The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  One day Hicks turned up beside her family. He’d brought them bread. More visits and more treats followed. He was reaching out a hand; she took it. She was a poor emigrant on her way to an unknown, unimaginable country. He was an American, handsome, and secure. He was with her when she first saw Manhattan. Viewed from the east, the city seems to rise from the sea, first the far-off tower of Trinity Church, announcing the island with an exclamation, then the wharves and the pier sheds, warehouses and limestone buildings, the green Battery, the brick houses beyond Peck Slip, the great avenues.

  Once her family found lodgings in the city, Hicks visited the apartment where they stayed. Her parents did not approve. There was something unsettling about him. It was there in his eyes. The family moved upstate, a not uncommon choice for immigrants looking to escape the degradation of the Fourth Ward or the Five Points. For less than a dollar, you could ride a ferry from Manhattan to Albany, a beautiful steamer that filled the night sky with sparks. Above Washington Heights, the river is punctuated by islands and bays, blue mist shrouds the hills that recede into wilderness. Is this what America looked like to Thomas Jefferson? They’d pass West Point, lofty on its palisade, Cold Spring, Beacon, Rhinebeck, Catskill, and Hudson, bustling towns where you could stumble into the rest of your life.

  They settled on the edge of Albany, a city booming on the river trade. Hicks visited every few months, bringing presents—amethyst, mother-of-pearl, gems from beyond the sea. Sometimes he was flush; other times he was broke. Sometimes he was moody; other times ebullient. They went for rides in the country, or sat in the shade of the hemlock trees. Her parents urged her to break it off. Where does this man come from? Where does he go? How does he come to have so much money? How does he lose it? Where is his family? Two cards in the tarot deck were visible, but the rest had been dealt facedown.

  She’d been warned, but she was twenty-three and getting older every minute. They were married in April 1853. They settled first in Norwich, Connecticut, where Hicks worked in a shop until he tired of it. That was how he was—restless, continually overcome by a need for variety. Boredom was a driving force in his life. He could do something only so long, then gave it up. He was constantly short of money as a result. It troubled the marriage. She went to her family for loans again and again. At first, they gave what they could. Then they refused. She and Hicks moved to New York City, where he set her up in a tiny apartment, two rooms on Batavia Street, in lower Manhattan—then went to sea. He hauled sugar, then cotton. Back in Connecticut, he worked for a doctor named Baldwin until he got restless. Again to New York, 129 Cedar Street. When he returned from sea that last time, it was with more cash than she’d ever seen. She believed they were about to start a new life, a real life. They had become parents. He was a good father and loved the boy.

  When the detectives arrested Hicks, the floor beneath her fell away. Nothing lay below but ruin and despair. The day after the arrest, she had followed her husband to New York, crying as she held the child. When she learned the true nature of his crimes…it was more than a person could fathom, everything her parents had warned her about times a million. Those facedown tarot cards turned out to include the Devil and the Hanged Man.

  For a few weeks she stayed away from Hicks, then began visiting him in jail. It might be hard to believe that she returned to this homicidal husband, resumed their relationship, and even came to love him again, but who else did she have? He was the father of her child, her only friend. As sleep is more important than sex, companionship is more important than disgust. Did she forgive Hicks? Would she remember him when he was gone, or wipe it all away and start clean? Did she tell her son who his father had been? All that is lost, unknowable, at the bottom of the river.

  The police worried about her. Small, weak-eyed, and alone, she carried the weight of the world. And the child! And those sad rooms on Cedar Street! What would become of her? Hart Weed, who ran the second precinct, wrote the federal government and asked that she be given money. Please help this pitiful woman.

  Isolated, running out of money, she finally wrote her mother in Albany. According to Robert Frost, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Her mother wrote back, a letter that survives. The syntax and many of the details are confusing, with inside references and allusions—the family was apparently named Bunting; a sister had seemingly married a man named Salters—but the general washing-of-the-hands sentiment will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been abandoned in a crisis.

  Albany, April 18, 1860.

  …I understand that your husband is charged of a very serious crime, and, as you want me to direct you how to act, I cannot advise you, under such circumstances, how to act. You have always been wanting something since you got married to him. You wanting at one time over one hundred dollars, and you would take all the Salters has and would do no good. I have got nothing for you, nor for myself, and have to depend on a strange man for my own support, as none of my children would support me; and as you want to be advised, I cannot say what is best for you to do, unless you adopt your child and live out. I cannot do nothing for you, and as for your sister and Salters, they do not want to hear any more from you and Johnson, for he got tired helping you and him, and done no good, and as besides Salters does not want you to come near him. He thinks a great disgrace of such a thing; he has a very large family to support, and you cannot expect anything from him. You would not take his advice, he told you not to marry Johnson, as you knew nothing about him; so as you made your bed, you must lie. You are young, and go to work; you will be better without Johnson, anyways; and if you think you cannot work, there is a place, for you can go to the Shakers, and have a good home there. But I think there is no chance for him to escape, so I have no more to say, but remain your mother till death,

