Dan Snow's History Hit - The Real Moriarty with Ben Macintyre

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Adam Worth was the quintessential criminal mastermind. He faked his own death, robbed banks in the US, stole diamonds in South Africa and amassed a fortune that helped him evade capture for decades. As a gentleman thief in London high society, he infamously stole Thomas Gainsborough's celebrated Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.Ben Macintyre, author of ‘The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief’, take us through the life of the man who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Moriarty.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Max Carrey.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. He was the Napoleon of Crime. He went under several aliases. Well, we think his real name, or certainly the name he chose to go by most of the time, was Adam Worth. He was the man who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create the character of Professor Moriarty, the most dangerous criminal in the world, the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. He lifted half a million dollars worth of diamonds from South Africa. He ambushed a money wagon in the Low Countries. He stole a celebrated portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, excellent taste, from a gallery in London. He broke into the vault of a bank by taking over the building next door in Massachusetts. He was an international criminal

mastermind. And here to tell us all about him is the one and only Ben McIntyre. He's a columnist, associate editor for The Times. He's written so many wonderful best-selling books. He's written one on Adam Worth called Napoleon of Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth, The Real Moriarty. But he, of course, has written Ancient Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat. And his work on the early SAS is legendary as well. It's been great fun to have Ben McIntyre back on the podcast to tell us all about this 19th century criminal mastermind. I should say, this podcast was suggested by one of you,

a listener, Stephen Reedy. Thank you very much for pointing us in the direction of the Napoleon of Crime. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity

till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Ben, lovely to have you back on the podcast. Lovely to be here. Tell me about this, the real-life Moriarty. I love that.

I've been listening to a show that comes with my kids in the car, and they love it. Tell me about the man who inspired Moriarty. Where was he born? What was his early life like? Well, he's an extraordinary figure. His real name was Adam Wirth, or Wirth. He was probably German-born,

but had emigrated to America in the sort of mid-19th century. The first time he crops up in any sort of official capacity is during the Civil War. So Adam Worth is an intriguing character, because he was a complete rogue. I mean, a really bad man in lots of ways. He was a total criminal. He never became anything else. He never went straight. But he was sort of, oddly, he was a criminal with a certain amount of principle, which I think is why, to circle back to your original question, Conan Doyle fixed on him as a sort of intriguing model for Moriarty. But he turns up faking his own deaths at the Battle of Bull Run, one of the very first and bloodiest of the Civil War engagements. And he then became what was known as a bounty jumper.

So he would sign up with different regiments and then take the bounty for joining. He didn't really seem to mind whether he was on the Union or Confederate side. He'd take the bounty for joining and then disappear, go AWOL. The first time we find him in the records he's already uh bent he's already crooked what's it I mean do did he get away with it do we find him in the records because he was disciplined for it or what's going on he got caught and then he I think he was only fined the first time and then then but he seems to have completely got away with it and we don't know exactly where he was born. We know he was brought up in pretty abject poverty, somewhere on the East Coast.

But after the Civil War, he drifts into New York and into the New York underbelly, really. I mean, he appears in that wonderful book by Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York, that was made into that splendid film with Daniel Day-Lewis. So he's moving around the kind of underworld of New York that was made into that splendid film with Daniel Day-Lewis. So he's moving around the kind of underworld of New York. He becomes a pickpocket. He then links up with a splendid female crime boss called Marm Mandelbaum, who was running a kind of fencing racket in sort of post-Civil War New York. And really, that's where his sort of criminal enterprise begins. He's a man of great ambition, Adam Worth. He's highly intelligent. He's very small. And I think that's one of the reasons why the title, The Napoleon of Crime, works,

which was eventually sort of given to him by the British police after a long time, but the CID. But it was partly because he was a tiny man. I mean, I think he was about five foot two. But he made up for it with a gargantuan Napoleonic complex, which involved, you know, eventually graduating to the aristocracy of crime. And also the 19th century folk, they couldn't help attaching the Napoleon prefix to anything. Napoleon of railways. I mean, they were an absolute thrall to the Corsican. Anyway, initially, what? It's just street crime, pickpocketing, con artists, stuff like that. Yeah, and then he graduates to bigger stuff. He starts doing sort of safe cracking.

