It was a lesson many of the lowly gangsters of Five Points still needed to learn.
Gangs, Gangsters, and the Women Who Love Them
In many ways, John Morrissey was the exception to the rule. Through sheer ambition and force of personality, he came to symbolize the era in which he lived. There were few coattails in the underworld, however. Morrissey’s individual success did not necessarily translate into new levels of acceptance and opportunity for the Irish American gangster. By and large, gangs continued to proliferate and were refueled from the nether regions of America’s ongoing urban nightmare. By the 1880s, the squalid slum conditions that had given rise to an earlier generation of Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies hadn’t changed much. In Five Points, the Old Brewery had been torn down, with all traces of its sordid past eradicated, but tenement life had become more stifling and spread well beyond the bounds of the Sixth Ward.
In How the Other Half Lives, photojournalist Jacob A. Riis’s pioneering chronicle of slum life in late nineteenth century New York City, the gangster mentality was shown to be a natural consequence of tenement life. With nearly 33,000 densely-crowded tenement houses on the Lower East Side alone, children had little choice but to lead their lives in the street. A pack mentality ruled. Riis wrote
Every corner has its gang, not always on the best of terms with the rivals on the next block, but all with a common programme: defiance of law and order, and with a common ambition: to get “pinched,” i.e., arrested, so as to pose as heroes before their fellows. A successful raid on a grocer’s till is a good mark, “doing up” a policeman cause for promotion. The gang is an institution in New York.
For Riis, the roots of gang life were painfully obvious.
The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement-house growth. It was born there, endowed with a heritage of instinctive hostility to restraint by a generation that sacrificed home to freedom, or left its country for its country’s good. The tenement received and nursed the seed…New York’s tough represents the essence of reaction against the old and the new oppression, nursed in the rank soil of the slums. Its gangs are made of the American-born sons of English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang.
In the years following John Morrissey’s death in 1878 to the end of the century, the Whyos were by far the most notorious gang in New York. Like the Dead Rabbits before them, the Whyos were a conglomeration of numerous smaller street corner crews who, according to Riis, met in “club rooms…generally a tenement, sometimes under a pier or dump, to carouse, play cards, and plan their raids; their ‘fences,’ who dispose of the stolen property.” In a city that was now fully one quarter Irish, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement had been simply overwhelmed and chased out of town. The Whyos were thus less of a protection organization based on traditions founded in the Old Country and more of a criminal organization whose sole reason for existing was profit and plunder.
They were led by the two Dannys—Danny Lyons and Danny Driscoll—and presided over a sprawling domain that seemed to take in most of lower Manhattan. Their membership, almost all of whom had nicknames (a common feature of the gangs in general), included Red Rocks Farrell, Googy Corcoran, Bull Hurley, Hoggy Walsh, and Slops Connolly (not to be confused with Baboon Connolly). Piker Ryan, another Whyo who helped make the gang famous, achieved a kind of immortality when he was arrested with a “gangster price list” in his pocket that was subsequently published in the Police Gazette.
PUNCHING….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….$2
BOTH EYES BLACKED….….….….….….….….….….….….4
NOSE AND JAW BROKE….….….….….….….….….….….10
JACKED OUT (knocked out with a blackjack)….….….….15
EAR CHAWED OFF….….….….….….….….….….….….….….15
LEG OR ARM BROKE….….….….….….….….….….….….19
SHOT IN LEG….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….25
STAB….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….25
DOING THE BIG JOB….….….….….….….….100 AND UP7
The Whyos were racketeers, a new breed of street-level capitalist criminal. The term itself comes from the word “racket,” which was a public function—a party or a dance—held by criminals under the guise of being a fund-raiser for a worthy cause.8 Eventually, the term was expanded to infer the use of physical intimidation or political pressure to squeeze protection money out of merchants. The Whyos collected tribute payments from saloon keepers and shop owners in the area in return for services rendered a la Piker Ryan’s price list.
