Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (8 page)

Fein was set free, but because he was considered a rat, he lost all of his union partners-in-crime, and any political influence he may have had. Fein was reduced to committing petty crimes in the streets, until he was arrested in 1931 for throwing acid in the face of a competitor: Mortimer Kahn. That set Fein up in Sing Sing Prison for a few more years.

In 1941, Fein was arrested again for stealing over $250,000 worth of clothing and fabric from the Garment Center. Fein was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, Fein, for some unknown reason, had his sentence reduced to 10-20 years.

When Fein was released from prison for the last time, he went right back into the garment industry, but this time as a legitimate tailor, a skill he had learned from his father. Fein moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn, where he married and raised a family.

Fein, unlike most of his contemporaries, who were either killed in the streets or fried in the electric chair, died of cancer and emphysema in 1962.

F
orty Thieves

Based on “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” the Forty Thieves were considered to be the first organized street gang in New York City.

In 1825, the Forty Thieves originated at a produce store located on Centre Street, just south of Anthony (now Worth Street), in an area called The Five Points. The proprietor of the store was Rosanna Peers, who sold rotted vegetables out front and ran an illegal speakeasy in the back, where she sold rotgut liquor at prices much cheaper than licensed establishments. Soon, the joint became a haven for pickpockets, murderers, robbers, and thieves, and a dour gentleman named Edward Coleman rose as their leader.

Coleman gave out strict assignments to his men, with quotas on which and how many crimes he expected each man to commit. If after a period of time, a man did not meet his quota, he would be banished from the gang and sometimes even killed, as a message to others about the importance of meeting quotas.

Coleman's downfall was precipitated by one of the gang's few legal ventures: the Hot Corn Girls.

Coleman would send out scores of pretty young girls onto the streets, carrying baskets filled with hot roasted ears of corn. The Hot Corn Girl, dressed in spotted calico and wearing a plaid shawl, would walk barefooted in the streets, singing; “Hot Corn! Hot Corn! Here's your lily white corn. All you that's got money. Poor me that's got none. Come buy my lily hot corn. And let me go home.”

The Hot Corn Girls were not allowed off the streets by Coleman until every single ear of corn in their basket was sold.

All the Hot Corn Girls were fairly attractive and the pretty ones were fought over by the amorous young men mingling on the streets. The best looking one of the lot was called “The Pretty Hot Corn Girl” and Coleman fell for her hard. After fighting off several other suitors, Coleman married “The Pretty Hot Corn Girl,” and then he put her back out on the streets selling corn.

However, after his wife consistently did not meet her quotas, Coleman felt, in order to save face and be consistent with his orders, he had no other choice but to kill her. And that he did. As a result, Coleman was arrested and convicted of murder. On January 12, 1839, Coleman became the first man ever to be hanged at the newly constructed Tombs Prison.

After Coleman's death, the men in the Forty Thieves drifted into other street gangs: including the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, and the Bowery Boys.

In the early 1850's, a juvenile street gang sprung up in the Five Points called the Forty Little Thieves, which consisted of homeless children of both sexes, from the ages of 8 to 12, who emulated the escapades of the old Forty Thieves. The head of the gang was Wild Maggie Carson, only 12-years-old herself.

The Forty Little Thieves soon outgrew their gang, and their members became assimilated into the older and more famous gangs; all except for Wild Maggie Carson, who was taken off the streets by Reverend Lewis Morris Pease, founder of the Five Points House of Industry. Under Pease's guidance, Little Maggie got a legitimate job sewing buttons. According to Pease, when she was 15, Little Maggie met and married a well-to-do gentleman. And she lived happily ever after.

That is, according to Pease.

F
lour Riots of 1837

The flour problem began with the 1835 Great New York City Fire, which destroyed almost 700 downtown buildings. Nearly the entire New York City financial center, including the city's lifeblood - the banks - was burned to the ground. Unable to obtain loans, owners of factories and other downtown businesses, were not able to rebuild, putting tens of thousands of New Yorkers out of work.

By 1837, New York City had sunk into the depths of a recession. With no jobs and no money, people's diets sometimes consisted of little more than simple buttered or jammed bread. The poor of the city began to panic, when they discovered that flour, needed to make their daily bread, would become so expensive they would not be able to afford to buy it.

Matters were made worse, when reports from Virginia and other wheat producing states said there was a scarcity of wheat, from which flour was made, and a rise in price was inevitable. At the beginning of January 1837, wheat started at $5.62 cents a barrel. Within days, it had risen to $7 a barrel; then to $12 a barrel. There were rumors that in a few weeks, wheat would go to an incredible $20 a barrel.

