Upstate had its own aristocratic thief
“King of Crooks” from 1800s dethroned in Middleburgh
Schoenbein had already been cooling his heels in prison for eight years when “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” hit the presses in 1905. Maurice
Leblanc’s fictional “gentleman thief ” is now enjoying his star turn as the inspiration for the popular Netflix series “Lupin,” but Schoenbein — known around the globe as “Baron” Max Shinburn — was upstate New York’s own criminal aristocrat.
Pursued on two continents for 35 years by the legendary Pinkerton Detective Agency, Robert Pinkerton declared
Shinburn to be “the greatest bank, safe and vault burglar that has ever been known in police history.”
The so-called “King of Crooks” would be dethroned in 1895 in the unlikeliest of locations: The village of Middleburgh in Schoharie County. According to Shinburn biographer, Jerry Kuntz, “Shinburn’s arrest for the Middleburgh robmaximilian
bery was the pivotal event in ending his criminal career.”
Max Shinburn was suspected in taking part in dozens of heists from Buffalo to Belgium in the latter half of the 19th century. The Los Angeles Herald in 1902 tallied his lifetime haul in excess of $5 million — that’s about $150 million in today’s dollars. The size of the robberies was only part of Shinburn’s mystique; his style and elusiveness were the stuff of legend both inside the criminal world and in the press.
Crime journalist Herbert Asbury noted in his book “Gangs of New York” that Shinburn was “at heart an aristocrat.” The Germanborn thief eschewed violent confrontation, employing his considerable intelligence to access the banks and their vaults outside of normal business hours.
Between burglaries, Shinburn could be found holding court in tailored broadcloth in New York’s finest hotels and gaming rooms, charming evening guests in several languages. Few of his fellow citizens would guess the true source of his apparent wealth.
When the constabulary did occasionally collar Shinburn, his escapes were equally clever and nonviolent. While once handcuffed to an arresting officer, he picked the shackles’ lock with a pin as the man slept and disappeared into the night.
However brilliant and elusive as Max Shinburn could be, his criminal career would ultimately be book-ended by two sensational events in upstate New York: his public arrest in Saratoga Springs in 1865, and his trial for the robbery of the First National Bank of Middleburgh.
Though born in Germany, Shinburn’s professional career began in Troy with an apprenticeship at the Lillie Safe Company in 1860. The young man was so adroit with the mechanics and manufacture of their safes, he was offered a management position. Shinburn declined. He had other ideas for his future — and theirs.
East Coast banks equipped with Lillie safes soon began to find money disappearing. To gain access to those banks after hours, Shinburn mastered the art of “sneaking” — entering the home of a bank employee undetected, locating their keys and making a wax impression of those keys to fashion a duplicate.
Once inside a bank safe, he often sowed confusion and obscured his thefts by removing only a portion of a safe’s contents. Shinburn’s repeated success in the shadows would help push Lillie into bankruptcy within a few years.
In 1864, Shinburn entered the Walpole Savings Bank in New Hampshire and absconded with $96,000 ($1.6 million today) in less than 30 minutes. With this handsome score, he returned to New York and attempted to set himself up as a country gentleman in Saratoga Springs.
Shinburn became a conspicuous resident of the town’s enormous brick Grand Union Hotel on the west side of Broadway. He stayed in the cottages reserved for the society’s elite and was a regular at the morning meetings in the so-called investor’s room there.
In the book “Robber Baron,” author Edward J. Gallagher writes that detectives tailing Shinburn described him as “expensively attired, brilliant in conversation with other guests of the establishment,” and as someone who “could be found either as a spectator or participant in games at the casino.”
The police made their move on Shinburn on April 10, 1865 at the Saratoga Music Hall. In the pocket of his dinner jacket, police found seven $1,000 bonds for the Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad, stolen from the Walpole Savings Bank. They then raided the top floor of his cottage at the Grand Union and uncovered a complete workshop of burglary tools as well as the keys to the vault of the Cheshire County Bank of Keene, New Hampshire, containing $230,000 ($3.8 million today).
He was convicted for the bank robbery in New Hampshire, but Shinburn demonstrated that he was as skilled at getting out of prison as he was at getting into banks. In December of 1866, he orchestrated a daring escape from the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord. A string of high-profile bank robberies followed over the next three years.
Of that period, Shinburn later wrote in a series of articles for The Boston Herald: “Between that time and the year 1869, I robbed nine out of eleven banks which I attempted, and secured a share in loot ranging from $50,000 to $1,900,000.”
That’s a score worth about $800,000 to $32 million today.
Still on the run from the law but now flush, Shinburn left New York for Belgium in 1870 with a new wife and a half million dollars ($10 million today) in cash. He picked the perfect destination to start anew: Belgium, a country with no existing U.S. extradition treaty.
Shinburn purchased a barony and a silk mill, intent on living out his days as a titled and legitimate businessman, but by the late 1880s, the “Baron Shinburn” had lost his ill-gotten fortune on the gaming tables of Monte Carlo and run afoul of the Belgian authorities.
Shinburn returned to his former way of life in New York by the early 1890s and was again suspected of another string of bank robberies. Safe cracking had necessarily evolved over those decades to keep pace with new safes, and the preferred tool among bank robbers at the end of the 19th century was now highly explosive nitroglycerin.
On the night of April 16, 1895, Shinburn used too much nitro to blow the safe door off the First National Bank of Middleburgh. The cannon-like detonation awoke the village and a local posse pursued Shinburn and his crew as they fled into the night along the tracks of the Middleburgh & Schoharie Railroad on a stolen handcar.
An indiscreet communiqué passed through a hotel maid in nearby Jefferson was Shinburn’s final mistake. On June 28, 1895, detectives from the Pinkerton Agency collared Max Shinburn in New York City.
The trial at the Schoharie County Courthouse made news around the world. Given Shinburn’s history of escapes, the Pinkertons and the police were understandably nervous about the county’s ability to hold him during the proceedings. They were correct to be concerned.
The slippery Shinburn remained true to form and made several bids for freedom. In one of those escape attempts, he successfully cut his way out of the Schoharie holding cell only to be tackled by the jailer’s wife who was bringing him a slice of pie at the time. Ever the gentleman thief, Shinburn reportedly remarked on surrendering to her: “I, never in my life, have struck a woman.”
Shinburn would be convicted of the Middleburgh robbery and went upstate to serve five years in Dannemora prison. The New Hampshire authorities were waiting at the gates on his release in 1900 and dragged him back to Concord to serve out his previous sentence imposed 40 years earlier.
Shinburn was finally a free man again in 1908 and lived out the remainder of his days in Boston — but not at a grand home in a tony neighborhood. The once-dapper Shinburn, who loved fine clothes and surroundings, listed as his last address, until his death in 1916, as the John Howard Home of Reformed Prisoners.
Shinburn wrote a series of articles for The Boston Herald about his capers. Hudson Valley historian Jerry Kuntz published a collection of those articles in 2018 in the book “King of Burglars: The Heist Stories of Max Shinburn.”