The employer’s enthusiasm was based on avarice and greed. In the antebellum South, slaves cost money. The slave owners considered their Negroes too valuable to risk at such dangerous work (especially their top-of-the-line house Negroes). Better to get an Irishman, who had no choice but to accept the rough and dirty work. If an Irishman died on the job, he could be replaced at no cost, since starving Paddies were arriving by the boatload on a near daily basis.
The biggest project of the era was the New Basin Canal, a navigational outlet conceived by merchants and promoters to link Lake Pontchartrain with the Mighty Mississippi. Irish labor from all over the country was recruited. Over a four-year period, hundreds, if not thousands, of Paddies slipped into the cypress swamp and dug on a straight line toward the lake. Given the rampant cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, everyone knew the mortality rate would be high. The precise cost in terms of human lives can never be known, for even contemporaries argued over the number of diggers who died. One account stated that 3,000 Irishmen were buried along the canal, while another quoted a figure closer to 30,000. A popular song of the era put the number somewhere in between:
Ten thousand micks, they swung their picks,
To dig the New Canal
But the choleray was stronger ’n they,
An’ twice it killed them awl.
The work conditions were disease-ridden and abysmal, and the living environment for the workers wasn’t much better. At the height of the post-famine “invasion,” destitute immigrants moved into shacks abandoned by Negroes in an extremely poor section of what was known as the Third Municipality. The city at the time was divided into three municipalities, each with its own council (board of aldermen) and executive officer (called a recorder but, in effect, a police court judge). The First Municipality was the Latin Creole district, the Second Municipality or uptown area was regarded as the American and progressive quarter, and the Poor Third was for immigrants—mostly German and Irish.
The crowded, unsanitary living conditions were a nightmare. In the spring of 1847 the Times Picayune reported that “a small house in Dauphine Street contains about fifty immigrants, worn down by starvation and disease to mere skeletons…some of them…eating straw that they gathered in the street.” Newly arrived passengers on the plague ships were described as “food for fever,” which certainly rang true in 1853, when one of many yellow fever epidemics devastated the city. Yellow fever is a deadly virus transmitted through mosquitoes; once bitten, the victim carries a parasite in his red blood cells that causes fever, jaundice, physical debilitation, hemorrhaging, and possibly death.
The disease originated in the swamps among the working men and then spread. There was no cure. Before the sweltering summer of 1853 had come to an end, twelve thousand people died, of whom one-third were Irish. Among working men, seven out of ten fell to the sting of yellow jack.2
Disease led to hunger, hunger to despair. Those lucky enough to survive were left emotionally and spiritually scarred. The famine refugees acquired some of the characteristics of a hunted animal. One of the many who had been reduced to begging on Canal Street expressed his plight to a reporter: “What’ll I do!? I have no place to go and no means but what I beg.”
Out of this bitch’s brew of slave labor, disease, and squalor arose the city’s criminal underworld. New Orleans had always been a wild and licentious place, a haven for pirates, international adventurers, riverboat gamblers, professional snake oil salesmen, and the like. The great Irish rabble merely put their own spin on things.
The earliest record of gang activity in the city can be traced back as far as 1834, when a back-of-town gang called the Corkonions waged a bloody war with another Hibernian gang known as the United Irishmen. Like the early Five Points gangs in New York, the Corkonions and United Irishmen were offshoots of Ireland’s rural terror societies, which in recent years had given rise to the Young Ireland Movement, a determined effort to free Ireland from the yoke of British rule. In the Old Country, these gangs were engaged in a war of resistance. In New Orleans, their activities usually revolved around labor-related issues. The war between the Corkonions and the United Irishmen had been fomented by a sugar refinery company that wanted a canal dug and encouraged underbidding between gangs of Irish diggers. In February 1834, the gangs turned on each other, resulting in four deaths and numerous arrests after the City Guard was called in to quell the riot.
By the 1850s, Irishmen had themselves become labor contractors, and the labor riots were mostly a thing of the past. Gang activity was now more commercial, and it was generally centralized in one area: the highly colorful Gallatin Street district of gambling dens, concert-saloons, dance houses, and abundant bordellos.