One of the key moments in Worth's life is he links up with a with another character straight out of central casting called piano charlie bullard now piano charlie bullard was a safe cracker he was also a pianist um there are some wonderful photographs of him in the pinkerton detective agency archive and he's this sort of etiolated looking figure with a wispy beard but he was a brilliant pianist and an even better safecracker, said to have fingers so sensitive that he could feel the combination on a safe tumbler. And the two of them went into union together and began running ever larger safecracking exploits. in the first phase was the Boylston National Bank in Boston, where they leased the building next door to the bank and drilled through the wall. It's actually an exploit that you will find in Sherlock Holmes. It does reappear in one of the Conan Doyle stories, this exploit. So they set up what looked from the outside like a chemist's shop. And they were selling sort of pharmaceuticals,

but at the same time, they were also breaking. And they were selling sort of pharmaceuticals. But at the same time, they were also breaking. And it was a hugely successful operation. And actually, Wirth doesn't seem to have bothered to cover his tracks particularly well. He kind of, in a way, this is one of the things about him, was that he was rather celebrated because he sort of celebrated himself, which is not a great thing for an organised criminal. But already he was becoming rather an aristocrat of the whole operation. He sort of established quite clear principles for his gang, which was that while they were perfectly able to steal anything they wanted to under his guidance, he did not approve of violence. There were occasions when he did. He didn't carry a gun.

He wasn't a kind of stick-em-up man. He was more of a kind of let's-think-our-way-round the police and the authorities man, which again, I think, is why Conan Doyle was attracted to him as a character, because like Moriarty, it's all about him as a criminal mastermind trying to out-think his enemies. And when you say he liked to big himself up, I mean, were there in the tabloids? Are there sort of features about him and stuff? From about 1885, Adam Worth, the gentleman crook, becomes a kind of figure in the yellow press, if you like. I mean, he's changing his name a lot. Bear that in mind.

I mean, nobody really knows him as Adam Worth anymore. He's already taken on various different aliases. But there is this sort of shadowy figure who is beginning to sort of appear. And of course, that appeals hugely to the Victorian imagination, the idea of this sort of hidden hand that is sort of moving around. And crucially, he goes international. You know, he starts to spread his tentacles, if you like. And he, first of all, with Piano Charlie and another wonderful character called Kitty Flynn, who is this rather attractive buxom barmaid that they both fall in love with. She actually ended up marrying the man who founded

Pan American Airways. So she became eventually incredibly rich. And she had two children, no one was ever sure whether they were Charlie's children or Adam's children. They both claimed them. And the three of them knocked around. It's a little like sort of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You know, the three of them went into partnership together. And she was in it up to her shell-like ears. And she was completely involved in all of it. And they began to knock around. And they set up in Paris, in the Rue Lévy. They set up the first time, I think, a sort of American bar, which had a long bar downstairs. And it was highly successful as a sort of Yankee restaurant. But upstairs was a

gambling den. And they had a system whereby an early warning buzzer would go if the French police turned up because gambling was illegal. And they had a way of turning the tables around so they would slot back into the walls. I mean, you never know with these stories quite how much of them is mythology and how much of it is true. But certainly the Paris Sureté, the police force, were on Worth's trail. They were now trying to track him down with the help, crucially, of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And this is where the Pinkertons enter this story. These are the sort of private detective agency,

which really become the foundation for sort of Interpol and a kind of America-wide detective agency. Initially, the Pinkertons, there's Alan Pinkerton, who is the sort of paterfamilias, who's a sort of tough Scots immigrant, and his two sons. And initially, they're hunting outlaws in the West. And when I say hunting, I mean hunting. I mean, they tended to shoot first and ask questions, if at all, later.

