Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reboarding. And after our episode on the real Sherlock Holmes, we have quite a few people right in suggesting that we cover somebody else from Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories. So it turns out that just as Dr Joseph Bell helped inspire the character of Sherlock Holmes, a master criminal named Adam Worth helped inspire the character of Holmes's arch rival, the criminal Professor Moriarty. And although he doesn't appear in that many home stories and actually is only mentioned in a few more, Professor Moriarty is almost a bye word for evil, genius, and fiction. As Holmes himself tells Watson quote, the man pervades London and no one has heard of him. 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, and abstract thinker. So if you've been watching the new Sherlock television series, I think you have haven't been well saw the first season. I haven't seen a second well that's all I've seen to actually, but it does have that dramatic conclusion, and I think it's pretty hard to shake the show's version of a very erratic, very young professor. But even if you're not familiar with that character, you know you haven't read about him in home stories, you haven't seen the TV version, the life of Adam Worth will still strike a chord I think with most of our listeners. He created a web of crime that expanned over three continents, and he would dash between the countries on his luxury yacht. He robbed banks, diamond trucks, and post offices, all while maintaining the front of a respectable gentleman. And he never used violence, which is interesting. He's stuck to a strict criminals code. But perhaps most strangely, he fell in love with a painting, which we're gonna get to a little bit later. We will, and we'll probably get to that more in the part two of this episode. Adam Worth did so much stuff, we're gonna stretch this one out a little bit, but it's first worth noting here that just as quote No. One had heard of Moriarty, the same as largely true today of Adam Worth. I mean, you probably haven't heard that name before. And most of the information on him has been collected in a biography by Ben McIntyre called The Napoleon of Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief. But during his own day, even though he's kind of an obscure figure today, during his own day, Worth was actually a widely covered figure. And in fact, you can still find the Pinkerton's National Detective Agencies pamphlet on Worth online through Google scholar. It's one of the best sources on his life because it combines his own freely given account with the Pinkerton's decades of surveillance and research, so it's not exactly autobiography. It's got a little factual information in there too. It's funny though in a way, Worth's obscurity almost makes him more intriguing. It's as though he just kind of made a splash, left his literary descendant and then just sort of slipped away, almost undetected for the next century. Really, so Worth's first act of slipping away like that probably happened when he was only about fourteen years old. He was the son of a tailor. He had immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Germany when he was about five years old um and he ran away when he was fourteen from his home, so he jumped from Cambridge to Boston before taking his first and only real job in New York City as a clerk. But the desk job didn't really last that long because when the Civil War started, Little Adam that was his his street name, since he was only about five four or five five, enlisted in the thirty fourth New York Light Artillery, which was convened nunately enough commanded by a fellow German who really took a liking to Little Adam and had him promoted to sergeant at a remarkably fast pace. But during his first major battle, which was the Second Battle of bull Run, Sergeant Adam Worth was mortally wounded and died weeks later at only age eighteen. Wait a minute, here, that's a really short podcast. Is Well, actually it's not, because it's unclear what happened, but Worth was likely wounded and was sent to Georgetown to recover. After that, either he swapped ideas Dick Whitman style or got his paperwork in this processed regardless, being a dead man or supposedly dead man meant that he could reenlist time and time again, each time collecting as signing bounty and then just skidaddling before the fighting started. Yeah, he became a professional bounty jumper, which was something you could really do during the Civil War. Yeah, but it didn't mean that you avoided conflict entirely. It didn't always work out that neatly. Worth actually found himself participating in the Battle of the Wilderness in May eighteen sixty four, which, if you listen to our William Chester Minor episode a couple of months ago, was a pretty harrowing, scary battle when you probably would have hoped to have missed if you were a professional bounty jumper. But Worth also had no bones about switching sides. He wasn't just sticking to Union only after he had worn out his welcome, you know, he started to be recognized after doing this a few times. He joined the Confederacy and then gradually wound his way back to the Northern States before the war's end, of course, going back to New York City, and as we've discussed in earlier episodes, Wartime and postpell in New York City was a really great time for criminals. I mean great kind of being in quotation marks there. Um. The area where Worth specifically settled, the Bowery, was a very very tough part of town too. It was ruled by gangs, filled with bars, people with characters with names like Eddie the Plague or Ludwig the blood Sucker. Really, my favorite part of McIntyre's book might be his details about the gangs in the bars in