The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  The enthusiasm of the revivalists was considerably dampened by the articles which appeared in the Times and the World, and the public began to desert the services when it became apparent that the preachers had not been wholly truthful. Eventually the campaign was abandoned, and Water street and the remainder of the Fourth Ward returned to their ways of sin. But John Allen’s house never recovered from the blighting effect of the prayer meetings; the gangsters began to consider him, as he expressed it, “loose and unsound,” and would not patronize his establishment. He retained his women and musicians, and after his contract with the preachers had expired tried desperately to restore his house to its former evil splendour, but within a few months he was compelled to abandon his enterprise. His last public appearance was late in December, 1868, when he and his wife, together with several of his girls, were arraigned before Justice Dowling in the Tombs Police Court, charged with robbing a seaman of $15. One of the girls, Margaret Ware, was held for immediate trial, and Allen was bound over in $300 bail for appearance in General Sessions. Allen accused Oliver Dyer of causing his arrest, and declared that it was all a “put up job.”

  RIVER PIRATES

  WHILE THE early gangsters of the Five Points and the Bowery were frequently thieves, and on occasion murderers, they were primarily brawlers and street fighters, and most of their battling was done in the open. But the thugs who infested the Fourth Ward and swarmed each night into its dives and gin-mills for their recreation and plotting, were killers and robbers first of all. They seldom engaged in gutter rows with the gangs of other districts, but when they did they usually carried the day and left their opponents maimed and bleeding upon the field, for with the possible exception of the later Whyos of Mulberry Bend they were the most ferocious criminals who ever stalked the streets of an American city. One of them was more than a match for a Dead Rabbit, a Plug Ugly, or a Bowery Boy, and not even the legends which have so elaborated the exploits of the mighty Mose tell of a successful foray against the gangsters of the water front.

  In more modern times the Hudson Dusters, as well as the Potashes, the Gophers and other gangs of Hell’s Kitchen and the West Side, have gained considerable renown by their exploits on the west shore of Manhattan, but the early pirates for the most part confined their activities to the East River water front, and only one gang of importance operated along the Hudson. This was a choice collection of ruffians known as the Charlton Street Gang. They made their headquarters in a low gin-mill at the foot of Charlton street, and sallied forth each evening to steal whatever was loose upon the docks, and to rob and murder anyone who ventured into their territory. But most of the Hudson River piers were used by ocean-going steamers and sailing vessels, and the owners provided well-lighted docks and employed a small army of watchmen to guard their property. Consequently the Charlton street gangsters found the pickings very slim, and were at length driven to make a choice between regular piracy and honest labor.

  Naturally, they chose piracy, and for the first year or two of their new career roamed the Hudson in rowboats, but with scant success until the spring of 1869, when they were joined by a woman known as Sadie the Goat, who proceeded to put new life into the gang. Sadie acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess money or valuables, to duck her head and butt him in the stomach, whereupon her male companion promptly slugged the surprised victim with a slung-shot, and they then robbed him at their leisure. For several years Sadie the Goat was a favorite among the gangsters of the Fourth Ward, but she finally became embroiled in a fight with Gallus Mag and was badly worsted. She fled the ward, leaving one of her ears in Gallus Mag’s pickling fluid behind the bar of the Hole-in-the-Wall, and sought refuge in the den of the Charlton Street Gang on the West Side.

  Under her inspired leadership the Charlton street thugs considerably enlarged their field of operations. They stole a small sloop of excellent sailing qualities, and with the Jolly Roger flying from the masthead and Sadie the Goat pacing the deck in proud command, they sailed up and down the Hudson from the Harlem River to Poughkeepsie and beyond, robbing farmhouses and riverside mansions, terrorizing the hamlets, and occasionally holding men, women, and children for ransom. It has been said that Sadie the Goat, whose ferocity far exceeded that of her ruffianly followers, compelled several men to walk the plank in true piratical style. For several months the thugs were enormously successful, and filled their hiding-places with bales of goods, some of

