The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  The Molasses Gang, captained by Jimmy Dunnigan, Billy Morgan, and Blind Mahoney, was also a contemporary of the Whyos. The members of this outfit were for the most part till-tappers and cheap sneak thieves, although Dunnigan and Blind Mahoney were expert pickpockets as well. It was Dunnigan’s custom, with other members of the gang, to enter a store and ask the owner to draw his soft hat full of molasses, preferably sorghum, explaining that he had a bet with a friend as to how much the head-gear would hold. When the hat was full Dunnigan promptly clapped it on the storekeeper’s head and pulled it down over his eyes, so that he was almost blinded by the molasses. While he struggled to free himself the gangsters robbed the till, picked up everything else they could carry, and departed.

  Under the leadership of Sheeney Mike, Little Freddie, and Johnny Irving, the Dutch Mob operated with great success from Houston to Fifth streets east of the Bowery until 1877, when Captain Anthony J. Allaire took command of the police of the Eighteenth precinct and clubbed them out of the district. The area bounded by Eleventh and Thirteenth streets and by First avenue and Avenue A was kept in a continual uproar by the Mackerelville Crowd, while farther north the Battle Row Gang appeared and ranged through the sixties from the East to the Hudson rivers. The original Battle Row was in Sixty-third street between First and Second avenues, but in later years the name was also used to designate a block in West Thirty-ninth street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues. The Rag Gang was one of the most notorious of the many newly formed combinations along the Bowery, while on the West Side the original Hell’s Kitchen Gang came into being about 1868 and soon became a collection of the most desperate ruffians in the city.

  The name Hell’s Kitchen was first applied to a dive near Corlear’s Hook on the East Side north of Grand street, but soon after the Civil War it became the popular designation of a considerable area north and south of West Thirty-fourth street west of Eighth avenue. Under the leadership of Dutch Heinrichs this gang roamed through Hell’s Kitchen, levying tribute on the merchants and factory owners, breaking into houses in broad daylight, beating and robbing strangers, and keeping the entire district in a chronic state of terror. Much of their stealing was done at the old Thirtieth street yards and depot of the Hudson River railroad. Heinrichs was sent to prison for five years after he and two of his gangsters had attacked Captain John H. McCuUagh, then a patrolman, who had ventured alone into Hell’s Kitchen to investigate the theft of two hogsheads of hams from a freight car. McCullagh battled with the three thugs for more than half an hour, and finally knocked them unconscious with his nightstick. He then tied their arms behind their backs with their own belts, loaded them into a cart and hauled them to the police station in West Thirty-fifth street. The Hell’s Kitchen Gang eventually absorbed the Tenth Avenue Gang, whose most noted exploit was the robbery of an express train of the Hudson River Railroad. Led by Ike Marsh, the gangsters boarded the train at Spuyten Duyvil, at the northern end of Manhattan Island, and clambered into the express car, where they bound and gagged the messenger and then threw off an iron box containing a large sum of greenbacks and government bonds.

  The district around Broadway and Houston street, besides being the resort of bank burglars, panel thieves, and other criminals, was also infested by many small gangs. None were of any permanent importance, but their membership comprised some of the most ferocious street brawlers of the period. Several policemen who attempted to subdue them and stop their depredations were killed or badly beaten, and little progress was made against them until the appearance of Patrolman Alexander S. Williams, who was destined to become an Inspector and one of the most famous of New York policemen. Williams was a huge and powerful man with a great bull voice which had been strengthened by many years at sea as a ship’s carpenter. Two days after he had been assigned to the Houston street area he selected the two toughest characters of the neighborhood, picked fights with them and knocked them unconscious with his club. He then hurled them one after the other through the plate glass window of the Florence Saloon, from which they had issued to attack him. Half a score of their comrades came to their rescue, but Williams stood his ground and mowed them down with his nightstick. Thereafter he averaged a fight a day for almost four years. His skill with the nightstick was extraordinary, and the fame of his powerful blows became so widespread that he was hailed as Clubber Williams, a sobriquet which he retained to the end of his career.

