The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  Hicks and Stone worked at night. They’d infiltrate, rob, and kill—“dead men tell no tales.” They believed many of their deeds were mistakenly credited to Joaquín Murrieta, a Mexican bandit who’d became a populist hero in gold country, robbing the rich, killing the arrogant, hounding the Yankees. Murrieta was said to be the real-life model for Zorro. “I have no doubt that, during this period, many of the crimes attributed to the notorious Joaquín were committed by us,” Hicks said. “The devil, whose work we were so industriously doing, seemed to protect us.”

  Having accumulated a fortune—Hicks said they had more gold than they could carry with both hands—the pirates decided to blow it all in San Francisco. What if you did whatever you wanted, as much as you wanted, every way you wanted? How long would it take you to spend it all?

  San Francisco was a boomtown in 1855—not so different than Cuzco, Peru, in 1550 or Leadville, Colorado, in 1882. In a heartbeat, it had gone from nothing to everything, from a small Spanish mission and fort called Yerba Buena to a wild metropolis annexed by the United States and renamed for its picturesque bay. Between 1846 and 1850, 200 inhabitants became 21,000. It was less a city than a stampede, a delirium. It can feel like that still, cresting and falling on great floods of commerce: beat poets, hippies, computer programmers. It’s insubstantial as a result, pumped up, phony. From a distance, it’s a picture on a soap bubble—towers, bridges, sea. You hold your breath, waiting for it to pop. When Hicks and Stone arrived, it was ramshackle, with houses of redwood and pine, the smell of sawdust, the ring of hammers, storefronts packed onto the hills. Certain landmarks were already in place—the Presidio, the Spanish Mission, the nonsensically pitched streets that climb to heaven, then plunge to earth. Mansions and silversmiths, bordellos, the harbor, smoky islands that dream of China.

  Hicks rented a hotel room near the wharf. Dropping a sack of gold onto the desk, he said, “Tell me when I’ve gone through that.” Stone installed himself on the same floor, blinds drawn against morning light, chatter of seagulls—the Pacific Ocean means the end of America. The city had grown so fast, people were living in tents, in driftwood shacks. There were dozens of high-end clip joints, ten percent houses, wolf traps. Every bar was a casino, offering a million ways for you to lose everything you’d dug out of the hills. Faro was the preferred game, but aficionados had begun to branch into poker and draw. The sound of cards being shuffled, the clatter of dice, the dealers—this fantasy California existed, if it existed at all, for only a moment. On certain nights, Hicks knew he was “the mightiest man in the world.” “The bar-room, the brothel, and the monte table, were the only attractions for us,” he explained. “For six months we led the life of demons, leaving no bad impulse, no fiendish purpose, no gross passion, nor any wicked design, ungratified and unaccomplished.”

  And then he ran out of money. It was gone. He’d found the bottom of the bucket, gambled, boozed, and whored it all away. So…back to the till…back to the machine…back to the water.

  The fate of the Josephine, a brig that shipped from the foot of California Street, San Francisco, was like a premonition of the fate of the E. A. Johnson. The ship was bound for Valparaiso, Chile. Having heard its holds were packed with silver doubloons, Hicks and Stone signed on as hands. They performed diligently while awaiting their moment. It came a few miles off Mazatlán, Mexico. As the crew—four or five men—slept, the pirates armed themselves, went down to the cabin, and subdued, tied, and bound everyone. They crowded them into a yawl and set it adrift. In control of the brig now, they methodically gathered every bit of the treasure—more money than they’d started with in San Francisco, more money than they’d ever seen. They set fire to the Josephine—it burned off the coast at dawn—climbed with their loot into the other yawl, dropped into the sea, and headed for shore. As they approached Mazatlán, it grew larger and filled with detail, dusty streets and rickety houses, rocky hills. There were ancient chapels in Mazatlán, Spanish churches, and cliffside houses that kept vigil over sunbaked market squares.

