With three of his best cutthroats in the hands of the police, Merrick abdicated as chieftain of the Hookers, and was succeeded by Bum Mahoney. Mahoney was only twenty-three years old, but he was one of the best known and most widely feared thugs along the river front. One of his able lieutenants was Slipsley Ward, who was sent to prison after he had clambered to the deck of a schooner at Pike street and attempted single-handed to overpower her crew of six men. Another member of the Hookers was Piggy Noles, who stole a rowboat, repainted it and then sold it to its original owner; and still another was Nigger Wallace, who came to grief when he tried to rob three men in a rowboat. Unfortunately for him, they were detectives. Mahoney also claimed the allegiance of Old Flaherty, head of a notorious family. Old Flaherty affected long white whiskers and a benevolent smile, but he was one of the most cruel thugs of the Seventh Ward. He was finally sent to the Penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island for stealing, and his wife, a noted shopUfter and pickpocket, soon followed him. Meanwhile their youngest son had been sentenced to fifteen years in Sing Sing for garrotting and highway robbery, and their first-born, seeking new pastures, had acquired a ten-year sentence in the Illinois State Prison.
The police succeeded in driving the gangsters out of the Fourth Ward by the end of the Civil War, but they were not able to accomplish much against the Corlears’ Hook thugs until the Steamboat Squad was organized in 1876, under command of Captain Gastlin. The steamboat Seneca was first employed, and afterward several others were added to the fleet. They cruised up and down the East and Hudson Rivers and through the harbor, their cabins crowded with policemen who set out in rowboats whenever a gangster was sighted, or when an alarm was brought to them. Later steam launches were added to the equipment of the harbor police, and eventually there developed the present Marine Division, probably the most efficient branch of the Police Department.
By 1890 most of the dives in the Water street and Corlears’ Hook districts had closed for lack of patronage, and within the next ten years the police had practically cleared the water front of organized gangs, although there remained, and do to this day, individual thieves of great prowess. But until the rise of the White Hands after the World War there were no gangs worthy of mention in the same breath with the Daybreak Boys. Under the leadership of Dinny Meehan and Wild Bill Lovett the White Hands terrorized the Brooklyn Bridge and Red Hook sections of Brooklyn, on the East River, and made occasional forays against the Manhattan docks and shipping interests. However, the latter ventures were few and were never successful. Wild Bill’s method was simple enough—^barge and wharf owners who refused to pay tribute to the gang were beaten and stabbed, and their property burned, wrecked and looted. Lovett was killed in 1923, three years after Meehan had passed to his reward, by a jealous gangster who aspired to his crown. The gang then came under control of Peg Leg Lonergan, but Lonergan was too ambitious. He undertook a raid upon the headquarters of a South Brooklyn gang and was killed, together with two of his lieutenants. Since then the White Hands have been without a chieftain of note, and have been more or less quiescent.
THE KILLING OF BILL THE BUTCHER
THE MOST brazen of all the criminal elements which infested New York during the pre-Civil War period were the gamblers. They were amazingly prosperous, and were able to pay handsome sums to the political powers for protection, and so operated in open disregard of the fulminations of the reformers. Late in 1850 Jonathan H. Green, a reformed gambler who had become general executive agent of the New York Association for the Suppression of Gambling, was commissioned to survey the situation, and on February 20, 1851, presented his report at a great mass meeting in the Broadway Tabernacle, where speeches were made by Horace Greely and other prominent citizens. Green described the existence and active operation of some six thousand gambling houses, of which more than two hundred were first-class establishments catering to men of standing and sound financial substance. There were also several thousand raffling, lottery, and policy houses, policy having come into great favor as the gambling pastime of the immigrants.
A majority of the first-class houses were on Park Place, Liberty and Vesey streets. Park Row and lower Broadway, and on Barclay street, which is now largely given over to stores selling religious images and literature. Jim Bartolf’s place, notorious as a skinning house, was at No. 10 Park Place, and only a few doors away Jack Wallis, a Chinaman, kept a noted establishment, once the property of French José and Jimmy Berry. Wallis won the business from them on the toss of a coin. Other famous gambling hells were Handsome Sam Suydam’s and Harry Colton’s in Barclay street, Hillman’s in Liberty street, Pat Herne’s and Orlando Moore’s in lower Broadway, and Frank Stuart’s in Park Place. Herne was one of the most successful of the lot, but was himself an incorrigible player, and what he won in his own establishment was quickly lost in the houses of his contemporaries. Many of the first-class resorts, as well as a great number of the policy and raffling houses, were reputed to be owned or backed by Reuben Parsons, unquestionably the gambling monarch of his time, who was widely known as the Great American Faro Banker. Parsons was a native of New England who had come to New York with several thousand dollars, intending to engage in business and continue the upright life he had led in the town of his birth. But he lost his fortune in a gambling house, and was so impressed by the ease and dispatch with which his money was taken from him that he opened a place of his own, and soon became rich. Unlike most of his fellows. Parsons dressed plainly and was unassuming in manner. He refused to associate with other gamblers, and was seldom seen publicly in any of the resorts of which he was the financial genius. And he never gambled after his first experience.
