The late sixties also saw the beginning of the reprehensible practice of using knock-out drops to deaden the senses of a victim while the thieves picked his pockets or appropriated his jewelry. Laudanum had occasionally been employed by the crimps of the old Fourth Ward water front to drug a sailor so he could be shanghaied without too much protest, but no effective use of drugs for the sole purpose of robbery was made in New York until a California crook, Peter Sawyer, appeared in 1866, and aroused such a furore in police and criminal circles that the former honored him by calling the practitioners of his art peter players. At first Sawyer used nothing more deleterious than snuff, which he dropped into his victim’s beer or whiskey, but later he and other peter players came to depend principally on hydrate of chloral. Occasionally they used morphine. Since Prohibition bootleg hquor has generally been found to be sufficiently efficacious.
The medicinal dose of hydrate of chloral is from fifteen to twenty grains, but from thirty to forty grains were used for knockout purposes. The drug was compounded in the proportion of one grain to a drop, and a teaspoonful was commonly employed to dose a glass of beer. The action of the drug is to decrease the action of the heart, and an overdose is apt to cause paralysis of the heart and lungs. Few men can stand a larger dose than thirty grains, but occasionally the old time peter players were compelled to give up to sixty grains to a victim who had been drinking heavily.
The practice of using knock-out drops became so popular that large gangs of both men and women thieves were formed, and employed no other method to prepare a victim for robbery. They generally worked in pairs, and while one distracted the attention of the dupe the other dropped the poison into his beverage. For many years the police seldom arrested a street walker who did not have chloral or morphine in her purse or secreted in the lining of her muff. The largest and most successful of the knock-out gangs maintained a headquarters in a dive in Worth street near Chatham Square, at the southern end of the Bowery, employing street boys to trail well-dressed men who ventured into the territory and notify members of the gang when the visitors appeared to be ready for the final touches. More than a score of men amassed fortunes from the sale of small vials of chloral at two dollars each, but eventually the bulk of the business fell into the hands of Diamond Charley, a notorious Bowery character whose shirt front blazed with precious stones in the manner of the later but respectable Diamond Jim Brady. Each evening at dusk Diamond Charley sent out a dozen salesmen carrying small satchels packed with vials of chloral, which they sold openly in the dives and on the street corners. They also offered a small morphine pill which could be hidden under a finger ring, but it would not dissolve readily and was never in great demand. Soon after he had obtained a monopoly Diamond Charley increased the price of chloral to five dollars and then to ten dollars a vial, to the great indignation of the users of the drops, for the cost of manufacturing a dose was not more than six cents. Thereafter many of the thieves compounded their own mixtures, and in their eagerness for quick action added other poisons to the chloral, frequently with fatal consequences which worried no one except the police and the victim’s relatives.
Knock-out drops were also used with great success by the cadets and procurers, who conducted their business with the utmost brazenness. Many of the former were organized into associations, and maintained club rooms, where they met for discussion of business problems; while the latter frequently operated from elaborate offices. Red Light Lizzie, perhaps the most famous procurer of her time, employed half a dozen men and women to travel through the small villages of New York and adjacent states, and lure young women into the metropolis with promises of employment; and several young men received salaries from her for enticing girls into dives and plying them with drugged liquor. Red Light Lizzie herself owned half a dozen houses of ill-fame, but she supplied other places as well, and each month sent a circular letter to her clients. Her principal rival was Hester Jane Haskins, also called Jane the Grabber, who became notorious as an abductor of young girls for immoral purposes. She came at length to specialize in young women of good families, and the disappearance of so many aroused such a commotion that in the middle seventies Jane the Grabber was arrested by Captain Charles McDonnell and sent to prison.
The procurers also obtained many recruits from the flower and news girls who were about the streets in great numbers. Many of these, some no more than children, were prostitutes on their own account, and there were half a dozen places of assignation which catered solely to them. The owner of one such establishment advertised that her place was frequented by flower girls under sixteen years of age; another kept nine small girls, ranging in age from nine to fifteen, in the back room of an oyster saloon near the corner of Chatham street, now Park Row, and William street. It was the custom of these girls to approach a man in the street, and instead of asking him to purchase flowers or newspapers, hail him with “Give me a penny, mister?” For several years this was the common salutation of the street girls, and the manner in which the more dissolute of the flower and news vendors made known their calling.
