The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  The warden came to say goodbye. “Hicks shook him warmly by the hand,” according to an account, “thanking him for the many acts of kindness he had received at his hands, bade him a last farewell. The culprit then remained closeted with his father confessor for an hour or so, and declined seeing any person other than his spiritual adviser.”

  Marshal Rynders appeared in the doorway at nine A.M., in dress uniform. He told Hicks the task he now had to perform was unpleasant. Hicks said he knew it and also knew the marshal was only doing his job. Rynders took a document from his pocket and read it out loud. It was the death warrant. That finished, the marshal told the prisoner to prepare himself to die.

  Hicks dressed in an outfit made specially for the occasion—tailored and paid for with the help of the Freemasons. In the next world, the currently condemned would be king. It was electric blue, as gaudy as any suit worn on Broadway. “His coat was rather fancy, being ornamented with two rows of gilt navy buttons and a couple of anchors in needlework,” according to a report. “A white shirt, a pair of blue pants, a pair of light pumps, and the old Kossuth hat he wore when arrested, completed the attire. Hicks was exceedingly cool while engaged in arraying himself in his fancy suit, and seemed as unconcerned about his approaching doom as though the idea of death had never crossed his mind.”

  Hicks walked along the Murderers’ Corridor, saying goodbye to fellow inmates, chatting with the guards. He thanked them all, lingering before the cell of his neighbor Mortimer Shay. Hicks then went through the big doors and out into the sunlight.

  * * *

  —

  A huge crowd had gathered on Franklin Street to get a last look at the pirate. Some called out, others cursed, admonished, or jeered, but most merely stared. Hicks was more than just a criminal and more than just a killer. He was famous, a celebrity, a star. Fliers had been glued to brick walls up and down the Bowery. They advertised the execution as you might advertise a traveling carnival: Cruise to Bedloe’s Island, enjoy beer and all you can eat oysters while watching the hanging of the notorious Pirate Hicks. One Dollar.

  Newspapers were stacked along the curbs. Hicks could not read, but he would have recognized his name. All carried reports on the confession. The document itself was for sale at kiosks, bound between covers, fronted by a garish headline.

  THE CONFESSION OF ALBERT W. HICKS

  Pirate and Murderer

  ASTOUNDING CONFESSION AND STARTLING DEVELOPMENTS

  MADE BY HICKS, THE PIRATE.

  Ready THIS DAY (Friday, the 13th), The Day of Execution.

  The Life, Trial, and Confession of Albert W. Hicks, the Pirate who committed the Triple Murders on Board the Oyster Sloop Edwin A. Johnson, in New York Harbor! This most startling confession was made by him to the US authorities, and the proceeds of its publication guaranteed for the benefit of Hicks’s family, this being the only consideration upon which he would reveal a Tale of Crime which identifies him with the commission of NEARLY ONE HUNDRED MURDERS!

  Hicks talked to George Nevins and Elias Smith—the detective and the reporter—outside the Tombs. They’d only played their part, but being responsible for the death of another man is a hell of a thing. Hicks greeted them like old friends.

  Smith said he was sorry.

  “No hard feelings,” said Hicks.

  “How do you feel about the future?” asked Smith.

  Hicks pointed to Father Duranquet, saying, “That is a matter I would rather leave to him.” He thought a moment, then added, “I am resigned. I will not say anything on the island.”

  “I forgive you,” Hicks told Detective Nevins.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said the detective.

  Hicks climbed into a closed carriage, seated between Marshal Rynders and Father Duranquet. The driver cracked the whip, the horses moved, the wheels turned, the houses and buildings of lower Manhattan moved backward outside the coach windows. The driver turned east onto Canal, a dramatic change from the chaos in front of the jail. The streets were empty, the avenues deserted. Even then New York had the almost magical ability to absorb any sort of event, no matter how lurid. Go a block, turn a corner, and it’s gone. As Hicks had only a few hours left on earth, you imagine him trying to experience each moment—value comes from scarcity—the shadows and the colors, the brick buildings, the smell of horses, the smell of summer.