The district is long gone now, with little or no trace of its ribald past, but from the early 1840s to the mid-1870s, Gallatin Street thrived on vice and sin of every variety, with nary a legitimate business in sight. In the words of author Herbert Asbury, the district “was completely filled with barrelhouses where for five cents a man could get not a meager tumblerful of liquor, but all he could drink; dance houses which were also bordellos and gin mills; and sailors’ boarding houses from which seaman were occasionally shanghaied…. From dawn to dusk the district slept off its debauches behind closed shutters; from dusk to dawn the dives roared full blast, and Gallatin Street was crowded with countrymen, sailors, and steamboat men seeking women and diversion. And they in their turn were sought by a horde of harlots, sneak thieves, garroters who openly carried their deadly strangling cords, and footpads with slung shots looped about their wrists. There was crime and depravity in every inch of Gallatin Street; the stranger who entered it at Ursuline Avenue with money in his pocket and came out at Barracks with his wealth intact and his skull uncracked had performed a feat which bordered on the miraculous.”
The most notorious gang on Gallatin Street went by the name the Live Oak Boys, so called because they carried what the New Orleans True Delta described as “elaborately carved oaken cudgels.” These cudgels, no doubt, were in fact shillelaghs, the weapon of choice for the rural resistance societies back in the Old Country.
The Live Oaks were formed in 1858 by Red Bill Wilson, a well-known criminal figure in the district who carried a knife concealed in his bushy, red beard. The gang was not a large, politically oriented organization like those found in New York, but rather a loose collection of rowdies with no recognized leaders. Among the gang’s members were a tough bunch of fighters, including Bill Swan, Jack Lyons, Jimmy O’Brien, his brother Hugh O’Brien, and Hugh’s sons, Matt and Hugh, Jr.
It was the O’Brien family who achieved the greatest infamy and brought the Live Oak Boys into the realm of legend. In 1867, Jimmy O’Brien was the first to enter the annals of New Orleans criminal lore when, after a night of drinking and thieving with fellow Live Oak Henry Thompson, he sought to rob Thompson in his sleep. Thompson awoke to find O’Brien rifling through his pockets. When he struggled, Jimmy calmly pushed a knife deep into Thompson’s heart and continued his search. Jimmy O’Brien might have gotten away with this murder if he hadn’t been seen by a Negro and a small boy. Their testimony at trial was enough to seal O’Brien’s fate; he was convicted and sent to the penitentiary for twenty years. He died in prison.
Next up was Jimmy’s brother Hugh, who stole a rowboat and set out from the Dumaine Street wharf with dreams of becoming a pirate. He was killed when he tried to rob a fisherman on the Mississippi River.
Hugh left behind his two sons, Matt and Hugh, Jr., who were then nineteen and twenty-one years old, respectively. Unlike the thousands of Irish immigrants who slaved away in the swamps every day, the O’Brien brothers and the rest of their crew were known for never having performed a stroke of honest work. Their nights were devoted to carousing and brawling in Gallatin Street dives, their days to sleeping, lounging, and planning new crimes. They were especially feared and disliked by the dance-hall proprietors; a night rarely passed when they didn’t raid one or more of the district�
�s resorts. Usually, when the Live Oaks came charging into a dance house brandishing their oaken shillelaghs and looking for a fight, the bouncers, bartenders, musicians, and customers rushed out the back door. The gangsters were left to wreck and rob the place at their leisure.
One establishment that welcomed the O’Brien brothers and the rest of the Live Oaks was Bill Swan’s Fireproof Coffee House. Swan, a member of the gang, was the city’s premiere promoter of dogfighting and rat-killing, an illegal though popular sport of the era. Swan advertised his events through printed handbills that were handed out in neighborhood saloons. One such flyer advertising an event to be held on March 10, 1879 read in part:
Grand national rat-killing match for $100, to take place at Bill Swan’s saloon, corner Esplanade and Peters streets, third district, Sunday afternoon, at four o’clock, precisely.
