The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  The hangman stood by the scaffold. His name was Joe Atkinson, though everyone called him Little Joe. He’d been a carpenter in Brooklyn before he was recruited by George Isaacs, who served as city executioner until his death in 1852. George Isaacs, who’d been inspired by a book—The Autobiography of Jack Ketch, the “renowned high executioner of Great Britain”—trained Atkinson. (“I kind of eased into the business,” Little Joe said. “I guess I just had a knack.”) The press made a lot of the methods Little Joe learned from George—together, it was said, these men built a more humane gallows and made certain the procedure was not prolonged and no one suffered unduly, though at some level they must have just loved killing people.

  George taught Little Joe how to run a memorable hanging—in addition to ending a life, an executioner should be a master of ceremonies. He oversees the erection of the gallows, the adjustment of the weights and ropes, but must also have a sense of showmanship. Little Joe would turn up on execution day with a flourish, like a director arriving at the theater on opening night.

  Joe began his career with a double hanging on January 28, 1853—William Saul and Nicholas Howlett, the leaders of the Hook gang, who’d killed a night watchman on the schooner William Watson off James Slip—and continued until 1890, when he was replaced by the electric chair. In that time, he executed forty of the fifty prisoners put to death in the yard behind the Tombs, but considered the job he did on Hicks the highlight. It was the uniformed officials, the huge drunken crowd, the newspapermen, the nature of the criminal and his crimes, the snap of the canvas, the ladies with their parasols, the sailors in the rigging.

  Little Joe was waiting for Hicks on the gallows. It was raised fifteen feet, reached by ladder. Joe carried a black hood in a silk case—a trademark. He slipped it over the pirate’s head. For Hicks, there were just a few sensations left. The darkness inside the hood, the soft fabric, the scratchy rope as it was put around his neck. He stood there, the man in the sack, the pirate in the blue suit, the condemned man at the top of the world. The crowd became still. It made the kind of silence only a crowd can make. Ships jostled against each other in the harbor, toys in a bathtub. There was hardly any open water—just a carpet of vessels.

  Marshal Rynders waved a handkerchief. The hangman pulled the lever, the weights dropped, and Albert Hicks was yanked with a release of kinetic energy high into the air. The noose closed, his head fell to the side. His neck had snapped at the third vertebra. It was 11:15 in the morning. His body danced at the end of the rope for three minutes, then was still. At 11:20, the body jerked once more—wildly—then was still in a different way. A few minutes later, the hands of the pirate and the neck below the hood turned purple. At 11:29, the body was lowered until the pirate’s boots grazed the platform. The doctors came up—those three men. Each, in his turn, listened for a pulse and a heartbeat. One heard a murmur, a single contraction. The body was raised again, returned to its previous position as a half-cooked cake is returned to an oven. It was lowered at 11:45 A.M. and examined once more. This time, nothing. Death was pronounced. Then by way of thoroughness, and so the multitudes would have something to see as they sailed away, they raised Albert Hicks once more.

  BURIAL AND RESURRECTION

  Albert Hicks was cut down and placed in a coffin. “Upon removing the black cap which enveloped the head of the deceased, his features were found to be quite natural,” according to a police report. “His face bore a calm expression, and nothing but a slight protrusion of the tongue denoted that death had been produced by any other than a natural cause.”

  The coffin was carried to a tug and brought back to Manhattan. By this time, the ships had cleared out, and the harbor had returned to its ho-hum quotidian weekday traffic.

  The tugboat—The Only Son—delivered the coffin to the customhouse dock. Mrs. Hicks was supposed to meet the ship at the landing, but there had been a mix-up, and she was waiting on the wrong pier. By the time she figured it out, the coffin had been buried at Calvary Cemetery, a kind of potter’s field.

  Robbers dug up the grave soon afterward. When the police arrived, the coffin was empty, the body gone. It was likely sold to students at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who were known to pay top dollar for fresh corpses, cadavers being in such short supply.

  What happened to Mrs. Albert Hicks?

