The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

You can largely credit the work of a single reporter, Elias Smith, who’d been with the paper only a short time when the E. A. Johnson was towed into South Street. Smith had been knocking around before that, working in single-tavern towns, chasing rumors. He had a gift for dialogue and a taste for action. He was fearless and willing not just to report but to become part of the story. He was like a weatherman who, on a blue-sky day, can make it rain.

  No one knows what Elias Smith looked like. He imprinted his voice and style on the Times in its early years, but he left no pictures. You might imagine him with a military bearing, if only because he enlisted in the army during the Civil War and was attached to the staff of General Ambrose Burnside, but he never quit reporting. He filed regular dispatches from the front. He was at the siege of Vicksburg, where he described the Confederate soldiers as “cowardly miscreants.”

  Smith wrote about everything for the paper, but he was especially interested in skulduggery. Crime was the best beat because crime had everything—action, heartbreak, misery; good guys and bad guys; complicated characters with complex backstories; the built-in tension of a plot, which is just time expressed in an unusual way. A crime without a suspect is the riddle of creation. Solving it is like answering fundamental questions. A crime is the human condition boiled down to particulars. If told well, it will be the story of a certain act committed on a certain day but also the story of all mankind. It will include people and places, buildings and cops, fog-choked alleys, fugitives in flight, do-gooders and detectives in search of promotion. Every crime is a civic issue and a public interest but also personal in a way that feels like none of your goddamn business. It offers pleasure to the voyeur and to the stool pigeon. A good crime story will touch on motive, which can never be fully understood. Even when you know, you don’t know.

  Better still, crime stories sold newspapers. Write them well, a reporter became famous. This had partly to do with the condition of New York City. Crime seemed important in the spring of 1860, because New York City was then in the midst of the worst crime wave it would ever know. The murder rate was four times what it is today. In 2018 the murder rate was 3.4 per 100,000 people; in 1860 it was 14 per 100,000. One hundred and ten killings were reported that year, but the actual number was probably much higher—the police tended to avoid neighborhoods like the Five Points altogether, leaving homicides there unreported. The killings were blamed on the immigrants flooding the downtown streets, the unknowable slums, the gap between rich and poor, uptown and downtown, or maybe it was the police department, understaffed and corrupt. Every morning more bodies turned up, followed by stories in the penny press. And yet this particular crime—the ghost ship, its decks washed in blood—garnered special attention. The public was riveted for months. Unfolding in the summer before the Civil War, the details of the sloop murders, the uncanny wandering of that abandoned ship, seemed to catch the anxiety of a town on the edge of nervous collapse.

  What was it about this crime?

  It started with the victims. This wasn’t a case, like so many on the waterfront, of gangsters killing gangsters, nor a case of the immigrant Irish getting slaughtered and dumped in the Five Points. These were sailors in a city of sailors, a maritime city on a maritime afternoon, murdered, along with their captain, while going about their mundane business in the Lower Bay. The Watts brothers. Captain Burr. It could have been anyone. When it could have been anyone, it is everyone. The author of such crimes has to be found and punished, the motive explained. Until then you will be driven by the sort of anxiety that makes you pick up a newspaper morning, noon, and night. You’ll be like a machine stuck in high gear, looking for an answer that lets you settle back into a comfortable hum. That’s what people mean when they say a body cries out for vengeance—until the killer is found, no one will be able to forget.

  Then there was the nature of the crime, the gruesome violence. It was a dream that seeped into daytime. And of course the mystery—four fingers and a thumb. Who did this? Everyone had a theory. Maybe it had been the work of river pirates, a bloodthirsty gang out of the Fourth Ward, the Daybreak Boys or the Swamp Angels. Maybe it had been the work of the captain, driven mad by the nearness of the moon. Maybe it had been the work of a shanghaied sailor. It was only a matter of time till one of the crimps marked the wrong man, the one-in-a-million killer who would take back his freedom with a blade.

