The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  * * *

  —

  The party was on the train by eight A.M., speeding south down the coast. Crowds waited at each stop, dark-hatted masses hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster who’d done those terrible things. News of the fugitive’s capture had leaked and was already in the newspapers. A mob gathered at the station in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Around five hundred were waiting in New London, where Nevins and the prisoner, who did not wear cuffs and was in no way identifiable, crossed the platform to switch trains. Captain Burr had been liked in New London, and many in the crowd, it was later said, had known the crew of the E. A. Johnson personally. They called out, cried for revenge. Some spat at Hicks, shouting, “There’s the murderer! Lynch him—lynch him!”

  Nevins told the prisoner not to worry: “I’ll shoot the first man who touches you.”

  “Hicks manifested considerable repugnance to these attentions along the route, and finally began to show signs of fear…,” Nevins said later. “His mind was quieted by telling him, what appears to be fact, that half the people did not seem to know which of the party was the criminal, the police from the captive. They were as likely to lynch me as they were to lynch him.”

  Nevins picked up a tabloid along the way. The story of the arrest was on the front page. What a strange sensation for Nevins, to be chronicled in real time. The eye watches you watch the eye.

  Nevins asked Hicks if he wanted to hear the article. Hicks shrugged. Nevins began to read: “ ‘ALBERT W. HICKS, alias WILLIAM JOHNSON, the alleged murderer of Capt. BURR and his two townsmen on board of the sloop E. A. Johnson, was arrested at Providence, R.I., by the officers who went in pursuit of him from this City.’ ”

  “[Hicks] listened nervously to every particular,” Nevins said later, “turned pale at times, and showed much uneasiness.”

  Turning away, Hicks said, “I know nothing about it.”

  “You’ll be identified in New York,” said Nevins.

  “You are free to think whatever you like,” Hicks replied.

  If Hicks had not been convinced of his imminent release, he might have made a run for it. He’d been known as a breakout artist. But crimes were wildly hard to prove in that era, especially murder in the absence of bodies, so he was certain he’d soon be free, so certain that he went easily, without a struggle. Being in police custody was in fact the only thing protecting him from the mob.

  The train continued through Connecticut into Westchester County, then crossed the Harlem River into upper Manhattan. It was still undeveloped, the old Indian wilderness, rocky, green and blue. Now and then the cars rattled past an intersection in the woods, the corner of 108th Street and Fourth Avenue, say, laid out as if by a lunatic, an urban crossing amid sumac and pine, like a street corner in the jungle. There was no transition from country to city. The woods began a dozen feet from the last streetlight. One moment it was the primeval wilderness of James Fenimore Cooper, the next it was the opera houses and elegant squares of Edith Wharton. Below 42nd Street, the city became the city we know, stately mansions lined as if in rank, a bulwark against the ever-encroaching slums.

  The train tracks ran down the middle of Fourth Avenue. A man was stationed at each crossing, shouting and swinging a bell, yet hundreds of people were run down each year. The smell of New York City, which was leather and woodsmoke and horses, drifted into the railcar.

  The engine slowed as it crossed 30th Street, then stopped at the 27th Street station, the last stop on the line, with a tremendous squeal of breaks, the sooty carriages vanishing in a billow of steam. A crowd waited here, too. They clamored for the fugitive, demanded to see the killer. Having expected as much, Nevins had hidden Hicks beneath the sacks of mail in the baggage car. Let the yokels look in the windows, walk through the coach—they will find nothing. Later, after the crowd dissipated, Nevins led Hicks through the station, neither cuffs nor gun necessary. A Studley & Company horse coach waited on the avenue. The horses whinnied, the whip flashed, and off they went. The carriage wandered through the dark streets, wagons and night traffic. All those faces, all those mysterious lives.

  The precinct was on Ann Street, a few blocks from the Spring Street pier, where Albert Hicks had first met Captain Burr. Life is not a circle, it’s a hangman’s knot.

  Hicks got out of the carriage coolly, nodding at the waiting crowd. People were surprised by the fugitive, and troubled. He did not look like a killer. He was handsome. He smiled as he went by, winked as he walked up the steps between the detectives. Nevins was grinning, too, like a dog returning with a bone.

