The Napoleon of Crime Read Free Page B

Pinkerton lamented. Another important figure in Worth’s life, a notorious thief and gangster’s moll named Sophie Lyons, concurred in the belief that Worth had come from good stock, reporting that he was “born of an excellent family and well educated, [but] formed bad habits and developed a passion for gambling.”
    Worth himself was the last person to deny such glamorous beginnings, which were, like so many aspects of his existence, a very considerable distance from the truth. Adam Worth (or Wirth, or even, occasionally, Werth) was born in 1844 somewhere in eastern Germany. His father and mother were German Jews who emigrated to the United States when Worth was just five years old. Speaking no English and almost destitute, Worth père set up shop as a tailor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No other details about Worth’s mother and father have survived, but one may surmise that their parenting skills, particularly in the area of ethical guidance, were distinctly lacking: not only did Adam Worth take to crime at an early age, but his younger brother, John, quickly followed suit, and his sister, Harriet, continued the family tradition by marrying a more than usually crooked lawyer.
    Worth’s first lesson in swindling was apparently learned in a Cambridge school playground. Pinkerton liked to tell the story of how Worth “entered school when six years of age, and was very soon after, as he himself stated, drawn into a trade with a boy larger than himself, who offered to give him a brand-new penny for two old ones.” The child Worth, finding the newly minted coin a more attractive object than his two old ones, agreed to the swap and returned home to show his father, who “gave him a most unmerciful whipping,” thus “impressing on him the value of the new penny as against his two old ones.”
    “From that day until his death, no one, be he friend or foe, honest or dishonest, Negro or Indian, relative or stranger, ever got the better of Adam Worth in any business transactions, regular or irregular,” Pinkerton concluded.
    The young Worth grew up, or rather did not grow up, to be small in stature, measuring between five feet four and five feet five, according to police records. Contemporaries made much of his lack of height, and his criminal colleagues, who were nothing if not literal when it came to the allocation of sobriquets, called him “Little Adam.” In reality, for an age when human beings were appreciably smaller than they are now, he was not much below average height, but it suited the purposes of those who could not help admiring him to make our man out to be a midget, for thus his evil-doing was magnified and his ability to thwart authority appeared the more remarkable. When the Scotland Yard detective Robert Anderson called him “the Napoleon of the criminal world,” he was referring not only to the man’s nefarious accomplishments and criminal stature but also to his lack of inches. The undersized Worth quickly developed an out-sized Napoleonic complex.
    Worth’s height was the first physical feature noted by the various detectives, policemen, crooks, and lovers who came into contact with him. The second was his eyes, which were dark, almost black, penetrating voids beneath shaggy eyebrows, suggestive of intelligence and determination. When he became enraged, which was seldom, they bulged unpleasantly. He had thick hair, which he wore short and combed to one side, a prominent curved nose, and, in later life, a long mustache which curled across his cheeks to meet a pair of mighty side-whiskers.
    If Worth’s tough childhood left him with a cynical determination to outdo his peers by guile, it also seems to have imbued him with an intense romanticism. As his father scraped together a living to keep his brood alive in the malodorous hovel that was the Worth family home, his oldest son’s imagination released him to a world of grand dinners, fine apparel, and civilized conversation.
    In the Harvard