The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  According to the manifest, Johnson and family continued from Stonington to one of the towns up the Mystic River. That meant they took a river ferry, Foster explained—a hired ship that traveled from village to village.

  The detectives and the reporter walked to the charter terminal as the sun sank, casting long shadows on inky water. Nevins found a captain who indeed remembered someone like the wanted man—woman, child. See…in the book…the names. Nevins hired the same ferry, and the three men boarded it and headed upriver. After about two hours, they disembarked at a small town.

  Nevins asked around, talking to mates and dockmasters, before he found a bag handler who remembered a William Johnson. He said he’d helped the man find lodging and even spoke to the wife and child.

  “Spoke to the wife and child? How’s that?” asked Nevins.

  “Just like I said. We spoke.”

  “The child is barely more than a babe in arms,” said Nevins. “He can’t know more than a few words.”

  “Well, this warn’t no babe in arms,” said the bag handler. “This was an older boy, twelve at least. And impudent. A real cuss.”

  That was how Nevins learned he was on the wrong trail, chasing a false lead, wasting precious hours. He made it back to Stonington in the wee hours, tired and deflated. He took a room in a small waterfront hotel, awoke early, shook it off, and got back to work. He went to the train station and sent his partner to the ferry landing. The detectives questioned employees on every incoming and outgoing train and ship. Have you seen…have you seen…have you seen…When they began to meet the same porters for a second or even third time, they knew it was time to move on.

  If not Stonington…

  They went by train to Providence, arriving at night. Slept in a railroad hotel, took a businessman’s breakfast in the morning—eggs, bacon, biscuits, coffee. The Rhode Island newspapers were filled with details of the killings and the chase: Where was this monster, and what if he were never found?

  Providence was a big town on the East Coast, a raucous seaport with sailors from every part of the world—an easy place to ditch a weapon and vanish. It had been surpassed in size by Manhattan, which left behind every other city with the opening of the Erie Canal, but it was still in the running for new world metropolis—a diverse town with a mixed population of fifty thousand, natives and immigrants, its own folklore and underworld history. The city you see today, modern Providence is, in a sense, what remains of that freewheeling town. In Providence, it never got better than it was in 1860—the elegant avenues, the limestone buildings, storefronts shaded in the setting sun, the hills leading down to the waterfront gin mills, saloons, and joints.

  The detectives checked the big ferries and the small ferries—those that stopped in Stonington and those that came directly from New York. Nevins was convinced the killer had come by water. He was a sailor after all, a pirate.

  Nevins enlisted the help of the local authorities, particularly Detective George Billings of the Providence police department. Billings took the visitors on a tour of the dives. For the New York detectives, it would have been their world in miniature, and they would have looked down on the city and its police in the usual way of the boys from the bigger town. “We drove around the city to all the sailor-boarding houses, and to all the railroad depots, questioning baggage-masters and everyone likely to give us information, but could get no satisfactory clue,” Nevins reported.

  Meanwhile Elias Smith was stuck on a question: Why are we so certain our man traveled the most well-worn route? Pulling Nevins aside, he said, “Maybe he didn’t come from New York or from Stonington.”

  “Then from where?”

  “Maybe he took the ferry from New York to Fall River, Massachusetts,” said Smith, who knew Fall River as a port, a commercial and transportation center. Fall River was like O’Hare International Airport. Given enough time, everyone ended up going through it. “Once there, he could’ve gotten the Bradford Durfee—a steamship—down river into Providence,” Smith explained.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To throw us off the trail.”

  By this point, Hicks, having seen the newspaper headlines, would’ve realized his attempt to sink the E. A. Johnson had failed—that the police had the sloop in custody.

  Nevins was skeptical. The fugitive had shown no previous signs of trying to cover his tracks. Hadn’t he gone up and down Greenwich Street flashing his money? Did that sound like a man who’d go ten hours out of his way to confuse police?

  They argued back and forth.

  “I don’t buy it,” Nevins said, “but if you want to check it out for yourself, go ahead.”

  “Leaving these officers to work up their part of the case, I struck out on my own hook,” Smith reported in the Times. “The Bradford Durfee was still at the dock, and my first thought was to question her crew. The first man I spoke to was John McDermott, an intelligent deck-hand. I said, ‘You brought up a sailor man from Fall River, yesterday. Can you tell me what baggage he had?’ John promptly replied, ‘Yes,’ and immediately gave a precise list of every article, adding ‘he had his wife with him—a little woman, with a child, and she had weak eyes.’ ”

  This was the first Smith had heard of Mrs. Hicks’s myopia, a detail that would become important later, when she was depicted as a pathetic, pitiable innocent. Those weak eyes are one of the only things we know for certain about the killer’s wife.

  The fugitive had asked the deckhand if he could recommend a hotel in Providence, an out-of-the-way place “where he could go for a few weeks.” The deckhand could not—he did not live here—but he sent Hicks to a cabdriver who could. Smith reported in the Times:

  I was now fully satisfied that I had got on the track of the fugitive, and the next point was to trace him by the hack-man who took him, his family, and the baggage from the boat. Though willing to give all the information he possessed, the deckhand could not [remember] the number of the hack, nor the name of the driver, but he gave such a description of the man and of his horses as would furnish a good clue. In less than half an hour, I found the residence of the driver of the carriage, who proved to be Mr. Reuben Wyman, of Hack No. 6. He was asleep, but, on being called, promptly gave a full description of the baggage, and told where he had carried it.

