“I hear you’re a wizard with a butcher’s blade,” said Morrissey to Poole, “but I’d wager you’re a coward at the manly art of fisticuffs.”
“That sounds like a challenge, Morrissey.”
“It is indeed,” replied Old Smoke.
The two men agreed to meet the following morning at the Amos Street dock (now Christopher Street) to have it out once and for all.
At 7 A.M. the next morning, the two bruisers and their followers arrived en masse for the confrontation. The spectators formed a circle, which served as the ring. As later described in the Police Gazette, the encounter was a donnybrook of legendary proportions:
The fight began with some light sparring, Poole holding himself principally on the defensive as his opponent circled for a chance to close. For about five minutes this child’s play of the giants lasted. Then Morrissey made a rush. But Poole was too quick for him. As Old Smoke made his lunge, Bill the Butcher ducked with remarkable agility and seized him by the ankles. In a flash Poole threw his opponent clean over his head and as Old Smoke went sprawling he had only time to roll over when Poole pounced on him like a tiger. Then followed terrible minutes of fighting…. There was a long gash in Poole’s cheeks where the flesh had been torn by his opponent’s teeth. The blood was streaming from Morrissey’s both eyes…. Not a hand was raised to interfere or favor either contestant during the two or three minutes this inhuman struggle lasted.
The fight ended in what some would call a draw; others claimed that Poole got the best of it. Either way, it did not settle the ongoing rivalry between the Poole and Morrissey factions. Their war continued for months, with numerous tit for tat encounters, until the night of February 25, 1855. In this face-to-face encounter between Morrissey and Poole, two of Morrissey’s henchmen gunned down the infamous Bill the Butcher at Stanwix Hall, a saloon on Broadway. Though mortally wounded, Poole lingered on for fourteen days before delivering his immortal final words: “Goodbye boys. I die a true American.”
John Morrissey, along with Paudeen McLaughlin, Lew Baker, Jim Turner, and a few minor accessories, was put on trial for the murder. The case resulted in a series of hung juries before charges were dropped altogether, sealing Morrissey’s legend as the man who brought about the demise of Bill the Butcher, one of the great xenophobe’s of American history. Old Smoke Morrissey had been a gangster, a saloon keeper, a boxer, and gambling impresario—now he was an acquitted murderer and the most popular man in the Irish American underworld.
The First Irish Mob Boss
The term “mob boss” originated in Five Points and refers to a form of spontaneous political activity known as a mob primary. Mob primaries comprised the most basic form of political organization known to man. They were initiated by an aspiring political leader merely standing on a milk crate or soap box and orating until he had gathered a crowd, or mob, who was willing to sign a petition on the man’s behalf declaring him a candidate for public office. The mob pledged its vote to the orator, who was usually a saloon keeper willing to offer free drink, a sandwich, a cellar mattress to sleep on, or all of the above in exchange for a vote. The type of voter most willing to enter into this arrangement was usually a rough character—a bum, a homeless person, a thief, or a gangster. Thus, the mob boss, or mobster, became the leader of a less than savory constituency that was, nonetheless, a powerful force capable of swinging many local elections.
The arrangement worked both ways. By aligning himself with a rising and powerful mob boss, the street hoodlum was now also a mobster. He was connected, part of a system in which he now had a vested interest. Ostensibly, he would now have the kind of protection that was necessary for him to operate an illegal business—say, a house of prostitution, gambling den, burglary ring, unlicensed speakeasy, or any manner of criminal enterprise popular throughout the underworld. A vast subterranean universe of vice, exploitation, and good times, the underworld was kept alive through a steady flow of cash from above and below. From the earliest mob primary in America, the underworld and the upperworld were intrinsically intertwined and would remain so through centuries of bloodshed, criminal prosecution, and political reform.
