Читать книгу The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 11

THE BOYLSTON NATIONAL BANK in Boston was a familiar sight from Worth’s youth. The rich burghers of Boston believed their money was as safe as man could make it behind the bank’s grand façade, an imposing brick edifice at the corner of Boylston and Washington streets in the heart of the city. According to Sophie Lyons, Worth ‘made a tour of inspection of all the Boston banks and decided that the famous Boylston Bank, the biggest in the city, would suit him’. Max Shinburn would later claim to have had a hand in planning the robbery, but there is no evidence his expertise was either required or requested. Indeed, Shinburn’s exclusion from this ‘job’ may have been the original source of the enmity between him and Worth. Ike Marsh, Bullard’s rather dim Irish sidekick in the train-robbery caper, was brought in on the heist, which was, like all the best plans, perfectly straightforward. Posing as William A. Judson and Co., dealers in health tonics, the partners rented the building adjacent to the bank and erected a partition across the window on which were displayed ‘some two hundred bottles, containing, according to the labels mucilage thereon, quantities of “Gray’s Oriental Tonic”.’ ‘The bottles served a double purpose,’ the Pinkertons reported; ‘that of showing his business and preventing the public looking into the place.’ Quite what was in Gray’s Oriental Tonic has never been revealed since not a single bottle was ever sold.

After carefully calculating the point where the shop wall adjoined the bank’s steel safe, the robbers began digging. For a week, working only at night, Worth, Bullard and Marsh piled the debris into the back of the shop, until finally the ‘lining of the vault lay exposed’.

‘To cut through this was a work of more labor,’ the Boston Post later reported. ‘So very quiet was the operation that the only sound perceptible to the occupants of adjoining rooms was like that made by a person in the act of putting down a carpet with an ordinary tack hammer. The tools applied were [drill] bits or augers of about an inch in diameter, by means of which a succession of holes were drilled, opening into each other, until a piece of plate some eighteen inches by twelve had been removed. Jimmies, hammers and chisels were used as occasion required for the purpose of consummating the nefarious job.’ In the early hours of Sunday, 21 November 1869, Worth wriggled through the hole, lit a candle inside the bank safe and surveyed the loot. ‘The treasure was contained in some twenty-five or thirty tin trunks’, which Worth now handed back out to his accomplices one by one. ‘The trunks were pried open, their contents examined, what was valuable pocketed and what was not rejected.’ As dawn broke over Boston, the three thieves packed the swag into trunks labelled ‘Gray’s Oriental Tonic’, hailed a carriage to the station and boarded the morning train to New York.

At nine o’clock on Monday morning, fully twenty-four hours later, bank officials opened the safe and were ‘fairly thunderstruck at the scene which met their gaze’. The entire collection of safe-deposit boxes, and with them the solid reputation of the Boylston National Bank of Boston, was gone.