  Wharf Rats at Work

  it of considerable value, which they disposed of gradually through the fences and junk shops along the Hudson and East Rivers. But after they had committed several murders the embattled farmers along the river began to greet their landing parties with musket and pistol fire, and by the end of the summer life had become so perilous that they abandoned their sloop. Sadie the Goat is said to have taken her share of the loot and returned to the Fourth Ward, where she made truce with Gallus Mag and acknowledged her to be queen of the water front. Gallus Mag was so touched by the abject surrender of her erstwhile rival that she dipped into her jar of trophies and returned one female ear to its original owner. Legend has it that Sadie the Goat had her ear enclosed in a locket and wore it about her throat.

  In his report to the Mayor in September, 1850, Chief of Police George W. Matsell estimated that there were between four hundred and five hundred river pirates in the Fourth Ward, organized in some fifty active gangs. “The river pirates,” he said, “pursue their nefarious operations with the most systematic perseverance, and manifest a shrewdness and adroitness which can only be attained by long practice. Nothing comes amiss to them. In their boats, under cover of night, they prowl around the wharves and vessels in a stream, and dexterously snatch up every piece of loose property left for a moment unguarded.” Some of the thieving boats came from the Brooklyn water front, and others from the shores of Staten Island and New Jersey, and occasionally a good-sized smack lay off shore in the harbor during the night and served as a receiving ship, shifting her anchorage with the dawn and disposing of the accumulated plunder to the junkmen. But a majority of the river gangsters of whom Chief Matsell complained hailed from the dives of the Fourth Ward and, later, from the Seventh Ward and the Corlears’ Hook district at the bend in the East River, north of Grand street. From the docks and ships the pirates stole everything they could lay their hands upon. They usually transferred the loot to their own containers, which prevented positive identification and made it difficult for the police to obtain conclusive evidence that the property had been stolen.

  The Daybreak Boys, who had a rendezvous in a low gin mill kept by Pete Williams at Slaughter House Point, as the police called the intersection of James and Water streets, was the first of the river gangs to operate as an organized criminal unit. These thugs were so called because they generally chose the hour of dawn for their most hazardous and important enterprises, and few were the days on which the rising sun did not disclose them prowling about the docks or along the river in rowboats. Nicholas Saul and William Howlett, who were hanged in the Tombs when the former was but twenty years old and Howlett a year his junior, were the most celebrated leaders of the Daybreak Boys, although the membership of the gang included many noted criminals, among them Slobbery Jim, Sow Madden, Cow-legged Sam McCarthy and Patsy the Barber. None of these thugs was more than twenty years old when he had acquired a reputation as a murderous gangster and cutthroat, and there was scarcely a man among them who had not committed at least one murder, and innumerable robberies, before he reached his majority. Saul and Howlett joined the gang when they were sixteen and fifteen, respectively, and several others were even younger; a few were as young as ten and twelve years.

  The Daybreak Boys soon became famous as the most desperate thugs of their period, ready to scuttle a ship, crack the skull of a watchman, or cut a throat without hesitation. Frequently they murdered for the sheer love of killing, without provocation or hope of gain. Saul and Howlett became
captains in 1850, and under their joint leadership the gang terrorized the East River water front for two years, occasionally venturing into the more dangerous waters of the Hudson and the harbor. Both Saul and Howlett were extraordinarily adroit, and the boldness of their exploits, and the obvious prosperity of their followers, soon attracted to their banner the most vicious gangsters of the district. The police estimated that during the two years in which these heroes led the Daybreak Boys the gang stole property worth at least $100,000, and committed about twenty murders. And it is likely that they were responsible for at least twice that many killings, for a day rarely passed that one or more dead men were not found floating in the river or stretched stiff upon a lonely dock, their pockets turned inside out and fatal wounds upon their bodies. But there was seldom any evidence through which the murderer could be traced.