  It was a ten-minute ride to the harbor docks. The carriage slowed as it reached the pier where the ship that would carry Hicks to Bedloe’s Island was waiting, a side-wheel steamer called the Red Jacket, a ferry chartered for the occasion. It was bedlam on board: hundreds of people, many of whom had been drinking for hours, awaited the pirate. There were twice as many on the wharf. It was like a painting by Bruegel: stevedores and seafaring men, fixers and gangsters, all pressed together, shouting and laughing. “The police [experienced] considerable difficulty in keeping the crowd back,” the Times reported. “By strenuous exertions a passage was finally obtained, and Capt. Rynders ordered the carriage in which the prisoner was to drive on to the dock. The eager crowd, which had already got access to the pier, now besieged the carriage, and literally broke in the windows and tore away the curtains to get a sight of him. The only notice which he took of these proceedings was a derisive smile.”

  Hicks was led from the carriage and through the crowd, shoved and taunted, the priest always beside him. It was even worse on the ship. The saloon was open, and vast quantities of what the newspapers called “lager-bier” had already been served. The early hour meant no breakfast, which meant people were drunker still. And it was blazing hot. “The scene on the ship defies description,” wrote a witness. “A crowd of some 1500 persons, perhaps, had assembled onboard, and the most intense excitement prevailed. Gamblers, fighting men, ward politicians, reformed drunkards, actors, medical men, city officials, and bogus reporters without number, formed the great bulk of the motley crew.”

  Hicks was brought to what was normally the ladies’ salon. He sat on a couch and dropped his head in his hands. “He seemed to be thinking,” the Post reported. He stood as the ship glided into the harbor estuary, he walked across the cabin and looked out—the city, houses and wharves, mansions and slums, were turning into distance. The crowd chanted and howled. They wanted to see Hicks, but the prisoner refused to come out. He was kneeling beside the priest. The deputy marshals had left them—police guarded the doors. A reporter looking through an interior window watched Hicks pray. This was the only moment, according to the reporter, that the condemned man showed the slightest emotion. His face flushed, his brow furrowed. But when he stood, he was as impassive as before.

  Hicks asked to speak to Marshal Rynders. The men stood side by side, talking in the heat of the day. Hicks again said he would make no statement on the island. There’d be no last words, no plea for forgiveness. Hicks said he wanted it done and done fast. In the meantime, he would talk to no one but the marshal and the priest.

  Hicks went outside and stood at the rail. The Red Jacket followed the Manhattan shore. The prisoner was a dozen feet from the side-wheel, which churned the river into white water. The police kept the mob at a distance but could not stop people from gawking. Many were bothered by how calm Hicks appeared. They needed to see remorse in him—terror and tears. He “looked…on the river, evincing no show of feeling,” the Times reported, “but for the fact that he was known to be the man who was to die, his apparent unconcern for the great event of the day, would not have struck anybody, as he would simply have been set down as one of the crowd of spectators. As it was, known as he was, as Hicks, the pirate, whose moments of life were ebbing with every revolution of the paddles that threw back the spray of the hissing water almost in his face—those who saw him wondered, and came, perhaps, reluctantly to the conclusion that the man had no human feeling. Probably those who said so did him wrong, but his coolness and self-possession were at least remarkable
, even for a great and hardened criminal.”

  As you approach the end, everything becomes a clock—the sun as it crosses the sky; the coast as it slides past; the side-wheel as it turns. Time ebbed from Hicks, as it does from everyone. That is what makes a character like the pirate so poignant and pathetic. In these moments, bad as he was, he stood for all of us getting closer to the abyss every minute of every day. He was living the nightmare each person lives, only in public, among thousands who wanted to see him hang.