The hardest hit were the poor people, who lived in the slums of the Five Points, Bowery, and the Fourth Ward areas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Besides the increase in the price of wheat, meat prices had doubled and coal to heat their hovels rose to $10 a ton. People became desperate, and poor souls who were not normally crooks felt they had no choice but to commit petty crimes in order to put food on their family's table.

On February 1, 1837, news circulated that New York City had only four weeks supply of flour left and that the large flour and grain depot in Troy, New York, contained only 4,000 barrels of flour, rather than the usual 30,000 barrels. The newspapers began sensationalizing the issue, when they stated in their editorials that certain merchants were hoarding wheat and flour in anticipation of the rising prices.

The Tammany Hall politicians were adept at causing unrest between the poor Irish, who populated the slums of Lower Manhattan, and anyone with either money or prestige. Never letting a crisis go to waste, Tammany Hall began spreading unfounded rumors that England was refusing to send flour to the United States. The message was compounded by the untruth that the Old Mother Country's intention was to starve the poor Irish in America, as a repayment for the rancor between Ireland and England which had existed for centuries.

On February 10, 1837, a crowd of nearly 6,000 slum-dwellers, from the Five Points, Fourth Ward, and Bowery areas, met at City Hall Park. Running the meeting from atop the steps of City Hall were Tammany Hall titans like Moses Johnson, Paul
Hedle, Warden Hayward, and Alexander Ming Jr.  There it was decided that two businesses in particular - Hart and Company on Washington Street, and SH. Herrick & Company on Coenties Slip - were packed with both flour and wheat, and were holding back distribution, hoping for future monetary gain when the prices rose.

One of the speakers said, “Fellow citizens, Mr. Eli Hart has 53,000 barrels of flour in his store. Let us go there and offer him $8 a barrel, and if he does not take it......”

The speaker stopped in mid-sentence, but his implication was clear.

When the talking was over, the crowd stampeded from City Hall Park, and they headed down Broadway, west on Cortland and onto Washington Street. When the watchmen protecting Hart's Store saw the surging mob, they quickly ran inside, and they locked the three huge iron doors. But they forgot to insert the inside bar on the center door.

Eli Hart was viewing the mob unrest from a safe distance, and he immediately ran to City Hall, asking for police protection. Twenty policemen rushed to the scene, but they were beaten back by the rioters and their clubs taken away from them. The newly elected mayor of New York City, Aaron Clark, hurried up the steps of the store, and he tried to quell the angry mob. However, after he was showered with stones and bricks, Clark was forced to run for this life.

The rioters then rushed into the building and wrenched one of the iron doors from its hinges. Using it as a battering ram, they bashed down the other two iron doors, then they busted inside. Once inside, the mob entered the storerooms, then rolled approximately 1,000 bushels of wheat
and 500 barrels of flour into the street. They smashed the bushels and barrels, until thousands of rioters were knee deep in the flour and wheat.

People started to sing, “Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel!”

Women filled their apron and skirts with flour, while men used their hats and pockets to pilfer the goods. Even young children got into the act, scooping up what they could carry on their frail bodies.

Suddenly, the 27th Regiment of the National Guard arrived, and they confronted the rioters. Using bayonets and clubs, the National Guard stabbed and clubbed as many rioters as they could lay their hands on. Eventually, they captured scores of the worst offenders, and they started marching them to the Tombs Prison. However, before they got very far, more rioters attacked the National Guard, and they rescued dozens of prisoners, and in the process, tore the police commissioner's coat right off his back. Forty rioters were finally hustled to the Tombs, where they were tried and convicted, and sent to Sing
Sing Prison.

While the rioters carted off their dead and wounded from in front of Hart's store, another contingent headed to the store of S.H. Herrick & Company. There the mob smashed the doors and windows with stones and bats, and within ten minutes, they were able to destroy an additional 30 barrels of flour and 100 bushels of wheat.

Then, without any apparent reason, the mob suddenly disbursed and headed back to their slums, their thirst for destruction finally sated.

The very next day, the price of flour increased one dollar.

G
allus Mag

Dating back to the 1700's, the waterfront of the 4
th
Ward was a haven for robbers, killers, and pirates. Vicious gangs like the Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, and Slaughter Houses, prowled the streets, robbing and murdering any poor fool with cash in their pockets who was stupid enough to wander into their sacred domain. Yet, the most feared denizen ever to set foot in the 4
th
Ward of the mid-19
th
Century was not a man, but an amazon woman named Gallus Mag.

Gallus Mag was an Englishwoman who stood over 6-feet-tall. She was the bouncer at a Dover Street dive called the Hole-In-The-Wall Bar. The Hole-In-The-Wall Bar was originally built in 1794, and is now the site of the famed Bridge Cafe. The Hole-In-The-Wall Bar was owned by one-armed Charlie
Monell, and ruled by Mag, who got her nickname “Gallus” because she kept her skirt from falling down with suspenders, or galluses, as they were called at the time.