There were probably more gamblers and gambling houses in New York during the fifties and early sixties than in any other period of the city’s history. “Park Row, Barclay and Vesey streets constitute the Wall street of these despicable characters,” said the New York Herald, “There is, probably, a larger business done in this LIne here than in London, and it is very likely that the powerful measures adopted in London and Paris to suppress this iniquitous trade will drive many of the sharpers of these capitals to this city, so that a large increase in the work of robbery and plunder, and all its accompanying vices and crimes, may be anticipated. Many of these common gamblers, compared with whom the skulking pickpocket is respectable, mingle with the leaders of fashion in this city. They saunter along Broadway in the morning, drive out on the avenue in the afternoon, lounge at the opera in the evening, and cheat in Park Row and Barclay street till five o’clock in the morning. They are the most distingué at the springs and watering places.” The favorite gambling pastime in the resorts maintained by these elegant personages was faro, which was as popular then as poker is today. “The game of faro, another of the favorite pets of the police and of our city guardians of public morals,” wrote Green in his final report, “is a game so peculiarly adapted to the taste of the American people that it may almost be styled the national game, holding the same rank with the universal Yankee nation as Rouge et Noir in France and Monte in Spain. ... In this city the game of faro is advancing with rapid steps. A taste for its excitements is spreading among all classes of players.”
All of the first-class establishments were magnificently appointed, with liveried servants to attend to the wants of the players, and, on occasion, performers from the music halls and the legitimate theaters to provide entertainment. At least a score would not have suffered by comparison with such celebrated resorts as those operated in later years by Richard Canfield and Honest John Kelly. A contemporary writer thus described one of the gilded dens of Park Row: “Mirrors of magnificent dimensions extend from the ceiling to the floor. No tawdry frescoing, but costly paintings by the first artists, adorn the walls and cover the ceiling. The richest of gold, gilt and rosewood furniture in satins and velvets abound. The dinner is served at six o’clock. Nothing in New York can equal the elegance of the table. It is spread with silver and gold plate, costly china ware and glass of
exquisite cut, and the viands embrace the luxuries of the season served up in the richest style. Among the keepers of the first-class gaming houses there is a constant rivalry to excel in the matter of dinners, and the manner in which the table is spread.”
INTO this paradise of ward-heelers, gangsters and gamblers, in the early fifties, came John Morrissey. Keen of intellect and a giant in stature and strength, Morrissey was destined to become a noted gang fighter, a professional pugilist with a victory over John C. Heenan to his credit, the owner of luxurious gambling houses in New York and Saratoga Springs, a member of the Legislature and of Congress, and, with the original Honest John Kelly, a coleader of Tammany Hall and dispenser of its patronage. And, incidentally, although he came to New York ragged and without a cent in his pockets, Morrissey became a very rich man, with rings on his fingers and diamonds blazing from his shirt front, and his coffers piled high with gold. At one time, during the height of his career, his fortune was estimated at $700,000.
Morrissey is said to have been born in Ireland, but the first heard of him in the United States was in Troy, New York, where he tended bar and achieved great local renown as a slugger and a rough and tumble fighter. He made several brief visits to New York before he made his home permanently in the metropolis, and on one of his expeditions attempted the laudable but impossible task of wrecking the resort operated at No. 25 Park Row by Capt. Isaiah Rynders, who had temporarily deserted Tammany Hall and cast his lot with the Native American or Know Nothing Party. He had changed the name of his club from Empire to Americus, and it had become the resort of the gang leaders and bullies who fought under the Know Nothing banner. Among them were Tom Hyer, the American heavyweight champion, and Bill Poole, also called Bill the Butcher, chieftain of a gang of West Side bruisers who terrorized the area around Christopher street. Poole was commonly held to be the champion brawler and eye gouger of his time, and not even the ferocious mayhem experts of the Five Points and the Fourth Ward dared engage him in combat. Before organizing his own gang and becoming a power in politics, Poole had served an apprenticeship with the Bowery Boys.
John Morrissey
Morrissey was fearfully mauled by Poole and other Native American sluggers when he charged bellowing into the Americus Club and endeavored to lay it waste, but his strength and valor so impressed Rynders that he was put to bed in the best sleeping room of the establishment, and given medical and nursing attention until he was able to be about. He was then offered a job and a place in the front rank of the Rynders gangsters, but declined the honor, having conceived a violent dislike for Tom Hyer and Bill Poole. He went back to Troy to recuperate, but within a few weeks was again in New York doing odd jobs around the saloons and gambling houses and waiting for a chance to display his prowess. His opportunity finally came during a local election in the upper part of the city. Fearing trouble at the polls, and, indeed, hearing that Bill the Butcher had boasted that he intended to attack the place with his gangsters and destroy the ballot boxes, the honest citizens decided to fight fire with fire, knowing that they could not depend upon the police for protection. The word went out that they wished to employ a gang leader who would pit his strength against Poole and his minions.
