Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [604]
From the world of gamblers and boxers it was but a short step down to New York’s underworld, a term warranted by the numbers of criminals at work in the city, the emergence of a rough-hewn infrastructure of criminal operations, and the development among the fraternity of villains of a language peculiarly their own.
Chief of Police George Matsell compiled a 128-page Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (1859) whose words and phrases, arranged from A to Z, hint at the rich variety of opportunities (and perils) the port afforded the criminally inclined. Examples from the A-to-B range include “Air and Exercise” (working in the stone quarry at Blackwell’s Island or Sing Sing), “Amusers” (who use snuff or peppers to blind and rob victims), “Anglers” (who steal from store windows), “Badger” (one who robs a man’s pocket after he’s been enticed into bed with a woman), “Bat” (a prostitute who only walks the streets at night), “Boodle” (a quantity of counterfeit money), and “Booked” (arrested). Matsell also observed that this was a multiethnic jargon, spoken no matter what the thief’s nationality. The chief noted somewhat pridefully that in New York thieves “from all parts of the world congregate.”
Hangouts emerged that were patronized more or less exclusively by the criminal classes. One-Armed Charley, a noted thief, opened the Hole in the Wall, which became a place where robbers could meet with fences to plan jobs. Usually these fences were junkmen who moved stolen goods under cover of their normal operations, but there were innovators in this field too, like Fredrika ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum, who now launched her long career by peddling looted goods door to door. There were also noted female robbers. One-Armed Charley selected as his lieutenant “Gallus Mag,” a ferocious sixplus-footer who held her skirt up with galluses (suspenders). In addition to her considerable abilities as a mugger, Mag ran a tight ship at the Hole in the Wall. Seizing the ear of an excessively rowdy gangster in her teeth, she would drag him to the street or bite it off altogether and add it to the collection of pickled ears she kept in a jar behind the bar.
Much of the city’s crime was undertaken by individual entrepreneurs who hung around the waterfront, mugging boozy sailors as they exited dockside dives. Others sent female coconspirators to lure hapless landsmen to deserted piers or alleys, where they were struck on the head with a slung-shot (a rudimentary blackjack), their pockets rifled, and their unconscious bodies tossed in the river, sometimes with fatal results. One homeless German immigrant was coshed, robbed of twelve cents, and thrown over the Battery wall, where he was found, frozen, in river ice the next morning. Murders remained a rarity, however—at least solved murders. There were only thirteen homicide convictions in the entire city between 1838 and 1851 (roughly one a year), so that when another thirteen were registered between 1852 and 1854, with guns increasingly in evidence, the city trembled. “Horrible murders, stabbings, and shootings,” the New-York Atlas reported in August 1854, “are now looked for, in the morning papers, with as much regularity as we look for our breakfast.”
Some of the upsurge in fatalities could be traced to the burgeoning activities of socalled river pirates, gangs of professional predators who seized on the opportunities