The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  In the spring of 1860, he was hunting, looking for a score big enough to set up his family. He spent weeks studying manifests and want ads, walking the North and East River docks. He was searching for a certain kind of ship with a certain kind of crew engaged in a certain kind of trade. “I kept a sharp lookout for small craft outward bound for cargoes of fruit, oysters, etc., and in a quiet way gathered all the information I could in regard to the number of hands they shipped, and the amount of money they generally carried,” he later explained.

  He settled on the E. A. Johnson because it looked like a fat target. A midsize oyster sloop, it would leave New York empty, sail down the Atlantic coast to Deep Creek, Virginia, purchase a few thousand oysters, then return to the Fulton Fish Market to sell the cargo to wholesalers, who’d sell it to restaurants and fishmongers. The entire run would take two or three weeks. The cargo was fragile—oysters go bad—so the purchase would have to be made in cash. It was this cash—oyster sloops were famous for carrying it—that got the pirate’s attention. Get into the lockbox on the first leg, before the money was paid out—that was the idea.

  By asking around, Hicks learned the makeup of the E. A. Johnson’s crew—just three when Hicks inquired. Captain Burr, not yet forty years old, was a bearded fireplug in sea boots and sea coat, a pipe in the corner of his mouth, his face as dour as a face in a portrait behind a waterfront tavern. At just 135 pounds, Burr was surprisingly strong—all that loading and unloading, hauling and tying knots in the sun. He was a cord of muscle, as taut as rope. The deckhands were two half-brothers. Oliver Watts, at twenty-three, was big and strong and probably the only serious obstacle to Hicks—deal with him first. Oliver’s little brother, nineteen-year-old Smith Watts, was willowy and tall, a sea-obsessed boy who’d long dreamed of following Oliver into the world. “The sloop E. A. Johnson offered an easy prey,” Hicks later said. “She had on board, I supposed, from all the information I could gather, something over a thousand dollars.”

  Captain Burr was in need of a new first mate—his top officer had quit when the sloop last arrived in New York. Hicks applied under the name William Johnson, an alias he used on many voyages. It allowed him to live a double life. Albert Hicks was a law-abiding husband with a young child. William Johnson was a remorseless pirate, the author of scores of bloody deeds.

  In advance of his interview on the E. A. Johnson, Hicks shaved. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes glittered beneath his Kossuth hat—a fashion of the moment, named for the Hungarian freedom fighter who’d worn one at fiery rallies in Manhattan. Floppy-brimmed, it shaded his eyes, protecting his face. Hicks came to be identified by this hat as much as by his physical appearance. His sea coat, sometimes called a monkey coat, fell below his knees. Now and then, caught in the wind, it snapped behind him like a flag.

  He answered Captain Burr’s questions thoroughly but briefly. He’d always made a good impression. He had knowledge of ropes and sails—ropes would play an important role in his life—was a decent helmsman, and was willing to do repairs. He could work with wood and considered himself a skilled carpenter. He’d come with his own set of tools.

  Burr hired him on the spot, then introduced him to the others. Smith and Oliver Watts were from Islip, Long Island, an Atlantic fishing village. They had the same father but different mothers. Smith had grown up the doted-on only child of that mother and nearly had to run away to get clear of the house. He was an adolescent with a wispy blond beard.

  Captain Burr lived in Islip, too, though he was hardly ever at home. He kept in touch with his wife by mail. They were close in the way of people who share everything on paper. A sailor writing to his landlocked spouse—there is nothing more melancholy. Burr was half owner of the E. A. Johnson. He’d spent years in the service of other men, working and saving until he could buy a stake in his own vessel. It was state of the art for the time, a three-masted schooner with a large hold and a comfortable cabin, so well made you could lash a cord to the wheel and let it sail itself.

  The E. A. Johnson could haul any sort of cargo, even be used as a dragger, but it was built for oysters; the holds were large enough for several hundred pounds of ice and fish. New York had once had the greatest oyster beds in the world, but most had been exhausted or polluted by 1840. A booming business had opened in oyster hauling—an all-cash business because of the fragility of the crop. An enterprising captain could make a dozen runs a year, sailing a circuit between Manhattan and the Carolinas, returning with several thousand pounds of James River, Nansemond River, or York Point oysters that, once transferred from the sloop to the Fulton Street market bins, would doze atop ice amid yellowtail, crab, and grouper on Fulton Street. A captain who was lucky as well as clever, could expect an income in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars a year.

