Free The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre Page B

seized power, imposing a form of collective leadership and such radical policies as free speech, compulsory education, and cooperative ownership of businesses. The Commune lasted just three months, from March to May 1871, when the Communards were brutally crushed by the government’s forces. More than twenty thousand Parisians were killed in the ensuing repression.
    Worth, Bullard, and Kitty traveled slowly south through England and then tarried in London to await the outcome of the bloody events taking place in Paris, before making their way across the Channel at the end of June 1871. They found a city exhausted and partially in ruins, disordered and vulnerable, but still glamorous in her devastation: a perfect spot from which to coordinate fresh criminal activities, with plenty to satisfy the trio’s extravagant tastes. As a later historian observed, “France is an astonishingly resilient patient and now—shamefully defeated, riven by civil war, bankrupted by the German reparation demands and the costs of repairing Paris—she was to amaze the world and alarm her enemies by the speed of her recovery.” Here, Worth saw, were rich pickings. His namesake Charles Frederick Worth, the great couturier, had “bought up part of the wreckage of the Tuileries to make sham ruins in his garden”; now another Worth would also make his mark in the remnants of the devastated city, where, for the time being at least, the authorities were far too busy washing blood off the streets and piecing together the capital to pay much attention to the newly arrived triumvirate.
    In later years Kitty would claim, unconvincingly, that she had no idea her husband and his partner were notorious international criminals. It must have been clear from the outset that her charming spouse and his friend were hardly respectable businessmen, since they paid for everything in wads of cash, did no work whatever, and never discussed anything approaching legitimate business. Kitty’s part in the next stage of the drama indicates that she was involved in their criminal activities up to her shell-like ears.
    With the remains of the money from the Boston robbery, Bullard and Worth purchased a spacious building at 2, rue Scribe, a part of the Grand Hotel complex near the Opéra, under the name Charles Wells, and rented large and comfortable apartments nearby. The new premises, christened the American Bar, were refurbished, according to William Pinkerton, in “palatial splendor” at a cost of some $75,000 (the equivalent, amazingly, of more than $300,000 today) with oil paintings, mirrors, and expensive glassware. American bartenders were imported to mix exotic cocktails of a type popular in New York but “which were, at that time, almost unknown in Europe.”
    The American Bar was a two-pronged operation. The second floor of the building was fashioned into a sort of clubhouse for visiting Americans, complete with the latest editions of U.S. newspapers and pigeonholes where expatriates could pick up their mail. “Americans were cordially invited to use it as a meeting house,” a spot where they could gather and enjoy American drinks, a quiet, sober, and entirely respectable establishment. In the upper floors of the house, however, the scene was rather different. Here Worth and Bullard set up a full-scale, well-appointed, and completely illegal gambling operation. By “importing from America roulette croupiers and experts on baccarat,” they gave the den a cosmopolitan sheen, but it was Kitty who turned out to be the principal lure, for “her beauty and engaging manners attracted many American visitors.”
    The Pinkertons’ agents in Europe began keeping a watch on the place almost from the day the American Bar opened, and declared that it was fast becoming “the headquarters of American gamblers and criminals who here planned many of their European crimes.” Yet even the forces of the law were dazzled by the ample charms of the hostess. “Mrs. Wells