  Rebecca Bunting

  * * *

  —

  Albert Hicks was moved to the big prison on Centre Street, officially named the Halls of Justice, but no one called it that. Around this time the explorer and diplomat John L. Stephens toured the Middle East, then published a book that included drawings of wonders he had seen there. Someone noticed that Manhattan’s new lockup looked a lot like the Egyptian mausoleum in Stephens’s book and gave the jail its unofficial name: the Tombs. About twenty years old when Hicks arrived, the Tombs was considered an improvement over the primitive jails it replaced. Consisting of two massive buildings, it covered the block bound by Centre, Elm (now Lafayette), Franklin, and Leonard streets. It was built on the shoddy fill that erased the city’s bucolic pond, the Collect. Some said the Tombs was actually built on the island that sat at the center of that pond, the site of the city’s first gallows, where dozens of men, including the leaders of New York’s slave insurrection of 1741, were executed.

  The Tombs was three prisons under a single roof: one for men, one for women, and one for boys. Above a courtyard, a skyway carried prisoners from the admitting office to the cells. It was dubbed the Bridge of Sighs, after a Venetian walkway that led from that city’s palace to that city’s jail: as prisoners crossed it, legend goes, they’d look back at Venice and sigh. The top floors of the Tombs were for petty criminals—pickpockets, brawlers, drunks. Bank robbers and bunco artists were kept on tiers two and three. The worst prisoners lived on the ground floor, where the swamp stink of the Collect lingered in the drains. The jail was built for two hundred inmates but housed twice as many when Hicks lived there. Even then it was considered the sort of cruel place where the trial becomes the punishment. Charles Dickens, who visited the Tombs on one of his trips to America, called it a “dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama! Why, such indecent and disgusting as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!”

  Hicks was kept in the strip of cells occupied by the prison’s most dangerous men, the so-called Murderers’ Corridor. Cell 8. There w
as corruption even here. Wealthy inmates were allowed to bring in their own finery and food. One prisoner, Richard Robinson, had meals catered by Delmonico’s, the great New York restaurant. His cell was decked out in Louis XIV furniture: a velvet couch, a canopy bed. A drawing of him eating an oyster-topped filet in his cell was widely circulated. Charles Sutton, a longtime warden of the prison, described such a scene in his 1874 book The New York Tombs: “In a patent extension chair [the rich prisoner] lolls, smoking an aromatic Havana, while he reads the proceedings of his trial the day previous in the morning papers. He has an elegant dressing gown on, faced with cherry colored silk, and his feet are encased in delicately worked slippers….His lunch [is] not cooked in the prison but brought in from a hotel. It consists of a variety of dishes, such as quail on toast, game pates, reed birds, ortolans, fowl, the newest vegetables, coffee, cognac.”

  Hicks had no money, thus no special meals, no soft mattress. Just the basic setup: damp cell, iron bars. And yet in those first weeks, his mood seemed placid, even fine. He was so adamant about his innocence and so certain of his exoneration that he convinced many of those around him. You can see it in a story published in one of the downtown papers a few days after he arrived in the Tombs. The reporter spoke to the convict through the bars.

  At 3 1/2 o’clock our reporter paid HICKS a visit, and found him in the murderer’s corridor, ground floor, occupying cell No. 8. He had just been furnished with a new straw bed, on which he sat smoking a cheap cigar, and contemplating with apparent indifference his novel and comfortable abode. The following dialogue occurred:

  Reporter—Well, my friend, how do you like your new quarters? [Your digs] look rather comfortable, eh?

  Prisoner—Well, yes; they do very well. [Pause.] Are you one of the keepers?

  R.—No, I am a reporter.

  P.—A what?

  R.—A reporter; if you have anything to say that you would like published, I will take it down—nothing like hearing both sides. [Long pause.] I believe you have stated that you were not on board the sloop E.A. Johnson. Is that so?

  P.—Yes. I never saw the sloop. I never knew Capt. BURR, nor heard of him. I never was on an oyster boat in my life; the last boat I was on was the Geo. Darly. Now you put that down, will you?

  R.—All right—down it goes; what else? Where did the Darly sail from?

  P.—She sailed from Peck-slip.

  R.—Where to?

  P.—To Charleston.

  R.—How long ago was that?

  P.—[After a long pause]—Well, I should think it was a month and a half since I got back here. I was gone three weeks.

  R.—Where have you been since?

  P.—Well, when I got back from Charleston I went to Fall River by steamboat. In a few days I came back to New-York and stayed here three days—then went back to Fall River again, and have not been in New-York since, until last Wednesday morning. I arrived here in the Fall River boat, and returned on the same boat in the evening.

  R.—You will be able to show then that you were in Fall River all this time?

  P.—Yes, my counsel has gone on to see about it now.

  …

  R.—Well, how about that watch? How did you get Capt. BURR’s watch if you never knew him? I suppose you are aware that it has been identified by the jeweler who cleaned it?

  P.—Well, he will have to prove he cleaned it, won’t he?

  R.—He has got the record of it, with the number of the watch, and Capt. BURR’s name.

  P.—Well, I don’t know anything about that; it’s my watch.

  R.—Did you see Mr. HOWELL up at the Marshal’s office to-day?

