Free The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre Page A

moral position to do so, for, unbeknown to Kitty, he was married already. It was not until some time later that Kitty discovered Bullard had a wife and two children in America. Conceivably, Worth used this information to blackmail Bullard into sharing his wife. But that was hardly his style, and as the relationship between the two crooks remained entirely amicable, it seems more likely that the accommodating Kitty Flynn, the broad-minded Bullard, and Worth, who never let convention get in the way of his desires, simply found a ménage à trois to be the most convenient arrangement for all parties.
    While Kitty and Charley enjoyed a short honeymoon, Worth passed his time profitably by robbing the largest pawnshop in Liverpool of some £25,000 worth of jewelry. The Pinkertons later gave a full account of the theft:
He looked around for something in his line, and found a large pawnshop in that city which he considered worth robbing … he saw that if he could get plaster impressions of the key to the place he could make a big haul. After working cautiously for several days he managed to get the pawnbroker off his guard long enough to enable him to get possession of the key and make a wax impression: the result was that two or three weeks later the pawnbroker came to his place one morning and found all of his valuable pieces of jewelry abstracted from his safe, the store and vaults locked, but the valuables gone.
     
    The robbery caused a minor sensation in Liverpool, where crime was rife but large-scale burglary rare. The Pinkerton account was written many years later, but seems to be largely accurate. Most of the bonds stolen from the Boylston Bank had now been “worked back” to their owners and the bank had therefore decided to call off the costly detective agency, rightly concluding that the thieves were now beyond reach. But the Pinkertons continued to keep tabs, via a network of informers, on American criminals living abroad. In the coming years their information on Adam Worth and his activities as Henry Raymond grew increasingly detailed.
    Robbing pawnbrokers was easy game, and Worth was becoming restless for more challenging sport in new pastures. Kitty was also eager to find more glamorous surroundings, and Bullard did not care much where he went so long as there was money and champagne in plentiful supply, and a piano near at hand. Worth showered Kitty with expensive gifts (including his stolen gems), bought her expensive clothes, and connived and encouraged her in her determination to leave her lowly origins behind. With his stolen money, Worth sought to shape and remake Kitty just as he was reinventing himself. But grimy Liverpool was no place for a would-be lady, and the great shared fraud required a brighter backdrop.
    At the end of 1870 the trio packed up their belongings, including the still considerable remnants of the Boylston Bank haul, checked out of the Washington Hotel, and headed for Paris, where the war between France and Prussia, the siege of Paris, and now the lawlessness of the Commune had rendered the French capital a particularly enticing venue for a brace of socially ambitious crooks and their shared moll.

SIX
    An American Bar in Paris
     
    P aris furnished stark evidence of that peculiar brand of double standards Worth would absorb and adapt: under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–70), a woman could be arrested for smoking in the Tuileries Gardens, but personal immorality was almost de rigueur . The surface was magnificent, but corruption and libertinism were rampant. Entrepreneurs speculated, hedonists indulged, and English visitors railed about the “badness of the morals.” But the great gay façade of the Second Empire came tumbling down with the crushing of the French armies by the Prussian military machine.
    The crippling siege of Paris, starting in 1870, was followed by the Commune, that remarkable and violent political experiment in which an insurrectionary countergovernment