  Hicks moved onto the Johnson to prepare for the upcoming voyage. Several people—they’d later be called as witnesses—saw him on or near the sloop. Selah Howell, the ship’s co-owner, had dinner with Captain Burr and first mate Albert Hicks while the Johnson was anchored at the Spring Street pier, which long ago vanished beneath industry, roads, and landfill. Howell would remember Hicks as a commanding presence, polite but taciturn. Daniel Simmons, the investor who’d funded the run, saw Hicks on deck when he, Simmons, came along with the money. “I gave the captain two hundred dollars in silver coins,” Simmons said. “I paid him the balance of his charter money in gold, two tens, two fives and a two and a half, one dollar in gold and a half dollar.” Simmons carried the money in a canvas sack variously described as a shot bag or a seabag. Hicks watched Captain Burr lock it below. Hicks had a full beard when Simmons saw him—dark riddled with red, as if woven in blood.

  James Bacon—wharf grunt, odd-job man—had come aboard to shovel out the cargo hold, the shells and muck left over from the previous voyage. He saw Hicks at a distance but remembered his clothes: “A check shirt, a short coat, and a comforter about his neck. I think in the morning he had on a monkey coat, and when he went to work he pulled on a blue shirt.”

  In the days before the voyage, the sloop made several short trips. At some point, it was anchored in Gravesend Bay, on the Narrows, where Staten Island comes closest to Brooklyn. Charles Baker, who worked in Gravesend Bay, saw Hicks in “a kind of monkey coat. He had whiskers,” but “none on his upper lip that I could see.”

  Reuben Keymer, who lived a few hundred feet from Gravesend Bay and spent evenings watching the harbor traffic, had seen Hicks in a yawl, rowing beside Smith Watts. Keymer made eye contact with Hicks, then turned away. “I was afraid he would run afoul of me,” Keymer would say in court.

  Keymer happened to catch Hicks in an unguarded moment, mask down, but Captain Burr picked up none of the signals. Hicks had gone out of his way to charm the captain. “This man, William Johnson, who lives in New York, is a smart fellow,” Burr wrote his wife. “He went at the mast and scraped it while we were in Keyport, without telling, while I was ashore. He is a good hand; can turn his hand to almost anything.”

  “We sailed on the sixteenth of March from the foot of Spring Street, and proceeded to Keyport, [Long Island],” Hicks would tell detectives. “That’s where I scraped the mast of the sloop, did a lot of carpenter work, and evidently pleased Captain Burr very much.” From there, the E. A. Johnson went to Islip, then back to Spring Street, then to Gravesend Bay (near modern Bensonhurst, with its soccer fields and its redbrick apartments) to wait for the wind.

  Oh, to that precombustion age, when you could plan and plan but nature would decide! Oh, to those still afternoons and evenings when sailors stood on the decks of great ships, whistling for the wind as the sun set over New Jersey, amid the evening sounds, the sea hawk and the night owl. And finally the atmospheric pressure would shift, and the wind blow clean and cool and full of promise. Canvas billowed, spars creaked, a boom swung across the deck, and the ship came alive.

  Reuben Keymer was on his porch when
the E. A. Johnson sailed from Gravesend Bay on March, 20, 1860. “I felt [the wind], then saw it reach the sloop and watched the sloop going out,” he told investigators. “She went southwest to clear Coney Island, then took a southerly course. I saw her three miles out to the east of Sandy Hook; the wind was west northwest; the sloop was going about eight knots an hour….At the rate she was going, she would pass Sandy Hook in about an hour.”

  The Narrows is less open water than a tidal strait, a gateway to New York. Above it lies the Upper Bay; beyond it, the Lower Bay. In 1860 a ship moving through the Narrows would sail beside empty hills, a wilderness broken only by the occasional farmhouse. The E. A. Johnson passed Brighton Beach, then sailed along Staten Island.