Harry Jennings, of New York, has matched a certain New York dog, whose fighting weight is twenty-three pounds, to kill twelve full-grown rats per minute, for five consecutive minutes, being one of the greatest feats a dog can accomplish—sixty full-sized rats in five minutes…
In the backyard of Swan’s property was constructed a pit twelve feet long and ten feet wide, with two-foot high side walls, and a viewing area to accommodate hundreds. On the afternoon of March 10, dozens were in attendance, though, as reported by the Times Picayune, they were not exactly high rollers: “The rougher element of life predominated…the men representing business interests and the gentlemen of the town might have been counted upon the fingers of either hand.”
At four o’clock, the rat master released his rodents into the pit, where a dog named Skelper killed twenty-one rats in three minutes and forty-five seconds, but retreated yelping in pain when one rat nipped him on the nose. Another dog was brought in to take on the remaining rats. The audience cheered on the dog, or the rats, depending on the nature of their wager. The only big winner was Bill Swan, the proprietor, who gave a percentage of the take to the Live Oak Boys.
Matt and Hugh O’Brien reigned as leaders of the gang for years, though death and imprisonment thinned their ranks considerably. The wanton violence that distinguished the gang was bound to catch up with the O’Briens, which is exactly what happened on the night of October 2, 1886.
While drinking in Bill Swan’s saloon, the two brothers become involved in a bitter quarrel. Their brother-in-law Johnny Hackett and Jack Lyons, a fellow Live Oak and Gallatin Street old-timer, tried to intercede—in a fashion. While Matt shouted abuse at his brother, Hackett handed Hugh a knife and said, “Here. Shut him up with this.”
Matt saw the knife and clammed up. After a few more drinks, the brothers left the saloon on good terms, walking together into Gallatin Street. A few yards from the corner of Barracks Street they stopped and talked for a moment, then Matt drew a pistol and shot Hugh in the side.
“Hughy was drunk,” Matt O’Brien told the police when he was arrested a few hours later, “and he was goin’ to do me up, and I shot him to keep him from doin’ it. I didn’t give him no cause, only he was drunk and wanted blood.”
Hugh was not seriously hurt and left New Orleans to avoid testifying against his brother. Even so, based on eyewitness testimony, Matt was convicted at trial of assault less than mayhem and sentenced to the penitentiary. With one O’Brien gone and the other in prison, the Live Oak Boys drifted from the scene.
Violence in New Orleans did not come to an end. In fact, robbery, muggings, and murder continued to be so common throughout New Orleans that one parish sheriff described the city to a visiting British journalist as “a perfect hell on earth.”
The sheriff, presumably, was speaking metaphorically, while the city’s Irish inhabitants were living in a more literal state of hell that began with hunger and exile, continued with squalor, death, and disease, and was headed God-only-knew where.
Gambling Men, Wharf Rats, and Ladies of Ill Repute
Ruffians like the Live Oak Boys were the scourge not only of the police, but of the many other underworld figures who were trying to make their living off the cornucopia of sin and vice that flourished in the French Quarter. There was no Tammany Hall to organize the district’s criminal structure and link it to a larger political framework. Compared to New York City, New Orleans was small—barely one-third the size in terms of population. There was no Mob as such, no overriding set of rules that officially bound the underworld and upperworld together. Cops, politicians, and city officials were definitely still on the take, but unlike New York City where the vice rackets were spread far and wide, the French Quarter was a universe unto itself, a delicate microcosm with an ethnic polyglot of independent mid- and low-level operators seeking to establish their niche.