Since the early 1840s, the most powerful mob boss in New York City was Captain Isaiah Rynders. Rynders was the first to establish a network of saloons and gambling parlors that generated money and created an underworld constituency, which buttressed his political organization, the Empire Club. In 1844 Rynders achieved national fame for himself when he virtually delivered the presidency to James K. Polk, the Democratic candidate. He did so through a highly physical form of voter fraud. The use of gangsters on election day was a common practice of all the political parties, but Rynders was the first to perfect the art by organizing the hoodlums into cohesive voting blocks. In New York, his ability to deliver became the foundation of the powerful political organization, or machine, known as Tammany Hall. Rynders’s record of success was such that he made electoral forays to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, in 1854, the city of New Orleans, where he sought to educate local Democrats in the ways of Tammany-style machine politics.
Rynders’s only problem was that he wasn’t Irish, at least not Irish Catholic with roots in the Old Country. Although his mother was of Irish Protestant stock, his father was German American. Increasingly, the waves of Catholic famine immigrants who had begun to fill out the ranks of the underworld—and the lower political ranks of organizations like Tammany Hall—clamored for one of their own as titular leader of the Mob. In an era when social mechanisms for change were woefully unresponsive to the needs of the people, the Mob inevitably sought to bring about change in their own way—in the streets. It happened, oddly enough, on Independence Day, 1857.
During that time, the city’s gang wars had grown considerably worse largely due to the fact that New York was patrolled by two competing police forces: The Municipals, who were loyal to the Democratic Party, and the Metropolitans, stepchild of the Republicans. These two forces seemed more interested in fighting each other than actually policing the city (a situation that would be rectified two years later when the two forces were finally combined). The gangsters ran wild during what was an especially dark and turbulent year that would culminate with financial calamity for all when a run on the banks caused a massive Depression in the fall of 1857. Before it was over, scores of financial institutions and businesses would go under, with liabilities exceeding $120,000,000.
In the midst of all this, a rivalry that had been roiling between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys for more than a decade finally boiled over when, on the evening of July 4, a large contingent of Dead Rabbits and Roach Guards attacked the clubhouse of the Bowery Boys and Atlantic Guard at 42 Bowery. An all-night battle raged unencumbered by police interference, in which the nativist side appeared to prevail. The next day the gang war continued, with literally hundreds of soldiers on each side. “Brickbats, stones and clubs were flying thickly around…” reported the New York Times. “Men ran wildly about brandishing firearms. Wounded men lay on the sidewalk and were trampled upon. Now the Rabbits would make a combined rush and force their antagonist up Bayard Street to the Bowery. Then the fugitives, being reinforced, would turn on their pursuers and compel a retreat…”
Police finally arrived on the scene and advanced on the gangsters with unparalleled savagery, forcing scores of Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys into the tenements and up the stairs to the roofs, clubbing them at every turn. One fleeing gangster was knocked off the roof of a house on Baxter Street; his skull was fractured when he hit the sidewalk, where his gang enemies promptly stomped him to death.
Eventually, at 7 P.M. on the second night of rioting, the police in desperation turned to Captain Isaiah Rynders, who as leader of mob forces in the Sixth Ward was believed to have influence with both sides. Rynders arrived on the scene and stood before the barricades on Baxter Street.
“I implore you to end this carnage,” he declared to the rioters. “You are killing each other for what purpose? To what
end?”
The gangsters, including those on the Dead Rabbits side, threw rocks and missiles at Rynders, chasing him from the scene. The riot finally ended of its own volition an hour later, but the dye had been cast. Both symbolically and in reality, the Captain’s very public rebuke signaled the end of his influence in the Bloody Ould Sixth. From this point on, Rynders was out; Morrissey was in.6
Out of the ashes of the Great Riot of 1857 arose the first true Irish Mob boss in American history. As such, Morrissey’s first order of business was to expand his gambling empire. In the nineteenth century, gambling was (as illegal booze and narcotics would be for later generations of mobsters) the secret elixir that fueled the entire underworld, as well as upperworld politicians who relied on money and muscle provided by the gambling czars. Morrissey ran two kinds of establishments: gambling dens for the poor, which consisted mostly of card games, policy, and craps, and upscale parlors for the rich, who favored faro, bagatelle, and roulette.