  P.—Who?

  R.—Mr. HOWELL, of Islip, Long Island; he was up there and identified you as the man that took supper with him and Capt. BURR on board the sloop E.A. Johnson, the night before she sailed. He says you sat on his left and Capt. BURR on his right.

  P.—Oh, he’s mistaken; it was some other man; he never saw me in his life.

  HICKS here stepped back into his cell, and commenced shaking up his new bed.

  R.—You’ll be all right; if you can prove you have been in Fall River all this time, you’ll get out of it.

  P.—Indeed I shall; yes, Sir, I’ll get out of it all right.

  HICKS here stepped back into his cell, and commenced shaking up his new bed.

  This would strike a careful reader as a tell, not a confession perhaps, but an expression of stress, a guilty man retreating when presented with evidence of his crime. Note how, when the reporter attempted to buck up the prisoner—“You’ll be all right”—he did not express innocence but merely his certainty that he will “get out of it all right.”

  Hicks had retained the services of two defense attorneys. Freemasons like the prisoner, they probably considered the work an obligation of brotherhood. And a hedge—in the next world, the jailed man might be a prince or lord. When asked to describe his counsel, Hicks would merely hand over a business card: Graves & Sayles, Attorneys.

  Sayles was a hustling young lawyer, a court rat constantly on the lookout for the case that would make his name. In Hicks, he would have seen not only a Masonic brother in a jam but also a ticket to the big time. You represent a notorious man, you’ll be all over the press. And his partner Graves? Well, every wizard needs someone to fill that second seat.

  Sayles and Graves started by sitting down with their client and hearing him out. Why don’t you tell us what happened? Hicks said there was not much to tell as he knew nothing more of the killings than what had been read to him from the newspaper. He said he had not even been in New York at the time of the killings. “I haven’t been here, before now, for at least two or three months.” Which made things easy. Forget the compass and the watch and the other physical evidence—the defense lawyers need only to establish an alibi, a hotel registry or a person who could place Hicks out of town at the time of the killings. Maybe the killers had been river pirates, or some other variety of thug, but none of that really mattered. All they had to do was show that Hicks had not been in New York, and the prosecutor’s case would fall apart.

  In search of an alibi, the attorneys went to Fall River, a booming port on the Taunton River—you go through Fall River on the way to Cape Cod—tuned to the rhythm of the Atlantic tide. This was, after all, a story of the sea, of sailors and sloops, the great watery world. The attorneys spent two days knocking on doors and looking at documents, questioning friends and old neighbors. They found many people who had known Hicks or the family—there were several Hicks siblings—but none who had seen Albert recently or could place him in Fall River on the day in question. Asking leading questions did not help, nor did dropping hints or making suggestions. They could not even find anyone willing to lie or misremember for their client.

  They returned to Manhattan dejected, but Hicks did not seem concerned. What did he think would happen? Did he think a solution would emerge from the ether? Did he think a trail of light would appear in the Tombs, and he would follow it through an open door? His brother Simon had been in a similar fix—jailed in Connecticut for murder, scheduled to hang—but he had slipped away, as if by a miracle, in a jailbreak, never to be seen again. Sonofabitch is probably belly up to a frontier bar right this minute! Did the luck of Simon Hicks give Albert Hicks a false sense of possibility, faith that a gate would open and he too would slip away? Simon was out there, just above the prison wall, highballing it across the evening sky.

  Albert Hicks told his counsel to write to his older brother, Arnold. He was the best of them, educated and rich, with a house in East Killingly, Connecticut. He’d always looked after the younger members of the family. If Arnold were brought to understand the gravity of the situation, he would surely remember something. The attorneys wrote, signed, and sent the letter.

  The response came a few weeks later:
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  EAST KILLINGLY, Thursday, April 26, I860

  GENTLEMEN: I received your letter of the 24th, in regard to my brother’s present circumstances and future prospects; and in reply would say that no one can feel more keenly in regard to his condition than I do—but justice must, in my case at least, triumph over brotherly love. The chain of circumstances against him is conclusive proof, yea, more than that, that he is guilty of the crimes proffered against him. You speak of his case as looking more favorable than it did; but I do not understand that anything has come to light to make an impression on the public mind that he is innocent. The only way for him to evade the arm of justice is in regard to the point of jurisdiction, and every one must be aware, if that point can be settled so as to bring him to trial, there is no escape. Believe me, gentlemen, if I had a princely fortune, and believed, or had the least reason to believe, that my brother was innocent, I would willingly sacrifice it all in his behalf; but when a man so far forgets his duty to God and man as to stain his hands with human blood, though he were my own brother, I would sign his death-warrant.

  You may think these are unnatural feelings for one brother to have toward another, but in reply, I would say, unnatural deeds produce unnatural feelings; and though it pains me to the very heart when I reflect on his condition, yet when, in my imagination, I see the ghosts of Capt. BURR and the two WATTS boys arise from their watery beds, and point to him as the unmistakable cause—and when I contemplate the anguish and suffering of the friends of these murdered men, all my finer feelings vanish, and I sincerely hope that he will never escape through the weakness of the law.