Читать книгу The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 9

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, Worth drifted, like so many other veterans, to New York City which, by the mid-1860s, had already become one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and police were corrupt, the poor often had little choice but to steal while the rich sometimes had little inclination not to, since they tended to get away with it. Seldom has history conspired to assemble, on one small island, such a vivid variety of pickpockets, con men, whores, swindlers, pimps, burglars, bank robbers, beggars, mobsmen and thieves of every description. Some of the worst professional criminals occupied positions of the greatest authority, for this was the era of Boss Tweed, probably the most magnificently venal politician New York has ever produced. Corruption and graft permeated the city like veins through marble, and those set in authority over the great, seething metropolis were often quite as dishonest as those they policed, and fleeced. As human detritus washed into lower Manhattan in the wake of the Civil War, the misery, and criminal opportunities, multiplied. In 1866 a Methodist bishop, Matthew Simpson, estimated that the city, with a total population of 800,000, included 30,000 thieves, 20,000 prostitutes, 3000 drinking houses and a further 2000 establishments dedicated to gambling. Huge wealth existed cheek by jowl with staggering poverty, and crime was endemic.

New York’s most famously bent lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, wrote a popular account of the wicked city, entitled In Danger, or Life in New York: A True History of the Great City’s Wiles and Temptations, which purported to be a warning against the perils of crime published in the interests of protecting the unwary. But it basically advertised the easy pickings on offer and provided a primer on the various methods of obtaining them, from blackmailing to card-sharping to safe-cracking. Howe and Hummel promised ‘elegant storehouses, crowded with the choicest and most costly goods, great banks whose vaults and safes contain more bullion than could be transported by the largest ship, colossal establishments teeming with diamonds, jewelry, and precious stones gathered from all the known and uncivilized portions of the globe – all this countless wealth, in some cases so insecurely guarded’. (The book was an instant best-seller and, according to one criminal expert, ‘became required reading for every professional or would-be law-breaker’.)

It was only natural that an ambitious and aspiring felon should make his way to New York and, once there, learn quickly. Determined to avoid returning to work as a mere clerk and hardened by his wartime experiences, Adam Worth took his place in the thieving throng. ‘On account of his acquaintance with bounty jumpers, he finally became associated with professional thieves and crooked people generally, and from that time on his career was one of wrong doing.’ Pinkerton glumly recounted.

Worth soon found himself in the Bowery district of Manhattan, an area of legendary seediness and home to a large and thriving criminal community which was divided, for the most part, into gangs: the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Slaughter Housers, the Buckaroos, the Whyos and more. Many of these gangsters were merely exceptionally violent thugs, whose criminal specialities extended no further than straightforward mugging, murder and mayhem, often inflicted on each other and usually carried out under the influence of prodigious quantities of alcohol laced with turpentine, camphor and any other intoxicant, however lethal, that happened to be on hand.

‘Most of the saloons never closed. Or if they did, for just long enough to be cleaned out and then to begin afresh drinking, fighting, cursing, gambling, and the Lord only knows what,’ recalled Eddie Guerin, a useless crook but successful memoirist who would eventually become Worth’s friend and colleague. The three thousand saloons noted by Bishop Simpson included such euphonious establishments as the Ruins, Milligan’s Hell, Chain and Locker, Hell Gate, the Morgue, McGurk’s Suicide Hall, Inferno, Hell Hole, Tub of Blood, Cripples’ Home and the Dump. But if the nomenclature of the dives was indicative of the immorality therein, the names of the clientele were still more telling: Boiled Oysters Malloy; Ludwig the Bloodsucker, a vampire who had hair ‘growing from every orifice’; Wreck Donovan; Piggy Noles; the pirate Scotchy Lavelle, who later employed Irving Berlin as a singing waiter in his bar; Eat-em-up Jack McManus; Eddie the Plague; Hungry Joe Lewis, who once diddled Oscar Wilde out of five thousand dollars at banco; Gyp the Blood; the psychotic Hop-Along Peter, who tended, for no reason anyone could explain, to attack policemen on sight; Dago Frank; Hell-Cat Maggie, who filed her teeth to points and had sharp brass fingernails; Pugsy Hurley and Gallus Mag, a terrifying dame who ran the Hole-in-the-Wall saloon and periodically bit the ears off obstreperous customers and kept them in a pickling jar above the bar ‘pour encourager les autres’; Big Jack Zelig, who would, according to his own bill of fare, cut up a face for one dollar and kill a man for ten; Hoggy Walsh, Slops Connally and Baboon Dooley of the Whyos gang; One-Lung Curran, who stole coats from policemen; Goo Goo Knox; Happy Jack Mulraney, who killed a saloon keeper for laughing at the facial twitch which led to his sobriquet; brothel-keepers Hester Jane ‘the Grabber’ Haskins and Red Light Lizzie; and the unforgettable Sadie ‘the Goat’, a river pirate and leader of the Charlton Street Gang which occupied an empty gin mill on the East Side waterfront and terrorized farms along the Hudson River.