  Around midnight, Smith Watts went to the cabin to sleep. Captain Burr followed. There were four beds down there, two bunks. Oliver Watts was at the helm, steering through a seascape of dark islands. The moon went down. The stars came out. Hicks asked if he could take a turn at the wheel. As he spoke, he quietly laid an ax beside himself. He’d taken it off the pilothouse wall—it was meant for emergencies.

  Oliver asked Hicks why he wanted to steer. Hicks said it was the only way he could feel calm. Oliver said okay and stepped aside. He went to the prow and stood with the wind at his back, looking out.

  The men talked for a time, then Hicks seemed to notice something. Picking up the ax, he walked forward and, pointing southwest with his free hand, asked, “Is that Barnegat Light?”—meaning the lighthouse on Long Beach Island, New Jersey.

  Oliver looked quickly, then said, “No. We won’t see it for at least an hour.”

  “Look again,” said Hicks. “I’m fairly certain that’s Barnegat Light.”

  When Oliver turned that second time, Hicks swung the ax, driving it into the back of the young man’s head. Oliver cried out, fell to his knees, then onto his face. In a moment, his blood was all over the deck. Hicks struck him again, just to be sure.

  Oliver’s brother Smith, having heard the commotion, came up the ladder and stuck his head out the cabin door. He asked Hicks what had happened. Hicks, walking with the ax behind him, pointed toward the prow and asked, “Is that Barnegat Light?” Before Smith could answer, Hicks brought the ax down onto his neck. Smith’s head came off and rolled into the shadows as the body fell back into the cabin. Hicks later said decapitating Smith Watts was as easy as “cutting the trunk of a sapling tree.”

  Hicks went down the ladder, ax before him, hiding nothing now. Captain Burr was sitting up in bed, the headless body at his feet.

  “What’s happening?” asked the captain, confused.

  “I think I see Barnegat Light,” said Hicks.

  “You won’t see it for two hours,” said Burr, who, getting to his feet, pushed Hicks into a wall. What followed was a three- or four-minute fight that seemingly went on for hours, as if time itself had slowed. They gripped each other, grappled and grunted and cursed as they smashed into every surface in the cabin. Hicks’s main objective was to get free and swing the ax. At several points, he swung and missed—catching the blade in the wall, in the ceiling. When Captain Burr fell back onto the bed, Hicks drove the ax into the mattress. Burr got Hicks on the floor and had his hands around his neck, but Hicks was too strong. He rolled away and stood. Burr grabbed Hicks by that monkey coat. Hicks threw him off, and suddenly there was the space. He managed a good clean hard swing. “The blow took away half his head,” Hicks said later. “Half his eye was on the blade, a piece of his nose and some beard.”

  The cabin was a mess, everything overturned, blood on the walls, blood on the floor. Hicks was spent from the effort—it was a much closer thing than he’d expected. For a moment, he thought he would be sick. He raced up the ladder, ax in hand. He stood on the deck, head down. Then just as he began to calm down, he saw something at the edge of his vision, on the periphery, where threats materialize. Oliver Watts, ax wounds in his head and back, had gotten to his feet and was coming at Hicks slowly, like a corpse, arms raised, reaching out for his killer.

  Hicks stood frozen. For the first time in years, he was afraid. What is this, man or apparition? Hicks waited until the dying man was close, then swung the ax. Oliver Watts groaned and staggered. Grabbing hold with both hands, Hicks pushed him across the deck and threw him over the side. Yet somehow Watts, as he was falling, caught the rail and hung on, ocean zooming beneath. Hicks tried to pry loose the fingers but couldn’t—there’s nothing like a death grip. Hicks took a step back and brought down the ax, severing fingers and thumb, sending the dead man tumbling into the sea.

  Hicks went back to the cabin, stepping over the two bodies, then stood in the pantry. He got out a mug and filled it with beer, the pale ale that seamen drank. When he finished, he refilled his mug, drank it down, then filled it again. He knocked back five or six pints in hope of recovering his equilibrium. Then he went on deck and stood looking out at Staten Island.

