
three redeeming features in the life of this lost human
creature was that quote, he was never guilty of violence.
(09:27):
Under no circumstances would he have anything to do with
anyone who was. So it kind of seems like if
that was your ideology, you're really anti violence, but you
are also a criminal, you probably wouldn't want to get
into bank robbery because, you know, as we've seen with
earlier podcast subjects, bying Clyde John Dillinger tends to be
(09:48):
a pretty violent business. But Worth had a really different
strategy of going around robbing banks, and that was as
we have already seen with his prison break his patients.
He and piano Charlie set their sites on the Boylston
National Bank in Boston, a respectable institution that was conveniently
next door to a barbershop that was for rent. So
(10:10):
the two men set at a health tonic store in
that barbershop space. Even stocking it with bottles and bottles
of Gray's Oriental Tonic to cover up the windows and
make the place look legit. Gradually they tunneled through the
wall to the steel safe, robbing it of money and securities,
and timing the whole thing so that it wasn't discovered
(10:31):
for the entire weekend. From this, they netted about one
fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars. And this high
profile robbery made it really dangerous for them to stay
in Boston or even in New York City. So McEntyre
presents the interesting option that they could have gone west,
you know, sort of an alternate take on history. But
instead they chose to go to Europe, specifically to Liverpool. Yeah.
(10:55):
He specifically, he mentioned that they probably realized they weren't
suited to living out with They weren't the cowboy type.
They liked fine things, and they were going to be
more comfortable in Europe. But when they moved to Liverpool,
they also took on new names. And Worth took his
from the recently deceased co founder of the New York Times,
(11:16):
whose named Henry Jarvis Raymond. He didn't take the name,
you know, completely, He changed the middle name Jarvis to Judson,
but still so strange to me that he would take
a famous name for his alias, the alias that most
of his life. You'd think you wouldn't want people to
You wouldn't want to attract extra attention by picking anything,
(11:38):
like you wouldn't want anybody ever asking like, oh are
you related to the New York Times Raymond, or or
asking you more questions than they needed to. Maybe he
just wanted to sound really respectable. Who knows. Regardless the
men that these two men, they lived it up in Liverpool,
they conducted some robberies. They both courted the same woman.
They courted, the seventeen year old Irish barmaid working at
(12:01):
their hotel, whose name was Kittie Flynn. Eventually, Kitty agreed
to marry Piano Charlie, although he was already married. She
didn't know that, but she and Worth carried on with
their relationship at the same time as well, and so
she became the most important living woman in Adam Worth's life. Yeah.
So by the end of eighteen seventy though, these three
(12:22):
who are all hanging out together, Kitty, Bullard and Worth
decided that they were ready for something new. So they
packed up and left Liverpool for Paris. Of course, the
Bloody Paris Commune was going on at the time, so
they really took their time getting there. But once they
were situated, they set up the American Bar and catered
(12:42):
to expatriots and really anybody who wanted to try real
New York style cocktails mixed by American bartenders. And I know,
I mentioned that mixology class that I went to recently,
and apparently cocktails like old fashioned kind of cocktails that
have a revival today. We're really an American kind of
(13:03):
original at the time until Prohibition or around that time
when lots of American bartenders started moving to Europe. So
this was something unique that Worth and Bullard and Kitty
were offering a real American style bar. It was a
luxurious place with a legitimate bar and a club room downstairs,
and also a ritzy gambling house upstairs. Whenever a raid
(13:26):
was imminent, the downstairs bartender could ring a buzzer, alerting
the upstairs and all of the gambling paraphernalia would suddenly disappear.
I mean, it almost sounds like a movie. It's going
straight out of a chain spawd movie. I think but
they seemed to all have their roles in the bar,
to which I found kind of amusing. Bullard mostly enjoyed
(13:47):
the drinks. He was turning into a bit of an
alcoholic by this point. He played the piano, though it
was kind of what he had wanted to do in life.
Kitty acted as hostess for the gambling upstairs area and
was a alliant conversationalist, would attract customers, and then Worth,
who didn't drink, ran the place kept the business in line.
