The Napoleon of Crime (43 page)

On December 31, 1901, Agnew’s Seventh Annual Exhibition came to an end and was pronounced a rousing success by all. Pierpont Morgan prepared to take possession of his trophy. Despite being seriously ill, Worth “
would consult no doctor” and insisted on leaving the house to visit his old friend in Old Bond Street one last time. When the
Duchess
was finally taken down and out of his life, Worth’s spirit crumbled at last and he took to his bed. Weak, but in a spirit of liberation, he wrote to Pinkerton for the last time, enclosing a package—containing what little money he still possessed after his sister-in-law’s final demands had been met—and thanking the detective for his many acts of kindness. Pinkerton was free to speak about him after his death, but, if possible, Worth asked him to avoid causing his son and daughter any embarrassment. He also told his son to contact Pinkerton when the end came. His family later reported that he seemed oddly elated, his gray cheeks flushed a little, as if some weight had been removed from his emaciated shoulders.

On January 4, Pierpont Morgan, Worth’s unencountered soul mate and fellow expert in elegant double standards, transferred to Agnew’s the sum of $30,000 and arranged for the
Duchess
to be delivered to 13, Princes Gate, his great five-story neoclassical mansion south of Hyde Park (which would later become the ambassadorial residence for Joseph P. Kennedy and home to the future American President, John F. Kennedy). Morgan would prove just as jealous a protector of the
Duchess
as Worth had been. He declined to exhibit the portrait again, and flatly refused permission for engravings to be made—to the fury of Morland Agnew, who had hoped to give one to Pinkerton as an expression of thanks for his role in its reappearance. “
Mr Morgan will not allow the painting to be engraved at all, and we are powerless to do anything,” spluttered the enraged art dealer. “I trust he will relent later.” But Morgan didn’t. He was determined to keep the
Duchess
for his private pleasure.

Morgan brought the same absolutism to picture-hanging that he sought in every other aspect of his life. Some years later King Edward VII came to tea at Prince’s Gate and noticed another great portrait, the
Countess of Derby
by Lawrence.

“
The ceiling is too low in this room for that picture. Why do you hang it there?” demanded the King.

“Because I like it there, sir,” snapped the magnate.

Nobody, monarchs included, told Pierpont Morgan where to put his pictures, and there was no doubt in his mind where the
Duchess of Devonshire
should now reside. The great Gainsborough was hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece, the most prominent position in the house. The
Duchess
was a badge of social prominence and sexual conquest, and a symbol of worldly success, for a second time and for another man.

On January 8, 1902, four days after Morgan finally took possession of the Noble Lady and just a few miles away in Camden, the man who had kept her for twenty-five years lay quietly, his son and daughter near at hand. The pain throughout his body had slowly ebbed, leaving Adam Worth pathetically feeble, but exuberant. “
I left his room to go down to my supper and he seemed to be in the best of spirits,” young Harry Raymond reported. “When I came back to his room he was, as I thought, sleeping; several hours afterwards the landlady went into the room and came out to me and said that she did not like the looks of my father and requested me to go in, and I did so, but my father had quietly passed away without a struggle.”

The death certificate described Henry Judson Raymond as a man of “
independent means” whose death, at the age of fifty-six, was the result of heart failure, disease of the liver, and, in the coroner’s disapproving phrase, “chronic habits of intemperance.”

Harry Raymond, Jr., buried his father in Highgate Cemetery, where he lies still in an unmarked, “common” grave, overgrown by a thicket of brambles, and without headstone or any other marker. The burial register for plot number 34281 is made out in the name of Henry Judson Raymond. Even in death, Adam Worth was someone else, and perhaps it is only right that a man who adopted and shed so many aliases lies forever without a sign to betray his whereabouts.

Young Harry Raymond, still bearing the name his father had filched thirty years before, sold off the furniture in 2, Park Village East, and headed back to America with his younger sister. Two weeks after Worth’s death, the Pinkertons received a note, postmarked St. Paul, Minnesota: “
I beg to state to you that my father (Harry J. Raymond) passed away on the 8th January between six and seven in the evening,” signed H. J. Raymond.

