Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (6 page)

The gangsters, including those on the Dead Rabbits side, threw rocks and missiles at Rynders, chasing him from the scene. The riot finally ended of its own volition an hour later, but the dye had been cast. Both symbolically and in reality, the Captain’s very public rebuke signaled the end of his influence in the Bloody Ould Sixth. From this point on, Rynders was out; Morrissey was in.
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Out of the ashes of the Great Riot of 1857 arose the first true Irish Mob boss in American history. As such, Morrissey’s first order of business was to expand his gambling empire. In the nineteenth century, gambling was (as illegal booze and narcotics would be for later generations of mobsters) the secret elixir that fueled the entire underworld, as well as upperworld politicians who relied on money and muscle provided by the gambling czars. Morrissey ran two kinds of establishments: gambling dens for the poor, which consisted mostly of card games, policy, and craps, and upscale parlors for the rich, who favored faro, bagatelle, and roulette.

Morrissey achieved his greatest success when he traveled north of New York City to Saratoga Springs, a budding resort town. Having been raised in nearby Troy, Old Smoke knew the area well. Located near the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, Saratoga Springs was a beautiful setting where the hoi polloi came to relax in the local hot springs. The Five Points mob boss astutely surmised that the town needed a first class gambling parlor. He cobbled together money from a number of wealthy investors and opened the majestic Saratoga Club House, which immediately became known as “the finest gaming establishment in America.”

Saratoga Springs was a conservative place, home to the first registered temperance society in the United States. Morrissey’s arrival in town was not welcomed by all. There were attempts by reformists to close the Saratoga Club House. Old Smoke countered these attacks with lavish gifts, i.e. payoffs, to the town, the churches, civic organizations, politicians, and other public officials. Remarked one local newspaper columnist in admiration, “Morrissey divides the profits of his sinning with the good people of the village with a generous hand.” Thanks in part to the Irish Mob boss, Saratoga Springs would go on to build many fancy hotels, a spectacular race track, numerous fine dining establishments, and become one of the most popular destinations in the history of sporting men.

The success of the Saratoga Club House made Morrissey fabulously wealthy. The once destitute ghetto tough and immigrant runner became a leading representative of “mobster chic,” the first of his generation to establish what would become a proclivity among prominent gangsters for centuries to come. He presented himself in a manner both nouveau riche and gauche. He grew a full, neatly manicured black beard in the manner of General Ulysses S. Grant and wore sparkling jewelry—a diamond studded cravat, diamond rings on his fingers, and a gold-plated pocket watch dangling from his vest. He favored striped, high-waist pants, which he combined with a swallow-tail dinner jacket and a beaver-pelt overcoat, topped off with a mink bowler hat. To go along with his ostentatious personal appearance, Morrissey was squired around town in what could only be described as the pink Cadillac of its day—a gold-embroidered carriage, custom-built in New Jersey and priced at over $2,000.

Along with his garish personal style, Morrissey exhibited another trait that would become a staple of rags-to-riches mobsters for generations to come: a desire to be accepted by aristocratic society. Born and raised in squalor, Morrissey believed that he could buy his way into high society. He was seen around town with men like Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and August Belmont, the wealthy WASP industrialists who patronized his Saratoga Club House. These men may have been willing to go slumming with Morrissey, the garish Irish Mob boss, but they were not his friend. Vanderbilt allegedly gave Morrissey a bogus stock tip that cost him thousands. When Morrissey tried to buy a house in the aristocratic part of town, a local syndicate led by Belmont banded together and bought the property out from under him. Morrissey was shocked to find out that beyond the gold-leaf walls of his gaming establishment, he was, to the reigning WASPs and their socialite companions, just another Paddy.

It was a hard lesson for Morrissey. Being a famous gambling impresario might make him rich, but it would not bring him acceptance among the social elite. For this, Old Smoke surmised, the real key to his aspirations was the world of politics. In 1868 Morrissey called in all his chits as Irish Mob boss and New York state gambling czar and got himself elected to Congress. Two years later he was reelected by an overwhelming majority.

