The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  The detectives interviewed several people on the ferry, including the captain and the steward, before finding someone who’d spoken to Hicks that morning. They were constructing a chain, searching for witnesses who, taken together, could describe every step the fugitive took on his getaway. If they missed a single link, the chain would fall apart, and the killer would slip away.

  His name was Francis McCaffrey, an Irish immigrant in his early twenties. He’d arrived in America two years before, part of the great famine-driven migration. Between 1845 and 1852, 1.5 million Irish emigrated to the United States and went on to build new lives in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and New York. You could hear their accents, that lilting singsong, on every downtown street. On the Southfield, McCaffrey was a cabin boy, paid a few dollars a day to sweep floors, direct passengers, and empty ashtrays and spittoons—it was a world of tobacco juice. He told Detective Nevins that he’d noticed the fugitive, sitting by himself in an empty gallery, because of the coat. “It was patches all over,” McCaffrey said. “And he had that big bag and was sitting in the ladies’ cabin with his head resting on his hand.”

  Hicks was ragged, with dark circles under his eyes. The evening before, he’d been amid the crew of the E. A. Johnson, anchored in Gravesend Bay, awaiting the wind. He’d killed three people since, decapitated, brawled, suffered a collision, escaped in a yawl, rowed several miles, walked two miles across Staten Island, and consumed six glasses of ale and an entire bottle of whiskey. He’d been going this way for more than twenty-four hours.

  McCaffrey had been sweeping the hallway when Hicks called him over and asked him something, but he talked so slurry and fast, it was hard to understand. “He said he was afraid fellows had been cheating him,” McCaffrey told the detectives, “and asked if I was a good judge of this country’s money.”

  U.S. currency was not entirely uniform in 1860. Various banks offered various sorts of bills. Add to that the foreign money that was floating around New York, and you had a confusing hodgepodge.

  “I said I knew the gold and silver,” McCaffrey said, “but did not know much about the bills. He put his hand into the bag and pulled out about six dollars silver in quarters and half-dollars, he asked me to count.

  “He then asked for the water-closet, and requested of me if I would not show it to him,” McCaffrey continued. “I asked him, in going along, if he would not give me the price of my bitters. When we landed at Whitehall, he came up to me and gave me a quarter and asked me to have a drink; that was all the conversation I had with him; as he was sitting in the cabin, while we were passing over, I went by him two or three times, and found him with his head on the bag, as if he were tired and resting; he had a rather dusty, crushed-looking hat on and this old monkey-jacket.”

  * * *

  —

  On the Manhattan side, Detective Nevins found a man who had spoken to Hicks at the Whitehall Street Landing. Charles La Coste operated a news and snack stand at the corner of Broadway and Stage Terminal. He said Hicks had asked for coffee and a piece of cake. La Coste had watched him wolf it down. The fugitive had the feral look of a forest animal that finds itself in town, fascinatingly alive, mesmerizing but scary.

  That’ll be six cents, La Coste had said. Hicks handed over a gold coin.

  La Coste said he couldn’t make change for it—ten dollars was more than he saw in a half day. “[Hicks] rooted around in the bag and came out with two shillings and a cent,” La Coste told the detectives.

  Hicks then asked La Coste if he knew where he could hire a hack, a horse-drawn taxi. La Coste said it was still too early—there’d be no hacks for a few hours. He suggested Hicks catch the East Broadway stage.

  Hicks would have felt his tremendous weariness then. He was only a mile from home, but the thought of setting out on another long walk, with the heavy bag on his shoulder and booze and coffee in his system, in his scattered state of mind…when you closed your eyes, you saw and felt it all again…the faces of Captain Burr and the Watts brothers, the glint of the ax, the struggle, searching for the head in the dark, how easily it had come off, like a sapling….Hicks had to sit down, shut the door, and be alone in the dark with the seabag for two or three hours.

  He asked La Coste if there was a hotel nearby, a flop where he could be alone before he went back to his wife and child. La Coste suggested the respectable sort of place—French’s Hotel—that was exactly wrong for Hicks.