  Williams was appointed a captain in September, 1871, and assigned to the command of the Twenty-first precinct, which had a station house in East Thirty-fifth street, between Second and Third avenues. This was the original Gas House district, and was one of the most turbulent sections of the city, for the celebrated Gas House Gang was just coming into power, and was terrorizing a large area. Scarcely a night passed in which the gangsters did not loot houses and stores and fight among themselves in the streets and dives, and the police were powerless to stop them. But Williams invoked the gospel of the nightstick, and organized a strong arm squad which patrolled the precinct and clubbed the thugs with or without provocation. The district was soon comparatively quiet, and remained so throughout Williams’ administration. Indeed, so thoroughly had the gangsters been cowed that three months after he took command Williams made a demonstration for the benefit of police reporters, and citizens who had

  Inspector Alexander S. Williams

  protested against his wholesale use of the nightstick. While a small group watched, Williams hung his watch and chain on a lamp-post at Third avenue and Thirty-fifth street. The party then walked around the block, and when it returned to the post the jewelry had not been disturbed. After a few years in this precinct, and in the Eighth and Fourth, Williams was transferred in 1876 to the command of the Twenty-ninth, or Tenderloin district. He resigned in 1879 to become Superintendent of the Bureau of Street Cleaning, but after two years in that office returned to the Police Department and was again assigned to the Tenderloin, where he remained for six turbulent but prosperous years. Charges were brought against him eighteen times, but he was invariably acquitted when tried by the Board of Police Commissioners. Throughout his career he continued to pin his faith to the nightstick, and when complaints were made of his furious clubbing he justified his course with the famous observation, “There is more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court.”

  Along the lower West Side, in the area now inhabited principally by Turks, Syrians, and Armenians, several notable gangs were organized and soon became the rulers of the district, protected, as usual, by the politicians. The Stable Gang, which had some fifty members, made its headquarters in an old barn in Washington street, and devoted its talents entirely to robbing immigrants. The Silver Gang also had a rendezvous in Washington street; but pursued the more refined occupation of burglary. The most ferocious of the gangs in this section was the Potashes, who roamed the neighborhood of the Babbitt Soap Factory in Washington street near Rector. They were very fierce fighters, and with Red Shay Meehan as captain dominated the other gangs and kept for themselves the choicest morsels of thievery and brawling. A nest of double tenements in the block bounded by Greenwich, Washington, Spring, and Canal streets was the home of half a dozen gangs. Among them was the Boodle Gang, which raided the stores in Centre Market and attacked the provision wagons which passed through their territory. The operations of this crowd were similar to those of the butcher cart gangs, which had made their appearance in the late fifties. At first the butcher cart thieves confined their activities to meat wagons and butcher shops; a dozen thugs rode up to a store, rushed inside and seized a carcass of beef or as many hams and cuts of small meat as they could carry, which they flung into their cart. Then they went pelting down the street at top speed. In the middle sixties these gangs turned their attention to the financial district and began robbing messengers who carried money and securities from one bank to another. The first important theft of this character occurred on January 19, 1866, when Samuel Terry was robbed of
a satchel containing fourteen thousand dollars in checks and money, which he was carrying from the Farmers & Citizens Bank of Williamsburg to the Park National Bank of New York. As Terry crossed Beekman street near Park Row two men jumped from a butcher’s cart and approached him. One knocked him down with a slung-shot, while the other snatched the satchel. Both then sprang into their vehicle and whipped up the horses, easily making their escape. In recent years this method of robbery has been used extensively by automobile bandits, and by the hi-jackers, who specialize in liquor.