They were pretty tough, the Pinkertons, and they would latterly develop a very unsavory reputation as a strike-breaking force in the Pennsylvania coalfields the Pinkertons are an ambivalent group but they are also brought in to try and track down Pinkerton and to track down Adam Worth and in a funny way the sort of relationship between William Pinkerton one of the sons and Adam they actually have a sort of relationship between William Pinkerton, one of the sons, and Adam, they actually have a sort of relationship. They kind of get to know each other. And so you have this kind of internal sort of battle going on between the goody and the baddy with a kind of mutual respect. But again, it's highly mythologised, this, on both sides, I have to say. Well, we do know that he moved to London from Paris.

He did. He did. He moved to London. In his pomp, and we're now, let's say, we're probably in about 1889 or perhaps 1890 by this point. He's in his pomp. He's now taken on the name Henry J. Raymond, which is a name that he stole from the founder editor of the New York Times. He simply read an obituary for the Henry J. editor of the New York Times. He simply read an obituary for the Henry J. Raymond in the New York Times and decided that sounded like a grand name, and he just took

it. And he became known in criminal circles as Mr. Raymond. He sort of, you know, this was what he was like. He just sort of would have these kind of mad fantasies about who he was. He took a big house in Clacken Common, looking out on the Common, still there, West Lodge. It's a wonderful house. And that was where he and Kitty and Piano Charlie, although Piano Charlie kept getting arrested and having to be sprung out of jail. I mean, there are various stories about that. And they began to run a sort of counterfeiting business, a forgery business. He was very good at Czech forgery. That was one of his big things. A bit of safe cracking on the side. But he was making good money by this point. He was doing very well. And this is where the Scotland Yard sort of get wind of Adam Worth.

And a particular character called Anderson, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Department, character called Anderson, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Department, is the one who gave him the soubriquet, the Napoleon of crime. And that is pretty clearly where it's either there or a little later that Conan Doyle comes across this figure who is operating really at the top of his game as an, he's really the first, I mean, you can make lots of claims for Adam Worth, but I think one of them is that he really is the world's first international organised crime boss. But he's not a mafia type. That's what makes him interesting. I think that's what appealed to the Victorian sensibility is that he is a sort of gentleman. He has a kind of code of ethics.

And these are all the characters that I'm always particularly attracted to. I like scoundrels. I love people who are doing the wrong thing for the right reasons or the right thing for the wrong reasons. He's not a straight character. In fact, we might cut back a bit if you're interested because I came across Worth when I was the correspondent for The Times in America and the Rodney King riots were taking place in California, in L.A., And some of your listeners will remember all of that. It was a terrible time. And I broke off from covering those riots to go to the Pinkerton Detective Agency archive in

Van Nuys, which was then just, it's now moved to Yale, but it was then just a bunch of boxes in a basement. Because I was sort of looking to sort of write about American law enforcement in a different era and that's where this incredible archive lies and it can so the Pinkertons were the ones who kind of collected everything about Adam Worth partly to kind of celebrate their own brilliance as detectives but also because they kind of liked him and there were boxes and boxes and boxes of letters and photographs and stuff written by Adam Worth himself, which he'd given to the Pinkertons. So that's, in a way, where it comes from. So in a way, the Pinkertons and Worth collude in the creation of his own mythology. You're listening to Dan Snow's History,

talking about Adam Worth, the Napoleon of Crime. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And it's while he's in London that he carries out his most famous crime, the one that really catapults him into the headlines, because a Gainsborough painting by Thomas Gainsborough of the Duchess of Devonshire had just been sold at auction in London. It was the highest price ever paid for a painting at that point. And this image of the Duchess of Devonshire, she's a rather blousy image. She's

wearing this sort of huge feathered hat and looking very coquettish. She was a kind of, as it were, the Princess Diana of her day. She was absolutely beloved. And her image appeared on everything, on sort of cooking pots and teacups. And so it was a very famous image and a very, very valuable painting. And it had been bought, in fact, by Pierpont Morgan, the banker, the American banker. But it was still being held in Agnew's art gallery in Bond Street when Worth and his bodyguard, who was a man called Junker Phillips, who was a sort of six-foot-two thug, were strolling.