According to Herbert Asbury, whose 1928 Gangs of New York is probably the best book ever written on New York crime, ‘Sadie [the Goat] acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess money or valuables, to duck her head and butt him in the stomach, whereupon her male companion promptly slugged the surprised victim with a slung-shot and they then robbed him at their leisure.’ (For reasons unknown but not hard to imagine, Sadie fell foul of the formidable Gallus Mag of the Hole-in-the-Wall, who bit off her ear, as was her wont. But the story has a happy ending: the two women eventually became reconciled, whereupon gallant Gallus fished into her pickle jar, retrieved the missing organ and returned it to Sadie the Goat, who wore it in a locket around her neck ever after.)

Sophie Lyons, the self-styled ‘Queen of the Underworld’ whose remarkable memoirs are a crucial source of information on Worth’s life, was held by Asbury to be ‘the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced’. She eventually went straight, began writing her salacious, and partly fabricated accounts of New York low-life for the city newspapers, and ended up as America’s first society gossip columnist.

Into this colourful and horrific world, Adam Worth slipped quickly and easily. At the age of twenty, now complete with his own criminal moniker, Little Adam became a pickpocket.

‘Picking pockets has been reduced to an art here, and is followed by many persons as a profession,’ wrote the author of Secrets of the Great City in 1868. ‘It requires long practice and great skill, but these, once acquired, make their possessor a dangerous member of the community.’ Sophie Lyons, who became Worth’s close friend and sometime accomplice, described how Little Adam took to the apprentice criminal’s art: ‘Like myself and many other criminals who later achieved notoriety in broader fields, he first tried picking pockets. He had good teachers and was an apt pupil. His long, slender fingers seemed just made for the delicate task of slipping watches out of men’s pockets and purses out of women’s handbags.’

As an apprentice pickpocket, Worth found himself in an intensely hierarchical world. The lowest level of pickpocket was a ‘thief-cadger’, inexperienced youngsters often virtually indistinguishable from beggars; of slightly more consequence were the ‘snatchers’ who, as the name implies, made no attempt to avoid detection but simply grabbed and ran, or ‘tailers’, who specialized in extracting silk handkerchiefs from tail-coat pockets. The most developed of the species was the ‘hook’, also known as a ‘buzzer’, for whom picking pockets was an art requiring considerable daring and manual dexterity. Nimble and inconspicuous, Worth began as a ‘smatter-hauler’ or handkerchief thief, but soon the Civil War veteran graduated to become a fully-fledged ‘tooler’, a master of the art of ‘dipping’. Churches were particularly profitable hunting grounds, as were ferry stations, theatres, racecourses, political assemblies, stages, rat fights and any other place containing large numbers of distracted people in close proximity.

While lone pocket-dipping could be profitable, the most successful pickpockets worked in gangs and Worth’s talents ensured that ‘it was not long before he had enough capital to finance other criminals.’ Teaming up with some like-minded fellows, Worth now established a dipping syndicate, with himself as principal co-ordinator, banker and beneficiary. It was, proclaimed Lyons, ‘the first manifestation of the executive ability which was one day to make him a power in the underworld’, a Napoleon of ne’er-do-wells.

