The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  The cabin was in disarray—everything smashed. The floor, according to Captain Weed, looked as if it had been “scrubbed with water; there was a pail there which looked as if there had been bloody water in it, and the rope by which the pail was dipped into the water was saturated with blood, and had hair on it; the blood and hair were near the end of the rope, which was about six feet long—long enough to dip into the water from over the vessel’s side; there was no water in the pail, but the rope was wet; I found a broom, and it had the appearance of having been used to brush the blood into the forepart of the cabin, behind the stove.”

  Captain Weed discovered three holes “bored” into the floor behind the stove. These holes had been made with a hot poker—Weed called it an “augur”—found nearby. The purpose, some believed, was to fill the cabin with water and sink the ship. It seemed evidence of intent—a man meant to hide his crimes by sending the sloop to the bottom of the harbor. But blood had rushed out instead, carrying detritus that stopped up the holes and saved the E. A. Johnson.

  Captain Weed found a shirt on a dressing table. He held it up, letting it fall open. It was covered in slashes—four or five at least—each showing a place a blade went in. He reported:

  The biggest [slash] was seven inches. I found also that the walls and ceiling were besmeared with blood, and the gashes in the ceiling above appeared to have been done with a knife. I should suppose that the ceiling of the cabin is about six or eight inches higher than I am (that is, it is about 6 feet 4 inches at the most;) there was blood on the side of the cabin door, which (the blood) had the appearance of being fresh and seemed to have spurted on each side as the person bleeding was being hauled out; there was a new sail on top of the stairs, on removing which we found two lockers that had the appearance of being searched; we found a hole under the stairs, in which was contained the lead-line and some other articles; the blood had run down there, quite a quantity of it; when the sail was pulled out you could, by getting on your knees and crawling under, get at the private locker; on searching the drawer there, we found some blank papers, and papers not of that crew but of the crews of former voyages.

  By following the blood, the police got a picture of bodies falling, lying, being dragged. The search ended at the rail on the starboard side, where Weed found a bloody handprint. It looked as if a man had clung to the wood, as if hanging on for life.

  Weed noticed something else. “Look,” he said.

  The men got on their haunches. There, on deck, was all that remained of the crew of the E. A. Johnson—four severed fingers and a thumb.

  * * *

  —

  Manhattan island lies within an estuary. It’s where the currents converge, where a tidal wash (the East River) meets a cataract (the Hudson River, formerly called the North River), a flood of sweet water that runs down from the mountains. New York Harbor is a network of islands and coves, seabirds and arsenical green marshland, the sort that looks solid until you step on it. The Hudson, turbid and overshadowed by palisades, deepens below Manhattan. In the old days, every road on the island ended at the water, the sun rose at the foot of every street. Even now, when the fog rolls in, the waterfront is a sailor’s dream.

  The town grew around the harbor. In the late 1600s, all housing and commerce were crowded in tight communion on the southern shore. It was a fishing village and a trading post, then a bustling military base, a fort on the edge of an unknown continent, then a small town, then a big town, then a small city, then a metropolis. In 1860 New York was among the richest ports in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars of produce and machinery sat in its warehouses. Its coast was girdled by wharves; more than a hundred piers studded the East River and North River. The population doubled, then doubled again. Huge ships carried immigrant Irish and Germans into the city, a harbinger of the Jews and Poles and Russians and Italians who would follow. The inspection station at Ellis Island was not opened until 1892. In 1860, when this story takes place, emigrants were still landing in Manhattan and being processed through Castle Garden, an antique brownstone fort beside the Battery, where the Dutch had kept their big guns. As respectable neighborhoods turned into vast immigrant slums, Manhattan approached a mystical number—one million inhabitants.

  Such a city is about traffic control: regular ferry service had quickly been established with every important river and seaport in the Northeast. In addition, there was a twice-weekly run to Liverpool, England, huge steamships carrying the wealth of the American South, cargoes of cotton that powered Britain’s industrial economy. A black market in slaves flourished in the shadow of the harbor: pirates, violating the ban on the international slave trade, smuggled human beings from the west coast of Africa to New York, where they were sold, transferred, and carried to Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. There was a booming trade in guns and narcotics. Mott and Pell streets would soon be riddled with opium dens, subbasement cellars with velvet couches where hopheads took the curling white smoke deep into their lungs, their stony eyes filling with clouds and clipper ships. Whatever you wanted could be had in the riverfront taverns. On Water Street, you walked beneath the bowsprits of dozens of foreign ships, an artificial forest so thick it made a kind of canopy.

  Merchants, bartenders, and stage performers, bankers, cops, and criminals—especially criminals: everyone lived off the sailors who pumped through the city like blood. Most of these criminals, and most of their crimes, were confined to a handful of neighborhoods, the famous slums of New York. The Five Points, ur-ghetto of urban America, a sprawl of old barns and factories, tenements leaning this way and that. Charles Dickens had written about it:

  Here, too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep: underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number: ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.

  As had Davy Crockett:

  It appeared as if the cellars were jam full of people; and such fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world….Black and white, white and black, hugemsnug together, happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them, and I do think I saw more drunken folks, men and women, that day than I ever saw before….I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night.

