The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre Page A

happy hunting ground,” wrote Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin.
    Out of the criminal flotsam eddying around Paris, an unscrupulous and unsavory bunch, Worth would eventually forge one of the most efficient and disciplined criminal gangs in history. Fresh from clearing out the First National Bank of Baltimore, for example, came Joseph Chapman and Charles the Scratch Becker.
    Chapman was a habitual lawbreaker with a long beard and soulful eyes who had, according to a contemporary account, “but one vice—forgery; and one longing passion—Lydia Chapman,” his wife and “one of the most beautiful women the underworld of the 1870s had ever known.” Becker, alias John Blosh, was a neurotic Dutch-born forger of wide renown who was said to be able to reproduce the front page of a newspaper with such uncanny verisimilitude that when he was finished no one, including Becker, could tell the original from the fake. Pinkerton considered him “the ablest professional forger in the world.”
    Other patrons at the American Bar included Little Joe Elliott (alias Reilly, alias Randall), a rat-like burglar of intensely romantic inclinations (“a great fellow for running after French girls,” Worth called him); Carlo Sesicovitch, a Russian-born thug with an ugly temper but an uncanny knack for disguise; his Gypsy mistress Alima; and several more criminals of note.
    But by no means all the clientele at the American Bar were rogues and miscreants. Many were simply visiting businessmen, “swell Americans who were not aware that the keepers of this saloon were American professional bank and safe burglars,” and tourists keen for some nightlife and a flutter at the roulette or faro tables. Their number even included some who had fallen victim to the club’s owners in earlier days.
    According to one police report, the American Bar “was visited by Mr. Sanford of the Merchant’s Express Co. while he was in Paris,but Mr. Sanford did not know until his return to New York that Wells was the man Bullard, who had robbed the company of $100,000” back in 1868. It was also said that visiting officials from Boston’s Boylston Bank spent an enjoyable evening at the club, little suspecting how the mahogany card tables and expensive furnishings had been financed.
    For three years the American Bar prospered and the peculiar ménage à trois of the owners continued, amazingly enough, without a hitch. Kitty Flynn, her telltale Irish brogue now quite evaporated, was becoming the gracious grande dame she had always hoped to be, even if half her admirers were thieves and con men. Bullard was happily consuming American cocktails in vast quantities, beginning his day when he opened his eyes in the late afternoon and ending it when he closed them, around dawn, usually face-down on the ivories of the club piano. “In the gay French capital he soon became a man of mark as a gambler and roué”—one pair of American detectives recorded—which was all Piano Charley had ever really wanted to be. Worth was also contented enough yet strangely restless. Serving drinks was profitable, while the gambling den was a standing invitation to show his hold over fate. But the Paris operation was hardly the grand criminal adventure he saw as his destiny. The demimonde thronging his card tables were glittering and amusing, to be sure, but he had more ambitious plans for himself and Kitty than merely the life of an upscale croupier and a club hostess.
    In the winter of 1873, a most unpleasant blot suddenly appeared on the horizon of the merry trio when William Pinkerton, the scourge of American criminals, wandered nonchalantly into the American Bar and ordered a drink. No man put the wind up the criminal fraternity more effectively than William Pinkerton. The detective had become a stout and florid man, whose ponderous frame belied his astonishing energy and his unparalleled talent for hunting down criminals. Pinkerton’s face was known to just about every crook in America,