Читать книгу The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 10

CONTEMPORARY WRITERS reached for superlatives when describing Fredericka, better known as ‘Mother’ or ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum: ‘The greatest crime promoter of modern times’, the ‘most successful fence in the history of New York’ and the individual who ‘first put crime in America on a syndicated basis’ are just a few of the plaudits she garnered in a long career of unbroken dishonesty.

Marm’s nickname was a consequence of her maternal attitude towards criminals of all types, for her heart was commensurate with her girth. She was an aristocrat of crime, but unlike the object of Worth’s later affections – namely the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – Marm Mandelbaum was no oil painting. ‘She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a sharply curved mouth and extraordinarily fat cheeks, above which were small black eyes, heavy black brows and a high sloping forehead, and a mass of tightly rolled black hair which was generally surmounted by a tiny black bonnet with drooping feathers.’

Like Worth, Fredericka had emigrated from Germany to the United States in her youth, arriving ‘without a friend or relative’, but far from defenceless. Sophie Lyons, who adored Marm, noted that ‘her coarse, heavy features, powerful physique, and penetrating eye were sufficient protection and chaperone for anyone,’ adding unkindly (but no doubt accurately) that ‘it is not likely that anyone ever forced unwelcome attentions on this particular immigrant.’

Soon after she got off the boat, the formidable Fredericka had fixed her beady eye on one Wolfe Mandelbaum, a haberdasher who owned a three-storey building at 79 Clinton Street in the Kleine Deutschland section of Manhattan’s East Side. A weak and lazy fellow, Wolfe was ‘afflicted with chronic dyspepsia’. A few weeks of Fredericka’s voluminous but easily digestible cooking persuaded him to marry her, and ‘Mrs Mandelbaum forever afterward was the head of the house of Mandelbaum’. While still nominally a haberdasher’s, the property on Clinton Street was turned by Marm into the headquarters of one of the largest fencing operations New York has ever seen. She started by selling the ‘plunder from house to house’, and in a few years had built up a vast business which ‘handled the loot and financed the operations of a majority of the great gangs of bank and store burglars’. Warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to hide the stolen goods, while the unscrupulous lawyers Howe and Hummel were employed on an annual retainer of five thousand dollars to ensure her continued liberty, principally through bribery, whenever ‘the law made an impudent gesture in her direction’. Most of Marm’s business was fencing, but she was not above financing other crooks in their operations and was even said to have run a ‘Fagin School’ in Grand Street, not far from police headquarters, ‘where small boys and girls were taught to be expert pickpockets and sneak thieves’. A few outstanding pupils even went on to ‘post-graduate work in blackmailing and confidence schemes’.

Marm Mandelbaum is first listed in police records in 1862, and over the next two decades she is estimated to have handled between five and ten million dollars’ worth of stolen property. Criminals adored her. As the celebrated thief ‘Banjo’ Pete Emerson once observed, ‘she was scheming and dishonest as the day is long, but she could be like an angel to the worst devil so long as he played square with her’. As the fame, fortune and waistline of Mrs, soon to be the widow, Mandelbaum (Wolfe’s dyspepsia having returned with a vengeance) grew, so too did the extravagance of her lifestyle and her social ambitions. The two floors above her centre of operations ‘were furnished with an elegance unsurpassed anywhere in the city; indeed many of her most costly draperies had once adorned the homes of aristocrats, from which they had been stolen for her by grateful and kind-hearted burglars’. There Marm Mandelbaum held court as an underworld saloniste, and ‘entertained lavishly with dances and dinners which were attended by some of the most celebrated criminals in America, and frequently by police officials and politicians who had come under the Mandelbaum influence.’

‘I shall never forget the atmosphere of “Mother” Mandelbaum’s place,’ Sophie Lyons recalled wistfully, for here congregated not merely burglars and swindlers, but bent judges, corrupt cops and politicians at a discount, all ready to do business. Such criminal notables as Shang Draper and ‘Western George’ came to sit at Marm’s feet, and she repaid their homage by underwriting their crimes, selling their loot and helping those who fell foul of the law. In a profession not noted for its generosity, Marm was an exception, retaining ‘an especial soft spot in her heart for female crooks’ and others who might need a helping hand up the criminal ladder. Marm was an equal opportunities employer and a firm believer that gender was no barrier to criminal success, a most enlightened view for the time and a verity of which she was herself the most substantial proof. She did not, however, brook competition, and when one particularly successful thief called ‘Black’ Lena Kleinschmidt stole a fortune, moved to Hackensack (more fashionable then than now) and began putting on airs and dinner parties, Marm was livid. She was thoroughly delighted when Black Lena was exposed as a jewel thief and jailed after one of her dinner guests noticed his hostess was wearing an emerald ring stolen from his wife’s handbag a few weeks earlier. ‘It just goes to prove,’ Marm Mandelbaum sniffed, ‘that it takes brains to be a real lady.’