The technique for team-dipping or ‘pulling’, was well established. A prosperous-looking ‘mark’ is selected: he is then jostled or bumped by the ‘stall’; while the mark is thus distracted, the hook (sometimes known as the ‘mechanic’), quickly rifles or ‘fans’ his pockets, immediately passing the proceeds to a ‘caretaker’ or ‘stickman’, who then moves nonchalantly in another direction. Charles Dickens described the manoeuvre in Oliver Twist: ‘The Dodger trod under his toes, or ran upon his boot accidentally, while Charley Bates stumbled up against him behind: and in that one moment they took from him with extraordinary rapidity, snuff box, note-case, watchguard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket handkerchief, even the spectacle case.’ The ‘mark’, in this case, was none other than Fagin himself, the paterfamilias of dippers.

With his efficient team of purse-snatchers, Worth was fast becoming a minor dignitary in the so-called swell mob, as the upper echelon of the underworld was known, and according to Lyons he soon acquired ‘plenty of money and a wide reputation for his cleverness in escaping arrest’. But no sooner had Worth’s criminal career begun to blossom, than it came to a sudden and embarrassing halt. Late in 1864 Worth was arrested for filching a package from an Adams Express truck and summarily sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Sing Sing, the notoriously nasty New York gaol just north of the city on the banks of the Hudson River.

Worth’s brief incarceration for bounty jumping had not prepared him for the extravagant horror of the ‘Bastille on the Hudson’. In 1825 the prison’s first warden, a spectacular and inventive sadist by the name of Elam Lynds, remarked, ‘I don’t believe in reformation of the adult prisoner … He’s a coward, a willful lawbreaker whose spirit must be broken by the lash.’ In 1833 Alexis de Tocqueville had described Sing Sing as a ‘tomb of the living dead’, so silent and cowed were its inmates.

Clad in the distinctive striped prison garb instituted by Lynds, Worth was sent with the rest of the convicts to the prison quarries where he was put in charge of preparing the nitroglycerine for blasting. Many years later, Worth recalled how he was instructed by the foreman to heat the explosive when it became cold and brittle in the freezing air. This he did, grateful for the chance to warm his hands, and was lucky not to be blown to pieces for, as he frankly admitted, he ‘never had an idea at that time how dangerous it was’. Teaching hardened criminals how to handle nitroglycerine was not, perhaps, the brightest move on the part of the authorities, as Worth’s safe-cracking skills in later years so clearly proved.

The man who had slipped his chains on the Potomac, who had made a craft out of desertion, was not going to suffer the horrors of Sing Sing a moment longer than necessary, even though the prison’s guards, a breed of breathtaking brutality, had orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape. As he worked, Worth calculated the movements of the guards and after only a few weeks of prison life, he slipped out of sight while the guard-shift was changing and hid inside a drainage ditch, which ‘discharged itself inside the railway tunnel’. Under cover of night, according to a contemporary, ‘he managed to get a few miles down the river where there lay at a dock some canal boats’, in one of which, freezing and covered in mud, Worth hid, and ‘had the satisfaction a few hours after that, of having himself transported to New York City by a tug boat, which came up to fetch the canal boat in which he took refuge.’ At dawn, as the tug approached its ‘lonely dock far up on the West side of the city’, Worth clambered into the water and swam back to shore. ‘He managed, although having his prison clothes on, to get to the house of an acquaintance, where he was provided with a suit of clothes.’ He immediately plunged back into the ghastly but protective anonymity of the Bowery.