  The Red Jacket was supposed to turn south and cross the harbor, but Rynders realized he was ahead of schedule. There was still time—lots of time. He remembered that the Great Eastern, a British ironside—considered a wonder of the age, it was six times bigger than any other vessel on the sea—was docked at Hammond Street, about two miles up the North River. It was the ship’s first visit to the western hemisphere; it had been launched just over twelve months before. People were paying a dollar just to walk its massive deck. Why not go see it for ourselves? Rynders said to the captain of the Red Jacket. A moment later the steamer was heading north.

  * * *

  —

  “After leaving the wharf the Red Jacket went to Bedloe’s Island direct, most people would suppose,” a Post reporter commented. “By no means. She took a pleasure trip up the river, to give those on board a chance to see the Great Eastern. We believe Hicks himself did not go to the windows to witness the mammoth steamer, but almost everyone else on the Red Jacket did. This, it must be confessed, is not a usual episode on the route to an execution.”

  They approached the ironside from the south, the massive ship rising before them. The passengers of the Red Jacket, excited in the way of a drunken crowd, rushed the rail, nearly capsizing the steamer. Deputy marshals raced across the deck, screaming at the crew to redistribute the passengers. The Red Jacket cruised all around the Great Eastern—a seven-hundred-foot-long passenger ship with six masts, five funnels, two paddle bills, and a four-blade screw propeller—then headed back downriver.

  The mob was laughing and singing. It was less a funeral procession than a Mardi Gras parade. Along the way, they spotted another remarkable ship, a brand-new U.S. revenue cutter, a kind of Coast Guard boat called the Harriet Lane. Named for the niece of President James Buchanan, it would prove to be even more interesting than the Great Eastern, for whereas the Great Eastern was huge, the Harriet Lane would have a life as unexpectedly storied as that of Albert Hicks. A few months after being seen from the Red Jacket, the Harriet Lane was drafted by the navy for use in the Civil War. Refitted as a gunship, it saw action at Fort Sumter, New Orleans, and Galveston, was captured by the Confederates, recaptured by the Union, then declared unfit. It was abandoned at sea in 1881. It caught fire and burned for days.

  * * *

  —

  The Red Jacket reached Bedloe’s Island just before eleven A.M.—a tremendous moss-covered rock, green and gold, the scaffold visible, the rope swinging. The Upper Bay was crowded with ships full of spectators who wanted to see the execution. “Steamboats, barges, oyster sloops, yachts and row boats,” according to a report. “They had come from all parts. From Connecticut, where the murdered captain and the brothers Watts belonged; from Long Island, where they were well known. Large steamers, such as carry hundreds of people away on pleasure excursions were there, so laden with a living freight of curious people, that it seemed almost a wonder they did not sink incontinently. There were barges with awnings spread under which those who were thirsty imbibed lager-bier. There were row-boats with ladies—no, with females of some sort, in them, shielding their complexion from the sun with their parasols.”

  “Public executions are almost always regarded by a certain class as festival occasions, somewhat less expensive and vastly more entertaining to behold than a circus, or rat-bout by terriers,” the Post reported, “but seldom, in this city at least, has an execution been turned into a great gala festival….At Bedloe’s Island thousands of people came to witness the execution; eleven steamboats and a vast fleet of sailing vessels and skiffs accommodating the immense crowd, among which were a number of females, who came down as on a picnic to witness the death struggles of an atrocious villain. A party of fancy men”—sports and dandies in woolen tailcoats with brass buckles and buckskin pantaloons, carrying gold-knobbed walking sticks and jewel-studded snuffboxes—“on their way to meet and welcome the [bare-knuckle] prize-fighter [John C.] Heenan, stopped for a few minutes to look at the execution.”

  It was as if everyone Hicks had ever known or hated or been hated by turned up for the final scene of the violent play—to watch him hang until they could be certain he was dead. “Prize-fighters, shoulder-biters, keepers of low-drinking saloons and persons of a similar class” is how one reporter described the crowd. “On the trip they ate, drank, and made merry. It was a very delightful excursion, undoubtedly, this sailing down the bay, at the expense of the city, to see the death of a bloody pirate—altogether quite an amusing and pleasant way of spending a bright July morning.”

