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THE "growler" stood at the cradle of the tough. It bosses him through his boyhood apprenticeship in the "gang," and leaves him, for a time only, at the door of the jail that receives him to finish his training and turn him loose upon the world a thief, to collect by stealth or by force the living his philosophy tells him that it owes him, and will not voluntarily surrender without an equivalent in the work which he hates. From the moment he, almost a baby, for the first time carries the growler for beer, he is never out of its reach, and the two soon form a partnership that lasts through life. It has at least the merit, such as it is, of being loyal. The saloon is the only thing that takes kindly to the lad. Honest play is interdicted in the
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streets. The policeman arrests the ball-tossers, and there is no room in the back-yard. In one of these, between two enormous tenements that swarmed with children, I read this ominous notice: "All boys caught in this yard will be delt with accorden to law." Along the water-fronts, in the holes of the dock-rats,
and on the avenues, the young tough finds plenty of
kindred spirits. Every corner has its gang, not always
on the best of terms with the rivals in the next block,
but all with a common programme: defiance of law and
orders and with a common ambition: to get "pinched," i.e., arrested, so as to pose as heroes
before their fellows. A successful raid on the grocer's
till is a good mark, "doing up" a policeman
cause for promotion. The gang is an institution in
New York. The police deny its existence while nursing
the bruises received in nightly battles with it that
tax their utmost resources. The newspapers chronicle
its doings daily, with a sensational minuteness of
detail that does its share toward keeping up its evil
traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members
to be as bad as the worst. The gang is the ripe fruit
of tenement-house growth. It was born there, endowed
with a heritage of instinctive hostility to restraint
by a generation that sacrificed home to freedom, or
left its country for its country's good. The tenement
received and nursed the seed. The intensity of the
American temper stood sponsor to the murderer in what
would have been the common "bruiser" of
a more phlegmatic clime. New York's tough represents
the essence of reaction against the old and the new
oppression, nursed in the rank soil of its slums.
Its gangs are made up of the American-born sons of
English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect exactly
the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang.
Murder is as congenial to Cherry Street or to Battle
Row, as quiet and order to Murray Hill. The "assimilation"
of Europe's oppressed hordes, upon which our Fourth
of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect.
The product is our own.
Such is the genesis of New York's gangs. Their history
is not so easily written. It would embrace the largest
share of our city's criminal history for two generations
back, every page of it dyed red with blood. The guillotine
Paris set up a century ago to avenge its wrongs was
not more relentless, or less discriminating, than
this Nemesis of New York. The difference is of intent.
Murder with that was the serious purpose; with ours
it is the careless incident, the wanton brutality
of the moment. Bravado and robbery are the real purposes
of the gangs; the former prompts the attack upon the
policeman, the latter that upon the citizen. Within
a single week last spring, the newspapers recorded
six murderous assaults on unoffending people, committed
by young highwaymen in the public streets. How many
more were suppressed by the police, who always do
their utmost to hush up such outrages "in the
interests of justice," I shall not say. There
has been no lack of such occurrences since, as the
records of the criminal courts show. In fact, the
past summer has seen, after a period of comparative
quiescence of the gangs, a reawakening to renewed
turbulence of the East Side tribes, and over and over
again the reserve forces of a precinct have been called
out to club them into submission. It is a peculiarity
of the gangs that they usually break out in spots,
as it were. When the West Side is in a state of eruption,
the East Side gangs "lie low," and when
the toughs along the North River are nursing broken
heads at home, or their revenge in Sing Sing, fresh
trouble breaks out in the tenements east of Third
Avenue. This result is brought about by the very efforts
made by the police to put down the gangs. In spite
of local feuds, there is between them a species of
ruffianly Freemasonry that readily admits to full
fellowship a hunted rival in the face of the common
enemy. The gangs belt the city like a huge chain from
the Battery to Harlem--the collective name of the
"chain gang" has been given to their scattered
groups in the belief that a much closer connection
exists between them than commonly supposed--and the
ruffian for whom the East Side has became too hot,
has only to step across town and change his name,
a matter usually much easier for him than to change