  * * *

  —

  Isaiah Rynders was waiting in the station, his feet up on a desk, his arms spread in welcome. He was tall and elegant, in the best sort of suit, with steel-tipped boots and a western tie. His hair was slicked back, and his face was powdered in the way of a stage star, as perfumed as a dandy on Broadway. He knew how to play his part: the federal marshal imposing order on chaos.

  He’d been following the manhunt on the wire. If the killings had happened in the Upper Bay, the case would have gone to the City of New York and its chief of police. Because they happened in the Lower Bay—federal property—it went to the U.S. marshal. He was a sharp politician who understood the value of a sensation.

  What do you do if you find yourself in possession of a circus freak?

  Sell tickets.

  Isaiah Rynders was not unlike many of the criminals he was in charge of policing. Born in 1804 near Albany, he had made his name—first name, anyway—commanding North River sloops, trim three-sail sailboats that, on market mornings, filled the river from bank to bank. The skipper of such ships learned to battle by necessity—everything was about speed, getting there first. Rynders hauled produce from farms to harbor towns. He was soon refusing to answer to Isaiah, or even Mr. Rynders. If you wanted him, you called him Captain.

  Fame came later, out west, when he worked on the Mississippi River. He had gone to the frontier for the same reason as everyone else—for adventure. His appearance was striking, dark with pale blue eyes. Kit Carson. Wyatt Earp. Billy the Kid. That was the era, and that was the energy. Everything was wide open, everyone was going to get rich. He became a notorious knife fighter. You’d see him with that big bowie, bent low, juggling it between his palms. He worked on the big river ships, sometimes as a card dealer, sometimes as a gambler, a never-to-be-trusted sharp playing with his own stake.

  Faro was his game. For centuries, it had been a preferred diversion in every sort of casino and saloon. It favored psychology over skill. It was all about the bluff, reading the truth in the eyes of the other man. And look what he’s doing with his hands! And look how he twists that ruby pinky ring! Rynders excelled as a dealer and a player, stroking his mustache while considering. His nose was too large—you noticed it more as the years went by. His eyes were piercing. He had a birthmark below his left cheek, which called attention to the sharp bones of his face. His skull was close to the surface.

  Faro made him rich and endangered his life. He was always fighting or running or being threatened. It was in these years that he became a master of human nature: he learned to spot hidden value and choose only those fights he knew he could win. It was said that he stabbed a man to death in Natchez, Mississippi, late one night on a smoky riverbank. He was chased from Vicksburg by vigilantes. He burned through the West, consuming it as a hungry person consumes a meal. He retreated and returned east. He operated a racing stable in South Carolina. He was that most beautiful thing—a dissipated young man, fearful that his best days were already behind him. He drank and slept and took bets, amassing a treasure that would let him return to New York in style.

  He lost it all in the Panic of 1837. That phrase is so antique—“the Panic of ’37”—that you almost love it, as is often the case with suffering seen from afar. Up close it was the bust that followed the boom, banks shuttered, businesses
failing. Rynders returned to Manhattan anyway—made money at the tables, borrowed more and got to work, using all he had learned on the frontier to set himself up as a go-to guy, the man behind the man, the man who can get the thing you want but are not supposed to have.

  He opened a grocery in the Five Points, then another, then another. He would eventually own seven such stores in the slum. They were called groceries but were more like groggeries, a legitimate front hiding a tavern and a gambling den in back. In this way, Isaiah Rynders came to amass first money, then power, then influence. By 1850, he sat at the head of a great army of Irish kids. He was the grown-up behind the Dead Rabbits, one of the city’s most notorious street gangs. He used force to punish his enemies and help his friends. If asked to define him, newspaper reporters used the term sport, which is what they called downtown swells who wore parrot-colored clothes and shiny shoes, smiled with toothpicks in their mouths, haunted the taverns and billiard halls, bet on the ponies and the fights, and went everywhere in a group of connected guys, living a Sunday kind of life, never in an office but always at work.

