The Last Pirate of New York Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Rich Cohen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Cohen, Rich, author.

  Title: The last pirate of New York : a ghost ship, a killer, and the birth of a gangster nation / by Rich Cohen.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018049488 | ISBN 9780399589928 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780399589935 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hicks, Albert W., approximately 1820–1860. | Criminals—New York (State)—Biography. | Pirates—New York (State)—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HV6248.H4527 C64 2019 | DDC 364.1092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018049488

  Ebook ISBN 9780399589935

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Alex Merto

  Cover photograph: James O’Neil/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Once Upon a Time

  The Ghost Ship

  The Shore Line

  The Trial

  The Confession

  The Execution

  Burial and Resurrection

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Photographs

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  By Rich Cohen

  About the Author

  Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

  But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

  —BOB DYLAN

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  I grew up on gangster stories. While other kids were hearing about the Three Little Pigs and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, my father was telling me about the legends of his New York childhood—Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the visionary who put craps up on a table. “The lesson here,” my father said softly, as I lay in bed, “is that it was the same game, just played on a different level.”

  For a kid in the suburbs, these stories were more than stories. They were redbrick stoops, air shafts crossed by clotheslines, alleys, candy stores and subterranean club rooms, apartment houses that, compared to my atomized world of detached single-family living, seemed like paradise—coastal Brooklyn, where the fog bathes everything in a ghostly light and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge vanishes halfway across, like a ladder with its top in the clouds.

  As soon as I was old enough, I moved to New York. I said I was looking for a job, but I had really come in search of the truth behind my father’s stories. This became my career. Parents: be careful what you tell your children at night. I explored the parts of the city where I knew the old-time gangsters had operated: Little Italy and the Lower East Side, East New York and Brownsville, Brooklyn, the piers that had been the heart of the old Fourth Ward. I was consumed by New York history—not the story of marble buildings and glad-handing mayors but the alternate story that ran parallel and beneath—the story of the underworld, its heroes and stool pigeons, founders and visionaries. As my father said, “the same game, just played on a different level.”

  In time, mostly but not entirely working in my capacity as a reporter, I came to know some living examples of the genus and species: New York gangster. The young toughs loitering in front of the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street circa 1990. Outer-borough boys done up like canaries, in yellow and green. And, still more interesting, the old-timers who’d started their careers when the last of the ancients were still throwing lightning bolts. I spent an afternoon shadowing one of the men around St. Vincent’s Triangle in the Village asking about the way things used to be. They said he was feeble-minded, but that was an act. I found another gangster in New Jersey. (“I can’t handle you in town,” he said. “Meet me at the Meadowlands Complex. That’s mine. From there to Asbury Park, it all belongs to me.”) He said he’d talk to me, “ ’cause I met your father at La Costa, and he treat me real cordial.” When I told my father, he said, “If you write about Johnny, write nice. If he doesn’t like it, it’s not a letter to the editor he’s gonna send.” I met a boss of bosses, capo di tutti capi, at Bert Young’s restaurant on East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. Dozens of members of the Genovese crime family had been arrested and made bail and were celebrating. The boss knew my book Tough Jews, the first installment of this grander gangster project. The story of the Brooklyn mob Murder Inc., it centered on Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who, after testifying against members of his own gang, was tossed out a window of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. He was dubbed “The Canary Who Could Sing But Couldn’t Fly.”

  “I wouldn’t put him in my fuckin’ book,” the boss told me. “Maybe it’s history, but Reles was nothing but a goddamn rat.”

  When I asked the boss who he would put in his book, he smiled and said, “There are so many.”

  I suddenly realized that these men had also grown up on gangster stories told by their fathers. The boss recalled some of them, then encouraged me to track down the biographies. When I did, I found still other men who’d been raised on gangster stories. No matter how far back I went, in fact, I found still older old-timers talking about still more ancient days. It was an infinite regress. It went on and on, fading to an age so distant, it was lit by kerosene lamp. It gave me a mission, inspired a quest: I would track down and name and chronicle the very first New York gangster, the man behind all the other legends.

  Many consider Monk Eastman to have been the first. He led a gang called the Eastmans, had a pocked face and scary eyes, fought battles on Orchard and Cherry streets, served in the First World War, and was found dead outside a dance hall on Fourteenth Street in 1920. But when Eastman turned up in the dives, old-timers were already telling stories about gangsters of an earlier generation. If you figured out who those gangsters were actually talking about, you’d establish the bedrock beneath the underworld, the source of all that criminal energy. You might come to understand the alchemical process that turns psychopaths into folk heroes. You might even unlock something fundamental about New York. In this way, lantern in hand, I continued until I reached the Mesozoic era of the Manhattan underworld, when the earliest mobsters emerged from the primordial ooze. Little Augie Fein, gunned down on the corner of Norfolk and Delancey; Mose, the otherwise nameless thug who would pass his cigar to an underling before a fight, saying, “Hold de butt”; Bill “the Butcher” Poole, whose last words were, “Good-bye, boys, I die a true American!” These were some of the first bad men—but who were they telling stories about at bedtime?