  Why had he killed everyone on the ship if money was his object?

  Because, he later explained, “Dead men tell no tales.”

  Hicks did not coin this phrase—it had been familiar in the criminal world since the early 1800s—but he knew it and understood what it meant: freedom.

  “My bloody work was done, [and] I was alone,” he went on. “No eye had seen me, and now I was free to reap the reward.”

  Hicks had devised a plan in his first hours among the crew. It followed a methodology he’d executed without mishap many times before. He would turn the ship around, sail through the Narrows and the Upper Bay, follow the North River above Fourteenth Street, gather all the money and finery from the lockboxes, burn the ship—“fire her”—and then escape in the yawl, vanishing into the slums of the city. The dead would be lost at the bottom of the river, on the far side of the harbor, leaving nothing to connect Hicks to the crime—he’d shipped under an alias—which would not even be considered a crime but one of those mysterious mishaps not uncommon in a life at sea.

  But Hicks had more trouble handling the sloop than he had counted on. “I came near running her on the Dog Beacon, abreast of Coney Island and Staten Island lighthouse,” he later said. Then just as he was regaining control, he collided with the J. R. Mather. “It carried away my bowsprit and brought down my foresail,” Hicks said later—so much for the planned getaway.

  After calling out for a time, the captain of the Mather sailed back toward the city, but Hicks knew it would not be long before Harbor Patrol came out to investigate. That was when he made the fatal switch to panicked contingency: Get as much as you can as fast as you can, hide the evidence, sink the ship, and run like hell.

  He went to the cabin and roped the two bodies—the intact body of Captain Burr, and the headless body of Smith Watts—pulled them up the ladder, and tossed them over. He ransacked the cabin, smashing open boxes and trunks, rifling duffels, loading everything into the shot bag where the captain stored the cash, which Hicks did not count—no time. He searched the deck for the severed head of Smith Watts. It was dark, and it had rolled into the shadows. Hicks lost valuable minutes feeling around for it. He held it up when he found it—the sandy hair, the bloodshot eyes open, staring in disbelief. Mystics say the last image seen by a man is what he carries into the next world. Hicks tossed the head, shuddered, then tossed the ax. He retrieved an augur he’d left heating in the stove and used it to burn three holes into the cabin wall—enough, he wrongly believed, to sink the ship. He threw the shot bag into the yawl, climbed in after it, and lowered himself into the sea.

  THE SHORE LINE

  The news of the killings swept New York. It was, for days, a lead story in every newspaper, morning, afternoon, and evening editions, a flood of murder prose that found purest expression in the penny press, papers that could be had for next to nothing on every street corner. The Herald, the Sun, the Gazette, the Mirror, the Daily Eagle—these broadsheets and tabloids established the to
ne and the pace of the story. Beneath banner headlines—MURDER SLOOP HAUNTS CITY, GHOST SHIP HORROR—the articles turned Albert Hicks, who began as a question mark, into a celebrity: Not just a criminal or killer but the worst criminal and the bloodiest killer. Not just a bad man but, as Hicks himself later said, “the worst man who ever lived.”

  Unfolding crime stories tend to be owned by a single newspaper, the first to figure it out and get it right. In the case of the “Sloop Murders,” a story that was, in its time, as big as the story of Al Capone or O. J. Simpson, that would turn out to be the New York Times. The paper had been around for less than a decade at the time of the killings. It had been founded in 1851 by the banker George Jones and the journalist-politician Henry Jarvis Raymond, who served as its inaugural editor. It started as the New-York Daily Times, which was shortened to the New-York Times in 1857. The hyphen would be dropped in 1861. The paper would not be acquired by its current ownership until 1896, when Adolph Ochs, who began as an office boy at the Knoxville Chronicle, picked it off the bankruptcy heap for $75,000. Its current publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, is a sixth-generation descendant of that Knoxville office boy.

  In its early years, when the print market was as vibrantly wild as the Internet is today, the Times made its reputation in a classic manner: crime reporting. If it bled, it led. The Hicks case—the murders, the manhunt, and the trial—would be one of the stories that turned the New York Times into the paper of record.