  The fugitive, flashing coins and hugging that sack, had attracted the attention of street hawkers, riffraff. A bootblack asked Hicks if he wanted a shine. Hicks looked at his boots—studied them carefully, as if seeing for the first time their cracked leather, tarnished buckles, and worn-out soles. They’d walked a thousand miles, had a thousand more to go. Hicks seemed to consider it—he was rich now, wasn’t he?—then changed his mind, saying something like Nah, these shoes ain’t worth a shilling.

  Kids gathered around him, wastrels—ten-, twelve-, fifteen-year-old boys who’d wandered over from the Five Points and adjacent slums, ragamuffins looking for a dollar. They were dark-eyed and ratty in their cast-off clothes, worn till they rotted and fell free. They lived outside in the sun, as natural a part of the environment as the gulls that lit on the rooftops. Hicks eyed the boys warily. A cop can be fooled, but a child sees right through you.

  La Coste, as he was telling his story to Detective Nevins, pointed out the same kids. They were standing in a pack, watching at a distance. Nevins called them over and introduced himself, then asked if any of them remembered the man with the seabag. They all did. Could any of them describe him in detail?

  A boy stepped forward, sixteen-year-old William Drumm, bigger than the others. He said he lived at 8½ Stone Street. Today Stone Street is in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, shadowed by glass and steel towers, but back then it was a rickety lane. One of the shortest and oldest blocks in the city, it was home to the continent’s first brewery—built by the Dutch West India Company in 1632—a headwater of the torrent of ale that still floats the metropolis.

  Drumm occasionally worked for La Coste but mostly just hung around, waiting for incoming ferries, selling his services to travelers. “I offered to carry his bag,” he explained, because he looked so tired and so clearly had a long way to go. Hicks accepted the offer with relief. Drumm hoisted the sack—it was much heavier than he’d expected, it “cut deeply into my shoulder,” he told the detectives—then headed out behind the fugitive, who set a brisk pace.

  Nevins asked Drumm what route he’d taken with Hicks. He wanted to trace the path, see if he could make sense of it. The little party followed State Street across Bowling Green, then walked up Broadway, which had once been an Indian trail. Before the Civil War, you could still see evidence of that, in the hard-packed dirt, in the way it rambled, and in the smells, which were the smells of America old and new, smells of horse manure and leather and human sweat, but also the stench of factories; of putrid meat from the slaughter yards and tanneries, of oil from the gasworks and refineries. A decade later the city would actually produce a stench map, which people consulted in determining which parts of the city to avoid. Because a bad smell can ruin your day.

  It had still been early morning when William Drumm followed Albert Hicks. The city had been deserted. There had been smoke and steam. Foghorns moaned as big ships passed behind buildings at the end of every street. Now it was afternoon, crowded. The detectives, the reporter, and the boy had to maneuver through hustling merchants who pushed carts of product, businessmen returning from lunch to the trading houses, garment workers bound for sweatshops and mills. Clothing stores, feed shops, dry goods stores—alleys, apartments, redbrick and mansard roofs, stoops and clapboard houses that would not have looked out of place on the frontier, churches, tenements, firetraps with empty windows, the laundry strung above the weedy, trash-choked yards.

  The detectives asked
Drumm how the fugitive had carried himself, looked, behaved. Was he nervous? Excited? What had he said?

  The man had said nothing, Drumm told them, just went on and on, dead-eyed, in a trance. “We went about a mile, then stopped here.”

  They were standing at the corner of Cedar and Greenwich streets, amid horse traffic and foot traffic—the layout of the streets has been changed, but the intersection would look familiar to anyone who has rambled around Lower Manhattan. It was already among the most densely populated parts of the city. How simple it would be for a man to lose himself in such chaos.

  “What then?” asked Nevins.

  “He took the bag from my shoulder, and asked how much I expected to be paid,” Drumm said.

  The boy wanted what would be about five dollars today; he’d seen Hicks waving around that gold coin. A man going past called out to Hicks, “That boy is trying to rob you. Bag hauling is two shillings.”

  Hicks had looked at Drumm severely, as if reassessing, reached into his sack, and counted out three shillings, about ninety cents today. Drumm protested—he’d carried that heavy bag a long way. That’s all you’re getting, said Hicks. “Now get, or I’ll kick you.”

