The Napoleon of Crime Read Online Free PDF

law, then grudging mutual admirers, then co-conspirators, and finally, most bizarrely, friends. Their paths did not cross until the war’s end, but already they were dark and light reflections of each other. Like the bright and tarnished pennies of Worth’s childhood, they were similar in value but utterly different in luster.
    The elder son of Allan Pinkerton, a Scotsman who had founded the great detective agency in Chicago in 1850, William Pinkerton was Worth’s exact contemporary and had enrolled in the Union Army at much the same time. Where Worth’s early life had been marked by material want and a complete absence of ethical guidance, Pinkerton was brought up in well-to-do Chicago under a regime of the strictest moral rules.
    Allan Pinkerton was a superb detective but a brutal father and a fantastic prig who hammered the virtues of honesty, integrity, and raw courage into his children and employees with something close to fanaticism. William did his best to live up to these exacting standards, but could never be quite good enough. Working with his father, Abraham Lincoln’s official spymaster, William Pinkerton not only ran agents across the border into Confederate territory but was also present on the first flight of an observation hot-air balloon during the Civil War. Brave, bluff, and energetic, Pinkerton was wounded in the knee by an exploding shell at the Battle of Antietam, having already “gained experience that was invaluable to him in the vocation which he was to follow.” He attended Notre Dame College in Indiana for a year and then joined his father’s fast-growing detective agency, where he soon established a reputation as a tireless lawman, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of the American detective breed. The Pinkertons chose as their symbol an unblinking human eye and the motto “The Eye That Never Sleeps,” from which the modern term “private eye” has evolved.
    The lives and subsequent careers of Worth and Pinkerton starkly demonstrate the moral duality that so obsessed Victorians. They shadowed and echoed one another, the detective playing Holmes to Worth’s Moriarty, yet they were birds of a feather in their tastes, attitudes, and opinions. Both, to a remarkable degree, represented typical American stories of self-created men from immigrant stock, rugged in their opportunism, sturdy in their beliefs, but at opposite poles of conventional morality. Worth would have made an outstanding detective; Pinkerton, a talented criminal. The Civil War was a grimly leveling experience, but its end allowed the country to begin to rebuild and reinvent itself once more. The two men emerged from the battlefields determined, like thousands of others, to make their mark. They took diametrically opposed routes to that goal, but a lifetime later the bounty jumper and the war hero would end up, in a way neither could have predicted, as allies.
    Pinkerton’s had been a remarkable war, but then the official military record of Sergeant Adam Worth was also one of unblemished bravery and tragic heroism: a young and promising soldier mortally wounded while defending the Union at Bull Run. In truth, of course, he had spent the war dodging the authorities, swapping sides, abandoning the flags of two rival armies, and collecting a tidy profit along the way.

THREE
    The Manhattan Mob
     
    A fter the Civil War, Worth drifted, like so many veterans, to New York City, which by the mid-1860s was already one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt, the poor often had little choice but to steal, while the rich sometimes had little inclination not to, since they tended to get away with it. Seldom has history conspired to assemble, on one small island, such a vivid variety of pickpockets, con men, whores, swindlers, pimps, burglars, bank robbers, beggars, mobsmen, and thieves of every description. Some of the worst professional