  THE period in which the Whyos and their contemporary gangs began shooting, stabbing, and stealing their way toward the natural destiny of children born and reared in such frightful habitations as the Old Brewery, Cow Bay, and Gotham Court, also saw an enormous increase in the number of juvenile gangsters, who were to provide material for the great gangs of the nineties and the early part of the present century. Before the Civil War the juvenile as well as the adult gangs were largely confined to the Five Points, the lower Bowery district, and the Fourth Ward, simply because these were the congested and poverty stricken areas of the city; as the slums increased in extent, gangsters of all types and ages multiplied in numbers and power. By 1870 the streets throughout the greater part of New York fairly swarmed with prowling bands of homeless boys and girls actively developing the criminal instinct which is inherent in every human being. While all of these gangs chose their titular leaders from their own ranks, a majority were at the same time under the domination of adult gangsters or professional thieves, who taught the children to pick pockets, snatch purses and muffs, and steal everything they could lay their hands upon, while they masked their real business by carrying bootblack outfits, baskets of flowers, or bundles of newspapers. They lived on the docks, in the cellars and basements of dives and tenements, and in alleys and area ways; and when their masters could not feed them, which was often, they ate from swill barrels and garbage pails.

  When the Rev. L. M. Pease went to the Five Points in 1850 to open a mission he found that all of the great brawling, thieving gangs of Paradise Square had their sycophantic gangs of youngsters. There were the Forty Little Thieves, the Little Dead Rabbits, and the Little Plug Uglies, the members of which emulated their elders in speech and deed, and as far as possible in appearance.

  And in the Fourth Ward, along the water front, were the Little Daybreak Boys, composed of lads from eight to twelve years of age, who were almost as ferocious as the older gangsters whose name they adopted and whose crimes they strove mightily to imitate. Some accompanied the Daybreak Boys on various enterprises, acting as lookouts and decoys, and crawling through the portholes of ships and lowering ropes up which the adult thugs clambered to the decks. But they also planned and executed many adventures on their own account, and were believed by the police to have committed several murders. One of their famous exploits was performed in the Harbor just off the Battery, when half a dozen in rowboats attacked three boys who where out for a pleasure sail in a small sloop. The lads were robbed and beaten and then thrown into the river, while the young pirates triumphantly sailed the sloop up the East River and sold it to a junkman for a few dollars. Luckily their victims could swim, and reached the Battery in safety. Many of the most noted leaders of the Daybreak Boys, including Saul and Howlett, graduated from the ranks of these young miscreants.

  Some of the early juvenile gangs were led by girls, notably the Forty Little Thieves, who swore undying loyalty to Wild Maggie Carson, a fierce little vixen who had her first bath at the age of nine and was not tamed until the end of her twelfth year, when the Rev. Mr. Pease taught her the joy of sewing buttons on shirts. She became as enthusiastic a seamstress as she had been a brawler and roughneck, and when she was about fifteen was adopted into a good family. She finally married well. But not many of the juvenile gangsters were reclaimed. Jack Mahaney, a contemporary of Wild Maggie, who led a gang of his own, became in later life one of the most celebrated criminals in America, and because of the frequency of his escapes from prison and from the custody of policemen, was known as the American Jack Sheppard. He twice escaped from Sing Sing, as well as from the Tombs and almost every other important prison in the East, and several times leaped from fast trains to what appeared to be certain death. But he was never injured.

  Jack Mahaney Escaping from a Train

  Mahaney was born in New York City in 1844, and was the son of a well-to-do family. His father died when he was about ten years old, and his mother sent him to boarding school, where a naturally reckless and mischievous disposition soon got him into trouble. He ran away after he had been repeatedly flogged, and when the police found him in company with a gang of notorious little dock rats he was sent to the House of Refuge. He not only escaped from this institution, but took a dozen other boys with him and fled into the Five Points, where he fell into the hands of Italian Dave, a famous Fagin and sneak thief. Italian Dave had under his wing some thirty or forty boys between the ages of nine and fifteen, whom he housed in a rickety tenement on Paradise Square and taught to steal, conducting daily classes with the aid of fully dressed dummies of men and women, which were placed in various postures while the boys practiced picking pockets and snatching muffs and purses. They were also instructed in the fine points of begging and stealing articles from store windows and counters, and whenever they were clumsy Italian Dave ceremoniously clad himself in a policeman’s uniform and beat them with a nightstick.