Worth’s later insouciance when recalling this escape belied what must have been a dreadful, if formative experience. At barely twenty years of age he had seen the worst the American penal system had to offer, and his contempt for authority was formidable. That Worth did not hesitate to plunge into a churning river at dead of night, clad in prison clothes and aware that apprehension might well mean death, reflected both his physical toughness and a growing faith in his own invincibility. So far from being reformed by his brief and unpleasant experience of prison, Worth concluded that the life of a ‘dip’ did not offer sufficient rewards, given its perils, and the time had come to change direction, to up the stakes in his personal vendetta against society. Reuniting with some of his former gang, Worth began to expand his scope of operations to include minor burglaries and other property thefts as well as picking pockets. His word ‘was law with the little group of young thieves he gathered around him,’ remembered Sophie Lyons. ‘He furnished the brains to keep them out of trouble and the cash to get them out if by chance they got in. Every morning they would meet in a little Canal Street restaurant to take their orders from him – at night they came back to hand him a liberal share of the day’s earnings.’ So far Worth’s activities had gone no further than what might be called disorganized crime. Henceforth he would tread more carefully, delegating often and putting himself at risk only when the rewards, or promise of adventure, were greatest. His strict dominance over the rest of the gang was the first illustration of a power-complex that would grow more pronounced with age. Criminals, it is fair to say, are not the most intellectual of people. Indeed, the class as a whole tends to be characterized by fairly intense stupidity. Worth’s highly intelligent approach to the business, and his ability to get results in the form of hard cash, was enough to ensure the obedience, even the reverence, of his underlings.

Solvent for the first time in his life, Worth’s determination to beat the odds at every level soon led him to New York’s roulette wheels, gambling dens and the faro tables – that extraordinarily chancy game that was once the rage of gamblers and has since virtually disappeared. Betting heavily, in the burgeoning belief that the more he dared the more fortune would smile, he began to live the life of a ‘sportsman’, moving away from the grim Bowery dives to the brighter, more luxurious, but no less dissipated lights of uptown New York and the famously seedy glamour of the ‘Tenderloin’ district.

Worth’s native intelligence was not the only character trait to distinguish him from his fellow crooks. He was also notable for avoiding strong drink, at a time when alcoholism was endemic and heavy drinking virtually obligatory among the criminal classes. Perhaps still more strangely, he refused to countenance any form of violence, regarding it as uncouth, unnecessary and, given his limited physical stature, unwise. Of the 68,000 people arrested in New York in 1865, 53,000 were charged with crimes of violence. Yet Worth made it a rule that force should play no part in any criminal enterprise that involved him, a rule he broke only once in his life. His rejection of alcohol and violence was itself part of a need to control, not just himself, but those within his power. Crooks who drank or fought made mistakes, and for that reason he steered clear of the established gangs, which were often little more than roving bands of pickled hoodlums at war with each other. Worth was not content merely to organize his minions, he needed to rule, regulate and reward them as he clawed his way up through the underworld. A sober, resourceful, non-violent crook marshalling his forces amid a troop of ignorant, drunken brawlers, Worth was also exceptional for the scope of his criminal aspirations, or, to put it another way, his greed. Sophie Lyons took note of his ‘restless ambition’ as he began his ascent into the criminal upper classes.

One of America’s senior crooks later recorded that ‘the state of society created by the war between the North and the South produced a large number of intelligent crooks’ of varied talents, but in post-bellum New York bank robbers were considered an aristocracy of their own. James L. Ford, an expert on, by participation in, New York’s seamy side, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Such operations as bank burglary were held in much higher esteem during the ‘sixties and ‘seventies than at present, and the most distinguished members of the craft were known by sight and pointed out to strangers.’ Allan Pinkerton, the father of Worth’s future adversary, in his 1873 book The Bankers, The Vault and The Burglars, observed that ‘instead of the clumsy, awkward, ill-looking rogue of former days, we now have the intelligent, scientific and calculating burglar, who is expert in the uses of tools, and a gentleman in appearance, who prides himself upon always leaving a “neat job” behind.’

Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin argued that ‘a successful bank sneak requires to be well-dressed and to possess a gentlemanly appearance.’ Sophie Lyons concurred, noting also that a certain amount of professional snobbery pertained in the upper ranks of crime. ‘It was hard for a young man to get a foothold with an organised party of bank robbers, for the more experienced men were reluctant to risk their chances of success by taking on a beginner.’

Without success Worth sought acceptance in such established bank-robbing cliques as that of George Leonidas Leslie, better known as ‘Western George’, which was responsible for a large percentage of the bank heists carried out in New York between the end of the war and 1884. Lyons first encountered Worth when he was ‘itching to get into bank work’, specifically through her husband, Ned Lyons, a noted burglar. But the veteran crooks turned down all advances from the aspiring newcomer.

Worth needed a patron, someone to provide him with an entree to the criminal elite. He found one in the mountainous figure of ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum.