flat at 198 Piccadilly ‘for which he paid £600 a year’. The apartment was just a few hundred yards up the street from Devonshire House at number 74, where the duchess once entertained on such a lavish scale, and is now the Bradford & Bingley Building Society – precisely the sort of business Worth would once have had no hesitation in robbing. From here, with infinite care, Worth began masterminding a series of thefts, forgeries and other crimes.
Using his most trusted associates, he would farm out criminal work, usually on a contract basis and through other intermediaries, to selected men (and women) in the London underworld. The crooks who carried out these commissions knew only that the orders were passed down from above, that the pickings were good, the planning impeccable and the targets – banks, railway cashiers, private homes of rich individuals, post offices, warehouses – selected by the hand of a master-organizer. What they never knew was the name of the man at the top, or even of those in the middle of Worth’s pyramid command structure. Thus, on the rare but unavoidable occasions when a robbery went awry, Worth was all but immune, particularly when the judicious filtering of hush money down through the ranks of the organization ensured additional discretion at every level. Ever the control fanatic, Worth established his own form of omertà by the force of his personality, rigid attention to detail, strict but always anonymous oversight of every operation, and the expenditure of a portion of the profits to ensure, if not loyalty, then at least silence. He was happy to entertain senior underworld figures knowing, like a mafia godfather, that their survival depended on discretion as much as his, but the lesser felons who were his main source of income never knowingly saw his face. Before long the Piccadilly pad became an ‘international clearing house of crime’.
Worth’s phenomenal success in these years is perhaps best described by the frankly admiring assessment of the Pinkertons, who considered him ‘the most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal known to modern times’. In an official history published many years later, the detectives recalled that ‘for years he perpetrated every form of theft – check forging, swindling, larceny, safe-cracking, diamond robbery, mail robbery, burglary of every degree, “hold ups” on the road and bank robbery – with complete immunity … His luxurious apartment at 198 Piccadilly, where he received in lavish style … became the meeting place of leading thieves of Europe and America. His home became the rendezvous for noted crooks all over the world, especially Americans, and he became a clearing house or “receiver” for most of the big robberies perpetrated in Europe. In the latter 70s and all through the 80’s, one big robbery followed after another; the fine “Italian hand” of Adam Worth could be traced, but not proven, to almost every one of them.’
As another contemporary recorded: ‘Crimes in every corner of the globe were planned in his luxurious home – and there, often, the final division of booty was made.’ A particular speciality of Worth’s gang was stealing registered mail from the strongboxes carried by train and in the cross-Channel steamers. ‘One robbery followed another in quick succession … from two to five million francs were abstracted from the mails in this way.’ To initiate these robberies Worth relied on his trusted compatriots, preferring reliable American crooks to the more fickle British variety. Finding recruits was not hard, for, as one recorded, ‘the West End was full of Americans, bank robbers, safe smashers, forgers, con men and receivers’. Many years later Worth offered this opinion of the British criminal classes: ‘There were some men among the Englishmen who were really staunch, loyal fellows and could do good work and take a chance, but the majority of them were a lot of sticks.’
The key figures of the Worth gang included the forgers Joe Chapman and Charles ‘the Scratch’ Becker, Carlo Sesicovitch, the bad-tempered Russian, and Little Joe Elliott, whenever he could be persuaded to stop chasing chorus girls. To their number was added the imposing figure of Jack ‘Junka’ Phillips, a vast and vastly stupid burglar, so named on account of his habit of carrying quantities of junk in his coat pockets. He was the only English crook to be admitted to the inner circle, a decision Worth would live to regret. Combining ignorance and treachery in almost equal degrees, Junka was a terrifying figure with a prognathous chin, long mutton-chop whiskers and a face that might have been carved out of parmesan cheese. A former wrestler, Junka’s main attributes were his height (well over six feet), his ferocious visage and colossal strength. He could carry even the largest safe on his back, which could then be broken open at leisure, while his daunting appearance made an excellent deterrent to the overinquisitive. There is a hilarious photograph in the Pinkerton archives of Junka, under arrest some years later, in full evening dress, tied to a post. Like a criminal Samson, Junka is straining at his bonds, his eyes screwed up in fury. The Pinkertons, with rare understatement, labelled the image ‘An unwilling photograph’.
The scope of Worth’s operations was increased considerably by the purchase of a 110-foot yacht requiring, it was later said, a crew of twenty-five, which he equipped lavishly and then used to ferry his criminal cohorts on a series of foreign expeditions. He named the vessel the Shamrock, in honour of his Irish love. In 1874 the gang set off for South America and the West Indies and in a single operation they looted ten thousand dollars from a safe in a warehouse in Kingston, Jamaica, before slipping back out to sea. ‘This last exploit would have ended in his capture by a British gunboat which pursued him for twenty miles had his yacht not been a remarkably speedy craft,’ said Lyons, who was apparently aboard at the time. The Colonial police in Kingston sent a report of the robbery to the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard. ‘Inspector Shore agrees with me this must be Adam Worth,’ William Pinkerton wrote to his brother in New York. The hunch was accurate enough, but without proof they were powerless to pin him down.
The yearning for respectability, for gentlemanly rank, was arguably the single most strongly motivating urge in Victorian society; stronger, even, than the lust to acquire money which was, for many Victorians and certainly for Worth, simply a means to that end. As the philosopher Herbert Spencer noted, ‘to be respectable means to be rich’. This was an age of immense snobbery at every level, of intense social consciousness, but also upward (and downward) mobility. A man could raise his position in the hierarchy, through work, wealth or good fortune, and, by the governing precepts of the day, he should. ‘Now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproached, with people once far above him,’ wrote John Ruskin some years before, ‘it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was born in and everybody thinks it is his DUTY to try to be a “gentleman”.’
Defining quite what it took to be a gentleman at the various levels of society was rather trickier, since, as Anthony Trollope observed in his autobiography, any attempt to do so was doomed to failure even though everyone would know what was meant by the term. One historian has written that a Victorian gentleman was ‘expected to be honest, dignified, courteous, considerate and socially at ease; to be disdainful of trade and … to uphold the tenets of “noblesse oblige”. A gentleman paid his gambling debts, did not cheat at cards and was honourable towards ladies’ – all of which qualities Worth displayed to the full, with the sole exception of the first: honesty. Added to this was the general perception that the less obvious industry a man expended and the greater his expenditure, the higher his rank on the social scale. As far as his neighbours and non-criminal associates could tell, Henry Raymond did not a hand’s turn of work and spent money at a rate that might have been suspicious had it not been so thoroughly satisfying to the Victorian sense of priorities. As Oscar Wilde ironically observed, ‘it