post war New York City. As with any other kind of trade, though, Worth had to pretty much start at the bottom of the criminal world. He started with pickpocketing. From there he got good enough to have his own network of pickpockets that were working for him. But he wasn't entirely out of that game himself. In eighteen sixty four, he was caught stealing a package and then arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labor and sing sing and the work he was doing was handling nitroglycerin, which was used for blasting quarry So pretty hard, dangerous work. Yeah, And unsurprisingly that kind of work didn't really appeal to Worth, and so after only a few weeks, a very careful patient observation where he acted like the model prisoner. He disappeared during a guard change. Of course, you can imagine these yards were heavily armed, but he just slipped off. He hid in a drainage ditch, and then he gradually worked his way down river until he could hide at a dock among some canal boats, and then a few hours later when the boats were tugged into the city, where it jumped out swam ashore in the freezing cold, and um found some friends so he could change out of his prison stripes are really dangerous sounding escape. I mean, it sounds kind of like a Shawshank style escape, but you have to imagine that he was risking his life by doing it for sure. After that he went back to his life of crime. Obviously, pickpocketing, no matter how a dept you are at it or how many people work for you, will always be pretty small time. But that's not so, as we've seen before with bank robbery and safe breaking, which were Worth's next career goals. The only problem was that safebreakers were, according to McIntyre, a really elite bunch, so Worth needed some connections to get into the safe breaking game, and he found one through marm Mandelbaum, who was the ground um of New York City crime and also a master fencer of stolen goods. She not only took him under her wing, she fenced twenty dollars and stolen bonds from Worth's first big heist. Mandelbaum also introduced him to some lifelong friends like Charlie Bullard, a well born piano player who could break safe and also rob trains. And some longtime enemies are soon to be longtime enemies, like Max Shinburne, who went as far as to work at safe companies to stay on top of his profession. So that's dedication. Yeah, Max seemed to really be worth equal but also his arrival. So Worth became best friends with Bullard or piano Charlie after Worth and shin burn broke Piano Charlie out of jail, and it seems like that would be the kind of thing that would form a good bond of friendship between all three of them. But as it turned out, Bullard Worth became best friends. They decided they'd go into the crime world together as partners. Shinburne was excluded from that arrangement, maybe part of the reason why he and Worth ultimately became rivals. Maybe Shinburn just didn't really like him. Whatever it is, just remember that name Shinburn, because he's going to pop up way way later in worst career. So according to the Pinkerton's pamphlet, though, one of the quote three redeeming features in the life of this lost human creature was that quote, he was never guilty of violence. Under no circumstances would he have anything to do with anyone who was. So it kind of seems like if that was your ideology, you're really anti violence, but you are also a criminal, you probably wouldn't want to get into bank robbery because, you know, as we've seen with earlier podcast subjects, bying Clyde John Dillinger tends to be a pretty violent business. But Worth had a really different strategy of going around robbing banks, and that was as we have already seen with his prison break his patients. He and piano Charlie set their sites on the Boylston National Bank in Boston, a respectable institution that was conveniently next door to a barbershop that was for rent. So the two men set at a health tonic store in that barbershop space. Even stocking it with bottles and bottles of Gray's Oriental Tonic to cover up the windows and make the place look legit. Gradually they tunneled through the wall to the steel safe, robbing it of money and securities, and timing the whole thing so that it wasn't discovered for the entire weekend. From this, they netted about one fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars. And this high profile robbery made it really dangerous for them to stay in Boston or even in New York City. So McEntyre presents the interesting option that they could have gone west, you know, sort of an alternate take on history. But instead they chose to go to Europe, specifically to Liverpool. Yeah. He specifically, he mentioned that they probably realized they weren't suited to living out with They weren't the cowboy type. They liked fine things, and they were going to be more comfortable in Europe. But when they moved to Liverpool, they also took on new names. And Worth took his from the recently deceased co founder of the New York Times, whose named Henry Jarvis Raymond. He didn't take the name, you know, completely, He changed the middle name Jarvis to Judson, but still so strange to me that he would take a famous name for his alias, the alias that most of his life. You'd think you wouldn't want people to You wouldn't want to attract extra attention by picking anything, like you wouldn't want anybody ever asking like, oh are you related to the New York Times Raymond, or or asking you more questions than they needed to. Maybe he just wanted to sound really respectable. Who knows. Regardless the men that these two men, they lived it up in Liverpool, they conducted some robberies. They both courted the same woman. They courted, the seventeen year old Irish barmaid working at their hotel, whose