Morrissey achieved his greatest success when he traveled north of New York City to Saratoga Springs, a budding resort town. Having been raised in nearby Troy, Old Smoke knew the area well. Located near the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, Saratoga Springs was a beautiful setting where the hoi polloi came to relax in the local hot springs. The Five Points mob boss astutely surmised that the town needed a first class gambling parlor. He cobbled together money from a number of wealthy investors and opened the majestic Saratoga Club House, which immediately became known as “the finest gaming establishment in America.”
Saratoga Springs was a conservative place, home to the first registered temperance society in the United States. Morrissey’s arrival in town was not welcomed by all. There were attempts by reformists to close the Saratoga Club House. Old Smoke countered these attacks with lavish gifts, i.e. payoffs, to the town, the churches, civic organizations, politicians, and other public officials. Remarked one local newspaper columnist in admiration, “Morrissey divides the profits of his sinning with the good people of the village with a generous hand.” Thanks in part to the Irish Mob boss, Saratoga Springs would go on to build many fancy hotels, a spectacular race track, numerous fine dining establishments, and become one of the most popular destinations in the history of sporting men.
The success of the Saratoga Club House made Morrissey fabulously wealthy. The once destitute ghetto tough and immigrant runner became a leading representative of “mobster chic,” the first of his generation to establish what would become a proclivity among prominent gangsters for centuries to come. He presented himself in a manner both nouveau riche and gauche. He grew a full, neatly manicured black beard in the manner of General Ulysses S. Grant and wore sparkling jewelry—a diamond studded cravat, diamond rings on his fingers, and a gold-plated pocket watch dangling from his vest. He favored striped, high-waist pants, which he combined with a swallow-tail dinner jacket and a beaver-pelt overcoat, topped off with a mink bowler hat. To go along with his ostentatious personal appearance, Morrissey was squired around town in what could only be described as the pink Cadillac of its day—a gold-embroidered carriage, custom-built in New Jersey and priced at over $2,000.
Along with his garish personal style, Morrissey exhibited another trait that would become a staple of rags-to-riches mobsters for generations to come: a desire to be accepted by aristocratic society. Born and raised in squalor, Morrissey believed that he could buy his way into high society. He was seen around town with men like Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and August Belmont, the wealthy WASP industrialists who patronized his Saratoga Club House. These men may have been willing to go slumming with Morrissey, the garish Irish Mob boss, but they were not his friend. Vanderbilt allegedly gave Morrissey a bogus stock tip that cost him thousands. When Morrissey tried to buy a house in the aristocratic part of town, a local syndicate led by Belmont banded together and bought the property out from under him. Morrissey was shocked to find out that beyond the gold-leaf walls of his gaming establishment, he was, to the reigning WASPs and their socialite companions, just another Paddy.
It was a hard lesson for Morrissey. Being a famous gambling impresario might make him rich, but it would not bring him acceptance among the social elite. For this, Old Smoke surmised, the real key to his aspirations was the world of politics. In 1868 Morrissey called in all his chits as Irish Mob boss and New York state gambling czar and got himself elected to Congress. Two years later he was reelected by an overwhelming majority.
Morrissey’s political fortunes were aligned with none other than William Marcy Tweed, former captain of the Big Six Fire Engine Company and an alderman who had risen to become grand sachem, or boss, of Tammany Hall in 1863. Old Smoke’s endorsement of Tweed, a native-born Presbyterian of Scottish descent, was an important feather in Tweed’s cap. The Irish Catholic vote was huge. Morrissey’s support was a decisive element in Boss Tweed’s ability to deliver voters to the polls, which was the backbone of Tammany’s power. As payback, Morrissey became a prominent member of Tweed’s inner circle, known as the Ring. It was also Old Smoke’s understanding that, as Tweed’s Celtic liaison, he would be in line to assume the position of the first Irish Catholic boss of Tammany Hall.