  The detectives spent the rest of the day trying to figure out where Hicks had gone from there. They knocked on doors and talked to merchants and vendors, but New York is really a series of small towns. A man familiar on one block will be unknown on the next. In this manner, the link was lost and the chain fell apart.

  Nevins returned to the precinct in despair. In those days, in the absence of the tools available to modern investigators, such a failure usually meant the end of a chase.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning a stranger showed up at the precinct house, looking for Detective Nevins. His name was Burke, and he operated an apple stand on Greenwich Street. He also managed the apartment house at 129 Cedar, three blocks from the North River, collecting rents, making repairs, working as a sort of superintendent. He knew every tenant in the building, among whom, he believed, was the person responsible for the murders on the E. A. Johnson.

  The man lived with his wife and small child, Burke said to Detective Nevins. He had gone to sea a week before, telling his wife he’d be away a month, but he had returned weeks ahead of schedule stuffed with cash—coins and bills spilling from his pockets. He handed out shillings like candy. Asked how he’d come into this windfall, he’d told a fantastic story: part of it had come from an unexpected inheritance, a distant relative with no close kin, and part had come from good luck—he’d found a ship abandoned in the bay and sold it for scrap. The story kept changing.

  Nevins asked Burke for more details: What did the man look like? How old was he, and how big? How did he behave? Burke guessed his age, height, and weight, then described him as not unkind. “He’s been in the building close to three years and always paid on time,” said Burke. “He always paid me my rent like an honest man.”

  “Where are they now?” asked Nevins, meaning the man and his family.

  “Gone,” said Burke. “Packed up everything and rushed out.”

  Nevins accompanied Burke to 129 Cedar Street, a wooden tenement a block from where Hicks had paid Drumm three shillings for carrying his sack. Cedar Street looked then as it looks today—short and narrow, the sky shut out, walls closing in. The tenement has been replaced by a brick tower that sits beside O’Hara’s Pub a block west of Zuccotti Park. A two-bedroom apartment on Cedar Street currently goes for around $4,500 a month. Hicks had paid five bucks for a bedroom and space for the child. No bath, nor running water—just a woodstove, grim walls, and refracted light.

  It’s not clear if Nevins got a search warrant or would have needed to—he was in hot pursuit of a killer. Burke had a key to the apartment. The detective walked through the rooms slowly, examining. If you narrow your focus, it’s surprising how much you can perceive. The less you look at, the more you see. The rooms had been cleaned out. Closets, drawers, shelves were all empty. Bits of paper and trash were scattered here and there. Debris. Clues. One of them turned out to be important: a tarnished silver compass, its crystal cracked but the needle still shivering as it swung around to point north. It connected the tenant of the house—or former tenant—to the waterfront.

  The detectives, having recovered the trail, spent the rest of the morning canvassing the nearby streets: Greenwich, Thames, Trinity. More than a few merchants remembered Hicks, especially as he had been that day. “He’d swaggered about the neighborhood, seemingly seeking notoriety, asking everyone with whom he could claim the shadow of an acquaintance to drink,” the Times reported. “In the course of the day, he purchased $40 worth of clothing from a secondhand dealer in Greenwich Street. One man asserts that he was curious to know where [Hicks] had obtained his sudden wealth, and was told by the fugitive, in reply to questions, that the vessel on which he had shipped had been sold, and the money in question was his share of the proceeds.”

  Nevins knew that Hicks must have traded his mishmash of loot for a uniform currency—he must have laundered the cash. He inquired in a half-dozen exchanges before he found the broker, Albert James, an officer at the Farmers’ & Citizens’ Bank of Williamsburg, 116 South Street, Manhattan. The house accepted trades: you brought in a mess of coins and paper, and an officer determined its worth, then gave you a stack of notes unique to that bank. James had indeed dealt with a man like the one described by Nevins. The banker remembered the encounter well—the man’s rough hands and demeanor, how he emptied the big seabag onto the desk, the racket the coins made. The broker said he’d been suspicious right away; the man had been gleeful and smelled of liquor.