Robert, the more cynical of the Pinkerton brothers, was inclined to suspect another ruse on the part of the arch-counterfeiter, who had, after all, faked his death before. “
Do you think it could possibly be a trick on the old fellow’s part to deceive us before he went into some other scheme of robbery?” he wrote to his brother. But William was convinced, and immediately penned a reply, making no mention of Worth’s past:

Yours of the 24th informing me of the death of your father, came to me in the light of a shock. I had a letter from your father about the first of the year, telling me he had been quite ill … I wrote him stating I hoped he would take good care of himself and get himself fully restored to health.

I have known your father for over 30 years, and though our lives were very different, yet there was always a warm friendship between us. I hope he has left you in some sort of condition to take care of yourselves. I regret your father’s death very much. It seems incredible that a few months ago your father was here with me and enjoyed his visit very much … Your father used to talk very much about his children, and his whole life seemed centered in you two. Nobody wishes you better luck than myself. In deep sympathy, believe me,
Sincerely yours,
W. A. Pinkerton

According to one account, Worth left a will, “
proved in the autumn of 1907, [which] showed that he died possessed of about £23,000.” There is no evidence to corroborate this, and plenty to suggest that Worth died with nothing. Young Harry soon wrote to Pinkerton again: “
My father left little or no money, and after paying the funeral expenses and our passages back to America, we are practically penniless … but I am working for the future so that it will enable me to provide both for myself and my sister who is entirely dependent on me for support.” Clearly suspecting that there was more to his father’s past, the young man pressed the detective for information: “
My father often used to speak of you … you will no doubt be able to enlighten me to things regarding my father that I do not know and that would interest me greatly.”

The detective kept both sides of his bargain with the dead thief. He sent Worth’s final package, which at least ensured that the two young people would not starve, and over the coming years he stood as guardian to each of them. He never directly discussed Worth’s criminal past with them, describing Worth only as “
a man of great inventive ideas” and stressing his “kindness of heart.” His decorous observation to Worth’s son that their lives had been “very different” was as far as he was prepared to go.

“I shall always have a kind remembrance of your father, for while we had not met in years up until two years ago, and then again a year ago, still we always had a kindly feeling for each other and I would willingly do anything consistently in my power to aid either you or your sister.” It is a tribute to the affection Worth could inspire, and the size of Pinkerton’s heart, that the letters betray genuine grief at the loss of his old enemy and friend. “
I was very sorry, indeed, to hear of the little fellow’s death,” he wrote to his brother. “I think we were about the only people he ever trusted. His prolonged sprees undoubtedly helped to shorten his life.”

“
I feel as you do about Little Adam,” Robert replied.

News of Worth’s death was filtering through the underworld grapevine, but the detective brothers decided to “
keep the matter of his death secret for the present,” while agreeing that if the news broke and they were called on to comment, “
we should leave his family out entirely.” It was only a matter of time, of course, until the press picked up the scent. As far back as 1893, when
The Pall Mall Gazette
had published its “exposé” of the imprisoned thief, Adam Worth alias Henry Raymond had been linked with the theft of Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
. When the painting reappeared in the hands of Morland Agnew there was again speculation about Worth’s role, but by then the thief had gone to ground, and since Morland Agnew did not know, and Pinkerton would not say he was involved, the story had petered out.

On February 5, 1902, the London newspapers published a brief dispatch announcing the death of Adam Worth, alias Henry Raymond, and within hours journalists on both sides of the Atlantic began to put the pieces together. The Pinkertons were bombarded with requests to confirm or deny that the late criminal was really the Gainsborough thief. “
I have a letter from Adam Worth stating I could make use of anything he told me, after he was dead,” William Pinkerton recorded, and finally, with evident reluctance, he decided to tell the full story. “
I hated to say anything about him after his death, but thought it would be better for us to say something and have the thing right, than have the article given out by some detective, who knew nothing about it.” Journalists were an unreliable crew, he noted. “
You cannot get a thing right for a newspaper man … if you write the facts down for him, he will change them about to suit himself.”