  Most New Yorkers led sensible, hardworking lives. They rented houses and apartments in the center of the island, as far as possible from the raucous waterfront. The rich lived still farther uptown, in mansions on suburban Fifth Avenue. Central Park opened to the public in 1858. But the real action, the color and excitement, the fashion, music, and night life, was in the slums, the greatest being the Five Points. It was built on the grave of an ancient pond, the Collect, once New York City’s main source of drinking water. Befouled by industry, the Collect was drained in the early 1800s, then covered with streets and buildings, but the fill had not been done properly, and the buildings sagged and the basements filled with water. Understandably, the inhabitants of such a neighborhood, beaten and abandoned, championed anyone who seemed to defy the city’s aristocratic powers.

  The Five Points bred many of the town’s first street gangs, ethnic armies that went to war with each other and with the world. These were less like modern mob outfits—less like the famous Five Families—than like medieval peasant bands. They had little organization, method, or plan. The order of the day was simple: maraud. The names of these gangs are a hymn of colorful decay: the Whyos, the Chichesters, the Forty Thieves, the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, the Hudson Dusters. The toughest worked in the Sixth Ward, which covered a few dozen acres between Broadway and the Bowery. The g
rid of numbered streets and lettered avenues was laid out in the early 1800s, but it was still the old New York down here, with bends and hooks and rookeries and lanes. Many streets followed the path of a lost Indian trail or the shore of a vanished lake. Everything was evidence of something that was gone. Cherry Street had once been among the city’s grandest thoroughfares. It’s where George Washington was inaugurated, where John Hancock and DeWitt Clinton lived. It was dotted with parks and stately homes, but cut-rate developers filled the lots with tenements. By 1860, the old mansions had decayed. Many had been turned into bordellos or flophouses. In thirty years, the Sixth Ward had gone from leafy elegance to urban nightmare.

  The waterfront neighborhoods were even worse. Corlears Hook, a jutting coast that served as a landmark for river navigators (it’s now mostly buried beneath the FDR Drive), had been a red-light district since the early nineteenth century. By 1855 it was the heart of the local crime scene, crowded with dance halls and saloons, including the infamous Tub of Blood bar, home of the Tub of Blood Bunch and the even more infamous Hole-in-the-Wall Saloon, the headquarters of a gang called the Hookers.

  The characteristic crime of New York City’s nineteenth-century waterfront was the shanghai. Because conditions aboard sailing vessels were both boring and brutal, some part of every crew fled as soon as a ship reached port, leaving whalers and sloops short of manpower. Post a notice, interview seamen—that was the proper way. But desperate captains often hired port agents, disreputable characters, to kidnap drunks from waterfront crimps. At these run-down hotels, an agent would comb the lobby bar for a mark. At some point, he would dose the mark’s drink with a mickey—usually laudanum, which was one part opium and many parts Canary wine. When the mark stumbled to bed to sleep it off, the agent followed with a blackjack, then delivered the blow that sent the mark into deep unconsciousness. The most storied crimps, such as the Old Fourth Ward Hotel at Catherine and Water streets, were built on piers with trapdoors that led directly from the bedrooms to the river, where a rowboat was waiting. By the time the mark awoke hours or even days later, he was on a ship at sea. The choice was simple: work or swim. In the worst case, such a man would end up on a whaler bound for China—“shanghaied”—which meant he would be away for four or five months, like dropping off the map; his wife might grieve for a time, then marry another. Hundreds of marks were kidnapped in the Fourth Ward in the 1850s and ’60s.

  All kinds of criminals operated along the East River. Child crooks, apprentice pickpockets, served as lures. Most established gangs had a youth auxiliary for this purpose. The Forty Thieves had the Forty Little Thieves. The Hudson Dusters had the Little Hudson Dusters. Members of child gangs had tough faces, wore ragged coats and patched pants, and were underfed, illiterate, disease-ridden, and mean. They lived three to a bed in tenement flops, stalked the streets, and drank turpentine on a dare. There were con artists, bunko men, crooked dealers in every kind of card game—faro, poker, stud. There were thousands of gang members: some joined because they wanted a family, some because they needed protection. There were pimps and hookers, loan sharks, opium dealers, and addicts.

  And pirates. An 1850 police report estimated the presence of between four hundred and five hundred pirates in New York City. To the police, a pirate was any criminal who made his living on the water, attacking and robbing ships beyond the jurisdiction of the landlocked coppers—named for the tin badge on their peaked caps. Most river pirates were boys, twelve to eighteen years old, divided among a dozen or so outfits. The Slaughter Housers worked out of Slaughter House Point; the Patsy Conroys worshipped their martyred founder; the Short Tails were known for their favorite kind of coat; the Swamp Angels, the Hookers, the Border Gang, the Buckoos, and the Daybreak Boys—so called because that’s when they emerged in their flat-bottom boats—hit the sloops in the harbor, then vanished into the sewers.