Mag stalked the bar looking for troublemakers, with a pistol stuck in her belt and a bludgeon strapped to her wrist. If anyone was dumb enough to challenge her mettle, Mag would hit them with her club, then clutch their ear in her teeth, drag them to the front door and throw them out into the gutter. If the patron put up a stink, Mag would bite off their ear and store it in a large bottle of alcohol that she kept in plain sight behind the bar (They called it “Gallus Mag's Trophy Case”). The New York City police of that time proclaimed Gallus Mag the “most savage female they had ever encountered.”

Mag was challenged one day by another woman, Sadie the Goat, a member of the Charlton Street Gang. Sadie the Goat got her name because her preferred manner of robbery was slamming her head into the stomach of her victim, whereas her male companion would then nail the sucker in the head with a rock from a slingshot, then rob him of all his valuables. One day in the Hole-In-The-Wall Bar, Sadie, three sheets to the wind, foolishly challenged Mag to a fight and was beaten to a pulp. As was her wont, Mag severed one of Sadie the Goat's ears with her teeth, and she deposited it into a liquor jar behind the bar. Sadie was glad to escape with her life, and she fled the 4
th
Ward for the foreseeable future. She then prowled the West Side piers, looking for other suckers to rob.

Years later, after she had made considerable cash performing her specialty on the streets of the West Side, Sadie returned to the Hole-In-The-Wall Bar and made her peace with Mag. Mag was so touched by Sadie's gesture, she immediately went into a liquor jar, removed Sadie's severed ear and returned it to its rightful owner. The legend is that Sadie was so overjoyed by the return of her ear, she wore it in a locket around her neck until her final days.

In 1855, after a slew of seven murders were committed on the premises in the space of three months, the Hole-In-The Wall Bar was closed down for good by the authorities.

There is no record of the year of Mag's demise, but her ghost is said to haunt the Bridge Cafe to this very day.

G
ophers

The Gophers street gang was formed in the 1890's from a conglomerate of other Irish street gangs that patrolled the west side of Manhattan. The Gophers were given their name, because after they performed one misdeed or another, to avoid arrest, they hid themselves in the cavernous cellars that snaked throughout the neighborhood. The Gophers originally ruled the area west from Seventh Avenue to 11
th
Avenue, and north from 14
th
Street to 42
nd
Street. However, later they moved as far north as 57
th
  Street. The Gopher's numbers swelled and eventually reached over 500 men, all murderous hooligans of the worst kind.

The Gophers' first base of operations was a notorious saloon called Battle Row, also the name of the area on 39
th
Street, between 10
th
and 11
th
Avenue, where the Gophers committed most of their mayhem. Battle Row was owned by a thug named Mallet Murphy, who was given his nickname because he corrected drunks and other miscreants with a wooden mallet instead of a bludgeon, which was the weapon of choice of that day.

Due to the death or imprisonment of their bosses, the Gophers went through several leaders. The most famous Gopher boss was Owney “The Killer” Madden. Madden's reign ended in 1913, when he was sent to the slammer for 10 years for killing Little Patsy Doyle, his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and an ambitious man intent on replacing Madden as the leader of the Gophers.

Another such boss was One Lung Curran, who originated a practice that determined the fashion wear of his gang. One day Curran, dismayed that his girlfriend did not have a proper winter coat, snuck up behind a passing policeman, clubbed him over the head and stole his winter police coat. Curran gave the coat to his girlfriend, and after a few alterations, she produced a swell model with a military cut.

Other Gophers followed this trend, and soon there was an epidemic of police officers staggering back to their station house on West 47
th
Street, blood dripping from their heads and dressed only in their shirts, shoes, and trousers. This prompted the police captain of that precinct to send groups of four and five cops into the Gophers' domain. They bludgeoned enough Gophers that their sartorial vogue soon ended.

Another Gophers leader was Happy Jack Mulraney, called Happy Jack because his face was set in a permanent smile.
Mulraney’s  smile was not intended, but, in fact, caused by a quirky paralysis of Mulraney's face muscles. His cohorts enjoyed inciting the psychopathic-killer Mulraney into a rage, by telling him someone had made fun of his unintentional grin.

One day, Paddy the Priest, a bar owner on 10
th
  Avenue and a close friend of Mulraney’s, made the horrible mistake of asking Mulraney why he didn't smile out of the other side of his face. Mulraney immediately shot Paddy the Priest in the head, killing him instantly. Then adding insult to injury, Mulraney emptied Paddy the Priest's cash register. For his temporary lapse in judgment, Mulraney was sentenced to life in prison.

In August of 1908, several Gophers wandered out of their West Side domain, and smack into the middle of a shootout on the Lower East Side between Monk Eastman's gang and Paul Kelly's Five Pointers. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, the Gophers opened fire, shooting at members of both warring gangs.