Morrissey’s political fortunes were aligned with none other than William Marcy Tweed, former captain of the Big Six Fire Engine Company and an alderman who had risen to become grand sachem, or boss, of Tammany Hall in 1863. Old Smoke’s endorsement of Tweed, a native-born Presbyterian of Scottish descent, was an important feather in Tweed’s cap. The Irish Catholic vote was huge. Morrissey’s support was a decisive element in Boss Tweed’s ability to deliver voters to the polls, which was the backbone of Tammany’s power. As payback, Morrissey became a prominent member of Tweed’s inner circle, known as the Ring. It was also Old Smoke’s understanding that, as Tweed’s Celtic liaison, he would be in line to assume the position of the first Irish Catholic boss of Tammany Hall.

During an eight-year stretch from 1863 to 1871, Boss Tweed and his inner circle proceeded to plunder the city of New York like no political entity ever had before—or ever would again. Tweed himself became a billionaire, amassing his fortune through a mind-boggling array of graft, kickbacks, rigged bidding on city contracts, boodling, and money from illegal enterprises such as gambling and prostitution. Tammany Hall under Tweed set the standard for what would come to be known as gangster politics. The Boss and his Ring controlled the levers of power by determining who would and who would not be elected to office. They did so largely through the use of thuggery and terror on election day. Once in office, Tweed’s Ring got rich through control of the municipal government, the county government, the judicial system, the governorship, and the all-important Board of Audit, which supervised all city and county expenditures.

For a good while, the public stood idly by while Tweed and his crew siphoned off staggering amounts of money from city bonds and other pork barrel scams simply because they got things done. Under Tweed the municipal bureaucracy grew as never before, with the attendant city jobs and political opportunities for members of the tribe. The Irish, in particular, benefited greatly, and men with Hibernian names began to dominate Tammany’s vast ward structure, holding down key positions as ward committeemen, ward bosses, and precinct captains.

Eventually, Tweed’s own waste and arrogance brought him down. He bullied his own Board of Supervisors into building a massive, Victorian-style court house that no one wanted, then padded the construction costs to $13 million and skimmed the overage for himself. This typical act of profligacy prompted a series of damning articles in the
New York Times
. Aided by cartoonist Thomas Nast, who in
Harper’s Weekly
portrayed the Boss and his Ring as corpulent hogs slopping at the trough of public beneficence, the tide finally turned against the Machine. Tweed’s legitimate accomplishments—the fact that he’d presided over some of the city’s most far-reaching public works projects such as improved water supplies and sewage disposal for the poor—were buried under an avalanche of vitriol and negative press.

In the early 1870s, the Boss got his comeuppance when back-to-back civil and criminal indictments laid bare the full extent of his plundering. Six million dollars in stolen funds was traced directly to Tweed. It was alleged that the Boss and his Ring together had defrauded the municipal government out of $50 million (equivalent—conservatively—to $500 million in today’s currency). Facing major prison time, Tweed went on the lam, was eventually caught in Spain, and extradited to the United States, where he languished behind bars. As part of a plea arrangement, he eventually came clean, and in 1877, during an investigation of the Tweed Ring by the Board of Aldermen, the boss turned on his former protégé and Irish liaison, Old Smoke Morrissey.

In a long written statement, the disgraced Tammany boss identified Morrissey as a skillful practitioner of mass voter fraud and early bag man for the Ring. Furthermore, declared Tweed, Morrissey was “a proprietor and owner of the worst places in the city of New York, the resort of thieves and persons of the lowest character. Perhaps one of the worst faults that can be attributed to me is having been the means of keeping his gambling houses protected from the police.”