(14:07):
After a few years, though, the Paris police began raiding
the bar enough that it's scared off would be criminal customers,
and at the same time it made it really unpleasant
or cd for the respectable people who would come by.
So Worth pinched some diamonds off of a customer, sold
the bar and moved to London with Kitty, whom by
now he fathered one of two daughters with so running
(14:30):
a popular bar in a club sounds all well and
good for somebody like Adam Worth, but he really wanted
something more. He wanted respectability, and his quest for it
began the Moriarity phase of his career, which was of
course hands off but everywhere at the same time. You know,
he learned his lesson from getting put into sinc saying
(14:51):
about if you actually commit the crime yourself, you might
end up in jail. But we have to go through
some points of what it took to build up a
criminal empire like well, first of all, it took house.
Worth set himself, Kitty and the increasingly alcoholic Bullard up
in a comfy mansion south of the Thames, and it
was the epitome of gentlemanly living. He collected rare books
(15:14):
and decorated with fine paintings. He bought ten race horses
he even gave to charity. Secondly, they needed kind of
a home base. They needed a headquarters for their crime operation.
So to separate his life as a wealthy gentleman of
leisure from a busy master criminal, Worth also rented a
flat in Mayfair to plan his work from. Thirdly, and
(15:35):
perhaps most importantly, he needed a secret gang. So now
that he had pretty much determined to keep his own
hands out of crime, he needed some trusted delegates and
associates to work with. And even though he would still
personally plan and commissioned bank robberies, he'd plan railway and
steamer heighs because there was a lot of registered mail
(15:56):
being sent at the time he'd orchestrate post office robberies,
warehouse break ins. He wasn't always known to the people
who were committing those crimes. Something I think is is
kind of maybe more in line with how we think
of mob bosses or something today. But some associates had
privileged access to that Mayfair flat that you just mentioned
(16:17):
to Bolina, but others were anonymous. He never met with
them at all. He had his guys meet with them.
So it's easy also here to see the connection to
holmes description of Moriarty Sherlott Holmes description, he says, quote,
he sits motionless like a spider in the center of
its web. But that web has a thousand radiations, and
he knows well every quiver of each of them. So
(16:40):
there was one more thing that Worth needed to be
the master criminal exactly. He needed an escape. Specifically, his
escape was a luxury yacht, and for him it was
kind of a two first since it also added cashet
to Henry Raymond's gentlemanly image. The yaunt certainly helped stage
grab and go international rhimes. For example, of the Pinkerton's
(17:01):
rather dramatically described Worth leaving quote a trail of looted
cities behind him. But having a fast vote also helped
avoid the law. After a Kingston, Jamaica warehouse robbery, for example,
it even outran British ships, so that was a pretty
fast vote was a useful thing to have. But the
first serious tear in worth little web of crime here
(17:22):
I didn't occur until eighteen seventy four. So remember how
we quoted the Pinkerton's earlier. They had written that there
were three redeeming features in worse Life, one of which
was that he didn't use violence. Uh. The other was
that he never forsook a friend or accomplice, which was
something pretty clearly illustrated when a planned forgery went really
(17:46):
horribly wrong. So while robbing steamers of certified letters that
kind of thing was good work. You could make a
hefty profit on it. Forgery was really the Worth Gang's
bread and butter, mostly thanks to the talents of one
of his associates, to Charles the scratch Becker, who could
make these perfect looking letters of credit. Another crook, little
(18:08):
Joe Elliott, had the skills to pass off the fakes.
While Russian Carlosskovich and former Chicago bank clerk Joe Chapman
could also act as backups. But when the gang tried
to pass off letters of credit and Constantinople, they were
caught and they were convicted of forgery and sentenced to
seven years hard labor in a Constantinople prison. Now Worth
(18:29):
was pretty good at getting friends out of jail, either
through breaking them out, like like he did with shin Burn,
or through bribery, but this situation was different. Even a
yacht trip that he made to Constantinople with Chapman's desperate wife, Lydia,
proved fruitless. Finally, for unknown reasons, Becker, Elliott, and Sasakovitch
were all released. Yeah, and we should explain there too.