  Captain Rynders operated out of Sweeney’s House of Refreshment, a lunch counter at 11 Ann Street. He later opened his own joint, the Empire Club at 25 Park Row. He’d sit under a dim light in back, laughing and talking. Don’t worry—I’ll take care of it. Forget the kraut—he’s a nimenog and will be dealt with. In short, he was a fixer, the so-called “King of the Five Points,” where you’d go if you needed the Irish vote. With his crew of Dead Rabbits, he worked in the way of a modern Mafia boss. (“The brutal and turbulent ruffian who led the mob, and controlled the politics of the lower wards,” was how Teddy Roosevelt described Rynders.) On Election Day, he sent his army into the streets. They were expert at turning out repeaters, those who voted early and often. He helped get out the vote for Franklin Pierce in the presidential election of 1852. It was said he secured the presidency for James Buchanan in 1856. It was President Buchanan who appointed Rynders federal marshal of New York, a plum piece of patronage, an office in which the captain could enrich himself in a dozen different ways.

  Isaiah Rynders was at the height of his power when he met Albert Hicks. The first shots of the Civil War, which would upend everything—the entire era would be sealed in amber, relegated to the antebellum past—were just a few months away. Rynders did not personally involve himself in every murder case, but this one was special. What had happened on the E. A. Johnson was not just a killing, not just three killings, not just a slaughter—it was a sensation. It touched the deepest fears and obsessions of the city, toyed with its subconscious. Hicks was the nightmare that stalked your dreams. Rynders wanted to meet him because he was curious but also because there was money to be made.

  Rynders at first was interested in simply looking the killer over, getting a sense of him, making sure, in the way of a riverboat gambler, that this was indeed the man. He talked to Hicks, looked in his eyes, tried to tease out his cascade of monosyllabic answers. No, no, no—that was all Hicks said.

  First order of business for Rynders? Clear the crowd that lingered in front of the police station. Hundreds were standing on the steps, disrupting traffic. Rynders did it in the way of the sharpie, a two-part operation meant to satisfy and confuse the mob.

  One: Hicks was “conducted into the main office of the Marshal, where he remained for an hour and a half, during which time scores of persons were permitted to enter and gratify their curiosity by looking at the criminal,” according to Elias Smith. Hicks meanwhile “sat handcuffed in one corner of the room, and met the scrutinizing gaze of his multitude of visitors without betraying the slightest emotion of any kind. In fact he did not appear from his actions to be conscious that he was any more the object of curiosity than anyone else in the crowd. He is not vicious-looking, and the universal expression of those who see him, for the first time, is that of disappointment in finding so ‘good-looking a man,’ when they expected to behold a monster.”

  Two: “While the prisoner was thus undergoing the inspection of those who were so fortunate as to gain admission to the Marshal’s office, the large and increasing throng outside were made the victims of an ingenious maneuver, which exhibited the tact of Capt. Rynders in dissipating a crowd,” Smith went on. “A man named Curtis, recently convicted of forgery, and about to be conveyed to Sing Sing, was taken through the Marshal’s office, handcuffed and in charge of officers, and let out by a private door opening in Chambers Street. The crowd, supposing the man to be Hicks, ran off en masse in pursuit of the officers, shouting ‘There he is—that’s him—that’s him.’ The dodge created much merriment among those inside the Marshal’s office, and none laughed heartier or seemed to enjoy the joke more than the prisoner.”

  The process of building a case against Hicks got under way at once. Rynders began by bringing in witnesses to identify the fugitive. Is this the person you saw on the ship, yawl, ferry, street, etc.? A modern lineup consists of a handful of people of various makes, sizes, and ages standing beside a suspect. If the witness picks the suspected killer out of the line, the identification is considered made. Rynders used an older method, more like a 3D lineup or diorama. He filled a room in the precinct house with gangsters and sailors, many of them his own soldiers from the Sixth Ward, then brought witnesses in one at a time. The marshal told them to wander through the room as they would wander through a saloon until they found the man they’d seen on the ship, yawl, ferry, street, etc.

  Abram Egbert, who had talked to Hicks at Vanderbilt’s ferry landing on Staten Island; Augustus Gisler, who had served the pirate oysters and eggs in Peter Van Pelt’s saloon; Selah Howell, the co-owner of the E. A. Johnson who had had dinner with Hicks on the sloop; Burke, the superintendent of the Cedar Street tenement—each man wandered the room till he found Hicks. William Drumm, who had carried the big seabag through the city, stood five feet from the suspect, pointing and shouting, “That’s him—that’s the man! I asked for fifty cents. He gave me three shillings.”