name was Kittie Flynn. Eventually, Kitty agreed to marry Piano Charlie, although he was already married. She didn't know that, but she and Worth carried on with their relationship at the same time as well, and so she became the most important living woman in Adam Worth's life. Yeah. So by the end of eighteen seventy though, these three who are all hanging out together, Kitty, Bullard and Worth decided that they were ready for something new. So they packed up and left Liverpool for Paris. Of course, the Bloody Paris Commune was going on at the time, so they really took their time getting there. But once they were situated, they set up the American Bar and catered to expatriots and really anybody who wanted to try real New York style cocktails mixed by American bartenders. And I know, I mentioned that mixology class that I went to recently, and apparently cocktails like old fashioned kind of cocktails that have a revival today. We're really an American kind of original at the time until Prohibition or around that time when lots of American bartenders started moving to Europe. So this was something unique that Worth and Bullard and Kitty were offering a real American style bar. It was a luxurious place with a legitimate bar and a club room downstairs, and also a ritzy gambling house upstairs. Whenever a raid was imminent, the downstairs bartender could ring a buzzer, alerting the upstairs and all of the gambling paraphernalia would suddenly disappear. I mean, it almost sounds like a movie. It's going straight out of a chain spawd movie. I think but they seemed to all have their roles in the bar, to which I found kind of amusing. Bullard mostly enjoyed the drinks. He was turning into a bit of an alcoholic by this point. He played the piano, though it was kind of what he had wanted to do in life. Kitty acted as hostess for the gambling upstairs area and was a alliant conversationalist, would attract customers, and then Worth, who didn't drink, ran the place kept the business in line. After a few years, though, the Paris police began raiding the bar enough that it's scared off would be criminal customers, and at the same time it made it really unpleasant or cd for the respectable people who would come by. So Worth pinched some diamonds off of a customer, sold the bar and moved to London with Kitty, whom by now he fathered one of two daughters with so running a popular bar in a club sounds all well and good for somebody like Adam Worth, but he really wanted something more. He wanted respectability, and his quest for it began the Moriarity phase of his career, which was of course hands off but everywhere at the same time. You know, he learned his lesson from getting put into sinc saying about if you actually commit the crime yourself, you might end up in jail. But we have to go through some points of what it took to build up a criminal empire like well, first of all, it took house. Worth set himself, Kitty and the increasingly alcoholic Bullard up in a comfy mansion south of the Thames, and it was the epitome of gentlemanly living. He collected rare books and decorated with fine paintings. He bought ten race horses he even gave to charity. Secondly, they needed kind of a home base. They needed a headquarters for their crime operation. So to separate his life as a wealthy gentleman of leisure from a busy master criminal, Worth also rented a flat in Mayfair to plan his work from. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he needed a secret gang. So now that he had pretty much determined to keep his own hands out of crime, he needed some trusted delegates and associates to work with. And even though he would still personally plan and commissioned bank robberies, he'd plan railway and steamer heighs because there was a lot of registered mail being sent at the time he'd orchestrate post office robberies, warehouse break ins. He wasn't always known to the people who were committing those crimes. Something I think is is kind of maybe more in line with how we think of mob bosses or something today. But some associates had privileged access to that Mayfair flat that you just mentioned to Bolina, but others were anonymous. He never met with them at all. He had his guys meet with them. So it's easy also here to see the connection to holmes description of Moriarty Sherlott Holmes description, he says, quote, he sits motionless like a spider in the center of its web. But that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. So there was one more thing that Worth needed to be the master criminal exactly. He needed an escape. Specifically, his escape was a luxury yacht, and for him it was kind of a two first since it also added cashet to Henry Raymond's gentlemanly image. The yaunt certainly helped stage grab and go international rhimes. For example, of the Pinkerton's rather dramatically described Worth leaving quote a trail of looted cities behind him. But having a fast vote also helped avoid the law. After a Kingston, Jamaica warehouse robbery, for example, it even outran British ships, so that was a pretty fast vote was a useful thing to have. But the first serious tear in worth little web of crime here I didn't occur until eighteen seventy four. So remember how we quoted the Pinkerton's earlier. They had written that there were three redeeming features in worse Life, one of which was that he didn't use violence. Uh. The other was that he never forsook a friend or accomplice, which was something pretty clearly illustrated when a planned forgery went really horribly wrong. So while robbing steamers of certified letters that kind of thing was good work. You could make a hefty profit on it. Forgery was really the Worth Gang's bread and butter, mostly thanks to the talents of one of his associates, to Charles the