(18:51):
I mean it was definitely from worth influence and the
money he had been pouring in to trying to secure
their relief, but it wasn't anything that was officially arranged.
He didn't know, Okay, my guys are supposed to get
out on this day, because I've paid enough money for
that to happen. It just happened one day. The three
(19:12):
guys were let out. Chapman, though, had gotten into a
little fight with one of the other gang members and
had been placed in another part of the prison when
this release was finally secured. So he was in the
wrong place, of the wrong time, and nothing that Worth
did could secure his release too, so he had to
serve out the rest of his sentence, and consequently, while
(19:35):
he was doing that, his wife was murdered in her home,
likely by Seth Covic. Meanwhile, Piano Charlie had gone back
to the States and was arrested for the Boylston Bank
robbery of the sixties. He was sentenced to twenty years
in prison. Kitty had gone back as well, along with
her daughters, but not to be near Bullard. She went
out on her own and opened a boarding house in
(19:56):
New York City. So Worth himself was broke at this point,
after paying out all that money to get his guys
out of prison, he was also sands a gang and
without his love. But Worth wasn't completely done yet. His
best and boldest heist was still ahead of him, and
we're gonna talk a little more about that in the
next actually a lot more about that in the next episode,
(20:18):
and that was running away with the Duchess Duchess of Devonshire,
or at least the super famous oil painting of her.
So we'll save the details of Worths elopement as he
liked to call it, for the next episode, as well
as his career as a South African diamond thief and
his downfall because we told you remember that name, shin Burn.
(20:39):
And of course we're gonna talk a little bit more
about that jump to literary notoriety thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle,
our favorite podcast Cameo Guy, So definitely stay tuned for that.
And I think in the meantime, let's do a little
listener mail. So we've received a lot of mail about
(21:01):
our episode on the Errants Tobacco Collection, and as we requested,
you know, a lot of people are sending in their
own collections. We're gonna do a little collecting ourselves, collect
few these emails and store them up for the future
listener mail. But I wanted to go ahead and read
this message we got from Paul. He said, you mentioned
the Honus Wagner card in the Errant's collection. That didn't
(21:22):
mention the tobacco collection or the story behind it. Honess
Wagner was a short stop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in
the early twentieth century. He was one of the original
five indectees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some
people argue that he was the greatest all round player
of all time. In any case, his baseball card, the
T two six, is one of the most valuable baseball
(21:45):
cards in the world. I think that's the part that
we mentioned in the in the podcast. At the time,
baseball cards were sold with tacks, cigarettes and chewing tobacco.
Wagner refused to endure such products and was concerned that
children would buy the tobacco products in order to get
the cards and then use the tobacco, so he refused
to be depicted on a card. Consequently, there are only
(22:06):
fifty to sixty known to exist in the entire world,
and are in high demand because of how good a
player he is, as well as because of their rarity.
So pretty neat. When we were researching The Errant's episode,
I mentioned Honus Wagner to my dad and he told
me a little bit about this rare baseball card, but
I didn't know that. Um, the scarcity is because he
(22:28):
didn't want to be associated with tobacco products. What a
what a modern kind of thing? Yeah, well, I wonder
how he feels about being associated with the collection for
all time. Now, I guess he doesn't get to say
in it. No he doesn't. He just is the most
famous baseball card. So I guess not too bad of
a consolation prize. Absolutely so. Um again, maybe a last
(22:50):
chance to send us some book collection if you have
before we launch into that listener mail um, and of
course any other suggestions you have. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at
Misston History, and we're on Facebook. And if you want
to learn a little bit more about some of the
I don't know, maybe we shouldn't say if you want
(23:10):
to learn a little bit more, maybe if you just
want like a poor word, or yes, maybe you just
want a passing knowledge of some of the criminal activities
we've discussed on today's podcast. We do have an article
called how lock Picking Works that we get some flag
four once in a while, but if you want to know,
you can check it out. You might get lost out
of locked out of your house one day, or something,
(23:31):
but use it for good, use it for good, not evil.
You can find it on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
stu Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house. Stuff Works iPhone app
(23:54):
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes. Eat In
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