  On the evening of August 25, 1852, a detective passing Pete Williams’ dive at Slaughter House Point saw Saul and Howlett and Bill Johnson, an ineffectual member of the gang but a boon companion of the two chieftains, sitting at a table with their heads close together, taking no part in the gayety of the place. It was clear that they were plotting mischief, and as further proof Johnson was drinking heavily, as he always did when great events portended, for he was a man of small courage. An hour later the detective again passed the resort, but the three gangsters had gone, and he assumed that they had repaired to one of the dance halls much frequented by both Saul and Howlett. But instead, they had embarked in-a rowboat and with greased oarlocks and muffled oars pulled to the brig William Watson, which was anchored in the East River between Oliver street and James Slip. Leaving Johnson dead drunk in the bottom of the rowboat, Saul and Howlett clambered onto the deck of the brig and made their way to the ship’s cabin, where the watchman, Charles Baxter, came upon them as they tugged at the captain’s sea chest, which they purposed dragging to the rail and dropping into their boat. Although Baxter was unarmed, he attacked them and fought so fiercely that the thugs lost their heads, and instead of knocking him unconscious with a club or a slug-shot, shot him through the heart.

  Abandoning their attempt to plunder the vessel, Saul and Howlett hastily dropped into their rowboat and set out for shore, with Johnson still so drunk that he was unable to lend a hand at the oars. But the William Watson was lying close inshore, and the sound of the shot had been heard by a policeman on the Oliver street dock. A few minutes later he glimpsed the shadowy outlines of a rowboat gliding swiftly through the fog which had settled down upon the river during the night, and when it docked he saw Saul and Howlett drag Johnson onto the pier and half carry him into Pete Williams’ dive. Several hours later, after the body of Baxter had been discovered, a squad of twenty policemen, all heavily armed, swooped down upon the resort at Slaughter House Point and captured the three gangsters after a desperate battle with a score of thugs who rallied to the defense of their captains. All three were tried and found guilty of murder, and Johnson was sent to prison for life, while Saul and Howlett were sentenced to death. On the morning of January 28, 1853, they were hanged in the courtyard of the Tombs in the presence of more than two hundred interested spectators, a hundred of whom, including Butcher Bill Poole, and Tom Hyer, the pugilist, filed past the scaffold and shook hands with the condemned thugs.

  Slobbery Jim and Bill Lowrie now assumed the leadership of the Daybreak Boys, but Slobbery Jim soon fled the city to escape hanging for the murder of Patsy the Barber, and the gang declined in importance after Captain Thorne had closed the dive in Slaughter House Point. Lowrie and his sweetheart, Molly Maher, then opened The Rising States in Water street near Oliver, and tried to keep the remnants of the Daybreak Boys together, but Lowrie himself was caught in a dock robbery soon after he started his grog-shop, and was sent to prison for fifteen years. Cow-legged Sam McCarthy took his place both as leader of the gang and as lover to Molly Maher, but after a few months he abandoned both the river and the woman and cast his lot with a gang of burglars from the Five Points, who operated in the residential and manufacturing districts farther uptown.

  The Five Points in 1859.

  View taken from the Corner of Worth and Little Water St.

  Meanwhile Chief Matsell and other police officials had continued their agitation for a harbor force adequate to protect the docks and shipping, in which they were joined by many prominent citizens, among them James W. Gerard, who went to London and made an exhaustive study of the London police and returned to pubUsh a series of articles demanding that New York be given greater protection. Mr. Gerard was also a leader in the campaign which finally resulted in the police force being permanently uniformed. Not only did he urge a distinctive dress, but he had his tailor make such a uniform and himself wore it to a fancy dress ball, a circumstance which evoked much comment. But it was not until 1858 that the city authorities consented to the organization of a harbor police, and even then the force consisted of only a few men who patrolled the rivers and lower harbor in rowboats. The first boat set out on March 15,1858, and within a few days a dozen others were cruising under command of experienced policemen, who had orders to overhaul and examine every suspicious looking craft.