  She would likely have moved into one of the poorhouses crowded on the waterfront alleys of the Fourth Ward, Dickensian structures buzzing with the desperate and destitute—there were dozens of these in the city before the Civil War. Or she might have found refuge in the big new almshouse that opened on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) in 1845. It had a work farm where “vagrants” were taught “societal skills” and a nursery for children. It looked across the river at Manhattan, which might as well have been a light-year away. Or maybe, as her mother suggested, she found a place among the Shakers, a Christian community and Quaker offshoot named for the way its adherents trembled during prayer. The Shakers offered a home to anyone willing to believe, though theirs was a hard, celibate, stripped-down way of life. Or she could have left the boy at one of the city orphanages—a Catholic orphanage or a public refuge. New York’s first such house had opened in 1806 on Raisin Street, with half a dozen children. By the time Hicks went on trial, most local orphans were being kept in a new brick structure at the corner of 73rd Street and Riverside Drive. Living in New York, this cruel city of winners and losers, of the fabulously rich and the pitifully poor, Mrs. Hicks and her son, had they drifted to the bottom, would at least have had company. There were twenty thousand homeless children in New York in the mid-1800s.

  Or maybe she successfully fended for herself. By 1860, 15 percent of the city’s workforce was female—nurses and seamstresses, punch press and sewing machine operators. Factory owners were especially keen to hire women, as they came cheap. Office work, maid or hotel work, a face amid a sea of faces, part of a great industrious army. She would have lived to see miracles, technological wonders—the telephone, the electric light, the Woolworth Building illuminated like a star in heaven—but remained a product of the city of migrant ships and waterfront dives. Or maybe she started over, left her son and went out west—“adopt your child and live out” is how her mother put it—another life in another town, Pittsburgh or Chicago, met, married, and loved again, a second child who never learned of the first. Maybe, years hence, she sat at the head of a Thanksgiving table, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren who knew nothing of the pirate in their family tree.

  And what about her son?

  Given a normal American life span, he would have lived through the Civil War and been in his prime at the start of World War I. Given a remarkable but not-unheard-of life span, he could have seen the Second World War, Elvis, and the birth of rock ’n’ roll—just another old man, riding the IRT beneath the East River.

  Detective Nevins went on to have a long and distinguished career. Elias Smith became a great reporter during the Civil War. Marshal Rynders lost power, overtaken by ignominy and scandal. He collapsed on a New York street in 1885. Apoplexy. He could not speak and went unrecognized for hours. He died that night. In a sense, all of these stories are really just a way of telling the story of the city. It boomed after the death of Albert Hicks, was torn down and rebuilt again and again, always different but always the same.

  Today the Cherry Street crimp where Hicks had or had not been shanghaied, as well as the waterfront docks where he worked, are buried beneath the struts and pilings of East River Drive. Some of the tenements where Hicks slept still stand, though they’ve been turned from wino flops to hipster heavens. The Five Points neighborhood has long since been razed and built over—Paradise Square is now the site of Columbus Park, outside the federal courthouse. New York Harbor is the same, only not so wild—there are no pirates. Bedloe’s Island is still there, only it’s now called Liberty Island, home of the welco
ming statue. Beneath the green lady, at her foundation, as her foundation, lingers the ghost of the dead buccaneer who, as much as any politician or tycoon, created the spirit and style and energy of the great metropolis.

  Albert Hicks continued to dwell in Manhattan in the form of a wax figure until July 13, 1865, when, eerily, on the fifth anniversary of the hanging, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum burned down. Imagine the man in the monkey coat and Kossuth hat succumbing to the flames, melting—first the nose, then the chin, then the coal-black eyes turning liquid and running like tears down the mottled face. He continued to exist in lore. His story runs like a ribbon through the history of the underworld. He was the bad man talked about by the gangsters who were talked about by the gangsters who were talked about by the gangsters I interviewed just yesterday. His story is there even if you don’t know it. It’s the iron and nickel beneath the molten liquid, beneath the magma, beneath the bedrock that is the surface of the earth.

