even punctilious figure, laying on a lavish dance but watching his creation from one remove, forever an outsider, a prototype for Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.
With extraordinary ease he slipped into the life of an English gentleman, hosting grand dinner parties in the Mandelbaum tradition in his Piccadilly apartment and his Clapham mansion, both of which were now equipped with ‘costly furniture, bric-a-brac and paintings’ as well as rare books and expensive china. He mixed as easily with men and women of wealth and fashion as he did with the denizens of London’s underworld for, as the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, Sir Robert Anderson, later acknowledged, ‘he was a man who could make his way in any company,’ effortlessly switching roles from the rich man of leisure to the criminal mastermind. While he lived like a prince, Worth also seems to have sought to improve his mind and knowledge of culture. ‘He became a student of art and literature,’ Lyons noted, the better to play his role of man about town, but also out of a genuine interest in the finer things that could be obtained with others’ money.
Like any wealthy chap of a sporting disposition, Worth took an interest in the turf and purchased a string of ‘ten racehorses, and drove a pair of horses which fetched under the hammer £750’. To his Piccadilly neighbours Worth was a polite and evidently prosperous American, who entertained often and well, and had his suits made in Savile Row. To the frustrated Inspector Shore he was a permanent gall, for Worth always managed to stay a jump ahead by covering his tracks with infinite care and bribing sources within Scotland Yard to keep him abreast of Shore’s doings. One account even claims ‘he employed a staff of detectives and a solicitor, and his private secretary was a barrister.’ To his criminal colleagues Worth was a source of wonder, and regular income, whose largess was legendary: ‘When he had money, he was generous to a fault, never let a friend come to him a second time, and held out a helping hand to everybody in distress, whether in his mode of life or no,’ one associate later wrote, a view confirmed by the Pinkertons. ‘Anybody with whom he had a speaking acquaintance could always come to him and receive assistance, when he had it in his power to give.’ In an oblique recognition of his own humble, and now wholly concealed, beginnings, he only ever stole from those who had money to spare and remained adamant that crime need not involve thuggery: the Pinkertons found it astonishing that ‘throughout his career he never used a revolver or jeopardized the life of a victim’.
Perfectly confident in his own abilities to avoid detection, Worth began to take even greater risks and reap ever larger rewards. As he told his followers, ‘It’s just as easy to steal a hundred thousand dollars as a tenth of that sum … the risk is just as great. We’ll, therefore, go out for the big money always.’ Many years later the forger Charles Becker was interrogated by the Pinkertons and gave this account of the gang’s philosophy. It is worth quoting in full, for it provides important clues to the strange double life of Adam Worth:
If you want to get on quickly you must be rich or you must make believe to be so. To grow rich you must play a strong game – not a trumpery, cautious one. No. No. If in the hundred professions a man can choose from he makes a rapid fortune, he is denounced as a thief. Draw your own conclusions. Such is life. Moralists will make no radical changes, depend on that, in the morality of the world. Human nature is imperfect. Man is the same at the top, the middle or bottom of society. You’ll find ten bold fellows in every million of such cattle who dare to step out and do things, who dare to defy all things, even your laws. Do you want to know how to wind up in first place in every struggle? I will tell you. I have traveled both roads and know. Either by the highest genius or the lowest corruption. You must either rush a way through the crowd like a cannon ball or creep through it like a pestilence. I use the cannon ball method.
In its way, this was a peculiarly Victorian philosophy. Worth was (or considered himself to be) a superior being, equipped with greater resources for the Darwinian struggle for survival, which is, after all, a struggle without morals. Like many Victorians he considered the acquisition of wealth, and the respectability that went with it, to be a worthy goal in itself, but how the money was accumulated was, to Worth, a matter of the most profound indifference. The mere fact that he could dance one step ahead of the Pinkertons and Scotland Yard was proof that he ought to. None knew better than Worth that man is the same at the top, the middle and the bottom of society, for he had visited all three. The morality of the time was a strange, malleable thing: ‘They pretended to be better than they were,’ as one historian has observed. ‘They passed themselves off as incredibly pious and moral; they talked noble sentiments and lived – quite otherwise.’ Victorians strove to live outwardly ‘good’ lives, and made much of the fact, yet they enjoyed behaving ‘badly’ as much as any other society in any other period of human history. Worth’s own code of morality was a stern one, genuinely adhered to. He prided himself on a strict personal regime, abstained from strong drink, rose early, worked hard at his chosen profession, gave to charity and may even have attended church, while he broke every law he could find and enriched himself with the wealth of others. If Worth held to a set of high-minded convictions that were utterly at variance with his actions, he was by no means alone. He would have enjoyed Wilde’s quip in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.’
Sober, industrious, loyal, Worth was a criminal of principle, which he imposed on his gang with rigid discipline. With the exception of Piano Charley, drunks were excluded and violence was specifically forbidden. ‘A man with brains has no right to carry firearms,’ he insisted, since ‘there was always a way and a better way, by the quick exercise of the brain’; robberies were to be inflicted only on those who could afford them, and the division of spoils was to be fair. Myriad crooks and hangers-on owed him their livelihoods, yet Worth was no Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Then again, neither was Robin Hood.
‘It was his almost unbroken record of success in getting large amounts of plunder and escaping punishment for crimes that gave the underworld such confidence in him and made all the cleverest criminals his accomplices,’ Sophie Lyons concluded.
Worth delighted in his new-found position, elevated in both respectable society and the underworld. Slowly his confidence expanded into hubris. In the mid 1870s he met William Pinkerton again, on this occasion in the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, a noted meeting place for flâneurs and sporting men, but this time Worth felt so secure at the centre of his criminal network that he could offer the American detective a compliment, while damning his English counterpart, Inspector Shore. The Scotland Yard detective, he said, ‘could thank God Almighty
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