  They had to do something with all that cash—a hundred thousand gold and silver doubloons, the equivalent of millions today. It was more than they could carry or store, bury or explain. They had to launder it, though that’s not the term they used. They came up with a solution that would not be unfamiliar to a modern-day drug lord: they bought a hotel and a bowling alley in Mazatlán. The first indoor bowling alley had opened in New York a half decade earlier. The sport, if it is a sport, had become a sensation. The pirates lived in the hotel, a seedy wreck not far from the beach that catered to a rough crowd. Many of its guests were fortune hunters, prospectors heading to or from the mines.

  Hicks developed a routine: sleep late, have coffee in the bar, talk to guests, perhaps ask one of them—a Mexican businessman reading El Boletin, say—what was happening in the world. In 1853 Franklin Pierce was in the White House, and the Rangers killed that Mexican Robin Hood, Joaquín Murrieta, in California. Then he would head out. Hicks walked every inch of Mazatlán. He was thirty-three, a big gringo, as handsome as a stage star. He dressed like a sailor waiting for a ship, in canvas pants, a striped shirt, a knee-length peacoat (the sort known as a monkey coat), and a broad-brimmed hat. He wore a ruby pinky ring and took snuff. He was not a dandy, but did know how to dress. He’d switch clothes after sundown, head back to the bar, and spend the evenings drinking with guests. He was always gathering information. Where had this man arrived from, and where was he going? Was he born wealthy, or had he recently come into a fortune? Whether rich or poor, flush or busted, Hicks continued to rob and brutalize—because that’s who he was and that’s what he did. He paid special attention to well-dressed travelers, examining their companions and horses. If the setup looked good, he’d rouse Stone, and they’d follow the traveler after he checked out. They’d strike beyond town, at a quiet place along the road, emerging from the shadows, hats pulled low, Hicks waving a silver Colt pistol, the so-called Navy Revolver. Give us what you’ve got. The coins, the paper. All of it. Now.

  They were also willing to improvise. The world is various and vast; no one knows what the wind might carry. One evening they happened across a wagon train fronted and backed by men riding squat donkeys, the sort the Spanish call burros. It was on the road from the mines. Hicks and Stone killed the guards, then got into the saddlebags. They were amazed by what they found: dozens of freshly minted silver bars, each stamped with the name of its owner and the name of the Mexican state, SINALOA. They had to be worth at least $200,000, but how could you spend or trade them? It was like coming into possession of a famous work of stolen art—both invaluable and without value. They were too heavy to carry—even a few bars would be a burden. They took a shovel from one of the donkeys and dug, burying the treasure a few hundred yards off the road. Hicks offered to sell the bars to a Chinese trader for $25,000, a man Hicks called “the Chinaman, Cassa.” Cassa agreed to ride out and take a look, but he refused to bring along the purchase price, fearing, as he told the men, that they’d simply shoot him and take the money. Hicks laughed: You’re right about that, amigo. They never did figure out what to do with the silver bars. They’re probably out there still, buried beneath a shopping mall or highway.

  Suspicion soon fell on the hotel. Misfortune had come to so many of its guests. Mexican authorities investigated. Getting word of it—it took only a few questions—Hicks and Stone packed their duffels and cleared out. They rode fifty miles inland to the old town of Valparaiso, a colorful village in the hills that knew only two seasons: sunshine and rain. They’d gotten away with maybe fifty thousand dollars, part of which they used to buy a boardinghouse in the outskirts. They tried to continue as before, gathering information on miners and traders, robbing them outside town, but Valparaiso was smaller than Mazatlán, and word spread fast. They escaped a step ahead of an angry mob and raced back to the coast, a fortune in their saddlebags.

  Mexico was finished for them—th
ey’d become too well known, burned clean through it. They caught a ship, made a stop in Peru, then sailed through the strait and on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, an ancient city for this part of the world. Rio’s foundations had been laid in 1565, but the old Portuguese town had been remade by waves of Dutch, French, English, and Chinese immigration. With its horse-drawn trams and cobblestone plazas, its huge varied population, Rio was as modern as any place in the world in the 1850s—it was coffee shops and theaters, libraries, the opera, rich expats living beside the dirt-poor descendants of the city’s first inhabitants, masters and slaves. Portuguese was the language, but a dozen other tongues could be heard in the markets—Spanish, French, Dutch, English, Chinese, and Ladino as well as fast-disappearing Amazonian tongues. The most prominent citizens owned rubber, sugar, cotton, and brazilwood plantations in the provinces.