his shirt, to find a sanctuary in which to plot fresh
outrages. The more notorious he is, the warmer the
welcome, and if he has "done" his man he
is by common consent accorded the leadership in his
new field. |
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From all this it might
be inferred that the New York tough is a very
fierce individual, of indomitable courage and
naturally as bloodthirsty as a tiger. On the contrary
he is an arrant coward. His instincts of ferocity
are those of the wolf rather than the tiger. It
is only when he hunts with the pack that he is
dangerous. Then his inordinate vanity makes him
forget all fear or caution in the desire to distinguish
himself before his fellows, a result of his swallowing
all the flash literature and penny-dreadfuls he
can beg, borrow, or steal--and there is never
any lack of them--and of the strongly dramatic
element in his nature that is nursed by such a
diet into rank and morbid growth. He is a queer
bundle of contradictions at all times. Drank and
foul-mouthed, ready to cut the throat of a defenceless
stranger at the toss of a cent, fresh from beating
his decent mother black and blue to get money
for rum, [1] he will resent
as an intolerable insult the imputation that he
is "no gentleman." Fighting his battles
with the coward's weapons, the brass-knuckles
and the deadly sand-bag, or with brick-bats from
the housetops, he is still in all seriousness
a lover of fair play, and as likely as not, when |
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his gang has downed a policeman in a battle that
has cost a dozen broken heads, to be found next
saving a drowning child or woman at the peril
of his own life. It depends on the angle at which
he is seen, whether he is a cowardly ruffian,
or a possible hero with different training and
under different social conditions. Ready wit he
has at all times, and there is less meanness in
his makeup than in that of the bully of the London
slums; but an intense love of show and applause,
that carries him to any length of bravado, which
his twin-brother across the sea entirely lacks.
I have a very vivid recollection of seeing one
of his tribe, a robber and murderer before he
was nineteen, go to the gallows unmoved, all fear
of the rope overcome, as it seemed, by the secret,
exultant pride of being the centre of a first-class
show, shortly to be followed by that acme of tenement-life
bliss, a big funeral. He had his reward. His name is to this day a talisman among West Side ruffians,
and is proudly borne by the gang of which,
up till the night when he "knocked out his man,"
he was an obscure though aspiring member.
The crime that made McGloin famous was the cowardly
murder of an unarmed saloonkeeper who came upon the
gang while it was sacking his bar-room at the dead of
night. McGloin might easily have fled, but disdained
to "run for a Dutchman." His act was a fair
measure of the standard of heroism set up by his class
in its conflicts with society. The finish is worthy
of the start. The first long step in crime taken by
the half-grown boy, fired with ambition to earn a standing
in his gang, is usually to rob a "lush," i.e.,
a drunken man who has strayed his way, likely enough
is lying asleep in a hallway. He has served an apprenticeship
on copper-bottom wash-boilers and like articles found
lying around loose, and capable of being converted into
cash enough to give the growler a trip or two; but his
first venture at robbery moves him up into full fellowship
at once. He is no longer a "kid," though his
years may be few, but a tough with the rest. He may
even in time--he is reasonably certain of it--get his
name in the papers as a murderous scoundrel, and have
his cup of glory filled to the brim. I came once upon
a gang of such young rascals passing the growler after
a successful raid of some sort, down at the West Thirty-seventh
Street dock, and, having my camera along, offered to
"take" them. They were not old and wary enough
to be shy of the photographer, whose acquaintance they
usually first make in handcuffs and the grip of a policeman;
or their vanity overcame their caution. It is entirely
in keeping with the tough's character that he should
love of all things to pose before a photographer, and
the ambition is usually the stronger the more repulsive
the tough. These were of that sort, and accepted the
offer with great readiness, dragging into their group
a disreputable looking sheep that roamed about with
them (the slaughter-houses were close at hand) as one
of the band. The homeliest ruffian of the lot, who insisted
on being taken with the growler to his "mug,"
took the opportunity to pour what was left in it down
his throat and this caused A brief unpleasantness, but
otherwise the performance was a success. While I was
getting the camera ready, I threw out a vague suggestion
of cigarette-pictures, and it took root at once. Nothing
would do then but that I must take the boldest spirits
of the company "in character." One of them
tumbled over against a shed, as if asleep, while two
of the others bent over him, searching his pockets with
a deftness that was highly suggestive. This, they explained
for my benefit, was to show how they "did the trick."
