The Napoleon of Crime (21 page)

Juan was the son of Thomas Terry, an Irish adventurer whose ancestors, like Kitty, had quit the damp sod of Ireland to make their fortune in the New World. Thomas, or Thomaso, Terry was born in the city of Caracas, Venezuela, on the 24th of February 1808, and “
baptized in the local church of San Pablo.” An energetic and resourceful youth, he began building up a fortune by exchanging tracts of land for cheap jewelry, and in 1830 he settled in Cienfuegos, Cuba. There he met and fell in love with Teresa Dorticós y Gómez de Leys, the French-born daughter of a Havana sugar planter, and asked for her hand in marriage. Teresa’s enormously wealthy father, don Andrés Dorticós y Casson, the governor of Cienfuegos, took one look at the beguiling but hardly dependable figure of Tom Terry, and exploded. Not only did he refuse his consent, but he ordered his field hands to give his daughter’s impertinent suitor a sound thrashing and throw him off the premises. Terry promptly eloped with Teresa, and they were married on October 31, 1837. Thomaso simply ignored the ensuing uproar, and “
when he heard that his father-in-law had referred contemptuously to him he remarked quietly and earnestly, ‘I shall be richer than he is some day.’ ”

And so he became. “
Every transaction in which the young Venezuelan was concerned proved immensely profitable. His sugar plantations gave an abundant yield. The lands for which he had exchanged trinkets became valuable plantations.” Remaining loyal to Spain during the Cuban insurrection, Terry was rewarded with vast parcels of confiscated land at low prices, which “
proved veritable gold mines,” and within five years he was the largest sugar planter in Cienfuegos, richer by far than his now amiable father-in-law. Some of his fortune may have been made in an even more unromantic way, for according to one report he supplemented his income from sugar with a side business in the
slave trade. Nonetheless, Thomas Terry exchanged his Venezuelan passport for American citizenship, and as “
one of the wealthiest men in the Americas,” he and Teresa traveled the world, collecting properties and having children, amassing, by and by, roughly a dozen of each. “
The Terrys owned houses in New York and a mansion in Paris on the Rue de la Boétie, in prime expatriate territory off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and dwelt also in several castles of the Loire Valley, including, for a while, the magnificent Château de Chenonceau.”

Tom Terry was a prodigiously generous father to his multitude of children and handed out regular dollops of cash. Juan Pedro, the youngest, came to New York in 1875 with a gift from his father of $900,000 in cash, “
with which he went into Wall street and when he was through with a certain transaction in gold he was half a million richer.” An adept speculator, Juan was “
distinguished for his business ability, but fond of a life of luxury and pleasure.” Both aspects of his character immediately endeared him to Kitty Flynn.

Kitty may well have kept from her suitor the less respectable details of her history, which only leaked out many years later, but if Juan knew that the object of his adoration was a onetime barmaid who had been married to a bigamous burglar and had, for many years, shared her affections with her husband’s friend and partner in crime, he does not seem to have cared one jot. His own family history was quite as romantic and roué as Kitty’s, and with millions in the bank, he knew society could titter all it wanted. Indeed, the widow Flynn’s racy past may have added to her fascination in the eyes of the wealthy, fun-loving
flâneur
and speculator. Juan was also a bland and vacillating man whose will, weak at the best of times, was no match for the Irishwoman’s gumption. Kitty had more than enough chutzpah for them both.

According to Sophie Lyons, the two met at an art dealer’s on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, where Kitty, perennially short of money, had gone to sell the last of the paintings from the American Bar. “
Young Terry was infatuated with Kate’s queenly beauty, and he laid siege to her heart so ardently” that she agreed immediately to marry him. Sophie’s romantic memory being what it was, it seems rather more likely that, as newspapers later reported, they met at the widow Flynn’s boarding house one evening when Juan, on the spur of the moment, invited his hostess to attend a charity ball with him. “
She was pretty and fascinating, and caught the imagination of the Cuban,” the papers reported.

The only hitch in their fast-blooming love affair was that Kitty was still legally married to Charley Bullard, who was also illegally married to someone else. The intervening years had not been happy ones for the musical felon. On September 13, 1878, he had managed to escape from the prison in Concord to which he had been consigned for his part in the Boylston Bank robbery. “
His conduct as a prisoner was uniformly docile and good for many months, until one day he surprised his keepers by a seemingly inexplicable outbreak of insolence and riotous disturbance. For this offense against discipline he was confined overnight with five other rioters in the cells for refractory prisoners. The next morning it was discovered the birds had flown. Bullard had somehow fitted keys to the locks of the cells, released his confederates and found a way of escape.”