Racketeering was one example of how the underworld had become much more organized and stratified thanks to pioneers like John Morrissey. The organizational structure of the New York underworld was in many ways a precursor of professional baseball. The tenant neighborhood street gangs represented the minor leagues, where an enterprising hoodlum could establish a reputation and “show his stuff.” If a gangster distinguished himself at the street level, he advanced to the majors and became a mobster, which was a position more connected to the levers of political and economic power. If the mobster was really good, he got to play for Tammany Hall, the New York Yankees of the underworld. With Tammany Hall, he could become an all-star, get filthy rich, and even—if he were truly gifted—make it to the Mobster Hall of Fame like Old Smoke Morrissey.
You could also look at street-level racketeers like the Whyos as simply mimicking the mentality, if not the tactics, of America’s business elite. Early robber barons like J. P. Morgan, Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, and the Rockefellers were hard-nosed men whose fortunes were built on market speculation, corporate profiteering, and organized union busting. Through burgeoning industries like coal, oil, steel, and railroad building, these men enforced a kind of labor Darwinism that created a chasm between workers and management that would become a defining characteristic of American life. Beyond the boundaries of New York’s slums, the era of the Whyos unfolded at the tail end of the Gilded Age, a time of unbridled consumerism and accumulation of capital. Taking their lead from the tenor of the times, the gangsters were a gutter-snipe version of the Money Trust, as it would come to be known, a monopoly of industrial interests dedicated to the principle that a man must fight hard—by hook or by crook—for his piece of the pie and fight even harder to accumulate more and more.
Of course, the men of the Money Trust were mysterious figures rarely covered in the newspapers; it would be years before many of these men were even known by name. Gangsters, however, tended to perform their activities right out in the streets and were derided or glorified on a daily basis in the newspapers.
In fact, by the 1880s, Irish gangs in general had become so notorious that they achieved a kind of mythical status in the press. In Manhattan, most of the city’s broadsheets had a daily column that covered the criminal courts and another called the police blotter that relayed arrest reports from the previous night’s criminal activity in various wards around the city. The columns paid special attention to the exploits of the gangs. There were the river pirate gangs, most notably the Daybreak Boys, who were the bane of the harbor police. There were regional neighborhood gangs: the Hudson Dusters, the Gas House Gang, the Parlor Mob, and the Gophers (pronounced “goofers”). The Gophers were only beginning to take shape in the wilds of Hell’s Kitchen, a burgeoning slum on Manhattan’s West Side. Of all the gangs, none was mentioned anywhere near as often as the Whyos. For a time it appeared as if every jack-roller, pickpocket, sneak thief, panel house operator, and jaywalker in the state of New York was a member of the “notorious Whyo Gang.”
The aggrandizement of the Whyos and other gangs in the press was great for the cops and government lawyers whose reputations were enhanced by the pursuit and prosecution of what had been identified as “a national scourge.” It was not so great for the gangsters themselves, whose street-level
criminal shenanigans were now part of a vast underworld conspiracy that came to be known as the Shame of the Cities.
Two well-known gangsters who certainly did not benefit from the unprecedented notoriety of the Whyos were the two Dannys, Lyons and Driscoll. Of the two, Lyons inspired more fear. He was also considered to be devilishly handsome, with a mustache that was always freshly waxed and curled up at the ends (Driscoll sported an identical mustache). Lyons was a pimp and whoremaster who strolled the streets of the Sixth Ward with his stable of girls at his side. Among his most popular girls were Lizzie the Dove, Gentle Maggie, and Bunty Kate.
Lyons was always on the lookout for fresh recruits. Sometime in early 1887, he seduced and enlisted the talents of a new girl named Pretty Kitty McGown, a virginal redhead whose skin was white as alabaster. No one knew how he did it, but Lyons had a Svengali-like ability to bring women into the fold. Some credited his good looks and natural charms; others said he used drugs and other forms of coercion. In any event, in order to become a part of Lyons’ “white slave ring,” Pretty Kitty McGown left her boyfriend, Joseph Quinn. Quinn became enraged and vowed to get revenge against Lyons. For several months, he and the Whyo leader were gunning for one another. They finally came face to face on the morning of July 5. In Paradise Square, the heart of the Five Points, Quinn declared, “Daniel Lyons, you’re a whoremaster and a coward and a corrupter of women to boot. You will pay for your deeds.”