scratch Becker, who could make these perfect looking letters of credit. Another crook, little Joe Elliott, had the skills to pass off the fakes. While Russian Carlosskovich and former Chicago bank clerk Joe Chapman could also act as backups. But when the gang tried to pass off letters of credit and Constantinople, they were caught and they were convicted of forgery and sentenced to seven years hard labor in a Constantinople prison. Now Worth was pretty good at getting friends out of jail, either through breaking them out, like like he did with shin Burn, or through bribery, but this situation was different. Even a yacht trip that he made to Constantinople with Chapman's desperate wife, Lydia, proved fruitless. Finally, for unknown reasons, Becker, Elliott, and Sasakovitch were all released. Yeah, and we should explain there too. I mean it was definitely from worth influence and the money he had been pouring in to trying to secure their relief, but it wasn't anything that was officially arranged. He didn't know, Okay, my guys are supposed to get out on this day, because I've paid enough money for that to happen. It just happened one day. The three guys were let out. Chapman, though, had gotten into a little fight with one of the other gang members and had been placed in another part of the prison when this release was finally secured. So he was in the wrong place, of the wrong time, and nothing that Worth did could secure his release too, so he had to serve out the rest of his sentence, and consequently, while he was doing that, his wife was murdered in her home, likely by Seth Covic. Meanwhile, Piano Charlie had gone back to the States and was arrested for the Boylston Bank robbery of the sixties. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Kitty had gone back as well, along with her daughters, but not to be near Bullard. She went out on her own and opened a boarding house in New York City. So Worth himself was broke at this point, after paying out all that money to get his guys out of prison, he was also sands a gang and without his love. But Worth wasn't completely done yet. His best and boldest heist was still ahead of him, and we're gonna talk a little more about that in the next actually a lot more about that in the next episode, and that was running away with the Duchess Duchess of Devonshire, or at least the super famous oil painting of her. So we'll save the details of Worths elopement as he liked to call it, for the next episode, as well as his career as a South African diamond thief and his downfall because we told you remember that name, shin Burn. And of course we're gonna talk a little bit more about that jump to literary notoriety thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle, our favorite podcast Cameo Guy, So definitely stay tuned for that. And I think in the meantime, let's do a little listener mail. So we've received a lot of mail about our episode on the Errants Tobacco Collection, and as we requested, you know, a lot of people are sending in their own collections. We're gonna do a little collecting ourselves, collect few these emails and store them up for the future listener mail. But I wanted to go ahead and read this message we got from Paul. He said, you mentioned the Honus Wagner card in the Errant's collection. That didn't mention the tobacco collection or the story behind it. Honess Wagner was a short stop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early twentieth century. He was one of the original five indectees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some people argue that he was the greatest all round player of all time. In any case, his baseball card, the T two six, is one of the most valuable baseball cards in the world. I think that's the part that we mentioned in the in the podcast. At the time, baseball cards were sold with tacks, cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Wagner refused to endure such products and was concerned that children would buy the tobacco products in order to get the cards and then use the tobacco, so he refused to be depicted on a card. Consequently, there are only fifty to sixty known to exist in the entire world, and are in high demand because of how good a player he is, as well as because of their rarity. So pretty neat. When we were researching The Errant's episode, I mentioned Honus Wagner to my dad and he told me a little bit about this rare baseball card, but I didn't know that. Um, the scarcity is because he didn't want to be associated with tobacco products. What a what a modern kind of thing? Yeah, well, I wonder how he feels about being associated with the collection for all time. Now, I guess he doesn't get to say in it. No he doesn't. He just is the most famous baseball card. So I guess not too bad of a consolation prize. Absolutely so. Um again, maybe a last chance to send us some book collection if you have before we launch into that listener mail um, and of course any other suggestions you have. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at Misston History, and we're on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little bit more about some of the I don't know, maybe we shouldn't say if you want to learn a little bit more, maybe if you just want like a poor word, or yes, maybe you just want a passing knowledge of some of the criminal activities we've discussed on today's podcast. We do have an article called how lock Picking Works that we get some flag four once in a while, but if you want to know, you can check it out. You might get lost out of locked out of your house one day, or something, but use it for good, use it for good, not evil. You can find it on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. 