Politically speaking, Old Smoke was cooked. By aligning himself with Tweed, the undisputed gambling czar of New York had backed the wrong horse. Ostracized by his rival, Honest John Kelly, who replaced Tweed to become the coveted first Irish Catholic Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, Morrissey made one last stab at glory. He broke from Tammany and formed his own political organization called Young Democracy. His efforts were fraught with internecine struggles, and he was only partially successful. Though he was elected to the state senate in 1875 and reelected two years later, his personal life deteriorated into alcoholism and an early form of dementia brought on by his years of physical punishment in the boxing ring. With his defenses weakened, he contracted a severe case of pneumonia, and, on May 1, 1877, after being bedridden for weeks, he cried out in his sleep and then expired. At the time of his death, Old Smoke Morrissey was forty-seven years old.

In his short eventful life, this former son of the Old Sod, street tough, boxing champ, vice lord, and skilled political operative, created a prototype for the upwardly mobile Irish American mobster. Proud, adventurous, street smart, and unencumbered by any sense of fealty to the Protestant work ethic, he became a leader among men. Although his life did not end as he would have liked, Morrissey’s years were marked by many substantial though legally and morally questionable achievements. Most of all, he played a key role in helping to create a criminal framework by which the American underworld would prosper for decades to come. He also showed that, by combining physical prowess and criminal audacity with legitimate political influence, a man could rise up out of the gutter and take on the world.

It was a lesson many of the lowly gangsters of Five Points still needed to learn.

Gangs, Gangsters, and the Women Who Love Them

In many ways, John Morrissey was the exception to the rule. Through sheer ambition and force of personality, he came to symbolize the era in which he lived. There were few coattails in the underworld, however. Morrissey’s individual success did not necessarily translate into new levels of acceptance and opportunity for the Irish American gangster. By and large, gangs continued to proliferate and were refueled from the nether regions of America’s ongoing urban nightmare. By the 1880s, the squalid slum conditions that had given rise to an earlier generation of Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies hadn’t changed much. In Five Points, the Old Brewery had been torn down, with all traces of its sordid past eradicated, but tenement life had become more stifling and spread well beyond the bounds of the Sixth Ward.

In
How the Other Half Lives
, photojournalist Jacob A. Riis’s pioneering chronicle of slum life in late nineteenth century New York City, the gangster mentality was shown to be a natural consequence of tenement life. With nearly 33,000 densely-crowded tenement houses on the Lower East Side alone, children had little choice but to lead their lives in the street. A pack mentality ruled. Riis wrote

Every corner has its gang, not always on the best of terms with the rivals on the next block, but all with a common programme: defiance of law and order, and with a common ambition: to get “pinched,” i.e., arrested, so as to pose as heroes before their fellows. A successful raid on a grocer’s till is a good mark, “doing up” a policeman cause for promotion. The gang is an institution in New York.

For Riis, the roots of gang life were painfully obvious.

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…New York’s tough represents the essence of reaction against the old and the new oppression, nursed in the rank soil of the slums. Its gangs are made of the American-born sons of English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang.

In the years following John Morrissey’s death in 1878 to the end of the century, the Whyos were by far the most notorious gang in New York. Like the Dead Rabbits before them, the Whyos were a conglomeration of numerous smaller street corner crews who, according to Riis, met in “club rooms…generally a tenement, sometimes under a pier or dump, to carouse, play cards, and plan their raids; their ‘fences,’ who dispose of the stolen property.” In a city that was now fully one quarter Irish, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement had been simply overwhelmed and chased out of town. The Whyos were thus less of a protection organization based on traditions founded in the Old Country and more of a criminal organization whose sole reason for existing was profit and plunder.

They were led by the two Dannys—Danny Lyons and Danny Driscoll—and presided over a sprawling domain that seemed to take in most of lower Manhattan. Their membership, almost all of whom had nicknames (a common feature of the gangs in general), included Red Rocks Farrell, Googy Corcoran, Bull Hurley, Hoggy Walsh, and Slops Connolly (not to be confused with Baboon Connolly). Piker Ryan, another Whyo who helped make the gang famous, achieved a kind of immortality when he was arrested with a “gangster price list” in his pocket that was subsequently published in the
Police Gazette.