Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (10 page)

One establishment that welcomed the O’Brien brothers and the rest of the Live Oaks was Bill Swan’s Fireproof Coffee House. Swan, a member of the gang, was the city’s premiere promoter of dogfighting and rat-killing, an illegal though popular sport of the era. Swan advertised his events through printed handbills that were handed out in neighborhood saloons. One such flyer advertising an event to be held on March 10, 1879 read in part:

Grand national rat-killing match for $100, to take place at Bill Swan’s saloon, corner Esplanade and Peters streets, third district, Sunday afternoon, at four o’clock, precisely.

Harry Jennings, of New York, has matched a certain New York dog, whose fighting weight is twenty-three pounds, to kill twelve full-grown rats per minute, for five consecutive minutes, being one of the greatest feats a dog can accomplish—sixty full-sized rats in five minutes…

In the backyard of Swan’s property was constructed a pit twelve feet long and ten feet wide, with two-foot high side walls, and a viewing area to accommodate hundreds. On the afternoon of March 10, dozens were in attendance, though, as reported by the
Times Picayune
, they were not exactly high rollers: “The rougher element of life predominated…the men representing business interests and the gentlemen of the town might have been counted upon the fingers of either hand.”

At four o’clock, the rat master released his rodents into the pit, where a dog named Skelper killed twenty-one rats in three minutes and forty-five seconds, but retreated yelping in pain when one rat nipped him on the nose. Another dog was brought in to take on the remaining rats. The audience cheered on the dog, or the rats, depending on the nature of their wager. The only big winner was Bill Swan, the proprietor, who gave a percentage of the take to the Live Oak Boys.

Matt and Hugh O’Brien reigned as leaders of the gang for years, though death and imprisonment thinned their ranks considerably. The wanton violence that distinguished the gang was bound to catch up with the O’Briens, which is exactly what happened on the night of October 2, 1886.

While drinking in Bill Swan’s saloon, the two brothers become involved in a bitter quarrel. Their brother-in-law Johnny Hackett and Jack Lyons, a fellow Live Oak and Gallatin Street old-timer, tried to intercede—in a fashion. While Matt shouted abuse at his brother, Hackett handed Hugh a knife and said, “Here. Shut him up with this.”

Matt saw the knife and clammed up. After a few more drinks, the brothers left the saloon on good terms, walking together into Gallatin Street. A few yards from the corner of Barracks Street they stopped and talked for a moment, then Matt drew a pistol and shot Hugh in the side.

“Hughy was drunk,” Matt O’Brien told the police when he was arrested a few hours later, “and he was goin’ to do me up, and I shot him to keep him from doin’ it. I didn’t give him no cause, only he was drunk and wanted blood.”

Hugh was not seriously hurt and left New Orleans to avoid testifying against his brother. Even so, based on eyewitness testimony, Matt was convicted at trial of assault less than mayhem and sentenced to the penitentiary. With one O’Brien gone and the other in prison, the Live Oak Boys drifted from the scene.

Violence in New Orleans did not come to an end. In fact, robbery, muggings, and murder continued to be so common throughout New Orleans that one parish sheriff described the city to a visiting British journalist as “a perfect hell on earth.”

The sheriff, presumably, was speaking metaphorically, while the city’s Irish inhabitants were living in a more literal state of hell that began with hunger and exile, continued with squalor, death, and disease, and was headed God-only-knew where.

Gambling Men, Wharf Rats, and Ladies of Ill Repute

Ruffians like the Live Oak Boys were the scourge not only of the police, but of the many other underworld figures who were trying to make their living off the cornucopia of sin and vice that flourished in the French Quarter. There was no Tammany Hall to organize the district’s criminal structure and link it to a larger political framework. Compared to New York City, New Orleans was small—barely one-third the size in terms of population. There was no Mob as such, no overriding set of rules that officially bound the underworld and upperworld together. Cops, politicians, and city officials were definitely still on the take, but unlike New York City where the vice rackets were spread far and wide, the French Quarter was a universe unto itself, a delicate microcosm with an ethnic polyglot of independent mid- and low-level operators seeking to establish their niche.