At the time that Worth was desperately seeking a way into the criminal big league, Marm Mandelbaum was already a legend and arguably the most influential criminal in America. ‘The army of enemies of society must have its general, and I believe that probably the greatest of them all was “Mother” Mandelbaum,’ observed Sophie Lyons, who had taken a shine to young Worth and probably introduced him into Marm Mandelbaum’s charmed criminal circle. Worth became a regular at the Mandelbaum soirees, and it was almost certainly under her tutelage that he made his first, disappointing foray into bank robbery. In 1866 Worth and his brother John broke into the Atlantic Transportation Company on Liberty Street in New York and spent several hours attempting to blow open the safe, before leaving in frustration as dawn broke. Lyons recounts his ‘great disgust’ at the failed heist. Nothing daunted, after a year of organizing some lesser thefts, Worth, now working alone, pulled off his first major robbery by stealing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds from an insurance company in his home town of Cambridge. Marm Mandelbaum, who could fence anything from stolen horses to carriages to diamonds, obligingly sold them on at a portion of their face value – giving Worth her customary 10 per cent and pocketing the rest. He was hardly made a rich man by the robbery, but it was a start and the minor coup effectively ‘established him as a bank burglar’ among his peers. Before long, Worth had gained a reputation as ‘a master hand in the execution of robberies’, and stories of his sang-froid began to circulate in the underworld.

Worth seems to have delighted in sailing as close to the wind as he could get, and with every near-escape his contempt for the forces of law and order was confirmed and amplified. As the detectives Eldridge and Watts later recounted: ‘Once, after robbing a jewelry store in Boston, this daring burglar slipped out of the front door, only to meet a policeman face to face. Without an instant of tremor, this man of iron nerve politely saluted the officer and stepped back to re-open the door and coolly call to his confederate within: “William, be sure and fasten the door securely when you leave! I have got to catch the next car.” So, indeed, he did, after bidding the officer a pleasant good night, but he hopped off the car a few blocks beyond the store, slipped back stealthily, signalled to his confederate and both escaped with their booty.’

An avid pupil, Worth appears to have found in Marm Mandelbaum both an ally and a role model. The easy way she farmed out criminal work to others, her lavish apartments and social graces, were precisely the sort of existence he had in mind for himself. Above all, it was perhaps Marm who taught the lesson that being a ‘real gentleman’ and a complete crook were not only perfectly compatible, but thoroughly rewarding. Marm’s dinner table offered an atmosphere of illicit luxury, where superior crooks could enjoy the company of men and women of like, lawless minds.

Two of Marm’s guests in particular would play crucial although very different roles in Worth’s future.

The first was Maximilian Schoenbein, ‘alias M. H. Baker, alias M. H. Zimmerman, alias “The Dutchman”, alias Mark Shinburn or Sheerly, alias Henry Edward Moebus,’ but most usually alias Max Shinburn, ‘a bank burglar of distinction who complained that he was at heart an aristocrat, and that he detested the crooks with whom he was compelled to associate’. For the next three decades the criminal paths taken by Adam Worth and Max Shinburn ran in tandem. The two law-breakers had much in common, and they came to loathe each other heartily.

Shinburn was born on 17 February 1842, in the town of Ittlingen, Württemberg, where he was apprenticed to a mechanic before emigrating to New York in 1861. Styling himself ‘the Baron’ from early in life, Shinburn later actually purchased the title of Baron Schindle or Shindell of Monaco with ‘the judicious expenditure of a part of his fortune’. Aloof, intelligent and insufferably arrogant, the Baron cut a wide swathe through New York low society. Even the police were impressed.

Inspector Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department considered him ‘probably the most expert bank burglar in the country’, while Belgian police offered this description of the soigne, multilingual felon: ‘Speaks English with a very slight German accent. Speaks German and French. Always well dressed. He has a distinguished appearance with polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.’ Shinburn’s looks were striking; he had ‘small blue penetrating eyes, long, straight nose, moustache and small imperial, both of brownish colour mixed with grey, moustache twisted at the ends, pointed chin … at times wears a full beard and sometimes a moustache and chin whisker, in order to hide from view the pronounced dimple in chin.’ His numerous encounters with the law and a youthful taste for duelling had left him with numerous other identifying features. After one arrest, a police officer noted these with grisly exactitude: ‘on back of left wrist … pistol shot wounds running parallel with each other and near the deformity in right leg … pistol or gunshot wound on left side … several small scars that look like the result of buck shot wounds; scar on left side of abdomen, appearing as though shot entered in the back and came through …’ Shinburn’s fraudulent aristocratic claims were full of holes, and so was the rest of him.

His criminal notoriety sprang principally from the invention of a machine which he maintained could reveal the combination of any safe: ‘a ratchet which, when placed under the combination dial of a safe, would puncture a sheet of calibrated paper when the dial stopped and started to move in the opposite direction. He would repeat this process until he had the entire combination.’ According to other police sources, ‘his ear was so acute and sensitive that by turning of the dial he could determine at what numbers the tumblers dropped into place.’

With his mechanical training, Shinburn also perfected a set of light and powerful safe-cracking tools which he was prepared to sell on to others for a price. ‘Shinburn revolutionized the burglar’s tools and put them on a scientific basis,’ recorded Sophie Lyons. The better to perfect his safe-busting technique, the Baron ‘for some time took employment under an assumed name in the works of the Lilly Safe Co. [whose] safes and vaults were considered among the best and most secure.’ But not for long. Leaving a trail of empty safes in his wake, Shinburn was eventually penalized by his own competence and the Lilly safe ‘came into such disrepute, that the company was forced into liquidation’.

