The Napoleon of Crime Read Online Free PDF Page A

received three weeks earlier.
    What really happened to Adam Worth at Bull Run must be a matter of speculation, for, unlike Roemer, and for obvious reasons, he did not write his war memoirs. Certainly he was wounded during the engagement. He later boasted of the fact, yet the injury does not appear to have been serious. At some point between August 30, when he was carried from the battlefield, and September 25, when he was officially listed as dead, Worth successfully made his escape. Perhaps he swapped his identification with another, mortally wounded soldier, or perhaps in the confused aftermath of battle when so many injured and dying were crammed into the nation’s capital, he merely ended up as a fortuitous clerical error, marked down on the wrong list. Either way, Worth emerged from the battlefields of Virginia with only a superficial wound and an entirely new identity. Adam Worth was officially no more, and thus could move on without fear of pursuit. For the first time, but not the last, he reinvented himself and became a professional bounty jumper.
    Over the coming months Worth established a system: he would enlist in one regiment under an assumed name, collect whatever bounty was being offered, and then promptly desert. Thus he drifted from one part of the sprawling army to another, changing his alias at every stop and developing a talent for masquerade that would later become a full-time profession. William Pinkerton, who was himself a young soldier in the Union Army, reported that Worth, after his first desertion and reenlistment, was “stationed for a time on Riker’s island, N.Y. and from there he was conveyed by steamship to the James River in Virginia, where he was assigned to one of the New York regiments in the Army of the Potomac.” Although the war convinced Worth of the futility of violence, his desertions were prompted by avarice rather than cowardice, and he repeatedly found himself in the thick of battle, including, according to Pinkerton, the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, an engagement scarcely less ferocious than the Battle of Bull Run.
    Desertion was a lucrative but highly risky business. “On his third enlistment,” according to one of his criminal associates, “he was recognized as a bounty jumper, and was in consequence sent, in company with others of his class, chained together, to the front of the Army of the Potomac.” Once more, Worth somehow emerged unscathed; he promptly deserted and reenlisted again. There was clearly a limit to how long Worth could get away with changing regiments, so, in a remarkable act of brass cheek, he now decided to change sides. As a contemporary stated: “About this time General Lee of the Southern Army issued a proclamation to the effect that all Federal soldiers who would desert from the Federal armies to the Confederate lines, bringing their arms with them, would receive thirty dollars from the Confederate Government, and also receive a free pass to cross the frontier back into the United States by way of the adjoining States of West Virginia and Kentucky.”
    The aspiring crook, untroubled by niceties such as loyalty to the Union cause, immediately “took advantage of these exceptionally liberal terms, and deserted one night in company with some others, while doing picket duty.” He did not linger in the South and, having collected his thirty dollars, traveled back “through the Confederate States on foot, in order to gain the frontier of the Northern States.” He would doubtless have repeated the process several more times, but before he could do so, the war came to end, and so did the first phase of Worth’s criminal career.
    Worth was just one of thousands of young soldiers to find themselves at loose ends with the declaration of peace. William Pinkerton, who came to play a defining role in Worth’s life and was to become his most reliable chronicler, was another. Before long, the two men would become adversaries on opposite sides of the