The next morning Morrissey called upon John A. Kennedy, who later became Superintendent of Police and was brutally beaten during the Draft Riots, and arranged to organize a gang to protect the polling place and prevent Bill the Butcher from interfering. When the polls opened Morrissey was on hand with fifty of the most ferocious battlers of the Five Points, whom he had engaged at one dollar each for the duration of the fighting. He stationed his force about the building, and gave orders that once a Poole thug had been downed he was to be kept horizontal until his skull was cracked. He also let it be known that there would be no adverse criticism if Bill the Butcher’s bullies were permanently maimed, and that ears and noses would be highly regarded as souvenirs of an interesting occasion. About noon a huge lumber van drawn by four horses and loaded with thirty of Poole’s most courageous gangsters drove up to the polling place, and led by Bill the Butcher in person they jumped from the wagon and swarmed into the building. But they stopped short when they saw Morrissey and observed the preparations which had been made to welcome them. Poole and Morrissey met in the center of the main room and glared at each other for a moment, but Bill the Butcher realized that he had been outgeneraled, and that his thugs were outnumbered. So he turned and stalked out of the building, and, followed by his bruisers, climbed into the van and drove away. Morrissey had won a notable victory without striking a blow. However, his disappointed battlers flung a few brickbats as Poole’s henchmen retreated, and three of the latter were knocked down.
When the news of Morrissey’s exploit reached the ears of the Tammany leaders, they received him with open arms and gave him money with which he opened a small gambling house. With a prosperous business and money in his pocket, Morrissey now took his rightful place among the lesser powers of Tammany Hall, and became the associate and fighting companion of such notorious sluggers as Jim Turner, Lew Baker, and Yankee Sullivan, the last named a celebrated pugilist who was afterward lynched by the San Francisco Vigilantes. His real name was Ambrose. All of these men had essayed to stand up before Tom Hyer and Bill the Butcher, but had gone down before their thudding fists and stamping feet. Late in 1854 Hyer gave Yankee Sullivan an unmerciful drubbing in an oyster bar at Park Place and Broadway, and repeated the feat a few months later when they met in the professional prize ring. Naturally enough, Sullivan, Turner, and Baker saw eye to eye with Morrissey in his hatred of the Native American gladiators, and there were frequent clashes between the two groups.
Early in January, 1855, Turner and Baker went into Platt’s Saloon in the basement of Wallack’s Theater at Broadway and Twelfth street, where they found Hyer standing before the bar drinking a jigger of hot rum. As they passed Turner rubbed his elbow against Hyer’s nose and knocked the glass from his lips, at the same time making a remark which implied that he doubted the legitimacy of Hyer’s birth. Hyer remonstrated, whereupon both Turner and Baker threw off^ their Talmas(
The encounter in Platt’s caused tremendous excitement in gang and political circles, and both the Tammany and Native American bullies armed themselves and went about boasting loudly of their belligerent intentions. A few days later Bill the Butcher came upon Baker in a Canal street dive called the Gem, and gave the Tammany gangster a fearful beating, attempting, so Baker said later, to gouge out his eyes and bite off his ear. The police interfered before Baker had been completely ruined, and Poole left the saloon swearing volubly that he would yet “settle Baker’s hash.” Thereafter Baker went armed day and night, and seldom stirred abroad unless accompanied by Turner or b
y Paudeen McLaughlin, another noted Tammany battler whose disposition had been particularly murderous since his nose was chewed off during an affray at the Five Points; he was particularly adept at putting the boots to an adversary after felling him with a bludgeon or slung-shot, and was highly respected in the underworld. Encouraged by Turner and McLaughlin, Baker vowed boastfully that he would kill Poole on sight, while Poole retorted that if he ever got his hands on Baker the remains would scarcely be worth the attention of an undertaker.
Morrissey saw in the bitter enmity between Poole and Baker an opportunity to prove his frequent boast that he could defeat the Native American slugger in a rough and tumble combat with nothing barred. Physically, Poole and Morrissey were about equal, each being well over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. Poole was probably the more ferocious, but Morrissey made up for this defect in his nature by greater science and speed. It was generally felt that a battle between the two would be worth travelling miles to see, and sportsmen made every effort to bring them together. However, they never fought. One night a few weeks after Baker had fared so badly at the hands of Poole, the latter and Morrissey came face to face in a Broadway bar-room, and Morrissey offered to bet fifty dollars that Bill the Butcher could not name a place where he would not meet him. Poole named the Christopher street pier, in the heart of the area controlled by his own gang, and Morrissey paid the bet without protest. Half an hour later he declared that Poole could not name another place, and Bill the Butcher suggested that they meet at the Amos street dock, one block north of Christopher street, at seven o’clock the next morning.
The Gangs of New York Page 9