According to an eyewitness, Lyons was attacked by Quinn. In self defense, Danny pulled out his revolver and proceeded to shoot Joe Quinn dead in the middle of Paradise Square.
Immediately after the shooting, Lyons went on the lam, hiding out in tenement basements in Brooklyn and in the sage brush hinterlands of Long Island. His brothel operation fell into disrepair. Without the pimp master’s guidance, the girls quarreled. One night, Gentle Maggie and Lizzie the Dove got into a bitter shouting match at a saloon on the Bowery.
“You’re nothing but a filthy whore,” said Gentle Maggie.
“You bet I am,” replied Lizzie the Dove, “but at least I’m not a diseased filthy whore like you.”
Gentle Maggie ended the argument by stabbing the Dove in the throat with a cheese knife. Lizzie died. Her last words were that she would meet Gentle Maggie in hell and scratch her eyes out.
Shortly thereafter, Danny Lyons was captured and put on trial. The evidence suggested that Lyons—admittedly a disreputable criminal and all-round bad person—was merely defending himself on the day in question. As coleader of the notorious Whyo gang, however, he never stood a chance. Lyons was found guilty of murder and sentenced to the gallows.
Around the same time Lyons had been having it out with Joe Quinn; Danny Driscoll, the other leader of the Whyos, was embroiled in a situation that would have seemed fantastical were it not so strikingly similar to the predicament faced by his partner.
Late one evening in a Five Points saloon, Driscoll had been approached by Beezy Garrity, a comely, young whore who worked at a cheap panel house in Whyo territory at 183 Hester Street. Among the most notorious of prostitution enterprises, panel houses were usually located in an out-of-the-way residence. They had rooms with sliding walls that hid creepers, or sneak thieves. Once a john was preoccupied in bed with a hooker, a creeper would come out from behind the sliding wall and quietly rifle through the unsuspecting john’s belongings, stealing money, jewelry, or whatever else was there for the taking.
Beezy was upset because she had been ripped off by the operator of the panel house, an Irish immigrant named John McCarthy. “He took my earnings and kicked me out in the street,” said Beezy.
Despite his long criminal record that included a seven-year stint in prison for grand larceny, Danny Driscoll was considered something of a gentle soul. Nonetheless, Beezy’s claims of mistreatment raised his ire.
“By God, let’s go see the bastard,” he suggested.
Around 3:30 in the morning, Driscoll and Beezy went to the panel house and confronted John McCarthy. A shoot-out ensued. McCarthy escaped out a back window. Driscoll, while attempting to shoot McCarthy, accidentally plugged Beezy Garrity in the stomach with his .44-caliber revolver.
Beezy lingered in the hospital for a few days, swearing with her last breath that it was McCarthy—not Danny Driscoll—who had shot her. Then she died.
Driscoll was put on trial for murder. The most damaging evidence against him came from Beezy Garrity’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Sullivan. Although Beezy had, before her death, publicly maintained the lie that McCarthy pulled the trigger, her mother’s testimony refuted that claim. Mrs. Margaret Sullivan had always believed that it was the Whyo gang who had lured her daughter into a life of prostitution. On the stand, dressed in black, she testified to having had the following conversation with her dying daughter at St. Vincent’s Hospital:
MOTHER: Beezy, I knew something like this would happen to you for not doing as I told you.
DAUGHTER: Mother, what’s the use of you talking to me that way now; I’m going to die.
MOTHER: There’s many a person been shot before and are still alive.
DAUGHTER: But not with such a ball as the one I was shot with. You had to shoot the pistol like this—and Beezy placed both hands together.
MOTHER: Who did it to you?
DAUGHTER: ’Twas Danny Driscoll done the deed.