  As soon as the E. A. Johnson was anchored at South Street, beside the Fulton Fish Market, the police began to identify its crew and search for friends and acquaintances who could vouch for each man. For the most part, this was not hard, as Captain Burr, Oliver Watts, and Smith Watts were well known on the waterfront. That was not the case with the fourth man. In fact, the more information the police gathered about him, the less they seemed to know. At first they took him to be a common sailor, one of the thousands who crowded the docks, waiting for a ship. But few people could remember much about him. He’d been seen in the presence of Captain Burr and Smith Watts, a brooding sailor in a Kossuth hat, polite but with an aura—a bad business, Reuben Keymer told police. He was listed on the manifest as William Johnson, but there was no other record of a William Johnson. In fact, the only thing the police knew for sure about William Johnson was that he was not named William Johnson.

  * * *

  —

  Hart Weed was a police captain in Manhattan’s second precinct, which covered everything east of Broadway between Liberty Street and Spring Street. He opened the investigation with a single lead: the missing yawl that had once hung off the back of the sloop.

  Find it—that was where the trail began.

  Harbor Patrol was tasked with searching for the yawl in the Upper and Lower Bay. Established in 1858, Harbor Patrol, which had started with two sergeants, twenty-five men, and five boats, was meant to battle the river pirates who ran amok on the waterfront. Its distinctive black launches were as purposeful as Roman galleys, the officers at the oars, skimming the water in long blue parkas. The patrol added a steamship later—there were tremendous battles, victories at sea—but in the early years the officers were merely trying to prove their worth. They’d had skirmishes with the Daybreak Boys and the Hookers, but the river pirates had an otherworldly ability to fade into the mist. You closed your hand around them, but when you opened it, they were gone.

  Harbor Patrol searched the coasts of Brooklyn and New Jersey before finding the yawl on Staten Island, not far from Fort Tompkins on the harbor side. It had been dragged ashore and stashed in the tall grass. The beach was rocky and desolate there, climbing to farm fields, a red house in the distance. The men of Harbor Patrol stood over the yawl, examining it. There was an inch of water sloshing around the bottom, two oars, a broken tiller, what looked like half a broom handle, and a boot. Walking into the fields, the officers located the trail and got the distinct impression that it continued inland, which was outside their jurisdiction.

  They reported these findings to Captain Weed at the station house. Considering the brutality of the crime and the growing list of confusing clues—the broken bowsprit, the severed fingers—Hart Weed decided this spreading stain of a case was beyond his abilities and called in the detectives.

  George Nevins must have been following the reports in the press, as transfixed as everyone else. He was one of a few dozen detectives in the police department, but he was unique. Most of the others were the kind of men a dramatist would cast in the role of detective, squarely built and handsome—their appearance alone would settle a hysterical widow. Not many crimes were solvable in those antebellum days. There was no photography, no fingerprinting, no little plastic bags, no DNA evidence. If a killer wasn’t caught in the act, if he slipped away, changed clothes, and got into a crowd, it would be nearly impossible to connect him to the crime scene. At that time, over 50 percent of all New York murder cases ended in acquittal. It was just so hard to construct a chain of evidence that linked a man to an event. The dete
ctive was a ceremonial figure as a result, a necessary part of the process—someone to go around, hear out the families, write up the report, and file it away. A detective made less money than a beat cop for this piecemeal work: three to ten dollars a day, small potatoes even in 1860. It made these men notoriously corruptible. Most had something else on the side. You could hire a New York detective to work private security. You could pay him to lose a weapon in the river, forget a fact, or walk away. Their services were advertised in the evening papers: “piping,” “shadowing,” “working up”—trained professional detection, ten dollars a day.

  Detective Nevins was different. He looked like a beaver, short and thick, with rusty hair, a twitchy nose, and sharp eyes, and he worked and behaved like one—persistent and industrious, even dogged. He was a man of science. He believed everyone left a trail as they made their way through the world. You just needed to know how to look. If Nevins was incorruptible, it was because his horizon stretched farther. Most detectives thought about this season or next year, but Nevins was fixated on the future, when he hoped the art of investigation would become a trade. His mission was partly to protect the city and the public and partly to demonstrate the worth of his profession, which was as much a philosophy as a career. He believed that the past could be understood, that crimes could be solved, and that fugitives could be identified and brought to justice.