  There were nearly as many people on the island itself. They’d been drinking and were drinking still. They met the Red Jacket with a tremendous cheer, then rushed the landing, ready to lynch the killer before he could make it to the scaffold. Marshal Rynders stood on the pier, trying to quiet them, his voice sharp, rank with authority. He had participated in gunfights on the Mississippi River, been chased out of frontier towns, fought battles in the Five Points and in the city legislature. He commanded respect from the crowd, and the crowd did its best to give it, but the crowd was drunk. He had to hush and scold, scold and hush for several minutes. He called for order—We have not come to celebrate, he said, but to see a man die.

  Meanwhile a navy ship had arrived from Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn with a detachment of marines—young and fresh-faced, as handsome as toy soldiers with rifles and bayonets. Marshal Rynders had arranged it, foreseeing the hysteria of the crowd and knowing he’d need more than a few dozen deputies to contain it. The use of federal troops to control a local population was not that unusual at the time. More than once in the 1800s, guardsmen had been sent to quell the rioting gangs of New York.

  The marines pushed the crowd aside, then formed two lines, ten feet apart. The soldiers faced the crowd, creating an open space, a corridor that led uphill from the pier to the scaffold.

  As in a wedding, Marshal Rynders carefully ordered the procession. Police and government officials exited the Red Jacket first. Then came those whom Rynders described as “real members of the actual press,” as opposed to the hundreds who’d passed themselves off as reporters to get free passage to the island. Then came the physicians, who would make certain, when the time came, that the pirate was dead. Twenty of them had volunteered, simply to be part of the spectacle, but only three were tasked with doing the job: G. F. Woodward, A. C. Bell, and Guilmette Weltje. Then came the marshal with his deputies and lackeys. The pomp, the circumstance, the mayhem, and the spectacle—this must’ve been one of the great days of the captain’s life. When everyone else was settled, Hicks made his way, with Father Duranquet on one side and a deputy sheriff on the other.

  As the condemned man went up the hill, he would have seen a multitude of faces on land and at sea. Estimates put the crowd at twenty thousand. “A motley and strange scene indeed,” according to a reporter. “On the water, there were not less than 10,000 to 11,000 present in costumes almost as variegated as at carnival. White shirts, red shirts, blue shirts, blue jackets, red jackets, green jackets, and every steamer, vessel and yacht, decorated with lively-colored flags, while the uproar was incessant—cries of ‘Down in front,’ ‘Get out of the way’—rising from hundreds of throats at the same time.”

  The E. A. Johnson was among the ships. Selah Howell, its surviving owner, had had it fixed and painted for the occasion. Its name was written in big letters on the side. It was anchored beneath the gallows, between the scaffold and
the city, where it could not be missed. A huge flag flown from its mast, described in the press as a “burgee,” also showed the name of the ship. Howell said he hoped it would be the last thing the pirate ever looked at. Half a dozen people were on the E. A. Johnson, friends and relatives of the dead captain and crew. More relatives were scattered amid the crowd on Bedloe’s Island. No one was there for Hicks. Not even his wife—she could not stand to watch, and it would not have been safe. She was to meet the body—when it was just a body—upon its return to Manhattan.

  Hicks walked stiffly but steadily. He did not break character but remained stoic, expressionless. It’s something witnesses remembered, along with his flashy blue suit and cold black eyes. It was the only freedom he had left—a refusal to show remorse, weep, or submit; a refusal to give the crowd what it wanted. He was living through this morning as he had lived through all the others—serene and detached, as if already looking back from the other side.

  When he reached the top of the hill, he dropped to his knees and prayed for perhaps a minute, then stood and spoke his last words. Before he died, Lucky Luciano said, “Tell Georgie I want to get into the movies one way or another.” Stonewall Jackson said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Albert Hicks said, “Hang me quick—make haste.”