The rest of the band were so impressed with the importance
of this exhibition that they insisted on crowding into
the picture by climbing upon the shed, sitting on the
roof with their feet dangling over the edge, and disposing
themselves in every imaginable manner within view, as
they thought. Lest any reader be led into the error
of supposing them to have been harmless young fellows
enjoying themselves in peace, let me say that within
half an hour after our meeting, when I called at the
police station three blocks away, I found there two
of my friends of the "Montgomery Guards" under
arrest for robbing a Jewish pedlar who had passed that
way after I left them, and trying to saw his head off,
as they put it, "just for fun. The sheeny cum along
an' the saw was there, an' we socked it to him."
The prisoners were described to me by the police as
Dennis, "the Bum," and "Mud" Foley. |
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It is not always that
their little diversions end as harmlessly as did
this, even from the standpoint of the Jew, who
was pretty badly hurt. Not far from the preserves
of the Montgomery Guards, in Poverty Gap, directly
opposite the scene of the murder to which I have
referred in a note explaining the picture of the
Cunningham family (p.
169), a young lad, who was the only support
of his aged parents, was beaten to death within
a few months by the "Alley Gang," for
the same offence that drew down the displeasure
of its neighbors upon the pedlar: that of being
at work trying to earn an honest living. I found
a part of the gang asleep the next morning, before
young Healey's death was known, in a heap of straw
on the floor of an unoccupied room in the same
row of rear tenements in which the murdered boy's
home was. One of the tenants, who secretly directed
me to their lair, assuring me that no worse scoundrels
went unhung, ten minutes later gave the gang,
to its face, an official character for sobriety
and inoffensiveness that very nearly startled
me into an unguarded rebuke of his duplicity.
I caught his eye in time and held my peace. The
man was simply trying to protect his own home,
while giving such aid as he safely could toward
bringing the murderous ruffians to justice. The
incident shows to what extent a neighborhood may
be |
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terrorized by a determined gang of these reckless
toughs. In Poverty Gap there were still a few
decent people left. When it comes to Hell's Kitchen,
or to its compeers at the other end of Thirty-ninth
Street over by the East River, and further down First Avenue in "the Village," the Rag
Gang and its allies have no need of fearing treachery
in their periodical battles with the police. The
entire neighborhood takes a hand on these occasions,
the women in the front rank, partly from sheer
love of the "fun," but chiefly because
husbands, brothers, and sweethearts are in the
fight to a man and need their help. Chimney-tops
form the staple of ammunition then, and stacks
of loose brick and paving-stones, carefully hoarded
in upper rooms as a prudent provision against
emergencies. Regular patrol posts are established
by the police on the housetops in times of trouble
in these localities, but even then they do not
escape whole-skinned, if, indeed, with their lives; neither
does the gang. The policeman knows of but one cure for
the tough, the club, and he lays it on without stint
whenever and wherever he has the chance, knowing right
well that, if caught at a disadvantage, he will get
his outlay back with interest. Words are worse than
wasted in the gang-districts. It is a blow at sight,
and the tough thus accosted never stops to ask questions.
Unless he is "wanted" for some signal outrage,
the policeman rarely bothers with arresting him. He
can point out half a dozen at sight against whom indictments
are pending by the basketful, but whom no jail ever
held many hours. They only serve to make him more reckless,
for he knows that the political backing that has saved
him in the past can do it again. It is a commodity that
is only exchangeable "for value received,"
and it is not hard to imagine what sort of value is
in demand. The saloon, in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, stands behind the bargain.
For these reasons, as well as because he knows from
frequent experience his own way to be the best, the
policeman lets the gangs alone except when they come
within reach of his long night-stick. They have their
"club-rooms" where they meet, generally in
a tenement, sometimes under a pier or a dump, to carouse,
play cards, and plan their raids; their "fences,"
who dispose of the stolen property. When the necessity
presents itself for a descent upon the gang after some
particularly flagrant outrage, the police have a task
on hand that is not of the easiest. The gangs, like
foxes, have more than one hole to their dens. In some
localities, where the interior of a block is filled
with rear tenements, often set at all sorts of odd angles,
surprise alone is practicable. Pursuit through the winding
ways and passages is impossible. The young thieves know
them all by heart. They have their runways over roofs
and fences which no one else could find. Their lair
is generally selected with special reference to its
possibilities of escape. Once pitched upon, its occupation
by the gang, with its ear-mark of nightly symposiums,
"can-rackets" in the slang of the street,
is the signal for a rapid deterioration of the tenement,
if that is possible. Relief is only to be had by ousting
the intruders. a instance came under my notice in which
valuable property had been well-nigh ruined by being
made the thoroughfare of thieves by night and by day.