  Hicks and Stone rented a house near the harbor and spent most of their time in the groggeries that lined the docks, tough cavelike joints that served beer, Canary wine, and a Portuguese drink called Ginjinha. Days went by, a phantasmagoria of boozing and gambling and sleeping it off. So it continued, on and on, from drunk to sober, from affluent to busted, from sated to hungry. There were hardly more than two successive hours in which Hicks was not inebriated, his handsome face gone sloppy and slack, stupid smile and pinprick eyes, drinks for everyone. He remembered Rio as a “debauch”—liquor and women, flashing knives, cards, cotton skirts spinning across ballroom floors, slaves in clanking chains, gauchos driving herds through the side streets, peasants in tall hats—afternoons and nights, laughter and brawls and a single slug left in a bottle when the sun appeared above Guanabara Bay.

  After they’d gone through the last of the cash, they sobered up, bathed, and went back on the road, a Latin American road this time, headed south. They followed the old highway—now walking, now riding—from Rio all the way to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, fifteen hundred miles down the coast. It took them through faded port towns: Santos. Paranaguá. Punta del Diablo. Punta del Este. They robbed and killed along the way. “There is many a whitened skeleton bleaching by that roadside now, on the same spot where it fell by my murderous hand, and the traveler, as he rides along, will see many a place where the grass grows taller and greener than that which surrounds it but little dreams that its roots are enriched by blood shed by me,” Hicks told Deputy Marshal De Angelis.

  On the road, Hicks and Stone hijacked a party, a man and three women—they were clearly aristocrats, members of society who’d made the mistake of going riding in a wild, unsettled country. Their beautiful white horses suggested breeding. The man wore a fine suit, and the women wore jewels. Hicks described this incident at length in his confession; it was one of the few times he showed mercy. He seemed to consider it a turning point. Once you see your victims as people, you’re finished.

  In the confession, Hicks spoke of his intent to rape the women—it’s the ony time he talked like this. The pirates separated the man from the women, knocked the man to his knees, then went through their bags and pockets, taking anything that looked valuable. “We robbed them and should have killed them all, but the women were beautiful, and, for once, I allowed my heart to yield to the soft feeling of pity,” Hicks said.

  “I shall never forget the look of these poor frightened creatures kneeling at my feet, praying to me to be merciful, while my partner, Tom Stone, stood a few feet off, with his [gun] at the head of the man who was gradually divesting himself of everything valuable he had about him. One of the women wore half-a-dozen magnificent diamond rings, and the other carried two gold watches set with diamonds, besides other trinkets of great value. These I made them take off, and give to me. After which, I intended to have ravished and then killed them; I halooed to Tom to get rid of the man, and come and toss for the choice of the women—but the younger of the two, though I spoke in English, seemed to be aware, as if by instinct, of our designs. She started suddenly up, and, with a bound, sprang to the side of her husband, and clung to him in such a way that Tom could not kill him without killing her also. I seized the other woman, and was about to execute my hellish purpose upon her, when, with tears and prayers, she besought my pity, and begged for mercy….I do not know how it was, but my heart softened for once, and I stopped Tom’s hand just as he was going to pull the trigger on the man, who now stood alone, with his arms folded, awaiting his fate. Tom looked astonished, but put up his pistol with an oath, and after some demurrer, agreed with me to let them all depart without further harm. I even assisted them to catch their horses, which they mounted, and rode back with all the speed they could toward Montevideo. Ten minutes after they had gone I felt sorry, and thought I had acted like a fool.”

  The pirates soon accumulated a new fortune, which got them to Argentina. They posed as businessmen in Buenos Aires, which, like Manhattan, was set in an estuary, a swell of land on the western shore of the Rio de la Plata. By 1850 the city was a capital in the European style, an outpost on the edge of the pampa.

  Hicks and Stone lived there quietly, letting the days wash over. For a beat, it seemed they might continue like that forever. No running or being chased, no blood or confusion, just the ordinary pleasures of ordinary life. They had the money for it but, as it turned out, not the temperament. Two months of humdrum had them itching for action, which they figured they’d find back in the United States. They took jobs on “the bark Anada,” a three-masted ship with rectangular sails bound for New Orleans. They could have gone as passengers, but they did not want to lose control of their luggage, with thousands of dollars sewn into the linings. They worked before the mast instead.