One Gopher later said, “A lot of guys were poppin' at each other, so why shouldn't we do a little poppin' ourselves?”

For years, the Gopher's main source of income was plundering the freight cars and the train depot of the New York Central Railroad, which ran along 11
th
Avenue. The New York City police was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to stop these shenanigans. So, the railroad organized its own “police force,” which was comprised mostly of ex-cops, who had been brutalized by the Gophers in the past and were looking for revenge. This “police force” went into Hell's Kitchen, beating the Gophers from one end of the neighborhood to the other, or as a member of the “police force” said, “From hell to breakfast.” Sometimes they used clubs, and if needed, they fired guns. Being former policemen and well-trained in firearms, they were much better at gunplay than were the Gophers.

In 1917, after the arrest of One Lung Curran, and with Madden still in jail and Mulraney in prison for life, the Gophers gradually dissipated. By 1920, the Gophers street gang ceased to exist, only to be replaced in later years by another murderous group called “The Westies.”

G
reat New York City Fire of 1835

It was the worst fire in New York City's history. But that didn't stop the poor Irish, living in the slums of the Five Points, from going on a dazzling display of looting, which led to one of the biggest free champagne parties in the history of America.

The city was in the throes of one of the coldest winters on record. On the days preceding “The Great Fire,” the temperature had dropped as low as 17 degrees below zero. By the night of December 16, 1835, there was two feet of frozen snow on the ground and the temperature was exactly zero frigid degrees. It was so cold, both the Hudson River and East Rivers had completely frozen.

Around 9 p.m., a watchman (the precursor to a New York City policeman) named Warren Hayes was crossing the corner of Merchant (now Beaver Street) and Pearl Street, when he thought he smelled smoke. Hayes looked up at the last floor of a five-story building at 25 Merchant Street, rented by Comstock and Andrews, a famous dry-goods store, and he spotted smoke coming out of a window. Unbeknownst to Hayes, a gas pipe had ruptured and had ignited some coals left on a stove.

Hayes immediately ran through the streets yelling “Fire!!” In minutes, the great fire bell that stood above City Hall began peeling loudly, summoning what was left of the New York City Fire Department. The bell at the Tombs Prison, about a mile north, also started ringing, summoning the volunteer firemen in that area.

In 1832, New York City was stricken with the worst case of cholera in the city's history. Four thousand people died, and more than half of the city's quarter million population fled the
city in fear. This decimated the New York City Fire Department, and by 1835, the Fire Department had less than half of its previous members.

The volunteer fire department that responded on December 16, 1835, had spent the previous night fighting a fire on Burlington Street, on the East River, and they were now near exhaustion. By the time the local fire department arrived 30 minutes later, due to 40 mile-a-hour winds, the fire had already spread to 50 structures. Buildings were going up in flames on Water Street, Exchange Place, Beaver, Front, and South Streets. By midnight, the fire had also consumed Broad and Wall Street, which was the heart of the business and financial center of New York City, if not the entire country.  Most of the city's newspaper plants, retail and wholesale stores, and warehouses, were also engulfed by the conflagration.

The call went out to every fire department in the city, but it was of no use. 75 hook and ladder companies were at the scene less than two hours after the fire had started. Hundreds of citizens pitched in, carrying water in buckets, pails, and even tubs. Unfortunately, because of the cold weather, the fire hoses were mostly useless.

In addition, the entire city's cisterns, wells, and fire hydrants were frozen too. Whatever water did stream thinly from the hydrants through the hoses, only went 30 feet into the air, then quickly turned into ice. What made matters worse, due to the high winds, this ice/water mixture, feebly coming out of the hoses, was blown back onto the fireman themselves, and soon scores of firemen were living ice structures. Many firemen poured brandy into their boots to keep their feet from getting frostbite. Some drank the brandy, too, in order to keep the rest of their body warm.

Other firemen raced to the East River, and they started chopping the ice to reach the water below.  Black Joke Engine No. 33 was dragged onto the deck of a ship, and it started pumping water through the holes in the ice. Engine No. 33 directed the water though three other engines, until it finally reached the fire on Water Street. However, in just a few hours, those four engines were frozen too and were no longer of any use.

Two buildings were saved in an extremely odd way. Barrels of vinegar were rolled out of the Oyster King Restaurant, in the Downing Building on Garden Street. This vinegar was poured into several fire engines and used to douse the fires in the Downing Building, and in the Journal of Commerce  Building next door. However, the vinegar soon ran out and could not be used to save any more structures.

As the city was engulfed in mayhem, a man ran into a church on Garden Street, and he began playing a funeral dirge on an organ, which could be heard all throughout Lower Manhattan. Minutes later, that church caught fire too, and the organist was seen sprinting from the flaming church.