  The house where [Hicks] had taken lodgings is at the extreme south-east and in the least frequented part of the city, where, by observing ordinary precaution, [a person] might stay a long time without fear of discovery. The name of the lady who consented to take [him and his family] to board is Mrs. Crowell, a respectable widow.

  Smith left the driver, promising he’d see him again, then went to talk to Nevins, who he found beavering around the ferry terminal, frustrated, muttering. Smith told the detective what he’d learned from the hack about the boardinghouse on the edge of Providence.

  “I’m sure our man is there,” Smith said.

  Nevins sent an officer to pick up the driver and bring him to the Providence police station, where he answered questions. He offered to take Nevins to the boardinghouse where he’d dropped off the fugitive: “I’ll show you where…”

  The group traveled in the hack’s carriage, the cobblestone streets turning to gravel, then dirt, night coming on. The driver was around thirty years old, a German immigrant with a mustache. He was uneasy and talked the whole way in his thick accent.

  What’s making you so nervous? asked Nevins.

  The man you are looking for is not the sort of man you play with, explained the driver.

  They reached the hotel at sundown. Only it wasn’t a hotel. It wasn’t even an inn. It was a rickety boardinghouse in the fields. The porch sagged, and the upper windows were like sad eyes in a sad face. A tremendous beech tree shaded the yard, the trunk as smooth as river stone, its ribbed leaves as green as limes, with pale undersides that quaked in the wind. The
tree filled like a sail on a blustery day, bellying out like the main canvas on a clipper ship. For two dollars, the cost of a steak at Delmonico’s in New York, you could engage rooms in such a place for a week.

  Nevins sent the driver to knock on the door and told him to ask for William Johnson. If anyone wanted to know what it was about, Nevins told the driver to say it was about counterfeit money—say that Johnson had paid his fare in phony bills. Nevins and the others, looking through drawn curtains from the back of the carriage, watched the driver talk to the mistress of the house. She heard him out, went away, then came back with a woman who, Nevins realized, was Johnson’s wife. Smith had told Nevins about her myopia, but now he could see it for himself: she got right up close when she talked. Later, when Nevins wrote his report, he called her “sore-eyed,” then noted her general appearance: small, delicately made.

  The driver told the woman that her husband had paid in counterfeit bills. She said he had gone out but would be back. “Please be quiet if you come,” she added. “There’s a child sleeping.”

  After the driver returned to the hack and told Nevins what had happened, the detective devised a plan. Early in the morning, when the fugitive would be asleep, Nevins would return to the house with a detachment of Providence police. They’d surround the building, cutting off every getaway, then wake the suspect and confront him with the invented charge of counterfeiting. Maybe he could be tricked into a confession.

  At one A.M. the countryside was deserted, and the sky awash in stars. Police surrounded the boardinghouse, and Nevins sent a local cop to the door. He banged three times. One moment turned into another, then another. Silence. “Again,” said Nevins. Bang, bang, bang!

  A window opened on the second floor. A woman stuck her head out—the proprietress. She was not happy. “What is it?”

  “Police. We’re here to see Mr. William Johnson.”

  “Why?”

  “Counterfeiting. Paid a hack in bad bills. We need to clear it up.”

  The widow cursed as she let them in. She had not liked the look of Johnson from the start. She should have trusted her instinct, she said, and promised to never make that mistake again. She led the police to a room on the first floor.

  Nevins tried the door. Open. He went in, followed by eight cops. They filled the room completely, bottom to top, casting shadows on the walls. Nevins called out: “Johnson, Johnson. William Johnson!”

  The wife got up, groggy and confused. What’s this about? The child started to cry, first a whimper, then a scream.

  Nevins told the sore-eyed woman he needed to talk to her husband. She said he was asleep in the next room.

  Nevins went in and held a kerosene lamp over the bed. It was piled with blankets. He pulled them away, and there was the fugitive, stone-faced, staring ahead. At the end of the search, you find yourself puzzled. You are expecting a monster, but you find only a man. Or maybe it’s something more. Maybe you are expecting God or the devil, or an answer to a fundamental question, and instead you discover yourself in a small room in a small city as a child cries.

  “I woke him and he immediately began to sweat,” Nevins later said. “My God, how he did sweat!”

  “Get up and put on your clothes,” said Nevins, standing an inch from the fugitive, staring, examining, and wondering: Can this really be the man?

  Nevins asked the man for his name.

  He hesitated, looked down, started to speak, then reconsidered. “My right and proper name is Albert W. Hicks.”

  “What do you mean, ‘right and proper’?” asked Nevins.

  “Sometimes I go by the name Johnson—that is, when I go to sea.”

  Nevins told the fugitive he was wanted for counterfeiting.

  The man laughed.

  What’s funny?

  “Do I look like a counterfeiter?” he said. Then: “I’m not a counterfeiter. I’m a sailor.”