  The voyage started without incident. Then as the Anada was sailing through the West Indies, with a lush island in the distance—a beach and a mountain, a peak in the clouds—the cabin boy, who was very young, ran afoul of the captain. There was a scuffle. The captain decided the cabin boy should be punished in the open before the crew and the passengers. He stripped the boy to his knickers and tied him to the mast. The captain took off his coat and uncoiled the whip. He stood ten feet from the boy, talking as he drew back. While the crowd watched, the captain snapped his arm, delivering the first blow. The whip cracked before it touched skin—that meant the tip had accelerated past the speed of sound. Each stroke left a stripe on the boy’s back.

  Hicks told De Angelis of the pitiful cries—that kind of suffering, on that particular day, was too much to take. Maybe he saw himself in the boy. Maybe he saw himself as he’d been before Norwich prison. He pushed through the crowd, knife in one hand, a spike in the other. He cut down the boy, who fell whimpering to the deck. The captain grabbed Hicks, who quickly dropped him with the spike. Members of the crew set upon Hicks, who fought them off with knife and spike, joined by Tom Stone. Between them, the two took control of the Anada. They locked the passengers in a stateroom, tied up the crew, robbed the ship, loaded the loot into a yawl, plunged into the sea, and headed for the island, which turned out to be Barbados.

  They soon found work on an English brig bound for New Orleans, but some of the crew must have heard about the Anada mutiny because, soon after the brig was under sail, people began to glare at Hicks and Stone. Conferring together, they decided to flee before they could be caught. Near the mouth of the Mississippi River, they took off in a dinghy. They rowed into the bayou, into murky water as thick as stew, between the shacks and the gators, between swamp islands that vanished at high tide. They wandered until they found a road.

  New Orleans was already fading by the time Hicks and Stone turned up, an elegant place that had been allowed to dilapidate. Once America’s great southern port, a transit point for every bit of grain grown west of the Allegheny Mountains, its decline began soon after the first railroad was built. It would eventually degrade from commercial dynamo to museum of past glories. In the 1850s the city was filled with sailors, river men who floated down the spine of the nation on rafts and side-wheel steamers.
The big ships stood in a tremendous armada at the edge of the French Quarter, sending up columns of black smoke that turned to ribbons in the subtropical sky. The city had been French, then Spanish, then American, then French—an effect of the migration that followed the Haitian slave revolt, which, in the 1790s, filled the streets and markets with exotic food and brass bands. In the 1800s New Orleans minted coins in both English and French. On the back of the ten-cent piece was the word DICE. Sailors used the term to identify the city. Dice became Dixie, which came to characterize the entire region.

  New Orleans entered the Union as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It was a focal point in the War of 1812. In the Battle of New Orleans, fought after the war itself had ended—as usual, the city was late—General Andrew Jackson joined with the pirate Jean Lafitte to beat back the British. In other words, New Orleans was kind of a pirate city. The island-filled bayous that lurked beyond the outskirts, a region created by the Mississippi Delta, had long been a hideout for buccaneers.

  Hicks and Stone took rooms in the French Quarter, which filled the river bend that gave the town one of its nicknames: Crescent City. The streets are confused as a result of the geography. You never know exactly where you are in New Orleans, only that it’s too far and too deep. The air smelled of resin, bananas, coconuts, ale, tar, wood, tobacco, burning fields, horseshit, sweat, and industry. The docks were ramshackle: weeds came through the paving stones where society ladies stood before grand store windows. The wooden sidewalks were made from rafts that had come down the river. Royal, Chartres, Esplanade—the streets were lined with brightly colored houses, red and pink, absinthe green, curaçao blue, fronted by French balconies with iron facades. The stalls of the French Market glistened in a warm rain. The Mississippi looked like café au lait. The square at the center of town had been renamed for General Jackson in 1815. The taverns were boisterous: in the Napoleon House at 500 Chartres, a room had been set aside for the deposed dictator should he make it off Helena. At Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, at 941 Bourbon, the pirate had once fenced stolen goods.