The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Ben Macintyre
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007383641
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a few weeks earlier. ‘It just goes to prove,’ Marm Mandelbaum sniffed, ‘that it takes brains to be a real lady.’

      At the time that Worth was desperately seeking a way into the criminal big league, Marm Mandelbaum was already a legend and arguably the most influential criminal in America. ‘The army of enemies of society must have its general, and I believe that probably the greatest of them all was “Mother” Mandelbaum,’ observed Sophie Lyons, who had taken a shine to young Worth and probably introduced him into Marm Mandelbaum’s charmed criminal circle. Worth became a regular at the Mandelbaum soirees, and it was almost certainly under her tutelage that he made his first, disappointing foray into bank robbery. In 1866 Worth and his brother John broke into the Atlantic Transportation Company on Liberty Street in New York and spent several hours attempting to blow open the safe, before leaving in frustration as dawn broke. Lyons recounts his ‘great disgust’ at the failed heist. Nothing daunted, after a year of organizing some lesser thefts, Worth, now working alone, pulled off his first major robbery by stealing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds from an insurance company in his home town of Cambridge. Marm Mandelbaum, who could fence anything from stolen horses to carriages to diamonds, obligingly sold them on at a portion of their face value – giving Worth her customary 10 per cent and pocketing the rest. He was hardly made a rich man by the robbery, but it was a start and the minor coup effectively ‘established him as a bank burglar’ among his peers. Before long, Worth had gained a reputation as ‘a master hand in the execution of robberies’, and stories of his sang-froid began to circulate in the underworld.

      Worth seems to have delighted in sailing as close to the wind as he could get, and with every near-escape his contempt for the forces of law and order was confirmed and amplified. As the detectives Eldridge and Watts later recounted: ‘Once, after robbing a jewelry store in Boston, this daring burglar slipped out of the front door, only to meet a policeman face to face. Without an instant of tremor, this man of iron nerve politely saluted the officer and stepped back to re-open the door and coolly call to his confederate within: “William, be sure and fasten the door securely when you leave! I have got to catch the next car.” So, indeed, he did, after bidding the officer a pleasant good night, but he hopped off the car a few blocks beyond the store, slipped back stealthily, signalled to his confederate and both escaped with their booty.’

      An avid pupil, Worth appears to have found in Marm Mandelbaum both an ally and a role model. The easy way she farmed out criminal work to others, her lavish apartments and social graces, were precisely the sort of existence he had in mind for himself. Above all, it was perhaps Marm who taught the lesson that being a ‘real gentleman’ and a complete crook were not only perfectly compatible, but thoroughly rewarding. Marm’s dinner table offered an atmosphere of illicit luxury, where superior crooks could enjoy the company of men and women of like, lawless minds.

      Two of Marm’s guests in particular would play crucial although very different roles in Worth’s future.

      The first was Maximilian Schoenbein, ‘alias M. H. Baker, alias M. H. Zimmerman, alias “The Dutchman”, alias Mark Shinburn or Sheerly, alias Henry Edward Moebus,’ but most usually alias Max Shinburn, ‘a bank burglar of distinction who complained that he was at heart an aristocrat, and that he detested the crooks with whom he was compelled to associate’. For the next three decades the criminal paths taken by Adam Worth and Max Shinburn ran in tandem. The two law-breakers had much in common, and they came to loathe each other heartily.

      Shinburn was born on 17 February 1842, in the town of Ittlingen, Württemberg, where he was apprenticed to a mechanic before emigrating to New York in 1861. Styling himself ‘the Baron’ from early in life, Shinburn later actually purchased the title of Baron Schindle or Shindell of Monaco with ‘the judicious expenditure of a part of his fortune’. Aloof, intelligent and insufferably arrogant, the Baron cut a wide swathe through New York low society. Even the police were impressed.

      Inspector Thomas Byrnes of the New York Police Department considered him ‘probably the most expert bank burglar in the country’, while Belgian police offered this description of the soigne, multilingual felon: ‘Speaks English with a very slight German accent. Speaks German and French. Always well dressed. He has a distinguished appearance with polished manners. Speaks very courteously. Always stays at the best hotels.’ Shinburn’s looks were striking; he had ‘small blue penetrating eyes, long, straight nose, moustache and small imperial, both of brownish colour mixed with grey, moustache twisted at the ends, pointed chin … at times wears a full beard and sometimes a moustache and chin whisker, in order to hide from view the pronounced dimple in chin.’ His numerous encounters with the law and a youthful taste for duelling had left him with numerous other identifying features. After one arrest, a police officer noted these with grisly exactitude: ‘on back of left wrist … pistol shot wounds running parallel with each other and near the deformity in right leg … pistol or gunshot wound on left side … several small scars that look like the result of buck shot wounds; scar on left side of abdomen, appearing as though shot entered in the back and came through …’ Shinburn’s fraudulent aristocratic claims were full of holes, and so was the rest of him.

      His criminal notoriety sprang principally from the invention of a machine which he maintained could reveal the combination of any safe: ‘a ratchet which, when placed under the combination dial of a safe, would puncture a sheet of calibrated paper when the dial stopped and started to move in the opposite direction. He would repeat this process until he had the entire combination.’ According to other police sources, ‘his ear was so acute and sensitive that by turning of the dial he could determine at what numbers the tumblers dropped into place.’

      With his mechanical training, Shinburn also perfected a set of light and powerful safe-cracking tools which he was prepared to sell on to others for a price. ‘Shinburn revolutionized the burglar’s tools and put them on a scientific basis,’ recorded Sophie Lyons. The better to perfect his safe-busting technique, the Baron ‘for some time took employment under an assumed name in the works of the Lilly Safe Co. [whose] safes and vaults were considered among the best and most secure.’ But not for long. Leaving a trail of empty safes in his wake, Shinburn was eventually penalized by his own competence and the Lilly safe ‘came into such disrepute, that the company was forced into liquidation’.

      ‘The safe I can’t open hasn’t been built,’ Shinburn once boasted to Sophie Lyons.

      By the time Worth encountered Shinburn in the mid 1860s, the latter had developed a name for himself as a man of importance among the bank-robbing fraternity by cleaning out the Savings Bank in Walpole, New Hampshire. Worth was ambivalent about the Baron. He admired his dandified dress and envied his reputation, but found his endless braggadocio and air of superiority unbearable.

      Far more to Worth’s taste was another dark luminary of the underworld and Mandelbaum protege, Charles W. Bullard, a languid and alluring criminal playboy better known as ‘Piano’ Charley. The scion of a wealthy family from Milford which could trace its ancestry to a member of George Washington’s staff, Bullard ‘had a good common school education’, inherited a large fortune from his father while still in his teens and had gone to the bad, immediately and extravagantly. Having squandered his inheritance, Bullard briefly tried his hand in the butcher’s