  A merchant house had recently been robbed; thieves had gotten away with stolen silver. “Is this part of that?” the broker had asked Hicks.

  “No, sir.”

  “Tell the truth, sailor boy. Are you mixed up with that business?”

  “No, sir. I’ve come by this money honestly.”

  “How?” asked the banker.

  Hicks told yet another story: a sick sea captain, bedridden in a foreign port, had sent his mate to New York with bills and coins to exchange for clean money that could be used to hire a doctor. “I am my captain’s only hope,” Hicks told the broker. “How much will you give me?”

  The broker did some figuring: “$260,” he said. “$130 for the silver. $130 for the gold.”

  Hicks agreed. When he got the fresh bills, he shoved them into his sack and left.

  Everyone Nevins talked to painted the same picture of the fugitive—a man eager to spend his money, swanning up and down the avenue, elated and wild, maintaining a steady state of inebriation, as free with information as he was with cash. He told a dozen stories about how he’d come into his fortune, and a dozen more about what he’d do with it. He was consistent with just one detail: where he’d go next. He was headed up the coast, he said, possibly to Stonington, Connecticut, possibly to Providence, Rhode Island. He planned to take the Commonwealth, a big ferry that stopped at several ports on Long Island Sound.

  Why was Albert Hicks, aka William Johnson, so incautious? Why did he shoot his mouth off like the drunken sailor he was?

  Because he believed he’d already gotten away with it. He’d sunk the ship and left the bodies at the bottom of the harbor. No bodies meant no evidence; no evidence meant no crime. Being followed…being chased…getting caught…it never even occurred to him.

  * * *

  —

  The detectives traveled to Stonington by train—the Shore Line’s tracks hugged the New England coast from New York all the way to Massachusetts. Owned by the New York, Providence & Boston Railroad, the service had been operating since 1838. The coaches were large and roomy, elegant in the way of old-leather America, brandy, cigar smoke, and brass spittoons. From the window, Nevins watched the countryside go by—fishing villages and farms,
shingle-roof houses and bay front meadows.

  Nevins had brought along Times reporter Elias Smith. Even then, the term embedded was used, as for a tick or a leech. Smith had sold himself to the detectives as a resource: having grown up near Providence and Stonington, he knew the streets and wharves. The two cities were forty-five miles apart as the crow flies, four hours by train—the detectives would drag the fields and towns in between the way schooner captains dragged the Grand Banks. “Being familiar with the description given of the supposed murderer, and, withal, fully posted upon the general locale of places and routes in Rhode Island, your reporter was deputized to accompany the officers as a guide and assistant,” Smith reported on March 23, 1860.

  At six P.M. the train arrived in Stonington, a hub on Long Island Sound, a pass-through to every kind of schooner and sloop. The detectives and the reporter went straight to the ferry terminal, where the Commonwealth—the ship Hicks told people he would take—landed twice a day. There it sat among workaday boats like a prince among peasants, tall and grand, its decks gleaming in the setting sun. Passengers were disembarking when Nevins walked up. He showed his badge to a steward. New York City police. We need to see the clerk.

  The head clerk, Foster, was summoned. Nevins explained the situation: We are on the trail of a dangerous fugitive. We have reason to believe he’s been on your ship. Nevins identified the wanted man as “William Johnson, sometimes goes by Bill.” He did not have a photo or sketch, but he gave a description based on what he’d been told by witnesses: a big man, forty years old, with a dark beard and dark eyes. He was said to be traveling with a woman and a child.

  Maybe it was mentioning the beard that did the trick, or maybe it was the fugitive’s furtive air, but Foster did indeed remember such a man, or thought he did. The clerk went into the records office to check the manifest and came back grinning. He showed Nevins the entry—There’s the name, right there. “W. Johnson. Mr., Mrs., Child.” Why Hicks would continue to use his alias even as he made his getaway is a bit of mystery. Perhaps he was more comfortable traveling under an assumed identity, or perhaps he’d let confidence get the better of common sense. “They’d checked bags,” Foster said. “A suitcase and a duffel.”