  Nevins, in his thirties, was a native of New York, which made him a kind of foreigner. The city had changed so much since he was a boy—the past was another country. Much of Manhattan had been a forested Eden back then, wild terrain, but it had since been remade by industry. His once-green island was now covered in cobblestone and brick. The old rim-a-rack piers had given way to tremendous wharves. Along rivers where once he’d fished for sturgeon, factories stood. The morning sky was filled with steam and smoke.

  Nevins had a partner, but little is known about him. That’s always the way it is—when one man leaves a deep impression, the other fades.

  Soon after the yawl was found, the detectives headed to Staten Island. They went by ferry, then hired a carriage—a few were always waiting at the terminal—that took them to the shore. They got out and walked through the sand in their heavy black shoes, overcoats trailing in the bog grass. They stood around the yawl, talking. They’d brought a third man, Elias Smith of the Times. Everyone has a talent, and Smith’s was even more important in his line than writing: he had a brilliant knack for getting himself into the center of the action. As he watched the detectives work, he offered theories of his own. It’s from Elias Smith that we know many of the details of the manhunt.

  Someone must have seen something. The detectives went in search of witnesses. They spent the rest of the morning going from farmhouse to farmhouse, knocking on doors, calling to people working in the fields. Staten Island was a wilderness then, its villages clustered between vast estates, crescent-shaped beaches, and tumbledown forts and walls. Ancient machinery rotted in the cattails. They found a man who had seen the yawl come ashore. In court, they would call him a “hostler,” one who cares for horses. He operated a stable near the Narrows, “hard bestride Fort Tompkins.” He said he’d watched a man drag a little boat up the beach, a man who “seemed nervous and restless.”

  The detectives found another witness, George Nedlinger, a German-born farmer who had actually spoken to the fugitive. “I saw him pass at about 6 o’clock on Wednesday morning,” Nedlinger said. “He was about two hundred yards off, coming towards me, and had a big bag on his shoulder. As he came up he bade me good morning, and asked if anyone would interfere with his boat while he was away, as he had left it at the fort; I said no, and he went along; it was afterwards hauled up by some boys; when I saw him, his whiskers were rather long, and he wore a rather bluish coat, which they call a monkey-jacket, and rather a flat hat, that was squeezed down by the bag.”

  From that point, the killer’s trail was like a neon-lit road—all the detectives had to do was follow it. Nedlinger sent them on to another witness, Michael Durney, a farmer. They caught up with him on a broad causeway that crossed the island. Durney, fussing with a mule, wanted to know more about the fugitive before he talked.

  His name is William Johnson, Nevins explained. He’d come off a boat and is wanted for questioning in a crime.

  Durney said he’d seen the man. “He was dressed in a blue monkey-jacket, pants, and a black colored hat, and had a bag on his shoulder; he was pretty near Fort Richmond and going towards the ferry, and bid me good morning. He spoke about a boat he had left at the Fort and an oyster sloop. I did not understand him precisely; but said it was all right.”

  Nevins asked where the man had gone. Durney pointed up the road to Vanderbilt’s ferry landing, about two miles away. The detectives and the reporter walked the distance, sun beating down on them, fields desolate in the early spring. The smell of black earth, salt in the sea wind. As they went, they looked for clues, wanting not just to see but to experience everything the man in flight had experienced: houses and cart paths, rutted country lanes.

  They were footsore by the time they reached the landing.

  What time does that make it? asked Nevins.

  His partner checked his watch. Noon.

  So it took us two hours?

  Just under.

  The ferry terminal consisted of a pier and a few ramshackle houses, with a ticket office and a newsstand. Nevins asked around till he found Abram Egbert, the dock keeper, a little German immigrant with a distinct recollection of Johnson, or Jones, or whatever they were calling him.

