His career in crime, stretching from the United States to Europe and southern Africa, included the infamous theft of Gainsborough's celebrated Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which he retained for 25 years.

Scotland Yard Detective Robert Anderson nicknamed him "the Napoleon of the criminal world" based on his short stature.

[1] He is widely considered the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional criminal mastermind James Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series.

[3] When he was five years old, his family moved to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Worth's father became a tailor.

When the Pinkerton Detective Agency began to track him, like many others using similar methods, he fled from New York City and went to Portsmouth, UK.

Worth began to work for the prominent fence and criminal organiser Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum.

In 1869, he helped Mandelbaum break safecracker Charley Bullard out of the White Plains Jail, through a tunnel.

With Bullard, Worth robbed the vault of the Boylston National Bank in Boston on 20 November 1869, again through a tunnel, this time from a neighbouring shop.

The bank alerted the Pinkertons, who tracked the shipment of trunks Worth and Bullard had used to ship the loot to New York.

Worth was financier "Henry Judson Raymond", a name that he "borrowed" from the late founder editor of The New York Times,[5] and which he used for years afterwards.

They began to compete for the favours of a barmaid named Kitty Flynn, who eventually learned their true identities.

Later the Paris police raided the place numerous times, and Worth and the Bullards decided to abandon the restaurant.

[citation needed] In England, Worth and his associates bought Western Lodge at Clapham Common.

Things began to go wrong when Worth's brother John was sent to cash a forged check in Paris, for which he was arrested and extradited to England.

Four of his associates were arrested in Istanbul for spreading more forged letters of credit, and he had to use a considerable amount of money to buy off the judges and the police.

Worth gave Little Joe money to return to the United States, where he tried to rob the Union Trust Company, was arrested, and talked to the Pinkertons.

Bullard had been working with Max Shinburn (also Maximilian Schönbein), Worth's rival, when police captured them both.

On 5 October, Worth improvised a robbery of a money delivery cart in Liège with two untried associates, one of them the American Johnny Curtin.

In jail, Worth heard nothing about his family in London, but received a letter from Kitty Flynn, who offered to finance his defence.

Worth flatly denied that he had anything to do with various crimes, saying that the last robbery had been a stupid act he had committed out of a need for money.

A small tombstone was erected to mark his resting place in 1997 by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.