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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck reboarding. And after our episode on the real Sherlock Holmes, we have quite a few people right in suggesting that we cover somebody else from Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories. So it turns out that just as Dr Joseph Bell helped inspire the character of Sherlock Holmes, a master criminal named Adam Worth helped inspire the character of Holmes's arch rival, the criminal Professor Moriarty. And although he doesn't appear in that many home stories and actually is only mentioned in a few more, Professor Moriarty is almost a bye word for evil, genius, and fiction. As Holmes himself tells Watson quote, the man pervades London and no one has heard of him. 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, and abstract thinker. So if you've been watching the new Sherlock television series, I think you have haven't been well saw the first season. I haven't seen a second well that's all I've seen to actually, but it does have that dramatic conclusion, and I think it's pretty hard to shake the show's version of a very erratic, very young professor. But even if you're not familiar with that character, you know you haven't read about him in home stories, you haven't seen the TV version, the life of Adam Worth will still strike a chord I think with most of our listeners. He created a web of crime that expanned over three continents, and he would dash between the countries on his luxury yacht. He robbed banks, diamond trucks, and post offices, all while maintaining the front of a respectable gentleman. And he never used violence, which is interesting. He's stuck to a strict criminals code. But perhaps most strangely, he fell in love with a painting, which we're gonna get to a little bit later. We will, and we'll probably get to that more in the part two of this episode. Adam Worth did so much stuff, we're gonna stretch this one out a little bit, but it's first worth noting here that just as quote No. One had heard of Moriarty, the same as largely true today of Adam Worth. I mean, you probably haven't heard that name before. And most of the information on him has been collected in a biography by Ben McIntyre called The Napoleon of Crime, The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief. But during his own day, even though he's kind of an obscure figure today, during his own day, Worth was actually a widely covered figure. And in fact, you can still find the Pinkerton's National Detective Agencies pamphlet on Worth online through Google scholar. It's one of the best sources on his life because it combines his own freely given account with the Pinkerton's decades of surveillance and research, so it's not exactly autobiography. It's got a little factual information in there too. It's funny though in a way, Worth's obscurity almost makes him more intriguing. It's as though he just kind of made a splash, left his literary descendant and then just sort of slipped away, almost undetected for the next century. Really, so Worth's first act of slipping away like that probably happened when he was only about fourteen years old. He was the son of a tailor. He had immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Germany when he was about five years old um and he ran away when he was fourteen from his home, so he jumped from Cambridge to Boston before taking his first and only real job in New York City as a clerk. But the desk job didn't really last that long because when the Civil War started, Little Adam that was his his street name, since he was only about five four or five five, enlisted in the thirty fourth New York Light Artillery, which was convened nunately enough commanded by a fellow German who really took a liking to Little Adam and had him promoted to sergeant at a remarkably fast pace. But during his first major battle, which was the Second Battle of bull Run, Sergeant Adam Worth was mortally wounded and died weeks later at only age eighteen. Wait a minute, here, that's a really short podcast. Is Well, actually it's not, because it's unclear what happened, but Worth was likely wounded and was sent to Georgetown to recover. After that, either he swapped ideas Dick Whitman style or got his paperwork in this processed regardless, being a dead man or supposedly dead man meant that he could reenlist time and time again, each time collecting as signing bounty and then just skidaddling before the fighting started. Yeah, he became a professional bounty jumper, which was something you could really do during the Civil War. Yeah, but it didn't mean that you avoided conflict entirely. It didn't always work out that neatly. Worth actually found himself participating in the Battle of the Wilderness in May eighteen sixty four, which, if you listen to our William Chester Minor episode a couple of months ago, was a pretty harrowing, scary battle when you probably would have hoped to have missed if you were a professional bounty jumper. But Worth also had no bones about switching sides. He wasn't just sticking to Union only after he had worn out his welcome, you know, he started to be recognized after doing this a few times. He joined the Confederacy and then gradually wound his way back to the Northern States before the war's end, of course, going back to New York City, and as we've discussed in earlier episodes, Wartime and postpell in New York City was a really great time for criminals. I mean great kind of being in quotation marks there. Um. The area where Worth specifically settled, the Bowery, was a very very tough part of town too. It was ruled by gangs, filled with bars, people with characters with names like Eddie the Plague or Ludwig the blood Sucker. Really, my favorite part of McIntyre's book might be his details about the gangs in