  Policemen and gangsters stood around smiling and laughing. They doted on their chief, Isaiah Rynders, who sat on the edge of a desk, pipe in hand, talking. “About two dozen persons were in the room,” according to a reporter on the scene, “the most conspicuous of whom was the redoubtable Captain Rynders, who passed the time telling anecdotes, and amongst other things stated that five murderers were now in his custody, and if they caught John Chinaman that would make six.” (John Chinaman went otherwise unidentified, another untold New York story.) Hicks “took his hat off and appeared as if he [suddenly] realized the position he was in,” the reporter went on. “His head and features indicate him to be a man of brutal propensities—one who could knock another one down on the slightest provocation, being a large, strong, and powerful-looking man.”

  The police brought in the prisoner’s wife. They wanted to find out how much she knew—could she be charged as an accomplice? Elias Smith saw her in the station waiting for the marshal, holding her eleven-month-old son. She seemed bewildered. She wept, stopped weeping, then wept again. Myopia gave her gaze a lost, unfocused quality.

  The investigators spoke to her alone. At first, she could not believe her husband had done these things. She had never known him to be anything other than honest. When she’d asked him about the windfall, he’d told her it came from the salvage of an abandoned ship. Why wouldn’t she believe him? He was her husband. The police came to trust and even pity her. She had, in a sense, been a victim along with the others.

  She said she’d been terrified when she first read about the E. A. Johnson in the newspaper and had warned her husband, You must be careful; there’s a killer on the sea. She’d actually read him the article. This is likely when Hicks learned that the ship had not been scuttled, but was in fact in the possession of the police.

  “How’d he respond?” asked a detective.

  “He listened for a time,” said Mrs. Hicks, then told her he
was sleepy and didn’t want to hear any more.

  The police brought Mrs. Hicks to see her husband in his cell. It was their first meeting since the arrest. It had only been thirty hours, but it might as well have been a century. She stood at the bars, cursing. She called him a scoundrel, the worst kind of villain. He swore he was innocent and demanded she believe him. It went back and forth. Finally she held the baby up and shouted, “Look at your offspring, you rascal, and think what you have brought on us. If I could get at you, I would pull your bloody heart out.”

  “[Hicks] looked at her coolly,” according to a report, “and quietly replied, ‘Why, my dear wife, I’ve done nothing—it will be all out in a day or two.’ ”

  On her way to the street, Mrs. Hicks fell into the arms of Elias Smith, the reporter. “What can I do?” she cried. “I can’t go to my parents at Albany; I would not carry my disgrace home to them.”

  THE TRIAL

  She was never given a first name, in court records, city files, or newspaper stories. She was only Mrs. Hicks, the prisoner’s wife, a weak-eyed woman, the sore-eyed missus, betrothed to a killer. Maybe this was done as a courtesy, to keep the names of the innocent out of the whirlwind. Maybe it was done because she was seen as no more than an appendage, a woman in a man’s world of lawyers, detectives, sailors, and pirates. She remains a mystery as a result, a stand-in for all those on the periphery, out of the spotlight but still on the stage. What was she like? What did she really believe? What happened to her?

  Mrs. Hicks’s story is there, though, between the lines, in the asides in the court transcripts, in the background information written by reporters and cops. A small, nearsighted Irish immigrant, she’d been in America less than ten years at the time of her husband’s arrest. She had met Hicks on the Isaac Wright, the ship that brought her family from Ireland to America in 1853. She had been traveling with her mother, father, brother, and sisters, escaping Ireland’s hardship and famine. She probably spotted Hicks, who was working on the ship as a carpenter, on deck amid other workingmen. Perhaps he noticed her right away. Perhaps she noticed him noticing her. At some point, he introduced himself. Their exchanges grew long and personal. Perhaps they stood together in the wind and rain. It took at least ten days to sail from Dublin to New York, and in that time, you were almost certain to get the kind of weather that would cause even normally reserved strangers to cling together.