  Albert Hicks is the closest thing the New York underworld has to a Cain, the first killer and the first banished man, carrying that dread mark: MURDER. He operated so long ago, in a city so similar to and yet so different from our own, the word gangster had not yet been coined. He was called a pirate.

  For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working under an alias, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops that filled the lower part of Manhattan, drinking in barroom
s where the great entertainments were rat-baiting and bear-baiting—patrons wagered on how many rats a terrier could kill, on how many dogs it would take to bring down a bear. In 1860 Hicks was New York’s most feared man. This was Manhattan as dark fairy tale, an early draft that would be overwritten until it became a palimpsest. Even now, everywhere you look, reminders of that ancient city bleed through: at Peck Slip and the East River, a neighborhood once lousy with tall ships, blind pigs, and sons of bitches, a pirates’ playground; at Hangman’s Elm in Washington Square Park, a three-hundred-year-old tree said to have once served as a gallows for public executions; at Stillwell Avenue and the Boardwalk in Coney Island, where Lucky Luciano sat his boss Joe Masseria at a poker table, then stepped aside as a squad of hitmen, including Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis, came through the door. Asked where he’d been during the shooting, Luciano told police, “Taking a pee; I always took a long pee.”

  Hicks came to New York to make his fortune. He did it in crime, but he can stand as an alter ego for all those strivers who reach the city in search of success. He worked on the water; he worked in ships. He became notorious in the worst neighborhood Manhattan had ever known, the Five Points, where Anthony Street, Orange Street, and Cross Street came together to form the edge of Paradise Square. That New York was a sugar-and-salt mix of politics, business, and brutality. We know about the early political leaders: Peter Stuyvesant and Fernando Wood. We know about the pioneering tycoons: Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan. Albert Hicks was a founding father same as them, only he was a founder of New York’s underworld. His story was passed down by word of mouth, told and retold until it became a legend. It was officially recorded just once—in the press, as it unfolded—then shifted from breaking news to tall tale, added to and tarted up as time passed. If it’s not been properly chronicled since the summer of 1860, it’s partly because these events took place on the eve of the Civil War. That conflagration overhangs this story like the shadow of an incoming comet. In a moment, everything would be blown away.

  To research these events, I relied on police records, court documents, and newspaper accounts. The spirit of the time is less in the details of those articles than in the tone, the cacophony of voices, the competitive jostling between the New York Herald, the New York Sun, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and the New York Times. There were dozens of daily papers, evening and morning editions, as well as weeklies that offered deeper analysis. In obsessing on Hicks, in reading the old books and newspaper columns, I came to understand the city in a new way. All the good and all the bad were already in place in 1860. Everything that’s happened since has merely been a dreamlike elaboration.

  Even contemporaneous writers knew Albert Hicks was something other than a normal killer. He was a demon. He had that kind of charisma. He put his arm around the town and pulled its people close. In writing about him, reporters of the time were capturing a new kind of terror—the terror of the metropolis, its anonymity, all those tenements and all those windows, all those docks and all those harborside taverns, all those numbered streets and all those mysterious lives. Albert Hicks personified the free-wheeling city that would have to make way for the modern metropolis. He was Manhattan as it had been when pirates anchored off Fourteenth Street. The hero of the lunatics, a first citizen of a criminal nation, the subject of ancient bloody bedtime tales.

  His final spree played out like a ghost story, only it happened to be true.

  THE GHOST SHIP

  The ship was spotted March 21, 1860—Wednesday, four hours before dawn—by the crew of the J. R. Mather, a schooner hauling molasses to Philadelphia. The captain of the Mather, Ben Nickerson, discovered the ship by running into it. Bang! The crew was sent reeling. Nickerson rushed to the bridge. That’s when he saw the strange sloop, a dark shape on dark water, listing as if wounded. The bowsprit—the spar that extends from the prow over the sea—had snapped off. The fore-topmast staysail, inner jib, outer jib, and flying jib had come down in a heap. Wood and rigging landed on the deck of the Mather, where Nickerson stood over it, muttering. He went to work untangling the mess. His first reaction was anger. Why had this ghost been drifting without lights in the center of the Lower Bay? But when he turned his attention to the sloop, anger gave way to dread. There was something unreal about the ship. No sound came from it, no sign of life. No glow came from the pilothouse, no sailors stood at the rail. The decks were deserted.

  Nickerson called out—shouted, helloed—but nothing came back. Speaking to police a few days later, he recalled the unsettling silence. He would have investigated further had his own boat not been badly damaged. He returned for repairs to the South Street docks on the East River in Lower Manhattan instead, bringing with him the first news of the mysterious ship. That report, as well as the rigging Nickerson had carried away from the collision, fired up the rumor mill. Within hours, the story was being told in every harborside tavern.

