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
