Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante

Author:Luc Sante [Sante, Luc]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

We are requested by the Dead Rabbits to state that the Dead Rabbit club members are not thieves, that they did not participate in the riot with the Bowery Boys, and that the fight in Mulberry street was between the Roach Guards of Mulberry street and the Atlantic Guards of the Bowery. The Dead Rabbits are sensitive on points of honor, we are assured, and wouldn’t allow a thief to live on their beat, much less be a member of their club.4

The riot, as bad as it was, would turn out to be a mere dress rehearsal for the Draft Riots six years later, in which 70,000 to 80,000 people fought, with some individual mobs comprising as many as 10,000.

In the era before the Civil War, the only other significant concentration of gangs was along the waterfront, where gangs were much more singlemindedly criminal, and divided their attention between prey in the form of dive patrons and that represented by the harbor shipping. An 1850 report to the mayor by Police Chief George W. Matsell estimated that there were between four hundred and five hundred river pirates in the Fourth Ward, divided among about fifty gangs, whose numbers were sometimes augmented by thieves commuting from Brooklyn, New Jersey, or Staten Island. The major gangs included the Daybreak Boys, the Buckaroos, the Hookers, the Swamp Angels, the Slaughter Housers, the Short Tails, the Patsy Conroys, and the Border Gang.

Mugging was done by all these units as well as by ad hoc bands of thieves. Scorning such refinements as knockout drops, they developed a simple routine in which a well-dressed intruder, sailor, or, indeed, nearly anybody else walking by would be lured under a window, a female accomplice would dump ashes on him from above, and the gang would drag him to a cellar where he would be stripped, robbed, beaten, and often killed. A zone grew up between the southern docks (in what is now the financial district) and Corlears Hook, into which cops allegedly never ventured in groups of fewer than six. In the late 1860s it was estimated that, on Cherry Street alone, 15,000 sailors were robbed each year to the tune of about $2 million.

The first of the great East River gangs was the Daybreak Boys, who were headquartered at a saloon run by one Pete Williams at Slaughter House Point, the old name for the intersection of James and Water Streets in the territory that since the days of the Dutch had been associated with tanneries. They specialized in robbing ships at anchor and derived their name from their practice of working the hours around dawn. Their captains were Nicholas Saul and William Howlett; other members included Slobbery Jim, Patsy the Barber, Sow Madden, and Cowlegged Sam McCarthy. All were under twenty years of age at the height of their careers. In their heyday they were said to have stolen property worth in excess of $100,000 in two years. On an August night in 1852, detectives followed

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