They had chosen it because of a passage that led through
the block by way of several connecting halls and yards.
The place came soon to be known as "Murderers Alley."
Complaint was made to the Board of Health, as a last
resort, of the condition of the property. The practical
inspector who was sent to report upon it suggested to
the owner that he build a brick-wall in a place where
it would shut off communication between the streets,
and he took the advice. Within the brief space of a
few months the house changed character entirely, and
became as decent as it had been before the convenient
runway was discovered. |
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This was in the Sixth
Ward, where the infamous Whyo Gang until a few
years ago absorbed the worst depravity of the
Bend and what is left of the Five Points. The
gang was finally broken up when its leader was
hanged for murder after a life of uninterrupted
and unavenged crimes, the recital of which made
his father confessor turn pale, listening in the
shadow of the scaffold, though many years of labor
as chaplain of the Tombs had hardened him to such
rehearsals. The great Whyo had been a "power
in the ward," handy at carrying elections
for the party or faction that happened to stand
in need of his services and was willing to pay
for them in money or in kind. Other gangs have
sprung up since with as high ambition and a fair
prospect of outdoing their predecessor. The conditions
that bred it still exist, practically unchanged.
Inspector Byrnes is authority for the statement
that throughout the city the young tough has more
"ability" and "nerve" than
the thief whose example he successfully emulates.
He begins earlier, too. Speaking of the increase
of the native element among criminal prisoners
exhibited in the census returns of the last thirty
years, [2] the Rev. Fred.
H. Wines says, "their youth is a very striking
fact." Had he confined his observations to
the police courts of New |
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York, he might have emphasized
that remark and found an explanation of the discovery
that "the ratio of prisoners in cities is
two and one-quarter times as great as in the country at large," a computation that takes no
account of the reformatories for juvenile delinquents,
or the exhibit would have been still more striking.
Of the 82,200 persons arrested by the police
in 1889, 10,505 were under twenty years old.
The last report of the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children enumerates, as "a
few typical cases," eighteen "professional
cracksmen," between nine and fifteen years
old, who had been caught with burglars' tools,
or in the act of robbery. Four of them; hardly
yet in long trousers, had "held up"
a wayfarer in the public street and robbed him
of $73. One, aged sixteen, "was the leader
of a noted gang of young robbers in Forty-ninth Street. He committed murder, for which
he is now serving a term of nineteen years in State's
Prison." Four of the eighteen were girls and
quite as bad as the worst. In a few years they would
have been living with the toughs of their choice without
the ceremony of a marriage, egging them on by their
pride in their lawless achievements, and fighting
side by side with them in their encounters with the
"cops."
The exploits of the Paradise Park Gang in the way
of highway robbery showed last summer that the embers
of the scattered Whyo Gang, upon the wreck of which
it grew, were smouldering still. The hanging of Driscoll
broke up the Whyos because they were a comparatively
small band, and, with the incomparable master-spirit
gone, were unable to resist the angry rush of public
indignation that followed the crowning outrage. This
is the history of the passing away of famous gangs
from time to time. The passing is more apparent than
real, however. Some other daring leader gathers the
scattered elements about him soon, and the war on
society is resumed. A bare enumeration of the names
of the best-known gangs would occupy pages of this
book. The Rock Gang, the Rag Gang, the Stable Gang,
and the Short Tail Gang down about the "Hook"
have all achieved bad eminence, along with scores
of others that have not paraded so frequently in the
newspapers. |
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By day they loaf in
the corner-groggeries on their beat, at night
they plunder the stores along the avenues, or
lie in wait at the river for unsteady feet straying
their way. The man who is sober and minds his
own business they seldom molest, unless he be
a stranger inquiring his way, or a policeman and
the gang twenty against the one. The tipsy wayfarer
is their chosen victim, and they seldom have to
look for him long. One has not far to go to the
river from any point in New York. The man who
does not know where he is going is sure to reach
it sooner or later. Should he foolishly resist
or make an outcry--dead men tell no tales. "Floaters"
come ashore every now and then with pockets turned
inside out, not always evidence of a post-mortem
inspection by dock-rats. Police patrol the rivers
as well as the shore on constant look-out for
these, but seldom catch up with them. If overtaken
after a race during which shots are often exchanged
from the boats, the thieves have an easy way of
escaping and at the same time destroying the evidence
against them; they simply upset the boat. They
swim, one and all, like real rats; the lost plunder
can be recovered at leisure the next day by diving
or grappling. The loss of the boat counts for
little. Another is stolen, and the gang is ready
for business again.