  New York was a maritime city. It was all about the waterfront, oyster sloops and ferries, steamships and cutters, channels, tidal washes, and bays. Nearly everyone below Houston Street was connected to the ocean. Terms like bowsprit did not have to be defined; nor did forecastle, rigging, or captain’s daughter. Everyone knew the bowsprit was the spar that extended over the sea, that the forecastle was the ship’s upper deck before the mast, that the rigging was the system of ropes that controlled the sails, that a captain’s daughter was the whip that officers used to discipline unruly sailors, as in, “All right, boys, give him the captain’s daughter.” In that New York, an abandoned sloop, without crew or direction, a phantom nearly within sight of the downtown docks yet lost in a watery delirium, stood for breakdown and chaos.

  * * *

  —

  The crew of the Telegraph, a schooner out of New London, Connecticut, were the first to get a good look at the ghost ship. The sailors spotted it less than an hour after the collision with the J. R. Mather. The ghost was already a kind of ruin. Bowsprit busted, sails down, adrift—a thing like that is a bad omen, a portent of evil. They saw it at first light. The captain of the Telegraph recorded the location: the Lower Bay, between Brooklyn’s West Bank and Romer Shoals, an outcrop that stands between the harbor and the open sea.

  The Telegraph sailed around the ghost ship, the crew calling out, looking for signs of life, then tied to it. Several men went on board to investigate. The ghost was identified by the name on its side: E. A. Johnson. It was a classic oyster sloop, a mast in the middle, a main sail and smaller sails in front and in back. The crew of the Telegraph walked the deck, then went down the ladder to the cabin, bewildered by everything they saw. Ax marks in the ceiling and floor, drawers pulled out, locks smashed, trails of blood and pools of blood that ran in rivulets when the ship pitched. An oyster sloop was typically crewed by four to six, yet no bodies could be found. “Her deck appeared to have been washed in human blood,” the captain of the Telegraph said later.

  The yawl, the wood rowboat that served as life raft and dinghy on every sloop, was missing. Here were the braces and here were the chains, but the boat itself was gone.

  The Telegraph tried to tow the E. A. Johnson back to the city, but it was too heavy, and the sea was too rough. The captain called for help. Dozens of tugboats worked in the harbor, clearing wrecks, shepherding traffic. The Ceres, commanded by Captain Stevens, sat as low as the tugboat in the children’s story, red and gold, funnel and smokestack, pilothouse topped by a huge American flag—thirty-three stars. Captain Stevens boarded the ghost, walked the decks, and saw the signs of the slaughter, then shook off whatever unease he might be feeling and got to work. After securing the sloop with ropes and chains, he pushed it through the Narrows and Upper Bay, which was among the deepest, most protected natural harbors in the world. The E. A. Johnson drew attention from every onlooker—a battered craft, broken and bleeding, touched by disaster.

  Trinity Church was the tallest building in Manhattan. Its spire could be s
een before anything else, rising out of the sea. Then the harbor islands, the clanging buoys, and the seagull-covered rocks. Then Manhattan, with its warehouses and exchanges, wooden tenements and narrow streets.

  The Ceres left the E. A. Johnson at a pier beside the Fulton Fish Market, where the morning rush had given way to a sleepy afternoon. The warehouses were built on piers over the East River, brackish, trash-filled water sloshing around the posts. The market had opened in 1822 and would stay in that location—between Fulton and Beekman streets on the East River—until 2005, making it, for many years, the longest continuously operating shopping center in the United States. Sloops and draggers unloaded their catch through the night, and trading began at dawn. The stalls were heaped high with shellfish and finfish, many still alive, gasping through bloodied gills. The sky above the market was awash in seagulls, screaming and turning great circles.

  Crowds soon assembled to look at the ghost ship: cold-faced men in hats, street urchins, sailors, and clerks. They’d heard the rumors via the lightning-fast word-of-mouth network that carries news around all seaports.

  The story made the late editions of the newspapers. By the next morning, it was the topic of every conversation.

  * * *

  —

  The police went to work as soon as the sloop was anchored. Captain Hart Weed and an officer named Washbourne walked over to the Fulton Fish Market from the second precinct station house at 49 Beekman. They examined the wreckage on the Telegraph, ropes and rigging—it was docked nearby—then went aboard the E. A. Johnson. Then came the coroner—Schirmer—who wrote everything down in a book. The cops started at the prow of the E. A. Johnson in full sight of the crowd. “The deck was besmeared with blood,” Captain Weed said later. “It appeared as if two persons had been lying on it, and one had been dragged out of the cabin; the appearance of the blood led to the inference that on deck one had lain in front of the mast, and the other amidships….Forward of the mast there was some light-colored hair and blood; the blood had run on both sides of the vessel; when [we] hauled the sail up it was found to have covered up a great quantity of blood….On two places there were blood outside the rail, rubbed on, as if a bleeding body with clothes on had been thrown overboard.”