  Then there was that more mysterious category of criminal, a man—always a man—who lived between these worlds, engaged in a mission of his own. Freelancers and solo operators, these thugs were so feared, they did not require the protection of any gang. People left them alone because who needed that kind of trouble?

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks before the E. A. Johnson was found ghosting, Albert Hicks was sitting alone in a Water Street saloon—the Hole-in-the-Wall, say, with its card tables and its long oaken bar. For a nickel, drinking through a tube from a cask, you could take in all the beer you could hold. A man hammered out popular tunes on a rickety piano. The front door was a few hundred yards from the docks. You could hear foghorns, and maybe a sailor singing in a crow’s nest.

  Hicks was big and broad-shouldered—“strongly built” was how the police put it—a shade under six feet tall, with high cheekbones and wide-set black eyes that were described, variously, as accusatory, suspicious, paranoid, and wild. He’d let his beard grow, but it was mostly stubble beneath the chin. He was dark, tanned by many years at sea. Those who met him later, or who took him in from the safe side of the jailhouse bars, came away surprised—a man who lived as he did, who did what he’d done, should not have been handsome. It didn’t seem right. At some point, after a second or third whiskey, his expression would go from amused to dangerous. If you met his gaze, you’d regret it.

  No one knew much about him. The reporters said only that he’d been married and had a child and had spent years working on ships. He lived nearby and often drank alone. They said he could neither read nor write—his wife read to him from the newspaper—but not everyone believed it. He seemed to understand even the small print when it was in his interest.

  He’d spent his early years on a farm in Foster, Rhode Island, one of eleven siblings. Simon, the firstborn, became notorious before Albert. He’d befriended an old man in Foster, spent hours in his company. Then late one night he sneaked into the old man’s house, killed him in his bed, stole his money, went to Providence, and had a spree. Captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang, he escaped in a jailbreak and was never seen again. Where did Simon Hicks go? Out west, probably, where there was no law. It was a story that stayed with Albert, a story with a lesson moral. Even in the last moment, when you have nothing ahead but a swinging rope, you still have the possibility of escape.

  Hicks was a Freemason—that’s one of the few facts that suggest his internal life and beliefs. He joined the secret brotherhood somewhere along the way, perhaps attracted by the comity of a lodge or by the ritual and mystical explanation. To a Freemason, the world is an allegory shot through with symbols and signs meant to lead the faithful toward enlightenment. These hints are complicated and interlocked, like wheels within wheels, set in place by a hidden power. To Hicks, it would have suggested the existence of at least two worlds: one where things were as they appeared, and another where all the usual meanings were inverted. In that second world, the criminal was the hero and the condemned man was king.

  In the 1850s Hicks was a terrifying presence in lower Manhattan, a fiend of the taverns and dives. Some accounts described him as the most feared criminal on the waterfront—“the baddest man.” Sitting at the bar, he would stare into space or into his glass—wine so red it was black—laughing quietly. Stories followed him. Some said he’d fought with the gangs in the old days, when it was all tribal warfare below Fourteenth Street. Some said he’d hired himself out to various bosses, working for whoever was willing to pay most, fighting first for the Daybreak Boys, then for the Chichesters. Some said he’d operated as a hit man—you paid him, your problem went away. Asked for details, a bartender at the Hole-in-the-Wall told a reporter, “I know only that he looked for ships and that he followed the sea.”

  It can be hard to get a clean read on Albert Hicks. Was he a prototype for the modern hit man, for Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the mob enforcer, a menace who, once unleashed, cannot be recalled? Or was he something else, something older—the last of the pirates, the last of the Blac
kbeards and Jean Lafittes, a character out of Robert Louis Stevenson? He seems a kind of missing link. With him, the pirate turned into the gangster: he emerged onto dry land and took up in bars and casinos—Blackbeard morphing into Al Capone. Hicks became infamous during New York gangland’s prehistory. Writing about him, reporters created a basic underworld type. He was the first swamp angel, the great-grandfather of every mob punk and Bowery psycho who would follow.

  According to Herbert Asbury, author of the classic Gangs of New York, Hicks had been a victim before he’d become a killer, the subject of a shanghai who’d gone to sleep in a Cherry Street crimp but awakened on the E. A. Johnson at sea. It’s not clear where Asbury got this story. Maybe he invented it, along with the quote, attributed to Hicks, that seemed to confirm it: “After I realized what had been done to me, how I’d been mistreated and taken from my wife and child, I was filled with rage. Standing at the wheel of the ship, I determined to avenge myself by murdering all hands aboard.” Or maybe the shanghai story had already been part of the legend when Asbury came along—his book was published in 1928, nearly seventy years after the fact—added by raconteurs or mythmakers looking for a moral. Those who claimed Hicks had been kidnapped were seeking sympathy for the pirate, for without that sympathy he could not be fashioned into an archetype, a personification of grit. If he’d been shanghaied, his crimes would have been understandable, if not justifiable. But Hicks was not shanghaied; nor did he ever fall victim. His truth was less complicated and more terrifying. Cold, calculating, remorseless, Albert Hicks was always the hunter, never the hunted.