  Hicks’s story became mythology almost as soon as he died. Within weeks of his execution, a pop song was written about the killer. Released by the H. DeMartin Publishing Company, it was sold as sheet music and played in parlors and at cotillions. It’s a kind of murder ballad, like the narcocorridos that Mexican crooners sing about the rise and fall of infamous drug lords. On the page, it’s called “Hicks the Pirate, Air: The Rose Tree.”

  …Upon this oyster vessel,

  A pirate bold had found his way,

  With wicked heart this vassal

  The Captain and two boys did slay;

  He seized the gold and silver

  Which this poor captain had in store

  His watch and clothes did pilfer,

  While he lay struggling his gore.

  …

  But the eye that never slumbers,

  Did follow on the murderer’s track;

  And the vigilance of numbers

  To justice brought the monster back.

  …

  Twixt heaven and earth suspended,

  On Bedloe’s Island Hicks was hung,

  Some thousands there attended,

  To see the horrid murderer swung.

  Hicks appeared before his biggest audience on April 4, 1963, when he was featured in the fourth season of The Twilight Zone, in an episode called “The New Exhibit.” Wax figures in a museum, slated to be torn down and replaced by a supermarket, come to life and go on a killing spree. Among the murderers are Jack the Ripper and Albert Hicks, who is depicted with terrific accuracy right down to the Kossuth hat, sea ax, and black eyes.

  Why does this story resonate?

  Because it’s too great and grisly to be anything but true. Because it gives you a picture of the New York underworld in an earlier incarnation—it’s like a baby picture, the same city stripped of its subways and steel. Because Albert Hicks was a key figure, transitional, hinge—he belongs with Captain Kidd and John Gotti, the last pirate, a representative criminal in a city that was all about the ocean, but also the first gangster, a model for Lansky and Gambino. Because he is, in some versions, the victim, the shanghaied sailor who refuses to take it. Because he is a living demonstration of the fact that when you get into a dustup on a New York street, you never really know who you’re dealing with. Because he was the worst made manifest. Because he was the danger and excitement of the city in the shape of a human being. He was a citizen of a city that was disappearing. He was a killer but an adventurer too. He could not function in a town ruled by the scientific method of a modern police force, or the studied probing of newspapermen. He had to go the way of the Daybreak Boys and the Swamp Angels, clear out to make room for the modern town. That’s what was executed on Bedloe’s Island, the man but also the breed, the era, and the age. It was the cops and politicians, the bankers and socialites and tycoons who owned the future. Albert Hicks had only the past—he was New York as it used to be and could never be again, the wild seafaring town buried beneath the towers and highways.

  To Jessica,

  even when the valve narrows and the walls cave in

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My father said a thing not very long ago. He was running down the Golden Rule: Treat your neighbor as you’d treat yourself. “I’ve heard it my whole life, and I think it’s bullshit,” he told me. “I don’t like myself very much, so if I treat my neighbor as I treat myself, that neighbor’s getting treated like crap.” That said, I’d like to thank the following people for helping me research, correct, copyedit, untangle, or otherwise improve this book: Matt Levin, who helped dig out the old news stories; Sharon and Bill Levin, who birthed and raised Matt Levin; Steven Cohen and Lisa Melmed, for instilling in me a great love for New York lore; Ian Frazier and Mark Singer for early reads; ditto Dana Brown, Julian Sancton, and Neal Edelstein. David Lipsky for yeoman’s work—and an ocean of support. Julie Tate for the fact checking. My agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and my editor, Julie Grau, who is mishpucha. And my friends—all of them. Especially Jonathan Galassi, Mark Varouxakis, Jonathan Lethem, Graydon Carter, and Jonathan Newhouse. My mother, Ellen Eisenstadt Cohen, who died but is still here. When I think back on events that came after her death, I recall her presence vividly. Which is weird. Aaron, Nate, Micah, and EZ, who taught me that any collection of people becomes a gang. And mostly Jessica Medoff, who married me a long time ago. She read this book again and again and again. Without her input, it would not be. And my father, Herb Cohen, who told me old stories, encouraged me to treat every human interaction as a game, and that the key to life is to care, but not that much.

