Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (4 page)

Let us go again…and plunge into Five Points. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now…. This is the place, these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth…. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays…. Vapors issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark streets, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if judgement hour were near at hand…. Here, too, are lanes and alleys paved with mud knee deep; underground chambers where they dance and game; ruined houses open to the street, whence through wide gaps in the walls other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show; hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.

But of all the conditions that made Five Points legendary, the physical environment was but a garland compared to its reputation as the world’s preeminent stomping ground for gangs and gangsters. John Morrissey was well-acquainted with the life of the gangster. Back in Troy by the age of sixteen, he had become leader of the Downtowns, a small gang of mostly Irish and German teenage hooligans who often battled with the Uptowns, an anti-immigrant gang of American-born youths. The Uptowns frequently raided their territory in the riverfront industrial area of town. It was as leader of the Downtowns that Morrissey acquired his criminal record and also his reputation as a skilled street fighter who was adept with his fists.

In Five Points, fists were a throwback to a more innocent time. Even the Irish shillelagh, the oaken cudgel that had been a part of Celtic battles since the ancient days of clan warfare, was obsolete in Five Points, where hatchets, knives, slung shots, spiked clubs, brass knuckles, tomahawks, and muskets were among the more common implements of confrontation.

The gangs were ubiquitous and tended to strut their stuff in two main areas. The primary gathering place was Paradise Square, where Canal Street, the Bowery, Chatham, Pearl, and Centre Streets converged to form a truncated triangle, giving the neighborhood its name Five Points. Paradise Square was claimed by the earliest of the gangs, mostly Irish, including the Forty Thieves, Kerryonions, Shirt Tails, Chichesters, Patsy Conroys, Plug Uglies, Roach Guard, and Dead Rabbits. The other staging area for the gangs was the Bowery, which extended north of Five Points. Here were established the social clubs and headquarters of the native-born American gangs, most notably the Bowery Boys, the True Blue Americans, and the American Guard.

The gangs were a highly visible presence in Five Points, particularly during daylight hours, when they traveled brazenly in packs. By 1850, when John Morrissey was living on Cherry Street, the gangs had begun to claim various streets and territories as their own. Some of the gangs identified themselves with special colors or clothes. The Plug Uglies wore hi-top derbies stuffed with padding so they could use their noggins as battering rams; the Shirt Tails wore their shirts untucked; the Dead Rabbits sewed distinctive, red stripes down the outer seam of their pants to distinguish themselves from the Roach Guard, who wore blue stripes.

For the newly arrived Irish, coming from a land where colonial oppression had been the rule of law for generations, the formation of a gang carried with it the whiff of a noble gesture. These loosely organized street-corner crews were not primarily criminal organizations—not yet, anyway. Many were local versions of regional protection groups, or political resistance sects from the Old Country. Back on the Emerald Isle, these secret, loosely-structured organizations waged guerilla warfare against the British Crown’s commercial and military occupation. In America, what remained were the names, which became bastardized English-language versions of the original Gaelic. Plug Uglies, for instance, was an English translation of
baill oglaigh
, which meant member of the volunteers. Patsy Conroys was an anglicization of
páirt sa chonradh
(partners in league). The Whyos, a gang based in Five Points that became prominent later in the century, derived their name from the Gaelic
uathadh uais
(noble few).
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A gang was comprised of anywhere between ten and one hundred members. The largest of the gangs were the Dead Rabbits, who were a conglomeration of numerous Paradise Square gangs that came together under one banner. It was said that the gang’s name derived from the fact that they carried a dead rabbit impaled on a stick as a calling card. More likely, the gang’s name came from the Gaelic “dead
ráibéad
.” In the vernacular of the times, “dead” was an intensifier that meant “very.”
Ráibéad
, in Gaelic, was a galoot or big lug. Thus, a Dead Rabbit was a very big galoot. The Dead Rabbits had no leader, as such; they were broken down into subdivisions and spread throughout the Five Points district.