the bars in post war New York City. As with any other kind of trade, though, Worth had to pretty much start at the bottom of the criminal world. He started with pickpocketing. From there he got good enough to have his own network of pickpockets that were working for him. But he wasn't entirely out of that game himself. In eighteen sixty four, he was caught stealing a package and then arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labor and sing sing and the work he was doing was handling nitroglycerin, which was used for blasting quarry So pretty hard, dangerous work. Yeah, And unsurprisingly that kind of work didn't really appeal to Worth, and so after only a few weeks, a very careful patient observation where he acted like the model prisoner. He disappeared during a guard change. Of course, you can imagine these yards were heavily armed, but he just slipped off. He hid in a drainage ditch, and then he gradually worked his way down river until he could hide at a dock among some canal boats, and then a few hours later when the boats were tugged into the city, where it jumped out swam ashore in the freezing cold, and um found some friends so he could change out of his prison stripes are really dangerous sounding escape. I mean, it sounds kind of like a Shawshank style escape, but you have to imagine that he was risking his life by doing it for sure. After that he went back to his life of crime. Obviously, pickpocketing, no matter how a dept you are at it or how many people work for you, will always be pretty small time. But that's not so, as we've seen before with bank robbery and safe breaking, which were Worth's next career goals. The only problem was that safebreakers were, according to McIntyre, a really elite bunch, so Worth needed some connections to get into the safe breaking game, and he found one through marm Mandelbaum, who was the ground um of New York City crime and also a master fencer of stolen goods. She not only took him under her wing, she fenced twenty dollars and stolen bonds from Worth's first big heist. Mandelbaum also introduced him to some lifelong friends like Charlie Bullard, a well born piano player who could break safe and also rob trains. And some longtime enemies are soon to be longtime enemies, like Max Shinburne, who went as far as to work at safe companies to stay on top of his profession. So that's dedication. Yeah, Max seemed to really be worth equal but also his arrival. So Worth became best friends with Bullard or piano Charlie after Worth and shin burn broke Piano Charlie out of jail, and it seems like that would be the kind of thing that would form a good bond of friendship between all three of them. But as it turned out, Bullard Worth became best friends. They decided they'd go into the crime world together as partners. Shinburne was excluded from that arrangement, maybe part of the reason why he and Worth ultimately became rivals. Maybe Shinburn just didn't really like him. Whatever it is, just remember that name Shinburn, because he's going to pop up way way later in worst career. So according to the Pinkerton's pamphlet, though, one of the quote three redeeming features in the life of this lost human creature was that quote, he was never guilty of violence. Under no circumstances would he have anything to do with anyone who was. So it kind of seems like if that was your ideology, you're really anti violence, but you are also a criminal, you probably wouldn't want to get into bank robbery because, you know, as we've seen with earlier podcast subjects, bying Clyde John Dillinger tends to be a pretty violent business. But Worth had a really different strategy of going around robbing banks, and that was as we have already seen with his prison break his patients. He and piano Charlie set their sites on the Boylston National Bank in Boston, a respectable institution that was conveniently next door to a barbershop that was for rent. So the two men set at a health tonic store in that barbershop space. Even stocking it with bottles and bottles of Gray's Oriental Tonic to cover up the windows and make the place look legit. Gradually they tunneled through the wall to the steel safe, robbing it of money and securities, and timing the whole thing so that it wasn't discovered for the entire weekend. From this, they netted about one fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars. And this high profile robbery made it really dangerous for them to stay in Boston or even in New York City. So McEntyre presents the interesting option that they could have gone west, you know, sort of an alternate take on history. But instead they chose to go to Europe, specifically to Liverpool. Yeah. He specifically, he mentioned that they probably realized they weren't suited to living out with They weren't the cowboy type. They liked fine things, and they were going to be more comfortable in Europe. But when they moved to Liverpool, they also took on new names. And Worth took his from the recently deceased co founder of the New York Times, whose named Henry Jarvis Raymond. He didn't take the name, you know, completely, He changed the middle name Jarvis to Judson, but still so strange to me that he would take a famous name for his alias, the alias that most of his life. You'd think you wouldn't want people to You wouldn't want to attract extra attention by picking anything, like you wouldn't want anybody ever asking like, oh are you related to the New York Times Raymond, or or asking you more questions than they needed to. Maybe he just wanted to sound really respectable. Who knows. Regardless the men that these two men, they lived it up in Liverpool, they conducted some robberies. They both courted the same woman. They courted, the seventeen year old Irish barmaid working at their