At liberty in New York, and in a drunken euphoria, he had sent an “
insulting postal card” to General Chamberlain, the prison warden at Concord jail, “
stating that the Manhattan Bank robbery was planned by him.” After bumming around New York for a while, Bullard had made his way to Toronto, where he slipped back into some low-level crime, but “
his ill-gotten gains soon melted in his hands.” Long imprisonment followed by heavy drinking had sapped his once-legendary abilities as a sneak thief and pianist. The man who once had “
fingers so sensitive he could open a combination safe with his hands alone” now had the shakes so badly he could hardly open a bottle, let alone play the piano with any skill.

The thief of the Merchant Express and the Boylston Bank was reduced to petty pilfering and finally came to grief “
while penny weighting a watch chain in a jewelry shop,” for which he
was arrested and sent to the Canadian Penitentiary at Kingston for five years. This time he found himself well and truly incarcerated, and it was here, in the winter of 1880, that Bullard finally received the news that Kitty had divorced him.

The following spring, Kitty and Juan Terry were married by Judge Morgan in a civil service at Jefferson Market Court in New York, “
greatly to the consternation of his family,” who had been making their own investigations into Kitty’s past. Of all the levels of hypocrisy in this tale, the fury of the Terrys when presented with an Irish barmaid as a relative is among the most impressive.

To his credit, and like his father before him, Juan Terry simply ignored the bleating of his nouveau-riche relatives and moved his new wife into luxurious apartments in Stuyvesant House, New York. The widow Flynn may initially have been attracted by Terry’s wealth, but they were well suited to one another and the result was, as Sophie Lyons reports, an “
exceedingly happy marriage.” Kitty’s two daughters, “
who had grown up to be beautiful girls,” were informally adopted by their wealthy new stepfather. Juan Terry “
permitted Kate’s daughters to use his name and saw that they were properly educated with private lessons in the arts and sojourns in schools in New York and on the Continent in keeping with their rich-gypsy existence.” New York society might snigger as word of Kitty’s lowly origins leaked out, but the extent of Terry’s fortune was sufficient to ensure that such carping was short-lived. Within a few years Mrs. Terry had become a noted figure in New York society and a sought-after guest at the city’s social functions.

Her good looks, her wealth, and her exciting past earned Kitty the envy and attention of the masses, but another aspect of her character ensured that she quickly became a regular feature in the pages of the more scurrilous New York newspapers: her newfound and obsessive taste for litigation. The gangster’s moll who had happily turned a blind eye to the illegal doings of Worth and Bullard now recruited the law to her side. She sued hard and she sued often, and was sued in turn.

Where Worth had, for obvious reasons, made every effort to avoid setting foot in court, Kitty was strangely drawn to the legal fray, perhaps out of a desire to show herself on the right side of the law, having spent so much of her early life, if not actively, then at least by association, on the wrong side. Kitty was no criminal; she was not even a natural dissembler. She was an actress, and the courts were her stage. While her legal imbroglios did not always show her in the best light, the attendant publicity and revelations added to her social cachet—a manner of social self-advancement not unknown in modern times.

Her first experience in the New York courts involved one Miss Alcevinia, or “Vinnie,” Atwood, a young lady of dubious reputation, who appeared to be on uncommonly, not to say infuriatingly, intimate terms with Kitty’s new husband. The facts are disputed, as with all such domestic spats, but
The New York Times
reported the incident thus: “
Returning from a shopping tour on the afternoon of Nov. 10, 1881, Mrs. Kate Louise Terry found in her room in the Stuyvesant House, a letter addressed to her husband, Mr. Juan P. Terry. As the address was in feminine handwriting she opened the letter, and found it contained a request for money to enable Miss Vinnie Atwood to make a trip to some place called Burlington where she desired to interview the father and mother of some man who had done her a wrong.” The
New York World
reported that Kitty had actually extracted the letter from her husband’s pocket, “
the tone of which indicated a degree of intimacy not pleasing to his wife.”