Again, there are great pictures of Phillips from the archive, were strolling along Bond Street when they noticed that this was where the painting had been exhibited. when they noticed that this was where the painting had been exhibited. That night, in the middle of the night, Adam Worth climbed on Junker's shoulders, broke in through the window of Agnew's art gallery in Bond Street and cut the Duchess of Devonshire out of the frame, rolled it up and took it away.

It was the most celebrated crime of the era. I mean, it caused an absolutely vast sensation, even though actually stealing it had been comparatively easy. Why he did so, he did it partly thinking that he would be able to sell it. In the book, I also speculate, and I think there is something to this, that he partly stole it because the Duchess of Devonshire in this painting bears an uncanny resemblance to Kitty Flynn. And I think it is partly, if there's such a word, a memento amore. You know, he sort of it's a kind of love token in a way.

At this point, she'd run off with Charlie Bullard and wasn't coming back. And we think and he kept it and it caused this huge sensation in Victorian Britain. I mean, people wrote, I've seen the archive at Agnew's, hundreds of people wrote in with theories about where the painting was, most of them completely bogus, as often happens when a major crime occurs. People write in with great theories about, I i saw it on clappin common tube or i you know whatever you know people sort of make up stuff that they send in and ag news still has this extraordinary archive of stuff and it was a huge hue and cry and everyone went searching for

it and nobody really suspected worth at this point who had had a special trunk constructed in which he could he could hide the painting with a sort of hinged bottom which meant that when he times he could just open the hinge and look at this painting in sort of wicked criminal isolation so again it's the foundation story for for one of those great criminal myths you You'll remember the bit in Dr. No, when Dr. No is looking at the stolen portrait of Duke of Wellington, which had then been stolen at the point that Dr. No was made. gentleman connoisseur crooks who steal to order and enjoy secret pleasure in the sort of aesthetic thing that they've stolen. And that was possibly true of Worth. He certainly kept this painting for a very, very long time. It's just a wonderful story. He ends up, he steals half a million quid's worth of diamonds in South Africa, does he? But ends up getting caught, ends up getting caught. quid's worth of diamonds in South Africa, does he? But ends up getting caught, ends up getting caught. Yes. I mean, he travels the world. He knows he's in trouble at this point. So he's moving

pretty fast around the world. And his mistake is to hold up a coach in Belgium. He's captured. It's the only instance that we know of when Wirth attempted highway robbery. And it was successful. He got away with the strongbox, but then he was captured by the Belgians. And in fact, the trial transcripts in French are rather wonderful of Worth sort of refusing to admit anything and playing the part of a kind of gentleman crook.

Actually playing the part of a gentleman, not a crook who's been unfairly kind of accused of this stuff. But he was banged to rights, really. And he got 10 years in prison in Louvain. He served by good behaviour. He served, I think, about four and a half. He was betrayed by a criminal compatriot,

a man called Manny Shinwell, turned him in, basically, to the police. And he was betrayed. And prison really broke Adam Worth. I mean, he'd never spent that long in prison before. There are only two existing photographs of Adam Worth. One is of him as a fairly young man with these wonderful mutton chop whiskers. The second is a prison photograph. And you can tell that the years are really telling on him. He's beginning to sort of come apart. All the sort of brio has gone.

And when he came out, he wasn't dying yet, but he took to the bottle very quickly. And so the final years of Worth's life are in some ways very sad ones. He had two children by a woman who wasn't, we don't even know how many he had by Kitty, but he certainly had two more. And he clearly wanted to do right by them. And I think he sort of, it's pretty clear

that he had a premonition that the end was coming. And one of the things he wanted to do was to return the painting. So he arranged through the Pinkerton Detective Agency, he arranged for a representative Agnews to go to a hotel in New York, cough up $25,000, a not inconsiderable sum at that point, which would arrive through an intermediary. And then he pledged that through Pinkerton, and Pinkerton would vouchsafe this, that the painting would be returned. through Pinkerton, and Pinkerton would vouch safe this, that the painting would be returned. And sure enough, Agnew and his wife were waiting in the hotel room. There was a knock on the door. The bellboy appeared

with a kind of long cardboard tube. Huge great thing, actually. He sort of handed over and left, and inside was the Duchess of Devonshire, the missing Gainsborough painting. Of course, what Agnew hadn't realised was the bellboy was actually Adam Worth. That was he himself physically handing this thing over. And there was enough money there for Worth to sort of live out his very few days after that.