hotel, whose name was Kittie Flynn. Eventually, Kitty agreed to marry Piano Charlie, although he was already married. She didn't know that, but she and Worth carried on with their relationship at the same time as well, and so she became the most important living woman in Adam Worth's life. Yeah. So by the end of eighteen seventy though, these three who are all hanging out together, Kitty, Bullard and Worth decided that they were ready for something new. So they packed up and left Liverpool for Paris. Of course, the Bloody Paris Commune was going on at the time, so they really took their time getting there. But once they were situated, they set up the American Bar and catered to expatriots and really anybody who wanted to try real New York style cocktails mixed by American bartenders. And I know, I mentioned that mixology class that I went to recently, and apparently cocktails like old fashioned kind of cocktails that have a revival today. We're really an American kind of original at the time until Prohibition or around that time when lots of American bartenders started moving to Europe. So this was something unique that Worth and Bullard and Kitty were offering a real American style bar. It was a luxurious place with a legitimate bar and a club room downstairs, and also a ritzy gambling house upstairs. Whenever a raid was imminent, the downstairs bartender could ring a buzzer, alerting the upstairs and all of the gambling paraphernalia would suddenly disappear. I mean, it almost sounds like a movie. It's going straight out of a chain spawd movie. I think but they seemed to all have their roles in the bar, to which I found kind of amusing. Bullard mostly enjoyed the drinks. He was turning into a bit of an alcoholic by this point. He played the piano, though it was kind of what he had wanted to do in life. Kitty acted as hostess for the gambling upstairs area and was a alliant conversationalist, would attract customers, and then Worth, who didn't drink, ran the place kept the business in line. After a few years, though, the Paris police began raiding the bar enough that it's scared off would be criminal customers, and at the same time it made it really unpleasant or cd for the respectable people who would come by. So Worth pinched some diamonds off of a customer, sold the bar and moved to London with Kitty, whom by now he fathered one of two daughters with so running a popular bar in a club sounds all well and good for somebody like Adam Worth, but he really wanted something more. He wanted respectability, and his quest for it began the Moriarity phase of his career, which was of course hands off but everywhere at the same time. You know, he learned his lesson from getting put into sinc saying about if you actually commit the crime yourself, you might end up in jail. But we have to go through some points of what it took to build up a criminal empire like well, first of all, it took house. Worth set himself, Kitty and the increasingly alcoholic Bullard up in a comfy mansion south of the Thames, and it was the epitome of gentlemanly living. He collected rare books and decorated with fine paintings. He bought ten race horses he even gave to charity. Secondly, they needed kind of a home base. They needed a headquarters for their crime operation. So to separate his life as a wealthy gentleman of leisure from a busy master criminal, Worth also rented a flat in Mayfair to plan his work from. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he needed a secret gang. So now that he had pretty much determined to keep his own hands out of crime, he needed some trusted delegates and associates to work with. And even though he would still personally plan and commissioned bank robberies, he'd plan railway and steamer heighs because there was a lot of registered mail being sent at the time he'd orchestrate post office robberies, warehouse break ins. He wasn't always known to the people who were committing those crimes. Something I think is is kind of maybe more in line with how we think of mob bosses or something today. But some associates had privileged access to that Mayfair flat that you just mentioned to Bolina, but others were anonymous. He never met with them at all. He had his guys meet with them. So it's easy also here to see the connection to holmes description of Moriarty Sherlott Holmes description, he says, quote, he sits motionless like a spider in the center of its web. But that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. So there was one more thing that Worth needed to be the master criminal exactly. He needed an escape. Specifically, his escape was a luxury yacht, and for him it was kind of a two first since it also added cashet to Henry Raymond's gentlemanly image. The yaunt certainly helped stage grab and go international rhimes. For example, of the Pinkerton's rather dramatically described Worth leaving quote a trail of looted cities behind him. But having a fast vote also helped avoid the law. After a Kingston, Jamaica warehouse robbery, for example, it even outran British ships, so that was a pretty fast vote was a useful thing to have. But the first serious tear in worth little web of crime here I didn't occur until eighteen seventy four. So remember how we quoted the Pinkerton's earlier. They had written that there were three redeeming features in worse Life, one of which was that he didn't use violence. Uh. The other was that he never forsook a friend or accomplice, which was something pretty clearly illustrated when a planned forgery went really horribly wrong. So while robbing steamers of certified letters that kind of thing was good work. You could make a hefty profit on it. Forgery was really the Worth Gang's bread and butter, mostly thanks to the talents of one of his associates, to