During an eight-year stretch from 1863 to 1871, Boss Tweed and his inner circle proceeded to plunder the city of New York like no political entity ever had before—or ever would again. Tweed himself became a billionaire, amassing his fortune through a mind-boggling array of graft, kickbacks, rigged bidding on city contracts, boodling, and money from illegal enterprises such as gambling and prostitution. Tammany Hall under Tweed set the standard for what would come to be known as gangster politics. The Boss and his Ring controlled the levers of power by determining who would and who would not be elected to office. They did so largely through the use of thuggery and terror on election day. Once in office, Tweed’s Ring got rich through control of the municipal government, the county government, the judicial system, the governorship, and the all-important Board of Audit, which supervised all city and county expenditures.
For a good while, the public stood idly by while Tweed and his crew siphoned off staggering amounts of money from city bonds and other pork barrel scams simply because they got things done. Under Tweed the municipal bureaucracy grew as never before, with the attendant city jobs and political opportunities for members of the tribe. The Irish, in particular, benefited greatly, and men with Hibernian names began to dominate Tammany’s vast ward structure, holding down key positions as ward committeemen, ward bosses, and precinct captains.
Eventually, Tweed’s own waste and arrogance brought him down. He bullied his own Board of Supervisors into building a massive, Victorian-style court house that no one wanted, then padded the construction costs to $13 million and skimmed the overage for himself. This typical act of profligacy prompted a series of damning articles in the New York Times. Aided by cartoonist Thomas Nast, who in Harper’s Weekly portrayed the Boss and his Ring as corpulent hogs slopping at the trough of public beneficence, the tide finally turned against the Machine. Tweed’s legitimate accomplishments—the fact that he’d presided over some of the city’s most far-reaching public works projects such as improved water supplies and sewage disposal for the poor—were buried under an avalanche of vitriol and negative press.
In the early 1870s, the Boss got his comeuppance when back-to-back civil and criminal indictments laid bare the full extent of his plundering. Six million dollars in stolen funds was traced directly to Tweed. It was alleged that the Boss and his Ring together had defrauded the municipal government out of $50 million (equivalent—conservatively—to $500 million in today’s currency). Facing major prison time, Tweed went on the lam, was eventually caught in Spain, and extradited to the United States, where he languished behind bars. As part of a plea arrangement, he eventually came clean, and in 1877, during an investigation of the Tweed Ring by the Board of Aldermen, the boss turned on his former protégé and Irish liaison, Old Smoke Morrissey.
In a long wr
itten statement, the disgraced Tammany boss identified Morrissey as a skillful practitioner of mass voter fraud and early bag man for the Ring. Furthermore, declared Tweed, Morrissey was “a proprietor and owner of the worst places in the city of New York, the resort of thieves and persons of the lowest character. Perhaps one of the worst faults that can be attributed to me is having been the means of keeping his gambling houses protected from the police.”
Politically speaking, Old Smoke was cooked. By aligning himself with Tweed, the undisputed gambling czar of New York had backed the wrong horse. Ostracized by his rival, Honest John Kelly, who replaced Tweed to become the coveted first Irish Catholic Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, Morrissey made one last stab at glory. He broke from Tammany and formed his own political organization called Young Democracy. His efforts were fraught with internecine struggles, and he was only partially successful. Though he was elected to the state senate in 1875 and reelected two years later, his personal life deteriorated into alcoholism and an early form of dementia brought on by his years of physical punishment in the boxing ring. With his defenses weakened, he contracted a severe case of pneumonia, and, on May 1, 1877, after being bedridden for weeks, he cried out in his sleep and then expired. At the time of his death, Old Smoke Morrissey was forty-seven years old.
In his short eventful life, this former son of the Old Sod, street tough, boxing champ, vice lord, and skilled political operative, created a prototype for the upwardly mobile Irish American mobster. Proud, adventurous, street smart, and unencumbered by any sense of fealty to the Protestant work ethic, he became a leader among men. Although his life did not end as he would have liked, Morrissey’s years were marked by many substantial though legally and morally questionable achievements. Most of all, he played a key role in helping to create a criminal framework by which the American underworld would prosper for decades to come. He also showed that, by combining physical prowess and criminal audacity with legitimate political influence, a man could rise up out of the gutter and take on the world.
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