This Day in History: The Napoleon of Crime, Adam Worth, died on this day in 1902. Adam Worth was a German-born American criminal and crime boss who is widely considered the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional criminal mastermind James Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series, whom Conan Doyle calls "The Napoleon of Crime".
Worth enlisted in the Union Army during the civil war at age 17. When he was wounded in battle he found out that he was listed as "killed in action" and so he left. After the war, Worth became a pickpocket, and over time he started his own gang of pickpockets, and then began to organize robberies and heists.
"His name was Adam Worth; a dapper, cerebral and ambitious little man, he had come from nowhere--specifically, the mean backstreets of Cambridge, Massachusetts--to become the most successful safecracker and bank robber in the city of New York, which in 1865 boasted 53,000 crimes of violence. Dissatisfied with a mere local notoriety, and seeking to escape the notice of Pinkerton detectives, in 1869 he borrowed or stole the name of Henry J. Raymond, late founder editor of the New York Times, and sailed to England where he transformed himself into an elegant English gentleman, with a flat on Piccadilly, a steam yacht, racehorses and an international syndicate of robbers and forgers. For years he drove the world's police forces to distraction with well planned, bloodlessly executed crimes all the way to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, without ever leaving a bit of incriminating evidence."
See also 19th Century Crime Boss Adam Worth and the Pinkertons 1905
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