With so many hungry, idle young men gathered in green grocery speakeasies and on street corners, confrontations between groups were inevitable. The fights were sometimes barroom donnybrooks that spilled out into the streets, or more serious riots that grew out of organized social and political agitation. By far the most famous gang battles were those between the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys, but there were also smaller fights between factions of the Forty Thieves, Plug Uglies, and True Blue Americans. Some of these riots were territorial in nature—Irish versus Irish—but most were racial—native-born Americans versus “the nigger Irish.”

As recounted in the
New York Herald
, the
Police Gazette
,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News
, and other periodicals of the day, the gang wars could be shockingly brutal. In rural Ireland, some of the immigrants had belonged to fighting clubs in which altercations were fought according to Shillelagh Laws, where the primary instrument of battle was the Irish stick. In America, there were no rules. Sometimes gang riots raged sporadically for two or three days, with the streets barricaded by barrels and carts while gangsters blazed away with muskets and pistols, or tussled up close with brickbats, bludgeons, fists, and teeth. Most of the combatants were men, but women also played a role, either as lookouts or as resuppliers of ammunition. A few women even achieved renown as fierce battlers, none more so than Hellcat Maggie, who fought alongside the Dead Rabbits in many of their battles with the Bowery Boys and other nativist gangs. A young woman no more than twenty-years-old, Hellcat Maggie is reported to have filed her teeth sharp as mini-daggers and wearing on her fingers long, artificial nails made of metal. She would descend on rival gang members like a screaming banshee, biting and clawing until her fingers were dripping with the blood of her enemies.
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With casualty totals numbering in the hundreds and a level of carnage and destruction that frequently necessitated calling in the National Guard, the gang wars were a disturbing byproduct of the times. The gangs were a potential powder keg. Sprawling and disorganized, comprised mostly of rural Irish peasants now living in a strange and terrifying new environment, they haunted the streets of Five Points like spectral figures from some pre-utopian version of the American Dream. Mostly leaderless, the gangs were replenished weekly by the waves of destitute famine refugees arriving at Castle Garden wharf and other immigrant ports-of-call. The bitterness and sense of displacement that characterized the immigrant rabble was a potent force just waiting to be organized and harnessed. Anyone who could find a way to focus the frightening energy of the gangs, to tame the wild beast and redirect its power toward some useful purpose, would be a formidable leader indeed.

Old Smoke Riseth

By mid-1851, John Morrissey had established himself as a young man on the move. Through his activities as an immigrant runner and as a political organizer for Captain Isaiah Rynders’s Empire Club, he had cobbled together a small financial nest egg that made it possible for him to buy in as part-owner of the Gem Saloon. Being a saloonkeeper was an essential first step for anyone hoping to launch a career in politics. Morrissey’s ambitions were somewhat hindered by the fact that he could neither read nor write, a fact he sought to rectify through long hours of tutoring and study in the back of his saloon.

The young Irishman also had aspirations as a professional boxer, which, in the rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth century America, would be instrumental to a career in politics. Men hoping to achieve elective office needed to have a following; the saloon and the boxing ring were two arenas in which a man could distinguish himself as both tough and popular. Young John Morrissey was no exception. He launched his boxing efforts in the Five Points, where he had earned the catchy sobriquet of Old Smoke.

He’d first been given the nickname at an indoor shooting gallery in the basement of the St. Charles Hotel. One evening Morrissey became engaged in an impromptu fistfight with a man named Tom McCann, an American-born hoodlum affiliated with the Bowery Boys gang. The numerous onlookers who wagered on this fight were especially amazed when McCann pinned Morrissey against a stove of burning coals. Morrissey’s clothes sizzled and smoked, and the smell of burning flesh filled the room, but the Irishman never uttered a word of complaint. In fact, he eventually broke free from McCann’s grasp and whipped his competitor into submission. From then on, Morrissey was respectfully referred to as Old Smoke, a fighter who was able to endure pain and even gain strength and resolve through adversity.

