The Napoleon of Crime Read Online Free PDF Page B

criminals occupied positions of the greatest authority, for this was the era of Boss Tweed, probably the most magnificently venal politician New York has ever produced. Corruption and graft permeated the city like veins through marble, and those set in authority over the great, seething metropolis were often quite as dishonest as those they policed, and fleeced. As human detritus washed into lower Manhattan in the wake of the Civil War, the misery—and the criminal opportunities—multiplied. In 1866 a Methodist bishop, Matthew Simpson, estimated that the city, with a total population of 800,000, included 30,000 thieves, 20,000 prostitutes, 3,000 drinking houses, and a further 2,000 establishments dedicated to gambling. Huge wealth existed cheek-to-cheek with staggering poverty, and crime was endemic.
    New York’s most famously bent lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, wrote a popular account of the wicked city, entitled In Danger, or Life in New York: A True History of the Great City’s Wiles and Temptations , which purported to be a warning against the perils of crime, published in the interests of protecting the unwary. But it basically advertised the easy pickings on offer, and provided a primer on the various methods of obtaining them, from blackmailing to cardsharping to safecracking. Howe and Hummel promised “elegant storehouses, crowded with the choicest and most costly goods, great banks whose vaults and safes contain more bullion than could be transported by the largest ship, colossal establishments teeming with diamonds, jewelry, and precious stones gathered from all the known and uncivilized portions of the globe—all this countless wealth, in some cases so insecurely guarded.” The book was an instant best-seller and, according to one criminal expert, “became required reading for every professional or would-be law-breaker.”
    It was only natural that an ambitious and aspiring felon should make his way to New York and, once there, learn quickly. Determined to avoid returning to work as a mere clerk and hardened by his wartime experiences, Adam Worth took his place in the thieving throng. “On account of his acquaintance with bounty jumpers, he finally became associated with professional thieves and crooked people generally, and from that time on his career was one of wrong doing,” Pinkerton glumly recounted.
    Worth soon found himself in the Bowery, in Manhattan, an area of legendary seediness and home to a large and thriving criminal community which was divided, for the most part, into gangs: the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Slaughter Housers, the Buckaroos, the Whyos, and more. Many of these gangsters were merely exceptionally violent thugs whose criminal specialties extended no further than straightforward mugging, murder, and mayhem, often inflicted on one another and usually carried out under the influence of prodigious quantities of alcohol laced with turpentine, camphor, and any other intoxicant, however lethal, that happened to be on hand.
    “Most of the saloons never closed. Or they did for just long enough to be cleaned out and then to begin afresh drinking, fighting, cursing, gambling, and the Lord only knows what,” recalled Eddie Guerin, a useless crook but a successful memoirist who would eventually become Worth’s friend and colleague. The three thousand saloons noted with distaste by Bishop Simpson and others in post-bellum New York included such euphonious establishments as the Ruins, Milligan’s Hell, Chain and Locker, Hell Gate, the Morgue, McGurk’s Suicide Hall, Inferno, Hell Hole, Tub of Blood, Cripples’ Home, and the Dump. But if the nomenclature of the dives was indicative of the immorality therein, the names of the clientele were still more telling: Boiled Oysters Malloy; Ludwig the Bloodsucker, a vampire who had hair “growing from every orifice”; Wreck Donovan; Piggy Noles; the pirate Scotchy Lavelle,