The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  Sayles spoke of past cases in which defendants, identified, tried, convicted, were later shown to be innocent. What about the murder of that New England postman? Dozens of people had identified a man as the killer, but he was later cleared. What if he’d been executed before he’d been exonerated? Or the Bourne brothers, accused and convicted in the killing of a Mr. Colvin in Vermont in 1819—the brothers had actually confessed, been sentenced, and were awaiting execution when the real killer came forward. “But the most astonishing thing about the prosecution is the charge that this one man should kill these three men, powerful as they were, and not receive a single scratch,” Sayles told the jury. “There must have been a terrible struggle. Blood was spattered over the ceiling, blood everywhere, but [there was] no blood on him, no mark of violence on his person.”

  Did that sound possible?

  Think before you decide, he said. Consider all the circumstances. A man can be put to death, but he cannot be brought back.

  * * *

  —

  It was the prosecution’s turn to close. The gallery was filled with reporters for the occasion, attorneys, court officers, sailors, friends of the dead—it was the best kind of theater. “Hicks sat coolly and even coldly at the defense table, looking down, twisting a pen in his hand,” according to one newspaper account. “He would not make eye contact with the jurors.”

  Did Hicks still believe in escape?

  There was that silver train again, highballing across the evening sky.

  James Dwight stood before the jury. He would live to be an old man, see the assassination of Lincoln and the triumph of the railroad, but this was the biggest audience and biggest moment he would ever know. “I had hoped the defense would prove me wrong and prove this man innocent of these crimes, but I have been disappointed,” he told the jury.

  “The defense has contradicted not one fact or witness that the state has presented. That means all these things had to happen by coincidence and chance. The defense would endeavor to induce the jury to believe that Captain Burr parted with his watch, which he had carried for nine years, to a pawnbroker; that Smith Watts had parted with the clothes which his aged mother had put up for him; that Oliver Watts had parted with the daguerreotype of the girl he loved. The time has not yet come when Yankee sailor boys give up pictures of the girls they left behind without a struggle.”

  Dwight spoke to the jurors as you might speak to a friend at the end of a particularly bad day.

  “Gentlemen, I have occupied your time longer than I intended,” he said, “and I have but one word further to say. If this prisoner is not proven guilty of the crime against him, he is of course an innocent man. If there is in the breast of any of you one doubt concerning his guilt—one reasonable doubt as to his having committed this robbery of George H. Burr, as set forth in the indictment, in God’s name give him the benefit of that doubt. It is his sacred privilege, and it is just as much his right as he has a right to his life or his liberty. If you have any doubt upon considering the evidence, give him the benefit of that doubt, or any which you may have.

  “But if you think him guilty….

  “Here, in your very seats, I charge you to give the benefit of your conviction to the government, and I charge you to do this in your jury box without any hesitation. Gentlemen, there was no hesitation on his part: with that sharp ax he cut down the fair-haired boy, Watts; and then returned and felled the other; and then the death struggle with the captain occurred. Gentlemen, there was no hesitation there; and if you are convinced of his guilt, let there be no hesitation in your rendering in your jury box a verdict against him. There cries from the sands of Islip, ‘justice;’ from that widow and from that mother. There comes up ‘from the depths of the Atlantic, from all the ships that float on it, and all that go down in the great deep’—there comes the cry of ‘justice.’ The prisoner equally calls on you to do justice; and gentlemen, I ask you, in the name of the government, if you believe him guilty of this crime, which he committed speedily, summarily and devilishly, that you will let your verdict be speedy, summary and just.”

  It was four P.M. on Thursday, May 17, 1860.

  Judge Smalley made a final statement to the jury on Saturday. “The Court room was excessively crowded, but profound silence prevailed during the delivery of the charge,” the Times reported. “The prisoner listened to it attentively. His appearance was somewhat haggard, indicating a failure of physical power, and he had lost the nonchalance which he wore at the commencement of the trial.”

  The jury was sent to deliberate at 10:36 A.M. How long does it take one man to kill another? How long does it take a body, thrown overboard, to reach the bottom of the bay? How long does it take a soul to ascend to heaven? The jury came back after seven minutes. At 10:43 A.M., the judge told the foreman, James Fuller, to stand. Albert Hicks stood and faced him.

  “Have you reached a verdict?” asked Judge Smalley.

  “We have,” said Fuller.

  What is it?

  We the people find the defendant guilty of piracy on the high seas.

  Hicks fell back into the chair and closed his eyes. “Otherwise,” according to the Times, “except for a nervous twitching of the fingers, he made no sign indicative of the position in which the verdict of the Jury had placed him.”

  Rynders dropped a rough hand onto Hicks’s shoulder. The condemned held out his wrists to be shackled. Sayles rushed the bench, shouting at the judge, saying he’d ask for a new trial. Judge Smalley nodded.

  That case was made and rejected a few days later.

  All the relevant parties, along with dozens of reporters, were back in the courtroom the following week to hear the sentence. It was no surprise. The prosecution charged piracy specifically because the fate of a pirate is so well established.

