The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief

The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief | Ben Macintyre | Not for fans of Confessions of A Jewel Thief

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The Napoleon of Cr...

	The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief Ben Macintyre Delta, 1998 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.
He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.
He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. . . .
--Sherlock Holmes on Professor Moriarty in "The Final Problem"

The Victorian era's most infamous thief, Adam Worth was the original Napoleon of crime.  Suave, cunning Worth learned early that the best way to succeed was to steal.  And steal he did.

Following a strict code of honor, Worth won the respect of Victorian society.  He also aroused its fear by becoming a chilling phantom, mingling undetected with the upper classes, whose valuables he brazenly stole.  His most celebrated heist: Gainsborough's grand portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire--ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales--a painting Worth adored and often slept with for twenty years.

With a brilliant gang that included "Piano" Charley, a jewel thief, train robber, and playboy, and "the Scratch" Becker, master forger, Worth secretly ran operations from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa--until betrayal and a Pinkerton man finally brought him down.

In a decadent age, Worth was an icon.  His biography is a grand, dazzling tour into the gaslit underworld of the last century.  .  .  and into the doomed genius of a criminal mastermind.

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Elementary, Dear Adam

This book provides a fascinating portrait of one of the last of the gentleman criminals. In fact, Adam Worth wanted to be known solely as a gentleman rather than as a notorious criminal. The crimes were simply his way of gaining power and prestige in a Victorian world where he could never gain this position without buying it. And buy it he did by perpetrating almost every crime imaginable. An honorable thief who was fiercly loyal to his henchmen, Worth was devilishly clever, many times carrying out operations right out in the open without being caught. No wonder Doyle tapped him for Sherlock Holmes' arch-rival and Elliot immortalized him as Macavity, the Mystery Cat. Not bad for a guy who officially "died" in the Civil War at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run (reports of his death were greatly exaggerated--and he used his deceased status for financial gain, thus beginning his very lucrative criminal career).
Much of the book is taken up with his most famous crime, the stealing the "Duchess of Devonshire" by Gainsborough mere weeks after it was sold at the highest price ever paid for a painting up to that time. For a crime that was almost done on a whim, it is the one for which he is most well known and for which he was never caught (he returned the painting 25 years later anonymously).
Two very nice sub-themes run throughout the book. First was his undying love for his best friend's wife, Kitty Flynn. Flynn went on from humble beginnings (and after dropping he thieving hubby) to become a true Victorian lady of note, but Worth never dropped the torch he held for her (he was probably the father of two of her children).
The second was his friendship with William Pinkerton later in life. Born of mutual respect for each other throughout their careers as antagonists, Pinkerton not only did not volunteer evidence that could have condemned Worth to life in prison after he was caught and exposed, but also brokered the return of the Duchess while keeping Worth anonymous. Pinkerton mourned Worth when he died and kept a promise to watch out for his children by bringing his son into the detective agency, an ironic legacy for the Napoleon of Crime.
Fascinating stuff. Truly stranger than fiction.

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Not for fans of Confessions of A Jewel Thief

I picked this book up because it is heavily promoted by Amazon with Confessions of a Jewel Thief, Bill Mason's larger than life book about being a burglar. These books have nearly nothing in common other than fitting into the true crime genre. Macintyre misses the mark by getting bogged down in details and random facts (his research is impressive, yes) and forgetting to spin a compelling tale. There is too much material here with no cohesive narrative. Many other readers have hit it in the head by identifying the failings of Mason to focus solely on the topic of Worth and his exploits.

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A Fascinating Subject Diminished Somewhat by Speculation and Padding.

Adam Worth was perhaps the greatest criminal mind of the Victorian Era. William Pinkerton of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, hunter and eventually friend to Worth, called him "the most remarkable, most successful and most dangerous professional criminal known to modern times", and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used him as a model for Sherlock Holmes' arch-rival Professor Moriarty. "The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief" presents the life, crimes, and associates of this talented crook, who began life in poverty and fashioned himself into a wealthy English gentleman, stealing more than $4 million dollars in 30 years, personally and through vast networks of underlings who would never have guessed who pulled the strings.

Author Ben Macintyre makes use of Pinkerton's research and the memoirs of Worth's criminal contemporaries to flesh out his early life as the eldest child of poor German immigrants and a bounty jumper during the Civil War as a young man, before Worth was off to New York and a life of crime. A haul of nearly $1 million dollars with partner Charley Bullard from the 1869 robbery of Boylston Bank in Boston set him on his way to a distinguished criminal career. Worth adopted the alias Henry Judson Raymond, which he would use for the rest of his life, and found success at forgery, bank robbery, diamond heists, and, notably, art theft. In1876, Worth stole Gainsborough's painting of the notorious Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire from a London art gallery.

Macintyre places much emphasis on Worth's attachment to the painting of the Duchess. This is one of many clumsy attempts to analyze Worth's character, which annoyed me after a while. There is no doubt that Worth was uncommonly sober, disciplined, loyal, generous, and non-violent for a crook -or, for that matter, for anyone. At the same time, he stole on a grand scale. Macintyre finds more contradiction in this than Worth did and looks unconvincingly for explanations in his early life and in Victorian hypocrisy. There is too much speculation and commenting on people's morals for my taste. Numerous digressions which are tangential to the subject serve as padding. I would have preferred less of that and more detail about Worth's pyramid-style networks. Unfortunately, "The Napoleon of Crime" is more a padded popular biography than a scholarly social history, but it does succeed in making Adam Worth a fascinating figure.

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