  When the boys had completed their laboratory work Italian Dave sent them into the streets to practice their art, or hired them out to sneak thieves and burglars to act as lookouts. Sometimes a thief would pay the Fagin a stated sum and engage the services of a certain number of boys for a definite period, during which time everything they stole belonged to him. However, he was obliged to provide them with food and shelter, and it was always very much of a gamble. Mahaney became such an accompHshed pickpocket and sneak that he was retained by Italian Dave as his own personal boy and allowed privileges none of the others received. He frequently accompanied the Master on marauding expeditions. Sometimes he picked the pockets of a drunken man pointed out to him by Italian Dave, or snatched the purse of a careless woman; again he engaged a well dressed man in conversation and so distracted his attention while Italian Dave knocked him senseless with a slung-shot, after which Dave retired and the boy went through the victim’s pockets. When he grew older Mahaney severed his connection with Itahan Dave and joined one of the Five Points gangs. Later, having served his apprenticeship, he organized his own gang of butcher cart thieves, and in time became a burglar, a confidence man, and an all-around crook.

  Within ten years after the close of the Civil War conditions even worse than those of the Five Points and the Fourth Ward prevailed in many of the lower and middle sections of the city. With the connivance of crooked officials and politicians, contractors had hurriedly flung together cheap and fhmsy tenements in the congested districts to house the hordes of immigrants, and these structures soon degenerated into slums of the utmost depravity. The Tenth Ward, north of Chatham Square and Division street and comprising much of the territory which is now known as the lower East Side, was particularly squalid. Conditions in this district were especially bad in Hester street and in the block bounded by Pitt, Stanton, Willett, and Houston streets, which contained a double row of tenements called the Rag Pickers’ Den.

  But these slums were equalled if not surpassed by such places as Rotten Row in Laurens street. Poverty Lane and Misery Row in Ninth and Tenth avenues, and Dutch Hill, a group of shanties in East Fortieth street near the East River. An avalanche of juvenile gangs poured out of these slums. The Nineteenth Street Gang, a particularly vicious collection of young thugs with whom even the police did not care to battle, was composed of boys living in Poverty Lane and Misery Row; and the tenements around Second avenue and East Thirty-fourth street, populated principally by Irish Catholics, gave to juvenile gangland a youthful leader called Little Mike, who led his gang on many fo
rays against the Protestant missions and schools which were opened from time to time. It was Little Mike’s dehght to break up the classes and rehgious services by hurling stones through the windows, after which he poked his red head into the room and yelled, “Go to hell, you old Protestants!” Half a dozen gangs of small beggars and sneak thieves made life miserable for the merchants and householders on the lower West Side, around Greenwich and Washington street and within the shadow of old Trinity Church.

  In Worth, Mott, Mulberry, Baxter and other streets of the Bowery and Five Points areas saloons and dives were opened which catered solely to the street boys, selling them frightful whiskey at three cents a glass and providing small girls for their amusement. For the favor of one of these children two boys of a Mackerelville gang once fought a duel with knives in City Hall Park, surrounded by a mob of howling youngsters armed with dirks, clubs and stones. One of the boys was killed, and the affair ended in a free-for-all battle in which more than fifty juvenile gangsters were engaged. In various parts of the city were half a dozen gambling houses wherein the boys frittered away their meager earnings at faro and policy; and keepers of assignation houses and places of prostitution employed them as cappers, while independent harlots engaged them to distribute printed cards and act as guides for men in quest of amorous adventure. Hundreds of boys and girls roamed the streets producing squeaky noises from violins, harps, and other musical instruments, begging pennies which they turned over to their masters. A majority of the child minstrels lived in the slums of Mulberry Bend, where a strong colony of Italians had been established soon after the Civil War and was gradually ousting the Irish. In many instances the children had been indentured to thieves by their parents in Italy.