Many of the girls were also members of the panel and badger game gangs which abounded throughout the vice area. These methods of thievery were brought to great perfection by the gang captained by Shang Draper, who kept a saloon in Sixth avenue between Twenty-ninth and Thirteenth streets. Draper is said to have employed thirty women on salary to entice drunken men into a house in the vicinity of Prince and Wooster streets, where they were victimized by the badger game or robbed by thieves who crept into the room through hidden panels cut into the wall, and stole the victim’s valuables while his attention was distracted. Draper’s gang was finally broken up by Captain John H. McCullagh, although he continued to operate his saloon until late in 1883, when Johnny Irving was killed in a pistol duel with Johnny Walsh, better known as Johnny the Mick, who was immediately shot to death by Irving’s friend, Billy Porter. Irving and
Walsh were captains of rival gangs of sneak thieves and pickpockets, and there had been bad blood between them for many years. Draper himself was also a famous bank robber, and was implicated in the celebrated robbery of the Manhattan Savings Institution, as well as many other crimes.
The Panel Game
THE KING OF THE BANK ROBBERS
PRACTICALLY EVERY burglar and bank robber of note in the United States made New York his principal headquarters during the twenty years which followed the Civil War, but the only one to whom the police were willing to award the palm of genius was George Leonidas Leslie, also known as George Howard and Western George. Leslie was the son of an Ohio brewer and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, where he had specialized in architecture and won high honors. He could probably have amassed a fortune by the practice of his profession, but upon the death of his mother, soon after he had completed his work at college, he came to New York and fell in with bad company, and so became a criminal.
Within a few years after the close of the Civil War Leslie had become the head of the most successful gang of professional bank robbers that ever infested the continent. In the opinion of George W. Walling, who was Superintendent of Police from 1874 to 1885, Leslie and his followers were responsible for eighty per cent, of the bank thefts in America from the time of Leslie’s first appearance in the East, about 1865, until he was murdered in 1884. Walling estimated the total stealings of the gang at from $7,000,000 to $12,000,000, with the former as a conservative minimum. Probably one-third of their loot was taken from financial institutions in the metropohs, including $786,879 from the Ocean National Bank at Greenwich and Fulton streets on June 27, 1869, and $2,747,000 from the Manhattan Savings Institution in Bleecker street at Broadway, on October 27, 1878. In the Ocean Bank robbery the thieves left almost $2,000,000 in cash and securities scattered upon the floor beside the vault. The gang also carried out the famous raids against the South Kensington National Bank of Philadelphia, the Third National Bank of Baltimore, the Saratoga County Bank of Waterford, N. Y., and the Wellsbro Bank
of Philadelphia. It was largely the activity of Leslie and his associates, together with the frequent forays of sneak thieves, burglars and confidence men, that caused Inspector Thomas Byrnes to establish his famous Dead Line on March 12, 1880, when he opened a branch office of the Detective Bureau at No. 17 Wall street and ordered the arrest of every known criminal found in the area bounded by Fulton street on the north, Greenwich street on the west, the Battery on the south, and the East River.
But it was only to the police and the underworld that Leslie was known as a criminal genius. He posed as a man of independent means, and because of his education and family connections was accepted in good society in New York; he belonged to several excellent clubs and was known as a bon vivant and a man about town. He was a familiar figure at theater openings and art exhibitions, and acquired a considerable reputation as an amateur bibliophile; he possessed a fine group of first editions, and was frequently consulted by other collectors. He patronized the most exclusive tailors and haberdashers, and seldom associated with
his fellow criminals, except in a business way, until the early eighties, when he became enamoured of Babe Irving, a sister to the Johnny Irving who was killed in Shang Draper’s saloon by Johnny the Mick. He was also smitten by the charms of Shang Draper’s mistress, and spent much time and money on both women.