  A NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

  With a few exceptions, the photographs in this book do not portray the people or events described. They instead show cities, harbors, and sloops, the world as it existed in the age of Hicks. They are meant to conjure the mood of an older America, the country of my great-grandparents, which is preserved, when it is preserved at all, in silver prints, daguerreotypes, and dreams. Most of the photos, which I kept near me while writing this story, come courtesy of the Library of Congress. The first image in the book, the one of John Gotti and his crew in front of the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in the early 1990s—that’s different. It was taken by my friend Sara Barret, who happened across the gangster as you might happen across the first robin of spring. She asked if she could take his picture—Gotti was famously wary of photographers. He said, “Why do you want to take my picture?” Her answer—“Because you’re a celebrity”—touched his vanity. He said, “Yes, but just one.” Look at the photo again—seeing how the men around the boss are acting, especially the thick guy in the foreground, it might not surprise you to know that this is in fact the second picture Sara snapped of Gotti that morning.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  I came across the story of Albert Hicks while researching my book on Murder Inc., the Jewish mob of Brownsville, Brooklyn. It was in the pages of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, which reads like a Norse saga, illuminating a lost and unbelievably harsh civilization. Hicks occupied a special place in that civilization. He was its prehistory, its forefather. He was one of the Nephilim that turn up in the oldest parts of the Bible, giant bastard offspring of fallen angels and mortal women who walked the earth in a time of chaos and disorder. He was New York as it had been and could never be again, the city depicted by Robert Louis Stevenson in Kidnapped, the wild place of gibbeting and pirate saloons and mickeys and planks that must be walked. Hicks, as he appeared in Asbury—dark-eyed and handsome, collar raised to hide his face—was confused in my mind with every adventure, ghost, and pirate story I’d ever read.

  I began to search for him in old newspapers and books. His depiction was different in each telling. Here he was pure evil, unredeemed by even a spark of hope. There he was Robin Hood, taking back his freedom with a hatchet. If I read about him at night, his image would appear in my dreams, shadowy, spectral, doomed t
o wander. I never considered him without thinking of John Dillinger, Blackbeard, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, and Cain, the first killer, who’d been sent into the wilderness bearing the mark that both ostracized and protected him. Cain built the first city, so he is the father of every urbanite. And who was Albert Hicks but Cain in another guise, in another way?

  He appears at the beginning of Luc Sante’s Low Life, depicted as Asbury and every writer who followed had depicted him: a gangster and a seafaring man, drugged, kidnapped, carried unconscious onto a sloop, where, upon waking at sea, he was told “work or swim.” They called this a shanghai, and for generations, it was an essential part of the story. It seemed to explain and even justify the killings. But when I began to examine the facts, the shanghai story fell apart. I’m not exactly sure how it started. It first appeared in print in Asbury, then reappeared in a score of other crime books. Perhaps Asbury invented it, because he liked it better than the real story. His book, parts of which appeared in the New Yorker in 1927, reads less like traditional reporting than like folklore. Asbury was creating mythology for the New York underworld, writing creation stories for the Fourth Ward and the Five Points. Facts gave way to archetypes, symbols. But I don’t think Asbury made it up. I think he heard it from gangsters and neighborhood people, who, in the way of a game of telephone, shaped the facts into a legend, building up the story over time. It was the work of the city’s collective subconscious. Herbert Asbury was just the first person to write it down.

  In putting together this book, I’ve tried to strip away the accretion and recover Albert Hicks as he actually was—a story more complex and more interesting and terrible than any fairy tale. Hunter, scavenger, and waterfront dweller, he was the chaos hidden behind the official history. Telling his story is telling the story of New York: the good and the bad, the facts and the fantasy, and the process that turned those facts into that fantasy. The shanghai made Albert Hicks almost admirable, a suitable hero for the immigrant slums.