Gambling, of course, was a mainstay in the French Quarter and had been since the earliest days of the Mississippi River paddle boats. By the 1850s, when New Orleans became a major port for American armies operating in Mexico and a principle point of departure for the California Gold Rush, the city was thronged with soldiers, adventurers, and fortune hunters en route to and from San Francisco by way of Nicaragua and the Isthmus of Panama. The bulk of this immense transient population was composed of sharpies, bunco men, and reckless young fellows looking for quick ways to double their bank rolls—in other words, they were looking for suckers.
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One man who made the most of the city’s hospitality toward anyone looking to turn a card or toss the dice was an Irishman of the Protestant persuasion named Price McGrath. A native of Versailles, Kentucky, a small town near Lexington, McGrath started out as an aspiring tailor, but soon abandoned that profession to devote himself to the life of sporting men. He began as a steamboat card player and later became a roper and dealer of faro at gambling houses in Lexington, Frankfort, Louisville, and Cincinnati. In 1855 he arrived in New Orleans, and, with $70,000 to his name, founded McGrath & Company, a luxurious palace of chance at 4 Carondelet Street. With croupiers that wore frock coats in the afternoon and full evening dress after dinner, it was the sort of establishment where riffraff like the Live Oak Boys were most definitely not welcome.

Through judicious payoffs to the necessary authorities—politicians, police, and various officials of state and city government—McGrath & Company’s palatial house was in operation for six years, and during that time the annual profits ranged from $80,000 to $100,000. The success of Price McGrath’s operation spawned many imitators, which was a great boon to the city’s growing netherworld of commercialized vice. In many ways, gambling in New Orleans—and other American cities, for that matter—served the same function that narcotics would a century later: as the economic engine that powered the underground economy. Organizations like McGrath & Company set the standard for dozens of lesser establishments catering to men of more modest means. Through municipal kickbacks and graft, money from gambling generated an underworld cash flow that kept the upperworld fat and happy.

Price McGrath was an entrepreneur. With profits from his gambling parlor on Carondelet Street, he ventured north to New York City and introduced himself to none other than Old Smoke Morrissey, who was at the time organizing his syndicate of gambling operators. Together the two men opened a gambling house at 5 West 24th Street that was highly successful. In 1867, with Morrissey increasingly preoccupied with his Saratoga Springs operations and preparing for his initial foray into electoral politics, McGrath sold his interest in the Manhattan gambling parlor and returned to his native Kentucky, where he became a famous breeder of thoroughbred horses at a stud farm he called McGrathiana.

Back in New Orleans, the French Quarter continued to percolate. If there was a racket that rivaled the world of cards, dice, and roulette as an essential aspect of the local economy, it had to be “the word’s oldest profession.” In many ways, prostitution had given birth to the French Quarter. Without the lure of the harlot, it’s doubtful that the many cabarets, dance houses, and concert saloons of the district could have sustained themselves. Of course, prostitution was not restricted to the world-famous Vieux Carré. By 1870, when New Orleans had a population of 190,000 inhabitants, bordellos of every variety—from the ten-dollar parlor house to the fifteen-cent Negro chippy joint—were running openly in virtually every part of town. According to Asbury, “there was scarcely a block in New Orleans which did not contain at least one brothel or assignation house.”

For the young, destitute Irishwomen arriving in New Orleans in the post-famine years, the business of prostitution was both a horrible trap and a means of economic advancement. Immigrants just off the boat were met by assorted wharf rats, among them seemingly friendly women with names like Bridget Fury, Nellie McGee, and Irish Suze. These seemingly sympathetic women steered the newly arrived young girls toward lodging for the night—lodging that invariably turned out to be a house of ill repute.

As a profession, prostitution was certainly demeaning, fraught with potential violence and disease, but in many ways the harlots of nineteenth century New Orleans were better off than the escorts and streetwalkers of today. Many establishments were relatively safe and well-protected. The nearly legitimate or at least ubiquitous status of the profession allowed for mostly above board interactions between patron and prostitute. Occasionally, a young, Irish lass even rose to a level of prosperity and renown as a madam in the red light, lace curtain world of the New Orleans bordello.