  Smalley made the most of the moment even so: “It is now my duty, and my painful duty as an officer of the United States, to move for the judgment which the law has affixed as a punishment to the crime of piracy upon the high seas in the case of Albert Hicks,” he told the court.

  The prisoner has been found guilty of the crime and to that the law assigned the punishment of death, and no other punishment. It has left no discretion to the Court, as there is none with the jury or the District-Attorney. Were it an ordinary case I should make this application with great pain. Capital punishments are not favorites with me, nor with the community; and for the crime of robbery on the high seas, dangerous though it may be, if it stood by itself, the feeling of the community would be against inflicting the punishment of death, and would be in this case were it not for the surrounding circumstances. In making this application I do it with the knowledge, for with this verdict before us we have the legal knowledge, as we have also the moral knowledge, that though the charge is one of piracy, it involves also a charge of the murder of three men in cold blood, for the mere, I had almost said paltry, consideration of $150, some old clothes, and an old watch. Three men have been deprived of their lives, unwarned, probably in the dead of night, when the perpetrator incurred no seeming risk of detection, men who had been his comrades, with whom he had broken bread for days and days—these men were ruthlessly, cruelly and surreptitiously deprived of their lives, and one of them when life enough remained, not to defend himself, but to struggle for life, and while clinging to the side of the vessel and pleading for mercy, had his hand chopped off by the man who had previously murdered his companions. In such a case I should feel authorized to ask for the highest punishment of the law, if the law had provided for any degrees in the punishment of the offence.

  Looking at the convict, the judge asked, “Is there any reason why this sentence should not be passed upon you?”

  “No,” said Hicks, in a whisper. “I have nothing to say.”

  Smalley nodded, then went on.

  You, Albert W. Hicks, otherwise William Johnson, have
been indicted by the Grand Jury for this District for robbery and piracy on the high seas. You have had a patient and fair trial before an honest jury of your country. You have been defended by able counsel with zeal and fidelity, but found guilty. The evidence against you was so strong, clear, and conclusive that no one who heard it could doubt as to the correctness of the verdict. The evidence also established beyond a moral or rational doubt that, in order to accomplish the robbery, you were guilty of a triple murder; that to enable you to possess yourself of the paltry sum of $150 in money and some articles of clothing not your own, you, the first officer of the sloop in which you sailed, as she was proceeding to sea, in the stillness of the night, and under its cover, in cold blood and without provocation, murdered three innocent, unoffensive persons, and threw them into the sea; and the next morning attempted escape with your blood-stained plunder. But the finger of Providence seems to have followed you, and pointed you out to the guardians of the law. You were pursued, arrested and most of your ill gotten gains found upon you, and identified by the most unmistakable evidence as the property and clothing of the missing, and as it appeared on the trial, murdered men. The annals of crime present few cases of greater atrocity and horror. For this most inhuman and revolting violation of the laws of your country and of the great Ruler of the universe you must soon and justly pay the forfeit of your life. The crime is of such an aggravated character and your guilt is so certain and incontestable, that you must not hope anything from Executive clemency. The Court, therefore, would urge you to earnestly and sincerely devote the little time that may yet remain to you of life, to repentance and preparing to meet your last and final Judge.

  The sentence of the law and the Court is that you be taken from this place to the prison from whence you came, there kept in close confinement until Friday, the 13th day of July next, and on that day taken from thence to Ellis Island or to Bedloe’s Island, in the Bay of New-York, as the Marshal for this District may elect, and there, between the hours of 10 o’clock in the morning and 3 o’clock in the afternoon, be hung by the neck until you are dead.

  THE CONFESSION

  Albert Hicks did not change cells. He was still on the Murderers’ Corridor, Cell 8, the Tombs. But his cell took on a new aspect—it had gone from holding tank to death row. Public executions had been discontinued in New York City. Once upon a time, dozens of people had been executed every year before huge crowds in Manhattan. The last such hanging occurred in the spring of 1824, when over fifty thousand people watched the killer John Johnson swing from a gallows on the corner of Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street. But the crowd had been a little too drunk and festive on that occasion. It did not have the desired effect of deterring crime but became a boozy party instead. The executions went on, but for the most part, they were done privately, in the courtyard behind the Tombs.

  Hicks was unusual in that he’d been convicted as a pirate in the federal system, hence was destined to hang publicly—he would in fact be the last man publicly executed in New York. Bedloe’s Island was chosen because it was federal property as well as a traditional place of execution for buccaneers, standing as it does between the city and the open sea.

  Hicks’s demeanor changed as soon as the sentence was read. Hearing those words—“hung by the neck till dead”—seemed to unsettle him. Little by little, the mask fell away. According to the prison warden, Hicks wept in his cell in the dead of night. His shoulders shook, and his eyes were red and searching. He’d never believed he’d be caught—“It never even occurred to me,” he said. Now he was right up against it, looking the thing square in the face.

