Max Shinburn
by Allan Pinkerton
Maximilian Shinburn, alias Mark Shinburn, alias Mark Baker, alias Zimmerman, with half a hundred other aliases, is a very brilliant and exceptional instance of a professional criminal having won considerable fame from a series of masterly bank and bond robberies, marvelous prison escapes, and the like, in America, and then crowning all by a final escape, sound and safely, to Belgium, where he has since lived an active, and, as far as can be learned, an honorable business life, being favored with luxury and the pleasantest of life’s surroundings.
He is now about forty years of age, and, whether born in America or elsewhere, is a German Jew, and has a fluent command of the English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian languages. One account has it that he was born in Europe, and received his superb education there, leaving his native country on account of some wild, boyish escapade, and coming to America when he was about eighteen years of age, proceeding to St. Louis, where he became very proficient in the locksmith’s trade; but finding this a slow way to secure the elegancies of life, turning the knowledge thus gained to criminal pursuits, and after being arrested, and while awaiting trial, effecting the liberation of himself and seventeen other prisoners.
Again, some of his old associates in crime state that he was born of… Read More