One such woman went by the name of Fanny Sweet, a legendary figure in antebellum New Orleans.
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Not only was she an important figure in local red light lore, but Fanny Sweet was also an adventuress of great renown, a practitioner of voodoo, a professional grifter who slept with a knife and pistol under her pillow, and, according to a rather florid description in the
True Delta,
“a modern Lucretia Borgia…a hardened murderess…one of the most remarkable female desperados ever known.” For pure cunning and what would today be called sociopathic behavior, Fanny Sweet deserves mention among the most renowned gangsters of her generation.

By most accounts, she was not a physically attractive woman. She was tall and gangly with masculine facial features: a big nose, bushy eyebrows, and a noticeable mustache. Apparently, to compensate for her less than stellar looks, she developed many special tricks in the boudoir that endeared her to a steady stream of lovers or at least lovemaking partners.

She first came to New Orleans in 1844 and started out in a lowly whorehouse on Dauphine Street, where she met a young banker known only as “Mr. D.” Once introduced to Fanny’s special talents, the man became infatuated with her; she resigned her position in the bordello to become his personal mistress. Within a year after this relationship began, Mr. D stole a large sum of money from his own bank, later fleeing to Havana to escape arrest.

Fanny Sweet also fled the city. Disguised as a man, she set out for San Francisco and then Sacramento, where she ran a boardinghouse for miners. She was eventually accused of poisoning to death a stage-coach driver who had slapped her in public. Rather than face trial, she fled California to the Isthmus of Panama and then returned to the Crescent City, where she resumed her life as a prostitute and con artist who fleeced older men of means.

It was during this period that Fanny came to embrace voodooism, which was outlawed in New Orleans. She attended many secret meetings, bought great quantities of charms and love potions from Marie Laveau and other voodoo masters, and was part of a group that was arrested when the police broke up what was described in the papers as a “voodoo orgy.”

On Gasquet Street, Fanny ran a well-known assignation house that provided young girls for reputable elderly gents, and then blackmailed them. It was a dangerous game that finally caught up with her. She was forced to flee the city when one of her victims tried to kill her. She did not leave town alone, however; she took with her a wealthy widower whom she led on a wild overland adventure through Louisiana and Texas into Mexico, where, among Fanny’s numerous elaborate moneymaking plans, they would purchase quinine and munitions for war, then sell it to the Confederate Army at huge profit.

Somewhere between Houston and Corpus Christi, the wealthy widower became ill and died. Back in New Orleans, the press and local prosecutors, wise to the ways of Fanny Sweet, were convinced that she must have killed the man. Police searched her house on Gasquet Street and found a miniature voodoo casket that held several packets of white powder, believed to be love potions if not poison, and a lock of bloodstained hair, one of the most potent of voodoo charms. The mayor of New Orleans immediately sent a squad of detectives to Brownsville, Texas to apprehend Fanny Sweet and bring her back to the city to stand trial.

Fanny proclaimed her innocence. She was held in the city jail while tests were conducted on the secret voodoo powder found in her house. When it turned out to be medicine, not poison, public sentiment turned in her favor. A prominent criminal defense attorney, certain that she was being railroaded, took on her case pro bono. Eventually, on December 12, 1861, the attorney general of Louisiana threw in the towel, announcing officially that Fanny was exonerated of all charges. She was released from jail.

The case did not destroy Fanny, but her criminal schemes and shenanigans were exposed in the press to such a degree that she was never able to operate in New Orleans again.

When the
True Delta
published its long exposé identifying Fanny’s place of birth and revealing her real name as Mary Robinson, she penned a response that was published in two installments under the headline: “Autobiography of Mrs. Fanny Sweet—A Card to the Public.” Although she willingly admitted to many of the most egregious accusations against her, she steadfastly held to the fiction that she was of aristocratic origin, born and reared in England in comfort and even luxury. And yet, she was somehow unable to divulge the exact location of her birth or her real name. It was a telling commentary on the social pecking order of the day that, while Fanny Sweet would admit to being a prostitute, a killer, and a gold digger of the highest calling, she persisted in trying to fob herself off as a British aristocrat. Apparently, under no circumstance was she willing to admit that she was of Irish origin.