The police found ample indications of Leshe’s skill and leadership in more than a hundred robberies, but only once were they able to obtain evidence sufficient to warrant his arrest. That was in 1870, at the outset of his career, when he and Gilbert Yost undertook to rob a jewelry store in Norristown, near Philadelphia. They were captured while trying to enter the establishment, but Leslie had already made connections with Philadelphia poUticians, and was promptly released on bail, which he forfeited. Yost was convicted and served two years in prison. The Norristown job was one of the few occasions when Leslie found it necessary to take an active part in the actual commission of a robbery. Ordinarily his work consisted in making the plans, making the preliminary surveys, handling the bribe and graft money and arranging with the fences for the disposal of the plunder.
It was Leslie’s custom, whenever a bank had been selected as a pudding, to obtain, if possible, architects’ plans of the building; if none were available he visited the institution in the guise of a depositor and drew plans of his own from observation. He then prepared a large scale drawing of the ground floor and the basement, carefully plotting all entrances and exits, the exact location of the safe or vault, and all pieces of furniture which might be stumbled over in the darkness, or which blocked the way to a door or window. Sometimes he was able to insinuate one of his gang into the bank as a watchman or porter, and valuable information was then obtained in great and exact detail. The type of strong box was noted, together with the name of the manufacturer, and from a clerk or other employee of convivial habit something could usually be learned of the routine of the institution.
Leslie possessed great mechanical skill, and was thoroughly familiar with every type of safe and bank vault manufactured in the United States, many of which he could open by manipulating the dial. Of the majority he owned stock models or small replicas in wood or metal, which were stored in a loft in the lower part of the city. There he sometimes spent a week experimenting on the model which corresponded to the safe or vault in the prospective pudding, until he had learned to throw the combination out of gear and bring the tumblers into hne. This was generally accomplished by boring small holes above or below the dial, and worrying the tumblers with a thin piece of steel. When this knowledge has been acquired respecting a certain type of safe, Leshe summoned the men chosen for the enterprise, and in his work room carefully explained his drawings and allotted each man a definite task. Sometimes a room was fitted up to resemble the interior of the bank, and the robbers felt their way to the safe through the darkness and opened it while Leshe watched and criticised the performance.
Preparations of this character were made for the robbery of the Manhattan Savings Institution, but they miscarried through sheer carelessness, and the vault was finally forced with a remarkably fine kit of burglar tools which had been constructed especially for Leslie at a cost of more than three thousand dollars. Leslie began planning the Manhattan job late in 1875, three years before the crime was actually committed, when he selected as his principal assistants Jimmy Hope, Jimmy Brady, Abe Coakley, Red Leary, Shang Draper, Johnny Dobbs, Worcester Sam Perris, and Banjo Pete Emerson. After a careful survey of the vault Leslie decided against the use of dynamite or powder, for the shock of the explosion would shatter the plate glass windows of the bank, and the noise would certainly be heard by the janitor, Louis Werckle, who lived with his family in the basement, as well as by guests and employees of the St. Charles Hotel, next door.
Having learned the style of the combination lock to the Manhattan vault, Leslie procured another of the same make from the manufacturers, Valentine & Butler, and proceeded to experiment with it. He found that the combination could be thrown out of gear and the notches of the tumblers brought into line by boring a hole underneath the indicator, and then working the tumblers around with his thin piece of steel. In the course of the next few months Leslie obtained a job in the bank for Patrick Shevlin, an obscure member of the gang, and some six months later Shevlin was able to admit him into the bank at night. Leslie bored a small hole in the safe and threw two of the tumblers in line, working behind a black screen which had been placed in front of the vault to hide it from the view of persons passing in the street. But it was very nerve-wracking work, and although Leslie puttied up the hole he had bored, he forgot to replace the tumblers in their original positions, so that next morning the bank employees could not open the vault. The manufacturers installed a new lock plate, and when Leslie returned to the bank to complete his experiments he found that he could no longer move the tumblers, although he learned later that he could have done so had he bored a new hole an eighth of an inch below his previous opening.