The fiction of a social "club," which
most of the gangs keep up, helps them to a pretext
for blackmailing the politicians and the storekeepers
in their bailiwick at the annual seasons of
their picnic, or ball. The "thieves' |
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ball"
is as well known and recognized an institution
on the East Side as the Charity Ball in a different
social stratum, although it does not go by that
name, in print at least. Indeed, the last thing
a New York tough will admit is that he is a
thief. He dignifies his calling with the pretence
of gambling He does not steal: he "wins"
your money or your watch, and on the police
returns he is a "speculator." If,
when he passes around the hat for "voluntary"
contributions, any storekeeper should have the
temerity to refuse to chip in, he may look for
a visit from the gang on the first dark night,
and account himself lucky if his place escapes
being altogether wrecked. The Hell's Kitchen Gang and
the Rag Gang have both distinguishedthemselves within
recent times by blowing up objectionable stores with
stolen gunpowder. But if no such episode mar the celebration,
the excursion comes off and is the occasion for a
series of drunken fights that as likely as not end
in murder. No season has passed within my memory that
has not seen the police reserves called out to receive
some howling pandemonium returning from a picnic grove
on the Hudson or on the Sound. At least one peaceful
community up the river, that had borne with this nuisance
until patience had ceased to be a virtue, received
a boat-load of such picnickers in a style befitting
the occasion and the cargo. The outraged citizens
planted a howitzer on the dock, and bade the party
land at their peril. With the loaded gun pointed dead
at them, the furious toughs gave up and the peace
was not broken on the Hudson that day, at least not
ashore. It is good cause for congratulation that the
worst of all forms of recreation popular among the
city's toughs, the moonlight picnic, has been effectually
discouraged. Its opportunities for disgraceful revelry
and immorality were unrivalled anywhere. |
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In spite of influence
and protection, the tough reaches eventually the
end of his rope. Occasionally--not too often--there
is a noose on it. If not, the world that owes
him a living, according to his creed, will insist
on his earning it on the safe side of a prison
wall. A few, a very few, have been clubbed into
an approach to righteousness from the police standpoint.
The condemned tough goes up to serve his "bit"
or couple of "stretches," followed by
the applause of his gang. In the prison he meets
older thieves than himself, and sits at their
feet listening with respectful admiration to their
accounts of the great doings that sent them before.
He returns with the brand of the jail upon him,
to encounter the hero-worship of his old associates
as au offset to the cold shoulder given him by
all the rest of the world. Even if he is willing
to work, disgusted with the restraint and hard
labor of prison life, and in a majority of cases
that thought is probably uppermost in his mind,
no one will have him around. If, with the assistance
of Inspector Byrnes, who is a philanthropist in
his |
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own practical way, he secures a job, he is
discharged on the slightest provocation, and for
the most trifling fault. Very soon he sinks back
into his old surroundings, to rise no more until
he is lost to view in the queer, mysterious way
in which thieves and fallen women disappear. No
one can tell how. In the ranks of criminals he
never rises above that of the "laborer,"
the small thief or burglar, or general crook,
who blindly does the work planned for him by others,
and runs the biggest risk for the poorest pay.
It cannot be said that the "growler"
brought him luck, or its friendship fortune. And
yet, if his misdeeds have helped to make manifest
that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin
with the conditions of life against which his
very existence is a protest, even the tough has
not lived in vain. This measure of credit at least
should be accorded him, that, with or without
his good-will, he has been a factor in urging
on the battle against the slums that bred him.
It is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly
the price of liberty and the preservation of society. |
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20 |
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[1] This very mother will implore
the court with tears, the next morning. to let her
renegade son off. A poor woman, who claimed to be
the widow of a soldier, applied to the Tenement-house
Relief Committee of the King's Daughters last summer,
to be sent to some home, as she had neither kith nor
kin to care for her. Upon investigation it was found
that she had four big sons, all toughs, who beat her
regularly and took from her all the money she could
earn or beg; she was "a respectable woman, of
good habits," the inquiry developed, and lied
only to shield her rascally sons.
[2] "The percentage of
foreign-born prisoners in 1850 as compared with
that of natives, was more than five times that of
native prisoners, now (1880) it is less than double."--American
Prisons in the Tenth Census. |
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