Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (5 page)

Morrissey may have retired from the ring, but he still carried with him the reputation of being the toughest of the tough. His stature grew accordingly. He invested his boxing proceeds in a number of gambling establishments, one of which, a faro and roulette parlor located at No. 8 Barclay Street, became especially popular among politicians and sporting men. A more downscale gambling den owned by Morrissey was located near Paradise Square and was frequented by members of the Dead Rabbits. Increasingly, Morrissey’s circle of friends spanned two worlds: rich and poor, street hoodlums and connected politicians. Inevitably, some of Morrissey’s followers began to encourage Old Smoke to challenge Captain Isaiah Rynders as the de facto mob boss of Five Points, the man who served as a nexus between the sporting men, the gangsters, and politicians who utilized the Dead Rabbits and other gang members to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate rival voters on election day.

“I owe Ike Rynders my career,” Morrissey told his friends. “He put me to work when I knew not a soul in this town.” Morrissey proclaimed that he would not go up against Captain Rynders unless events in the street dictated that he do so—which is exactly what came to pass.

The trajectory of Old Smoke’s life changed forever on the night of July 26, 1854, when he came face to face with William Poole, a notorious nativist shoulder hitter and former Bowery Boy who presided over his own Poole Association. Poole was a butcher by trade, skilled with knives and not bad with his fists either. As a member of the Bowery Boys, he’d been in a number of gang wars with the Dead Rabbits and the Roach Guard. He was a bit of a dandy who wore a long frock coat, slicked his black hair down in an early-vintage pompadour, and tried to pass himself off as an aristocrat. Over six-feet tall and strong as a bull, he was known as Bill the Butcher to friend and foe alike. In recent months, he’d emerged as a popular representative of the Know-Nothing Party, a political organization that was the bane of Irish Catholics throughout the United States.
⁵

The Know-Nothing movement began in Pennsylvania and spread to New York, Boston, and as far south as New Orleans; it started out as a secret, anti-immigrant underground that engaged in late-night burnings of Catholic churches, the murder of immigrant leaders, and all manner of organized election-day skullduggery. The criminal nature of the organization’s activities necessitated its secrecy; whenever a member of the gang was asked about the private “club,” he responded, “I know nothing,” which is how the movement got its name.

In the wake of the Irish potato famine, which first hit the Emerald Isle in 1845 and continued over the next five to ten years, the Know-Nothing movement rode a wave of racist, jingoistic anti-Irish sentiment that had roots early in the century. In the United States, “No Irish Need Apply” was a sentiment expressed by American-born employers as far back as the 1830s. Resistance to the Irish was partly religion-based. The United States was a Protestant country. The Roman Catholic Church was viewed not only as a pagan cult with strange customs, but as a foreign-based power with designs on subverting and maybe even overtaking the U.S. system of government. “The Catholic church is the handmaiden of the devil,” was how Cotton Mather put it when American cities were first being constituted. Through the Know-Nothing movement, Mather’s beliefs became a virulent sub-theme of American society.

Religious intolerance was one thing, but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) resistance to any and all immigrants was also an economic imperative with roots in the marketplace. The Founding Fathers had never envisioned a country overrun by starving, illiterate, disease-ridden “foreigners.” The Irish, in particular, were seen as ignorant, hopelessly anti-authoritarian, clannish, overly emotional, and decidedly un-WASP-like in their strong identification with the common man. The term “Mulhoolyism” became a popular synonym for what was perceived to be rowdy, primitive behavior. In newspaper editorial cartoons in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and New York, the Irish were routinely depicted as vaguely simian creatures. One famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast, even established a thriving mini-career lampooning Paddy, whose pug-nosed, slovenly representation was often placed alongside Sambo, the ignorant rural black. Paddy and Sambo became dueling caricatures that personified the “white man’s burden” within America’s budding Anglo-Saxon republic.