Charles the scratch Becker, who could make these perfect looking letters of credit. Another crook, little Joe Elliott, had the skills to pass off the fakes. While Russian Carlosskovich and former Chicago bank clerk Joe Chapman could also act as backups. But when the gang tried to pass off letters of credit and Constantinople, they were caught and they were convicted of forgery and sentenced to seven years hard labor in a Constantinople prison. Now Worth was pretty good at getting friends out of jail, either through breaking them out, like like he did with shin Burn, or through bribery, but this situation was different. Even a yacht trip that he made to Constantinople with Chapman's desperate wife, Lydia, proved fruitless. Finally, for unknown reasons, Becker, Elliott, and Sasakovitch were all released. Yeah, and we should explain there too. I mean it was definitely from worth influence and the money he had been pouring in to trying to secure their relief, but it wasn't anything that was officially arranged. He didn't know, Okay, my guys are supposed to get out on this day, because I've paid enough money for that to happen. It just happened one day. The three guys were let out. Chapman, though, had gotten into a little fight with one of the other gang members and had been placed in another part of the prison when this release was finally secured. So he was in the wrong place, of the wrong time, and nothing that Worth did could secure his release too, so he had to serve out the rest of his sentence, and consequently, while he was doing that, his wife was murdered in her home, likely by Seth Covic. Meanwhile, Piano Charlie had gone back to the States and was arrested for the Boylston Bank robbery of the sixties. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Kitty had gone back as well, along with her daughters, but not to be near Bullard. She went out on her own and opened a boarding house in New York City. So Worth himself was broke at this point, after paying out all that money to get his guys out of prison, he was also sands a gang and without his love. But Worth wasn't completely done yet. His best and boldest heist was still ahead of him, and we're gonna talk a little more about that in the next actually a lot more about that in the next episode, and that was running away with the Duchess Duchess of Devonshire, or at least the super famous oil painting of her. So we'll save the details of Worths elopement as he liked to call it, for the next episode, as well as his career as a South African diamond thief and his downfall because we told you remember that name, shin Burn. And of course we're gonna talk a little bit more about that jump to literary notoriety thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle, our favorite podcast Cameo Guy, So definitely stay tuned for that. And I think in the meantime, let's do a little listener mail. So we've received a lot of mail about our episode on the Errants Tobacco Collection, and as we requested, you know, a lot of people are sending in their own collections. We're gonna do a little collecting ourselves, collect few these emails and store them up for the future listener mail. But I wanted to go ahead and read this message we got from Paul. He said, you mentioned the Honus Wagner card in the Errant's collection. That didn't mention the tobacco collection or the story behind it. Honess Wagner was a short stop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early twentieth century. He was one of the original five indectees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and some people argue that he was the greatest all round player of all time. In any case, his baseball card, the T two six, is one of the most valuable baseball cards in the world. I think that's the part that we mentioned in the in the podcast. At the time, baseball cards were sold with tacks, cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Wagner refused to endure such products and was concerned that children would buy the tobacco products in order to get the cards and then use the tobacco, so he refused to be depicted on a card. Consequently, there are only fifty to sixty known to exist in the entire world, and are in high demand because of how good a player he is, as well as because of their rarity. So pretty neat. When we were researching The Errant's episode, I mentioned Honus Wagner to my dad and he told me a little bit about this rare baseball card, but I didn't know that. Um, the scarcity is because he didn't want to be associated with tobacco products. What a what a modern kind of thing? Yeah, well, I wonder how he feels about being associated with the collection for all time. Now, I guess he doesn't get to say in it. No he doesn't. He just is the most famous baseball card. So I guess not too bad of a consolation prize. Absolutely so. Um again, maybe a last chance to send us some book collection if you have before we launch into that listener mail um, and of course any other suggestions you have. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at Misston History, and we're on Facebook. And if you want to learn a little bit more about some of the I don't know, maybe we shouldn't say if you want to learn a little bit more, maybe if you just want like a poor word, or yes, maybe you just want a passing knowledge of some of the criminal activities we've discussed on today's podcast. We do have an article called how lock Picking Works that we get some flag four once in a while, but if you want to know, you can check it out. You might get lost out of locked out of your house one day, or something, but use it for good, use it for good, not evil. You can find it on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. 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