‘The safe I can’t open hasn’t been built,’ Shinburn once boasted to Sophie Lyons.

By the time Worth encountered Shinburn in the mid 1860s, the latter had developed a name for himself as a man of importance among the bank-robbing fraternity by cleaning out the Savings Bank in Walpole, New Hampshire. Worth was ambivalent about the Baron. He admired his dandified dress and envied his reputation, but found his endless braggadocio and air of superiority unbearable.

Far more to Worth’s taste was another dark luminary of the underworld and Mandelbaum protege, Charles W. Bullard, a languid and alluring criminal playboy better known as ‘Piano’ Charley. The scion of a wealthy family from Milford which could trace its ancestry to a member of George Washington’s staff, Bullard ‘had a good common school education’, inherited a large fortune from his father while still in his teens and had gone to the bad, immediately and extravagantly. Having squandered his inheritance, Bullard briefly tried his hand in the butcher’s trade but gave up the occupation and ‘devoted his ability to the robbing of banks and safes’, for which he inherited a taste from his grandfather, who was said to be a burglar ‘in a small way’. Bullard’s ‘dissipation and a restless craving for morbid excitement made him a “fly” [skilled] crook’ and later an uncommonly daring and wily burglar. In New York low society he was considered ‘one of the boldest operators that has ever handled a jimmy or drilled a safe’.

‘Bullard is a man of good education,’ recorded one admiring police report, ‘speaks English, French and German fluently, and plays on the piano with the skill of a professional.’ Raffish, refined and handsome, with a wispy goatee and limpid eyes, Bullard had three passions in life, each of which he indulged to the limit: women, music and gambling. Through constant practice on his baby grand, Piano Charley had developed such ‘delicacy of touch’ that he could divine the combination of a safe simply by spinning the tumblers, while his piano sonatas could reduce the hardest criminal to tears and lure the most chaste woman into bed.

‘An inveterate gamester’, perennially short of funds, often outrageously drunk but always charming, Bullard was one of the most romantic figures in the New York underworld. Under the benign eye of Marm Mandelbaum, he and Worth struck up an immediate rapport.

Piano Charley Bullard’s crime-sheet included jewel theft, train robbery and jail-breaking. Early in 1869 he teamed up with Max Shinburn and another professional thief, Ike Marsh, to break into the safe of the Ocean National Bank in Greenwich Village after tunnelling through the basement. The venture was said to have realized more than a hundred thousand dollars, almost all of which ended up in Shinburn’s pockets. ‘The robbers were nearly a month at the work, and the bank was ruined by the loss,’ the police reported. Later that year, on 4 May, Bullard had again conspired with Marsh to rob the Hudson River Railroad Express as it trundled from Buffalo in upstate New York along the New York Central Railroad to Grand Central Station. Knowing that the Merchant’s Union Express Co. used the train to transport quantities of cash, with the connivance of a bribed train guard they ‘concealed themselves in the baggage car … in which the safe was stored and rifled it of $100,000’. Bullard and Marsh then leaped off the train in the Bronx with the cash and negotiable securities stuffed into carpet bags. The guard was found bound and apparently unconscious, with froth dripping down his chin – this turned out to be soap, and the guard was immediately arrested.

The Pinkertons, whose reputation had expanded to the point where they were called in on almost every significant robbery, had traced the thieves to Toronto and found Ike and Charley living in high style in one of the city’s most expensive hotels. After a long court battle, Bullard was extradited to the United States and gaoled in White Plains, New York, to await trial. Using what little money remained to them, the Bullard family hired an expensive lawyer to defend their wayward son. Like Worth, Piano Charley never passed up a criminal opportunity and arranged for one of his many women friends to extract a thousand dollars (the entire fee) from his attorney’s pocket ‘as he was returning to New York on the train’.

It was almost certainly Marm Mandelbaum who decided that Piano Charley, whose music-making was such a popular feature of her dinner parties, should not be allowed to languish behind bars.

Worth, already a close friend of the gaoled man, was selected for the job of getting him out, along with Shinburn. It was the first and only time the two men would work together.

One week after he was imprisoned, Bullard’s friends dug through the wall of the White Plains gaol and set both Ike and Charley at liberty, whereupon the crooks promptly returned to New York City for a long, and in Bullard’s case staggeringly bibulous, celebration. The Baron was immensely pleased with himself. ‘Shinburn used to take more pride in the way he broke into the jail at White Plains, New York, to free Charley Bullard and Ike Marsh, two friends of his, than he did in some of his boldest robberies,’ Sophie Lyons recounted. But the immediate effect of the successful gaol break was to cement the burgeoning friendship between Bullard and Worth. Piano Charley had the sort of effortless elan and cultural veneer that Worth so deeply admired and sought to emulate. On the other hand, Worth was clever and calculating, qualities which the suave but foolish Bullard singularly lacked.

They decided to go into partnership.