  With the aid of the rowboats, the police started an energetic campaign against the gangsters of the Fourth Ward, and concentrated their attack on the Daybreak Boys, who had already been demoralized by the successive misfortunes of their leaders and by the defection of Cow-legged Sam. Roundsman Blair and Patrolmen Spratt and Gilbert killed twelve of the thugs in 1858, and during that same year Detective Sergeant Edwin O’Brien arrested fifty-seven gangsters who owed allegiance to the Daybreak Boys, the Short Tails and the Border Gang. These activities soon scattered the Daybreak Boys, and by the end of 1859 the gang was practically extinct. Those members who had survived the onslaught of the police removed to the Bowery and Five Points, or to the Corlears’ Hook area, where they joined various gangs. But the Swamp Angels, who made their rendezvous in the sewer under the Gotham Court tenement in Cherry street, the Hookers, and the remainder of the Fourth Ward gangs continued to give the police much trouble, and shipping men were still uncertain as to the ultimate destination of a cargo consigned to a merchant who used the East River docks. Encounters occurred nightly between the police and the gangsters, and many officers and thugs were killed and wounded. The gangs of the Brooklyn and New Jersey water fronts also began to make excursions into Manhattan waters, although for the most part the former kept pretty close to their bases, for there were plenty of opportunities for theft and murder along the Brooklyn dock. Their principal hiding-places were in the sparsely settled region between Brooklyn and Williamsburg, then called Irishtown but now populated almost entirely by Jews and Italians.

  THE most illustrious thug who came to the attention of the police during this period was Albert E. Hicks, commonly called Hicksey, a free lance gangster and thief who lived with his wife

  Albert E. Hicks

  and one child at No. 129 Cedar street, not far from old Trinity Church and within two blocks of the Hudson River. Hicks spent most of his time in the dives of the Fourth Ward water front, and although a member of none of the great gangs, occasionally enhst-ed under the banner of a captain whose activities promised excitement and loot. On a night in March, 1860, having imbibed too deeply at a Water street dance hall, Hicks sought lodging at the house of a Cherry street crimp, trusting that his reputation would protect him. But the crimp was no respecter of persons. He put laudanum in Hicks’ nightcap of rum, and in the dead of night crept into the sleeping chamber and deepened his guest’s slumbers with a slung-shot. When Hicks awakened next morning he was on board the sloop E. A. Johnson, bound for Deep Creek, Virginia, for a cargo of oysters, and had been regularly shipped as a member of the crew under the name of William Johnson. Besides the shanghaied gangster, the vessel’s complement comprised the master, Captain Burr, and two brothers. Smith and Oliver Watts.

  The E. A. Johnson sailed out of New York harbor with Hicks lying in the forecastle trying to
collect his scattered senses. Five days later the sloop was found abandoned at sea, only a few miles off Staten Island, by the schooner Telegraph of New London, Connecticut. The schooner spoke the steam tug Ceres, which towed the Johnson into the Fulton Market Slip, at the lower end of Manhattan. She had evidently collided with another vessel, for her bowsprit and cutwater had been badly damaged, and the sailors who boarded her long enough to affix a tow Une reported that her decks were in the wildest confusion. After she had been tied up in the Slip, Coroner Schirmer and Captain Weed of the Second Precinct police boarded her and made an examination. They found the sails loose upon the deck, and the small boat ordinarily towed at the stern was missing. In the cabin the ceiling, floor, bunks, chairs, and table were stained with blood, as were the bedding and the ship’s papers, and various articles of clothing which had been thrown about the compartment. On the floor of the cabin, and on the planking of the deck, were marks indicating that a heavy body had been dragged to the side, and the rail was splotched by blood. On the deck beneath the rail lay four human fingers and a thumb, and near them a bloody axe.

  The next day Andrew Kelly and John Burke, tenants of the house in Cedar street, appeared at the police station and told Captain Weed that twenty-four hours before the sloop was brought into port Hicks had returned home with a large sum of money, and had given evasive answers when asked where he had obtained it. That night Hicks packed his household goods, and with his wife and child left the city. Patrolman Nevins traced them to a boarding-house in Providence, Rhode Island, and with the aid of the Providence police arrested the entire family. They were brought to New York, where Mrs. Hicks and her child were released, but Hicks was held for investigation because he told conflicting tales about the money.