By the time Bill Poole had begun to distinguish himself as a gangster, the Know-Nothings were the shock troops of an “American purification movement.” Among other things, the official Know-Nothing charter listed their principles as “anti-Romanism, anti-Bedinism, anti-Papistalism, anti-Nunneryism, anti-Winking Virginiaism, and anti-Jesuitism.” Around 1850, the Know-Nothings split from the Whig Party and became bullyboys for the new American Republican Party, who believed, among other things, that the naturalization period for immigrants should be increased to twenty-one years.

For some time, Bill the Butcher Poole and John Old Smoke Morrissey had been walking opposite sides of the fence. They were, in many ways, mirror images of each other, with Poole as the hero of the Protestant ascendancy and Morrissey a living embodiment of Paddy’s ability to rise above difficult circumstances. The men undoubtedly had crossed paths before, either at political rallies or in the district’s many saloons (Poole’s butcher shop was located in nearby Washington Market). Their bitter rivalry—based on politics, racial animosity, and bragging rights over who was “cock-o’-the-walk” in the Bloody Sixth Ward—finally came to a head on the night of July 26, 1854 when Morrissey found Poole drinking at the bar of the City Hotel at Broadway and Howard Street.

“I hear you’re a wizard with a butcher’s blade,” said Morrissey to Poole, “but I’d wager you’re a coward at the manly art of fisticuffs.”

“That sounds like a challenge, Morrissey.”

“It is indeed,” replied Old Smoke.

The two men agreed to meet the following morning at the Amos Street dock (now Christopher Street) to have it out once and for all.

At 7
A
.
M
. the next morning, the two bruisers and their followers arrived en masse for the confrontation. The spectators formed a circle, which served as the ring. As later described in the
Police Gazette
, the encounter was a donnybrook of legendary proportions:

The fight began with some light sparring, Poole holding himself principally on the defensive as his opponent circled for a chance to close. For about five minutes this child’s play of the giants lasted. Then Morrissey made a rush. But Poole was too quick for him. As Old Smoke made his lunge, Bill the Butcher ducked with remarkable agility and seized him by the ankles. In a flash Poole threw his opponent clean over his head and as Old Smoke went sprawling he had only time to roll over when Poole pounced on him like a tiger. Then followed terrible minutes of fighting…. There was a long gash in Poole’s cheeks where the flesh had been torn by his opponent’s teeth. The blood was streaming from Morrissey’s both eyes…. Not a hand was raised to interfere or favor either contestant during the two or three minutes this inhuman struggle lasted.

The fight ended in what some would call a draw; others claimed that Poole got the best of it. Either way, it did not settle the ongoing rivalry between the Poole and Morrissey factions. Their war continued for months, with numerous tit for tat encounters, until the night of February 25, 1855. In this face-to-face encounter between Morrissey and Poole, two of Morrissey’s henchmen gunned down the infamous Bill the Butcher at Stanwix Hall, a saloon on Broadway. Though mortally wounded, Poole lingered on for fourteen days before delivering his immortal final words: “Goodbye boys. I die a true American.”

John Morrissey, along with Paudeen McLaughlin, Lew Baker, Jim Turner, and a few minor accessories, was put on trial for the murder. The case resulted in a series of hung juries before charges were dropped altogether, sealing Morrissey’s legend as the man who brought about the demise of Bill the Butcher, one of the great xenophobe’s of American history. Old Smoke Morrissey had been a gangster, a saloon keeper, a boxer, and gambling impresario—now he was an acquitted murderer and the most popular man in the Irish American underworld.

The First Irish Mob Boss

The term “mob boss” originated in Five Points and refers to a form of spontaneous political activity known as a mob primary. Mob primaries comprised the most basic form of political organization known to man. They were initiated by an aspiring political leader merely standing on a milk crate or soap box and orating until he had gathered a crowd, or mob, who was willing to sign a petition on the man’s behalf declaring him a candidate for public office. The mob pledged its vote to the orator, who was usually a saloon keeper willing to offer free drink, a sandwich, a cellar mattress to sleep on, or all of the above in exchange for a vote. The type of voter most willing to enter into this arrangement was usually a rough character—a bum, a homeless person, a thief, or a gangster. Thus, the mob boss, or mobster, became the leader of a less than savory constituency that was, nonetheless, a powerful force capable of swinging many local elections.