  Hicks told the warden he wanted to talk to a priest. He had been raised a Catholic—his parents were Irish and German—but it had been years since he’d been in a church. The warden sent a message to the College of St. Francis Xavier on Sixteenth Street. The next morning Father Henry Duranquet stood outside Cell 8. Working with doomed men was the priest’s specialty. He was among the last survivors of a legendary family. There were noblemen, bishops, and holy fools among his ancestors. He was born in 1809 in Chalus, in Clermont, France, one of six brothers. Five of them grew up to become priests—les cinq pères Duranquet. All were Jesuits. Many died young. The oldest went to the Madura Mission in India, where he spread the good news, wept and prayed, caught cholera, and died at age thirty-seven. The next oldest, Charles, followed to the Madura Mission, carried on weeping and praying, caught cholera, and died at age thirty-nine. Victor, the third brother, died of “hardship and labor” at thirty-three.

  Henry, second to youngest, was educated in local academies, then sent to Rome to finish his schooling. He was tall and slight, as reedy as an El Greco saint. After taking his vows in Italy, he was sent to New Orleans. Eighteen thirty-six was a high point in the life of that city—wine-soaked alleys and palm shadows, church bells, ships lining the French Quarter docks. He was seen, even then, as a man of depth. (As Oscar Wilde later said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”) He did sacred work all over the New World, from Louisiana to New York to Quebec. He carried his faith before him like a torch.

  In 1851 Father Duranquet was transferred to the College of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, where he was to teach, advise, and administer the sacraments. New York was filling with refugees from Germany and Ireland, Catholics who faced prejudice and poverty, crying out from the Five Points and Fourth Ward, a flood of humanity in need of guidance. One day the father volunteered to talk to a man in spiritual crisis on Blackwell’s Island (today, as Roosevelt Island, it’s crowded with playgrounds and condos), home to a poorhouse, a sanitarium, and a prison. It was a place you tried to avoid, but Father Duranquet went there willingly, even joyfully. He spent hours with the prisoner, leading him from darkness into the light. But it was not the man who struck him so much as the multitude of men, in yards and cages, each soul lost, reaching out for help. If the priest did his work here, amid the lowest, tremendous progress could be made. It was a weedy patch, an untended field. What a few diligent hours could do! It became his specialty: Father Duranquet, the shepherd of the condemned.

  He had an ability to reach people who seemed unreachable. A Catholic journal credited his personality; helpfully, he was a little dumb. His brain didn’t get in the way; nor was he distracted by minutiae. He focused on the big things, on eternity and damnation. Prisoners, used to being ignored, mistreated, or turned into symbols, experienced his attention as an elixir and a revelation. “A remarkable characteristic of all Duranquet’s work was his calm, deliberate way,” according to the Catholic journal. He “often seemed to the younger men too slow, but, while those of greater energy wore themselves out and met an early death, our good father continued on and thus did more in reality by his slowness and the great experience he had gained, than those who would do everything at once.”

  That first morning Father Duranquet sat with Albert Hicks for several hours, side by side on the straw mattress, a guard looking in through the bars. We can’t know what they discussed or what passed between them, but based on the priest’s religious philosophy and considering how Hicks began to change soon afterward, we can guess.

  Albert Hicks knew he was trapped. He’d believed he could get out of this trap, as he’d got out of every other, as his brother had done. He said it several times. There would be a legal loophole, or he’d escape. His brother was the shining example—Simon had been in the same fix and was now a free man out west. But the words of the judge ate through his mind like a worm—“hung by the neck till dead.” Nonchalance turned to concern, then fear, then panic. One night Hicks asked the warden to sit with him. He said he was scared to be alone.

  Father Duranquet promised him a different kind of escape: to the next world. As Hicks came to accept the inevitability of his execution, his attention turned to God, not an abstract god of nature but the Old Testament God, a man on a throne in the sky. Hicks knew he was going to hell for
his actions. In fact, in the days after the verdict, he focused his anger on the devil. He believed he’d made a deal with the devil, and as part of that deal, the devil was supposed to protect him from capture. He now felt betrayed. If the devil had quit him, then couldn’t he quit the devil? That’s what he wanted to know from the priest. Was it too late to switch sides, get with the righteous, and win a place for himself in the heavenly kingdom?

  It’s never too late, said Father Duranquet. Not as long as you’re living. You need only open your heart and accept Jesus Christ. Hicks had been the worst kind of sinner, which meant he had a lot of work to do. He had to do it inside himself. He must admit his crimes, confess, and beg forgiveness. And it must all be genuine and real. It would be hard. Hicks had taught himself over the years never to admit or tell the truth, because once you did, you’d be finished. They wanted confessions, he thought, not to forgive or rehabilitate or understand people like himself, but to feel righteous when they strung him up.

  Father Duranquet visited Hicks every day. He spent a part of each morning in Cell 8, talking to, listening to, or praying with the prisoner. An emotional bond formed. People noticed it and its effect on the prisoner. “Hicks seemed to lose that firmness which he had hitherto manifested,” Lorenzo De Angelis, a deputy marshal who spent hours with the prisoner, said later. “His reckless indifference left him, and in place of the stolid look which had marked his face from the time of his arrest an appearance of deep anxiety gave token that he had abandoned the hope which had supported him, and that dread of his approaching fate, if not remorse for his crimes, had taken possession of him.”

  Hints of the coming confession can first be seen in an interview Hicks gave the Times in June 1860.