  “Let me see your hands,” said Nevins. “If you’re a sailor and not a counterfeiter, as you claim, your hands will make it clear.”

  Hicks raised his hands, then turned them over, showing his palms in the lamplight. They were hard and calloused, too big for his body. Once you noticed them, you could not stop noticing them.

  “Do these look like the hands of a counterfeiter?” asked Hicks.

  “No,” said Nevins, “they don’t.”

  Nevins asked Hicks the basic questions: How long have you been in Providence? Where did you come from? What is your business?

  “He replied with hesitation,” Smith later reported, “as if taking time to weigh the effect of his answers. He said he came from Fall River, and had not been in New York for two months.”

  The police searched the rooms. Trunks, sacks, cases. According to the report, the baggage “consisted of a sailor’s chest, with a cotton fringed cover, a bundle of bedding, and two cotton bags filled with clothing.”

  “I found a silver watch,” Nevins said, “since identified as Captain Burr’s, also, his knife, and, among the rest, two small canvas bags, which have since been identified as those used by the Captain to carry his silver.” Hicks had $121 in his pocket, most of it in bills issued by the Farmers’ & Citizens’ Bank of Williamsburg.

  The complete contents of the search, listed in the police report, offers a glimpse of nineteenth-century seafaring life: “A silver watch, No. 21,310; a jack-knife, a brass door-key; a red silk figured handkerchief; a white silk figured do, with a blue border; a small inlaid box containing a few small articles commonly used by sailors in mending clothes and sails; a leather wallet containing a locket ring with the likeness of a lady under a carnelian seal.”

  That last item—“the likeness of a lady”—would prove important. It was a daguerreotype of the dark-haired girl who had been meant to marry Oliver Watts. Hicks probably didn’t even know what it was—only that, in his hurry, he had wanted it. “We were also shown a signet ring…in the trunk of the prisoner’s wife,” Smith reported, “which, from its elaborate workmanship, its massiveness and careful engraving, we figured must be exceedingly valuable. It bears the motto: ‘Nunquam mutare’—Never change.”

  Hicks was arrested, his property carried away. “I didn’t take his wife’s baggage,” Nevins said. “I felt so bad for her that I gave her $10 out of the money. Poor woman! As it was, she cried bitterly, but if she had known what her husband was really charged with, it would have been awful.”

  On the way to the police station—early morning, horse hooves on paving stone, buildings ghostly at first light—Nevins asked Hicks how he had come into possession of so much money. He was, after all, a common sailor.

  Hicks said he had gotten it from his brother. Then, reconsidering, he said he had made it “speculating around the market,” which might sound absurd, but there had been an active stock exchange in Manhattan since 1792. It was not unknown for a workingman with a few extra dollars to trade bonds, cotton, or corn.

  Hicks seemed oddly calm as he was brought to the jail. He went into a cell, lay his head on the mattress, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Detective Nevins wired New York, telling his chief that an arrest had been made. He planned to escort the fugitive back to the city early the next morning. Nevins then wrote his report, sitting at a wooden desk, now and then looking up from his work to gaze out the window at the brick chimneys and tin roofs of a coastal city, smoke rising into the sky over the harbor. Nine A.M. “In person Hicks is tall and strongly built, being about five feet ten inches in height, with a slight stoop in his shoulders,” he wrote. His beard was raggedy and unkempt—what cops called a fugitive’s beard. “His arms are long and sinewy, and his hands very large and much hardened by work. His complexion is dark, and he has high cheek bones, and a stout crop of straight, black hair. His eyes are black, and rather small, with an unsteady and revengeful e
xpression. He is a native of Foster, R.I., and is 32 [sic] years of age.”

  Early in the morning Hicks asked for a pipe. He smoked slowly, with great concentration. After a time, Elias Smith was sent into the cell to tell the prisoner the true nature of the charges. This was unusual, having a newspaperman perform this task, but Nevins wanted to be free to study his suspect. Even the most hardened man might have a tell, a tic that betrays his guilt. We all want to be found out. If we’re not caught, how can we be forgiven?

  “The charge is not really counterfeit,” the newspaperman told the prisoner.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Hicks.

  As Smith detailed the murder charges, Nevins studied the prisoner’s face. He could see neither a flicker nor any suggestion of shame. Hicks remained stoic throughout. “On being informed of the crime with which he was charged, he exhibited no particular surprise, but just shook his head, saying, ‘I don’t know nothing about it,’ ” Smith wrote. “ ‘If you have taken me up for that you’ve got the wrong man.’ ”

  “He denied all knowledge of the sloop E. A. Johnson,” Smith added later. “He said he never was in her, and did not know Captain Burr. He had never been in an oyster vessel. He was told that there were persons who could identify him…as the man who was on board that vessel when she left New York for Virginia.”

  Hicks scratched his head, yawned, and said he felt cold, but he admitted nothing.

  “He was asked if he was willing to accompany the detectives back to New York to show that he was not implicated in the murder,” Smith continued. “He answered promptly that he was, and after some further conversation he was handed the [extradition paper] to which he affixed his mark, for he cannot write.”