The redoubtable Kitty, who thought nothing of opening her husband’s letters and was no stranger herself to the intricacies of divided love, took to the warpath. “
She wrote a reply, signing her husband’s name, took a cab and drove to the vicinity of Miss Atwood’s flat. She sent the missive into the house and receiving no reply, followed it in person.” Kitty testified that she had found Miss Atwood and some other women “
sitting smoking and drinking,” and that when she demanded an explanation for the letter, she was assaulted. Miss Atwood’s account was probably more accurate, given what we know of Kitty’s incendiary personality: “
Mrs. Terry, as soon as she entered her rooms, began to curse her and throw miniature images &c at her.” A brief but ferocious bout of fisticuffs ensued, “
in the course of which crockery was broken and Mrs. Terry’s face was bruised.”

Kitty stormed off to the police station at the 29th precinct, and Miss Atwood was arrested on a charge of assault and battery, to which a further charge of grand larceny was added after Kitty claimed her rival had also stolen from her the sum of $1,000. Justice Smith was plainly baffled by the fracas, and to Kitty’s fury, the theft charge was dismissed. Miss Atwood was briefly held on the charge of assault, and when she was finally acquitted, she promptly filed a countersuit against Kitty, “
complaining that Mrs. Terry had acted maliciously, and had injured her in her social reputation and standing, for which she asked $25,000 damages.”

When the cat-fight came to court more than a year later, New York was agog. Kitty insisted that Miss Atwood was a slut, “
a person of bad character, and therefore could not have been hurt in reputation,” since she had no social standing to damage. Miss Atwood’s lawyers, in turn, subjected Kitty to “
a similar cross-examination, the design of which was to show that she must be an untruthful woman because she was formerly the wife of Charlie Bullard, alias ‘Piano Charlie,’ one of the Boylston Bank robbers, and therefore the associate of his friends. She was asked if she knew certain notorious criminals and she said she did not.”

Kitty launched into an impassioned defense of her misspent youth. “
Her marriage to Bullard, alias Wells, she said, occurred when she was only 17 years old. He represented himself as a millionaire, and she married him after having known him only three weeks.” The jury found in Miss Atwood’s favor, but, perhaps moved by Kitty’s account of life with a wicked bank robber, ordered her to pay just $800 in damages, a mere trifle, given the size of the Terry bank account, and a great deal less than the $25,000 demanded. What Juan Pedro made of the legal tangle between his new wife and a woman we can only assume was his mistress is not recorded, because the Cuban millionaire, showing eminent good sense, had gone on holiday. Kitty, however, seems to have regarded the verdict as a moral victory. “
The court experience seemed to whet the appetite of the ex-barmaid for legal disputes,” the
New York World
later reported, “and ever since then she frequently figured in the New York courts.”

In 1888 she was back in the dock, accused of assaulting her servant, Mary Anne Coogan, and fought the charges in a lengthy court battle. Then in 1891 she was entangled in yet another case when she refused to pay rent owed to a Fifth Avenue boarding-house keeper, one Mme. Lavalette. Kitty, it appears, had rented this woman’s rooms a few years earlier but “
afterwards went South … leaving her rooms at Mme. Lavalette’s locked. Mrs. Terry was informed anonymously that Mme. Lavalette was not only using her apartments but also her clothing.” Kitty, furious, refused to pay the landlady and also took her to court, and won.

Such incidents reflected a vital aspect of Kitty’s character. She now had the fine clothes, the grand apartments, the gilded carriages, but she was still the salty, high-spirited woman who wouldn’t set herself on a moral pedestal, or pretend to be better than she was. There was no double life for Kitty Flynn, and if that meant showing the world she was still prepared to duke it out with chambermaids or her husband’s mistress, so be it.

Meanwhile, Juan Pedro and Kitty lived the flamboyant life of a wealthy young couple, holding dinner parties and dances, attending the opera, and generally showing off to their peers. Despite his brief and lucrative flutter on the stock exchange, Juan Pedro was never tempted to repeat the experiment and did not a hand’s turn of work for the rest of his life. When not in court, Kitty traveled the world in lavish style with her husband and children, much as she had done with Worth and Bullard, but this time there was no subterfuge. Kitty Flynn, the poor girl from the Dublin slums, had finally achieved the status she had always dreamed of: she was now a society duchess in her own right.