A Bank Burglar’s Outfit
Leslie then decided to commit the robbery by force, but this was not attempted until the policeman on post, John Nugent, had been bribed to remain away from the bank until he should be needed to guard the retreat of the robbers and, if possible, delay pursuit. At six o’clock Sunday morning, October 27, 1878, Jimmy Hope, Abe Coakley, Banjo Pete Emerson, and Bill Kelly, a strong arm man who was taken along in case fighting became necessary, slipped into the bank, all wearing masks. They went directly to the apartment occupied by Werckle, and there bound and gagged the janitor, his wife, and his mother-in-law. Kelly remained to guard them, while the others repaired to the main offices of the bank and began operations on the vault, which they opened after three hours of hard work. The interior compartments, constructed of the finest steel, resisted their most persistent efforts, although they finally forced an entrance into one which contained a large sum in cash, belonging to a depositor.
While Hope and Emerson were at work behind the screen which hid the safe, Abe Coakley removed his hat and coat and puttered about the bank as though he belonged there, dusting and rearranging the furniture and performing other tasks. While he was thus engaged Patrolman Van Orden of the Fifteenth precinct passed on his way home, and casually looked into the window. He was surprised to see the vault hidden by a screen, but his suspicions were allayed when Coakley waved to him in friendly greeting. A few minutes later the thieves slipped out of the back door of the bank with the loot packed in small satchels, one of which was carried by Patrolman Nugent.
The fact of the robbery was discovered within an hour, when Werckle burst his bonds and rushed into the hotel barbershop. But it was not until late in May, 1879, that the police were able to make any arrests. Coakley and Banjo Pete Emerson were acquitted, but Hope and Kelly were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Patrolman Nugent is said to have escaped by bribing a juror, but a few months later he was arrested in Hoboken and sent to jail for highway robbery. The police could
not obtain enough evidence against Leslie to bring him to trial. While the total sum stolen was enormous, only $300,000 worth of the bonds were negotiable, and the cash amounted to but $11,000. The bank afterward recovered $257,000 worth of the bonds, so that the actual loss was $11,000 in cash and $43,000 in securities.
The success of LesUe’s various operations soon brought him nationwide renown, and in the last years of his life he became a consulting bank robber, and was frequently called upon for advice by other gangs. For a stiff fee or a percentage of the gains, with a guarantee, he planned bank and store burglaries all over the United States. He is said to have received twenty thousand dollars to make a trip to the Pacific Coast to look over plans for a bank robbery contemplated by a syndicate of San Francisco thieves.
But this period of his career was short, for the liaisons with Babe Irving and Shang Draper’s mistress consumed more and more of his time and thought, and he lost much of his sagacity and prudence. He also became extremely apprehensive over the murder of J. W. Barron, cashier of the Dexter Savings Bank of Dexter, Maine, during an ill-starred attempt to rob that institution. Several other enterprises failed through faulty planning and direction, and his gang began to lose confidence in him. Draper, angry at Leslie’s attentions to his mistress, attributed to the King of the Bank Robbers the talk which led to police knowledge of the Dexter crime, and to the arrest of Hope, Coakley, Banjo Pete and others for the Manhattan robbery.
It soon became common knowledge throughout the underworld that Leslie was destined for a violent end, and no one was surprised when, on the morning of June 4, 1884, Mounted Patrolman Johnstone found his decomposed body lying at the base of Tramps’ Rock, near the dividing line between Westchester and New York counties beyond the Bronx River. He had been shot in the head, and a pearl-handled revolver lay beside him. Leslie’s corpse was identified by Herman Steid, an agent for Marm Mandelbaum, the notorious fence, who gave the dead robber decent burial. But the police were never able to find the murderers, although they suspected Shang Draper, Johnny Dobbs, and Worcester Sam Perris. Only two weeks before his body was found Leslie had returned to New York from a brief visit to Philadelphia, and had gone to a house at No. 101 Lynch street, Brooklyn, where Shang Draper was in seclusion with Jemmy Mooney and Gilbert Yost, and to which Worcester Sam and other members of the gang made frequent trips from Manhattan. The police always believed that Leshe was murdered in the Brooklyn house, and his body hauled away in a cart by Dobbs, Worcester Sam and Ed Goodie, a sneak thief who sometimes worked with the Leslie combination. These three were seen near Yonkers about the time that Leslie’s body must have been placed at Tramps’ Rock. But httle evidence could be obtained, and the killing remains on the long list of unsolved crimes.
The Gangs of New York Page 19