He only lived for about another year and a half after that. But his children were cared for. And one of them, in fact, the boy, became a detective in the Pinkerton detective agency he ended up himself on the other side of the law and Worth was buried in a pauper's grave in Highgate Cemetery I mean for years no one knew where it was and then actually I discovered it when I was doing the, I mean, it wasn't marked at all in any way, but there is now a little headstone that sits over it, which says Adam Worth, also known as Henry J. Raymond, the Napoleon of crime, with an approximation of his dates. So, you know, he got a headstone in the end. He got recognition. You've added to the lore of Highgate Cemetery. It's already packed with celebrities. But he's not that far from Karl Marx, actually, which would have

pleased him greatly, I think. Isn't it funny how all of these criminals, they seem to be very bad at capital accumulation. They don't save for a rainy day, do they, Ben? They have vast amounts of money passed through their hands, but they always die in poverty. Stick it in a flipping building society, lads. Absolutely. Well, you've got quite a lot of outlay. I mean,

you've got to keep the gang happy. You've got to buy the equipment. You've got to bribe people. And you've got to pay off the cops and so on. But you're right. I mean, he did live pretty high on the hog, Adam Worth. I mean, he believed in diamond neck studs, you know, coat studs. And he was a gambler too. So, you know, that's a very swift way to get rid of your ill-gotten gains. He couldn't resist the horses. He ended up actually, what appears to have been the last of his money, went on the dog races in the UK. So, I mean, he just managed to get rid of it. Fatal, fatal. And Conan Doyle was writing, well, no, writing in 1880s, wasn't he? So he would have been on the Scottish doctor at Bell. But there is good evidence that he had Worth in mind when he created Moriarty, because there's really no other candidate

in truth. I mean, there was no one else who was actually doing what Worth was doing. And as I say, his fame, self-created and created by the Pinkertons, was very considerable. I mean, the difference, I guess, though, is that, of course, Moriarty is a figure of pure evil. I mean, he is, you know, he is an undiluted beast, really. He's described as a sort of monstrous figure. Whereas, actually, Worth wasn't quite like that. Worth was a little more nuanced than that. So there are differences, and Conan Doyle obviously played him up for effect. But yeah, I think Worth himself would have been absolutely thrilled by the idea that he attained literary immortality. And of course, he goes even further than that, because T.S. Eliot then describes

Macavity, the mystery cat, as the Napoleon of crime. And that is in the book of Practical Cats. And that is itself a reference to Adam Worth. And then, of course, he ends up on stage in Cats, the musical. So it's a strange cultural journey that Adam Worth makes from obscure poverty in 19th century America to the West End stage. Well, and I suspect, Ben McIntyre, his cultural journey is not finished yet, you sneaky man. I think he's going to be probably hitting the silver screens near us sometime soon with an adaptation of your brilliant new book. Well, you're very kind. I would love it if that happened. I think Adam Worth deserves a wider audience.

He is a bizarre fellow. I mean, he's, and I grew sort of fond of him, actually. He's a difficult person to love in some ways because he was avaricious and he was, you know, he could be incredibly manipulative, but he was loyal. I mean, he was loyal to his criminal guys. He was very loyal to Pinkerton, actually, in the end.

And the two of them ended up as really quite close friends. I mean, it's a sort of strange buddy situation. So look, I would love it if someone made it. Anyone out there? You can, you know, there's a buddy movie, two sorts of buddy movies you made here, because you've got both the relationship between Worth and piano Charlie Bullard, but also between Worth and Pinkerton and Kitty Flynn in the background there. So it's, yeah, it's a great, it's a great story. I loved writing it. It was one of my very, very early books. I adored it. Well, thank you very much, Gunn, the podcast, telling us all about it. People want to, people want to read the book. It is called Napoleon of

Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth, The Real Moriarty. Thank you very much, Ben McIntyre, for coming on. A pleasure.