In early 1852 Morrissey officially began his career as a professional pugilist, even though the sport was illegal at the time. Bouts were usually held at secret locations, often on piers and barges to avoid raids by coppers. The fights themselves were bare-knuckled affairs fought according to London Prize Ring rules, which meant each round continued until one of the fighters was knocked off his feet. There was no set limit to how long a fight could last; the bout continued until one of the fighters either quit or could not answer the bell for a new round. Competitive boxing matches were brutal, bloody, and known to last as long as sixty or seventy rounds, sometimes with deadly results.

For his first major championship bout, Morrissey traveled all the way to California. At Mare Island in San Francisco Bay, Old Smoke fought and defeated the California state champion, George Thompson, in nineteen minutes for a purse of $4,000 and a side bet of $1,000. It was in San Francisco that Morrissey also made his debut as a gambling impresario, running a popular dockside faro game from which he amassed a sizable bank roll. One night, a local man named Jim Hughes claimed that he had been cheated.

“I challenge you to a duel,” Hughes said to Morrissey, “so that I may restore my lost honor.”

“So be it,” replied Morrissey. “May I choose the weapons?”

“Of course,” said Hughes.

The following night a crowd gathered in expectation of the agreed upon showdown, which never took place, for Jim Hughes fled in terror when Old Smoke Morrissey appeared on the field of honor with a pair of butcher’s cleavers under his arms.

The New York Irishman returned home more popular than ever. He fought again in October 1853, this time against the man who was the recognized champion of the world, Yankee Sullivan, an Irishman by way of Australia whose real name was James Ambrose. The fight was held at Boston Corners, a remote, rural location on the border of New York and Massachusetts. An estimated three to five thousand fight fans arrived at Boston Corners that day. They came by train, stagecoach, horse, and foot, all converging on the little hamlet to witness what they hoped would be the fight of the century.

Yankee Sullivan was a skilled champion, but he was forty years old. Morrissey was twenty-two. The younger fighter was highly favored, which is why it came as a shock to onlookers when Yankee Sullivan began pounding Morrissey in the early rounds. Sullivan was a wily veteran; he would unleash a flurry of jabs and hooks on his opponent, and then, when the opponent countered, drop to the ground, taking advantage of the London Prize Ring rules in which a drop ended the round.

According to one account, as the rounds progressed, “Sullivan, cool and calculating, went at his man determinedly, pecking, slashing, hammering, connecting three times to one.” Morrissey kept on coming, but soon “exhibited the most revolting appearance imaginable…his eye was dreadfully swollen, and the blood was flowing in a perfect stream from each nostril.” In the thirty-fourth round, Morrissey took a dozen blows without return. The odds, which were posted after each round, quickly changed from the original two-to-one for Morrissey to two-to-one in favor of Sullivan.

By round thirty-seven, the old fox seemed to be in complete command. Morrissey was “fading rapidly…his knees shook, and his hands were down and his mind bewildered.” But the youngster was amazingly game. After receiving a flurry of blows from Sullivan, he advanced with what looked like the last of his energy. He boxed Sullivan into a corner, wrapped him against the ropes, and began choking him with a forearm—which was perfectly legal according to London Prize Ring rules. A Sullivan partisan, fearing that his fighter was about to lose or be choked to death, jumped into the ring and knocked Morrissey down. This, according to any rules, was a foul. Sullivan then unloaded a roundhouse right on Morrissey, who was still on his knees. Foul number two. All hell broke loose, with various fans rushing into the ring. By the time order was restored, the referee and fight officials declared that Old Smoke Morrissey was the winner and new Champion of America.

John Morrissey returned to Five Points as the people’s champion. He married Sarah Smith, the daughter of a steamboat captain, and suffered one of his few early set-backs in life when his only child died at birth. His wife, Sarah, was a well-bred Protestant; she begged her husband to forego the crude and violent world of boxing. In a letter to the
New York Tribune
, Morrissey, the self-taught writer and nearly life-long pugilist, announced that he was retiring from the ring, having reached his decision out of “an honest desire more becomingly to discharge my duties to my family and society” and that “my duties to my family and myself require me to devote my time and efforts to purposes more laudable and advantages.”
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