On February 6, William Pinkerton summoned the increasingly persistent journalists to his Chicago office and delivered a prepared statement outlining Worth’s life, his trail of crime, his theft of the Gainsborough, and the detective’s part in its return, although not his close relationship with the late felon. The next morning the story, sensational even by the standards of the time, was published from coast to coast, detailing the events of Worth’s remarkable life with considerable accuracy, or, in Pinkerton’s words, “
about as correct as a newspaper ever gets anything.”

Reflecting the ambivalence toward crime that still exists today, the newspapers competed to pay tribute to a man who had robbed, forged, and conned his way through life. The adulatory tone of the obituaries was not so very far removed from that of other “great men,” such as the original Henry Raymond, whose breathless valediction had once caught Worth’s eye and provided him with the alias he took to his grave. The
New York Sun
called the Gainsborough theft “
the most remarkable crime committed in the nineteenth century” and proclaimed that “the memories of the police of two continents do not go back to the time when he was ever an amateur. The authorities seem to be agreed that, in his criminal specialties, Worth had neither superior nor equal and, when he died, he left none worthy of his mantle.” The
Evening
Sun
lauded him as “
one of the most celebrated thieves in the criminal history of Europe and America.” The
New York World
, with peculiar civic pride, called him “
one of the most remarkable crooks this city ever produced.”

“
He was personally very charming, and his charity was proverbial. Thousands of Americans have been helped by him,” noted Randolph Hearst’s
Chicago American
, while
The Tribune
recalled his title, as did so many others—“The Napoleon of Crime”—and mourned “
the last of a really great band of high-grade criminals who operated in America and all the world … in all his work [he] aimed only at large game.” Even such august publications as
The Times
and
The New York Times
listed his achievements with undisguised awe.

Perhaps the most telling, and certainly the best-informed assessment, came, not surprisingly, from the Pinkertons:

In the death of Adam Worth there probably departed the most inventive and daring criminal of modern times … In all his criminal career, and all the various crimes he committed, he was always proud of the fact that he never committed a robbery where the use of firearms had to be resorted to, nor had he ever escaped, or attempted to escape from custody by force of jeopardizing the life of an officer, claiming that a man with brains had no right to carry firearms, that there was always a way, and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain. Among all the men Pinkertons have known in a lifetime, this man was the most remarkable criminal of them all.

Worth had spent a lifetime stealing respectability and social elevation. With plundered lucre he made himself into the quintessential Victorian gentleman, complete with thoroughbred racehorses, grand houses, expensive yachts, and the most coveted painting of the age, before his fabulous fabricated existence fell apart. Worth had believed he could steal respect, and he was right, but not the way he had meant it. In death, he garnered the admiration and homage of the world, not for upholding the rules of Victorian respectability, but for secretly breaking every one.

“
Adam Worth is dead,” proclaimed
The New York Journal
. “His demise marks the closing of a singular modern romance.”

EPILOGUE

The Inheritors

A
dam Worth’s great if dubious talents survived him. In August 1899, Kitty Flynn’s three daughters were out driving in the New Jersey countryside when their carriage became stuck on a railway line and was tragically demolished by an express train. Katherine Louise, Kitty’s younger daughter, and Juanita Terry, her child by Juan Terry, were both killed. But Lucy Adeleine, almost certainly Worth’s oldest child, who had married the eminently respectable Charles Trippe some years before, survived, along with her infant son, Juan.

Juan Trippe, grandson of a career criminal, inherited the Terry fortune and went on to create Pan American Airways, once the most powerful airline in the world. His business methods were not so far removed from those of his grandfather. Gore Vidal, with a nod to Trippe’s criminal ancestry, called him “
the robber baron of the airways.” Juan Trippe’s forty thousand employees merely referred to him as the “
Great Dissembler.”