Gambling, of course, was a mainstay in the French Quarter and had been since the earliest days of the Mississippi River paddle boats. By the 1850s, when New Orleans became a major port for American armies operating in Mexico and a principle point of departure for the California Gold Rush, the city was thronged with soldiers, adventurers, and fortune hunters en route to and from San Francisco by way of Nicaragua and the Isthmus of Panama. The bulk of this immense transient population was composed of sharpies, bunco men, and reckless young fellows looking for quick ways to double their bank rolls—in other words, they were looking for suckers.3
One man who made the most of the city’s hospitality toward anyone looking to turn a card or toss the dice was an Irishman of the Protestant persuasion named Price McGrath. A native of Versailles, Kentucky, a small town near Lexington, McGrath started out as an aspiring tailor, but soon abandoned that profession to devote himself to the life of sporting men. He began as a steamboat card player and later became a roper and dealer of faro at gambling houses in Lexington, Frankfort, Louisville, and Cincinnati. In 1855 he arrived in New Orleans, and, with $70,000 to his name, founded McGrath & Company, a luxurious palace of chance at 4 Carondelet Street. With croupiers that wore frock coats in the afternoon and full evening dress after dinner, it was the sort of establishment where riffraff like the Live Oak Boys were most definitely not welcome.
Through judicious payoffs to the necessary authorities—politicians, police, and various officials of state and city government—McGrath & Company’s palatial house was in operation for six years, and during that time the annual profits ranged from $80,000 to $100,000. The success of Price McGrath’s operation spawned many imitators, which was a great boon to the city’s growing netherworld of commercialized vice. In many ways, gambling in New Orleans—and other American cities, for that matter—served the same function that narcotics would a century later: as the economic engine that powered the underground economy. Organizations like McGrath & Company set the standard for dozens of lesser establishments catering to men of more modest means. Through municipal kickbacks and graft, money from gambling generated an underworld cash flow that kept the upperworld fat and happy.
Price McGrath was an entrepreneur. With profits from his gambling parlor on Carondelet Street, he ventured north to New York City and introduced himself to none other than Old Smoke Morrissey, who was at the time organizing his syndicate of gambling operators. Together the two men opened a gambling house at 5 West 24th Street that was highly successful. In 1867, with Morrissey increasingly preoccupied with his Saratoga Springs operations and preparing for his initial foray into electoral politics, McGrath sold his interest in the Manhattan gambling parlor and returned to his native Kentucky, where he became a famous breeder of thoroughbred horses at a stud farm he called McGrathiana.
Back in New Orleans, the French Quarter continued to percolate. If there was a racket that rivaled the world of cards, dice, and roulette as an essential aspect of the local economy, it had to be “the word’s oldest profession.” In many ways, prostitution had given birth to the French Quarter. Without the lure of the harlot, it’s doubtful that the many cabarets, dance houses, and concert saloons of the district could have sustained themselves. Of course, prostitution was not restricted to the world-fam
ous Vieux Carré. By 1870, when New Orleans had a population of 190,000 inhabitants, bordellos of every variety—from the ten-dollar parlor house to the fifteen-cent Negro chippy joint—were running openly in virtually every part of town. According to Asbury, “there was scarcely a block in New Orleans which did not contain at least one brothel or assignation house.”
For the young, destitute Irishwomen arriving in New Orleans in the post-famine years, the business of prostitution was both a horrible trap and a means of economic advancement. Immigrants just off the boat were met by assorted wharf rats, among them seemingly friendly women with names like Bridget Fury, Nellie McGee, and Irish Suze. These seemingly sympathetic women steered the newly arrived young girls toward lodging for the night—lodging that invariably turned out to be a house of ill repute.
As a profession, prostitution was certainly demeaning, fraught with potential violence and disease, but in many ways the harlots of nineteenth century New Orleans were better off than the escorts and streetwalkers of today. Many establishments were relatively safe and well-protected. The nearly legitimate or at least ubiquitous status of the profession allowed for mostly above board interactions between patron and prostitute. Occasionally, a young, Irish lass even rose to a level of prosperity and renown as a madam in the red light, lace curtain world of the New Orleans bordello.
One such woman went by the name of Fanny Sweet, a legendary figure in antebellum New Orleans.4 Not only was she an important figure in local red light lore, but Fanny Sweet was also an adventuress of great renown, a practitioner of voodoo, a professional grifter who slept with a knife and pistol under her pillow, and, according to a rather florid description in the True Delta, “a modern Lucretia Borgia…a hardened murderess…one of the most remarkable female desperados ever known.” For pure cunning and what would today be called sociopathic behavior, Fanny Sweet deserves mention among the most renowned gangsters of her generation.
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