Driscoll was finished. Even though the killing was an accident (manslaughter, not murder), this was Danny Driscoll—Danny Lyons’s sidekick and coleader of the Whyo gang. Driscoll was found guilty of the murder of Beezy Garrity and sentenced to hang.
When the date for his execution arrived, Driscoll spent his last hours writing letters to friends, his wife, and his mother. He also wrote a poem dedicated to Mary, a Sister of Mercy who was kind to him during his imprisonment.
At 7:15 on the morning of January 23, 1888, Driscoll was led to the gallows. His last words were “May God have mercy on my soul.”
At 7:42 A.M., he was executed; three hundred pounds of iron jerked him three feet into the air and the thin rope of rare Italian hemp snapped his neck like a twig. He died in under two minutes.
Eight months later, the other Danny was led down the same hallway to the same gallows. The rope was placed around his neck, and the trap door dropped open. Lyons bucked and kicked for a few seconds, then he was gone.
A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle observed “So far as a hanging can be good, it was a good hanging.”
“Hurrah for Big Tim!”
The execution of a prominent gangster always made the papers. With a gang like the Whyos, you could never kill enough of them, or so the reports and editorials seemed to suggest. The irony, of course, was that the more law enforcement sought to eradicate the Whyos, the more press attention they received, until the gang was elevated from the grubby ink of the police blotter to mythical status.
For some people, the notorious reputation of the gang was a godsend. An ambitious ward boss or Tammany assemblyman, for instance, rose or fell in the political arena based on his ability to deliver, which translated into bodies, which translated into votes. Votes were a primary particle of survival in the big city. Votes fed the hungry, gave solace and power to the weak, and, more importantly, opened the door to a vast multitude of patronage jobs that the Irish were determined to use as stepping stones up and out of the slums of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere. Nobody enforced the will of the bosses and delivered votes better than a gang.
Old Smoke Morrissey had already laid the groundwork. An ambitious politician who was conversant with the world of the saloon, the ruffian, and the gambling den, and who could also find a way to organize and bleed the bordellos, the drug dens, and other untoward forms of vice, would be a powerful man indeed. Morrissey had started at the beginning as an immigrant runner and formulated an underworld narrative that included the Dead Rabbits as a kind of Greek chorus. The man who would do the same with the Whyos, benefiting greatly from their reputation for mayhem and their conne
ction to the entire constellation of rackets in Five Points, was a rising young Tammany stalwart named Timothy Daniel Sullivan.
Of the Whyos’ many impromptu club rooms, the most well known was Tim Sullivan’s saloon on Chrystie Street, where, among others, the two Dannys appeared on a nearly daily basis in the years before their respective executions. Sullivan, Lyons, and Driscoll had many things in common: All three were born into considerable poverty in and around the Sixth Ward. All were the children of potato famine immigrants. And all understood the true nature of upward mobility for an Irish Catholic in the New World, none more so than Sullivan.9
Sullivan was born in Five Points on July 23, 1863 and lived with his mother, six siblings, a stepfather, and three boarders in a run-down tenement apartment at 25 Baxter Street, just south of Paradise Square. His mother and father were immigrants from Landsdowne, County Kerry who, upon their arrival, were among the very poorest of the Five Points poor. Sullivan’s stepfather was a ne’er-do-well who contributed little to the survival of the family, leaving Tim, the oldest, as the man of the house.
Young Tim became quite an entrepreneur. He worked as a newspaper delivery boy and had by his early teen years developed a network of contacts among the city’s other newsboys and periodicals dealers. He formed his first business enterprise by giving orphans and runaways just starting out as newsboys their first stack of papers free, both to help the struggling street urchins and to win their loyalty. It worked. “Every new newspaper that came out, I obtained employment on, on account of my connection with the newsdealers all over the city of New York,” Sullivan recalled years later. He took most of what he earned home to his mother but still had enough left over to expand his business interests. His saloon on Chrystie Street was the first of four that he opened in and around the Sixth Ward; one of them, across from the Tombs Police Court, became a center of political activity in a sprawling district that included the city’s primary center of vice, the Bowery.
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