  He came up that road just like you did, Egbert told the detectives, only he was ragged in that monkey jacket and Kossuth hat. He was humping a big sack that looked like a shot bag and must have weighed something terrible, but he would not put it down or let it out of his sight. He was wild in the eyes—not nervous, more like elated. He got here just as the ferry was leaving—he missed it by two minutes. He tried to run for it, but it was no use. Once they shut the doors…He was not happy about that. He cursed something awful, stomped back, and asked for a ticket for the next ferry—they leave every hour. He dipped into that shot bag and pulled out a silver coin—you don’t forget a ten-dollar piece. I said it was too big, and he found something smaller. He asked if there was a place to get a drink. I sent him there.

  Egbert pointed to a tavern across the landing. It was the saloon of Peter Van Pelt where, according to the Times, the fugitive “took refreshments” and “ostentatiously displayed his money.”

  The detectives and the reporter sat down in the saloon and ordered coffee. They asked if anyone remembered a man who’d come in carrying a shot bag and wearing a Kossuth hat.

  “Yeah, I seen him,” said the bartender.

  Nevins asked the bartender his name. It was Augustus Gisler. He was seventeen years old and worked in the saloon part-time, mostly mornings. It was usually the same customers every day, he said, going back and forth on the ferry, so you noticed strangers. And this man…with that shot bag…he sat down slowly, ordering a whiskey, but as soon as the liquor was in him, you could see the effect. His eyes lit up and he grinned and hefted that big sack and asked for more drinks—this time for everyone in the place. “At one point,” the bartender said, “he took a gold piece out of his bag and held it to the light, then showed it to me and said, ‘Hey boy, I bet you want this?’ ”

  “I said, ‘No, sir. I can’t make change for that.’ ”

  He grinned and reached into the bag for a few shillings, which he rolled across the bar. He was dark and twinkling, on a jag. He ordered breakfast—eggs and oysters. It was a spectacle, the way he wolfed down the food and piled up the shells, roaring with laughter and slapping the bar as he ordered whiskey after whiskey.

  He called to Egbert, who was watching from the doorway. “Hey friend, join me for a drink before the ferry arrives.”

  Abram E
gbert asked the stranger “if he was a seafaring man.”

  The fugitive then told a fantastic tale, possibly working up a cover story to explain all that money, all that burning energy. Yes, he was indeed a seafaring man, he said. He’d been the captain of a sloop that experienced bad luck in the Lower Bay, the worst kind of bad luck, the kind that makes you appreciate each moment left in your life. He’d been sailing in the Lower Bay when, in the dead of night, he’d been run into by a ship that quickly and callously sailed away. One of his crewmen had been killed, pinned by a bowsprit against the mast, and another had been knocked over—presumably he died too. He himself had been downstairs asleep at the time and only had time to get his clothes and “needful”—he shook the seabag—and get ashore in the yawl.

  Are you sure that other man drowned? Egbert asked. Maybe we should alert Harbor Patrol. Maybe he’s been knocked silly and is wandering around some beach.

  The fugitive cut Egbert short, saying only that he was certain the man was dead.

  * * *

  —

  The detectives and the reporter boarded the same ferry the fugitive had taken—the Southfield, a 750-ton side-wheel steamer that had been built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1857. Refashioned as a gunboat, the Southfield would be lost in the Civil War, sunk by a Confederate ironclad in April 1864. It was a massive ship, filled with club rooms and galleries, the upper deck shadowed by a huge funnel, the current all around it beaten to white water.

  A few days earlier, Hicks had boarded at seven A.M. The detectives and the reporter boarded in the afternoon, for a trip that felt like an Atlantic crossing. The coast of bucolic Staten Island, home to Lenape Indians and Dutch settlements, was still nearly as virgin as when Henry Hudson sailed the Narrows. From there the ferry would take them in under thirty minutes to the bustling, crime-ridden, commerce-drunk port of Manhattan.