The arrangement worked both ways. By aligning himself with a rising and powerful mob boss, the street hoodlum was now also a mobster. He was connected, part of a system in which he now had a vested interest. Ostensibly, he would now have the kind of protection that was necessary for him to operate an illegal business—say, a house of prostitution, gambling den, burglary ring, unlicensed speakeasy, or any manner of criminal enterprise popular throughout the underworld. A vast subterranean universe of vice, exploitation, and good times, the underworld was kept alive through a steady flow of cash from above and below. From the earliest mob primary in America, the underworld and the upperworld were intrinsically intertwined and would remain so through centuries of bloodshed, criminal prosecution, and political reform.

Since the early 1840s, the most powerful mob boss in New York City was Captain Isaiah Rynders. Rynders was the first to establish a network of saloons and gambling parlors that generated money and created an underworld constituency, which buttressed his political organization, the Empire Club. In 1844 Rynders achieved national fame for himself when he virtually delivered the presidency to James K. Polk, the Democratic candidate. He did so through a highly physical form of voter fraud. The use of gangsters on election day was a common practice of all the political parties, but Rynders was the first to perfect the art by organizing the hoodlums into cohesive voting blocks. In New York, his ability to deliver became the foundation of the powerful political organization, or machine, known as Tammany Hall. Rynders’s record of success was such that he made electoral forays to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, in 1854, the city of New Orleans, where he sought to educate local Democrats in the ways of Tammany-style machine politics.

Rynders’s only problem was that he wasn’t Irish, at least not Irish Catholic with roots in the Old Country. Although his mother was of Irish Protestant stock, his father was German American. Increasingly, the waves of Catholic famine immigrants who had begun to fill out the ranks of the underworld—and the lower political ranks of organizations like Tammany Hall—clamored for one of their own as titular leader of the Mob. In an era when social mechanisms for change were woefully unresponsive to the needs of the people, the Mob inevitably sought to bring about change in their own way—in the streets. It happened, oddly enough, on Independence Day, 1857.

During that time, the city’s gang wars had grown considerably worse largely due to the fact that New York was patrolled by two competing police forces: The Municipals, who were loyal to the Democratic Party, and the Metropolitans, stepchild of the Republicans. These two forces seemed more interested in fighting each other than actually policing the city (a situation that would be rectified two years later when the two forces were finally combined). The gangsters ran wild during what was an especially dark and turbulent year that would culminate with financial calamity for all when a run on the banks caused a massive Depression in the fall of 1857. Before it was over, scores of financial institutions and businesses would go under, with liabilities exceeding $120,000,000.

In the midst of all this, a rivalry that had been roiling between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys for more than a decade finally boiled over when, on the evening of July 4, a large contingent of Dead Rabbits and Roach Guards attacked the clubhouse of the Bowery Boys and Atlantic Guard at 42 Bowery. An all-night battle raged unencumbered by police interference, in which the nativist side appeared to prevail. The next day the gang war continued, with literally hundreds of soldiers on each side. “Brickbats, stones and clubs were flying thickly around…” reported the
New York Times
. “Men ran wildly about brandishing firearms. Wounded men lay on the sidewalk and were trampled upon. Now the Rabbits would make a combined rush and force their antagonist up Bayard Street to the Bowery. Then the fugitives, being reinforced, would turn on their pursuers and compel a retreat…”

Police finally arrived on the scene and advanced on the gangsters with unparalleled savagery, forcing scores of Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys into the tenements and up the stairs to the roofs, clubbing them at every turn. One fleeing gangster was knocked off the roof of a house on Baxter Street; his skull was fractured when he hit the sidewalk, where his gang enemies promptly stomped him to death.

Eventually, at 7
P
.
M
. on the second night of rioting, the police in desperation turned to Captain Isaiah Rynders, who as leader of mob forces in the Sixth Ward was believed to have influence with both sides. Rynders arrived on the scene and stood before the barricades on Baxter Street.

“I implore you to end this carnage,” he declared to the rioters. “You are killing each other for what purpose? To what end?”