Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [794]
Some of the post-Appomattox crime wave was the doing of battle-hardened veterans, familiars of pain and death, but the period also saw a rapid growth of juvenile and teenage gangs (now called “hoodlums,” a word newly arrived from San Francisco). New legions erupted from the slum streets: the Baxter Street Dudes; the Nineteenth Street Gang (on Tenth Avenue); the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang (denizens of the 34th to 42nd Street horsecar conduit, led by young Richard Croker). Some were willing to contract out their violent services if the price was right: the Whyos, early pioneers of mayhem for money, would blacken eyes, break jaws, shoot legs off, or “do the big job” all according to an established scale of prices.
Crude criminality was countered by crude policing. Before patrolman Alexander S. Williams graduated so gleefully to the Tenderloin, the huge former ship’s carpenter had worked the Houston Street and Broadway area. On his first day out he selected two of the toughest local hoods, knocked them cold with his club, and hurled them through the window of their favorite saloon. Reportedly averaging a fight a day for the next four years, Clubber Williams (as he soon became known) was promoted in 1871 to captain in the Gas House district, home to the Gas House Gang. Williams formed a strong-arm squad that proceeded to club local gangsters senseless, with or without provocation. “There is more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick,” Clubber reflected, “than in a decision of the Supreme Court.”
Street gangs were arguably less significant in New York’s outlaw annals than a much smaller confraternity of criminals who dwelt in the working-class world but modeled themselves on the professional classes above them. Eschewing brute force, these more resourceful outlaws prized planning and analysis, and they scanned the contemporary landscape for entrepreneurial opportunities. Happily for them, almost every new enterprise developed by legitimate businessmen could also be considered a novel source of profit by their netherworld counterparts. As the postwar economy grew more specialized and sophisticated, so did those who preyed upon it.
With the tremendous expansion in the circulation of easily negotiable paper—greenbacks and federal bonds—and concomitant increase in everyday impersonal commercial transactions, a crew of sophisticated counterfeiters, forgers, and white-collar con artists sprang into being. The City Bank forked over seventy-five thousand dollars in exchange for a check purportedly signed by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Liquid assets had to be shuttled about the financial districts, so gangs waylaid messengers carrying money or securities between banks or, on a grander scale usually associated with the Wild West, hijacked rail shipments: the Tenth Avenue Gang boarded an express train of the Hudson River Rail Road at Spuyten Duyvil and got away with an iron box stuffed with greenbacks and government bonds.
As an ever-growing number of banks filled up with deposits, safecrackers and bank robbers made New York City their national headquarters. Some people called the robbery of Rufus Lord’s Exchange Place office in 1867, in which a three-man team made off with cash and securities worth over a million dollars, the first “truly professional” crime. But that isolated coup was as nothing compared to the body of work sustained over years by George Leonidas Leslie (or Western George, as he was known) and his colleagues. This Ohio immigrant lived a remarkable double life. At one moment he was an independently wealthy man-about-town, known for his impeccable manners, his tailoring, his love of books, and his membership in several excellent clubs. At other moments he headed a highly sophisticated gang of bank robbers whose careful preparations—obtaining architect’s plans of the building under scrutiny, or constructing special burglars’ tools—helped pull off perhaps a hundred jobs like the robbery, in 1869, of the Ocean National Bank at Greenwich