The Gangs of New York

The book, The Gangs of New York, is definitely not the movie! While director Martin Scorsese takes a fictional narrative of violence that focuses on Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), with an occasional nod to the real past, author Herbert Asbury provides insight to historical New York City's actual gang organizations and individual members by drawing on original documents such as police and court records, personal interviews with criminals and police officials, and numerous published secondary sources.

Asbury focuses on the gangs that existed from the early 19th to the early 20th century in what is now the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The early gangs had their origins among the tenements, saloons, and dance halls of the Paradise Square district. With the arrival of the cheap green-grocery speak-easies in the 1820s the gangs expanded over greater geographical territory and solidified into more organized groups, with established leaders. These organizations, some of them boasting dozens -- if not several hundred -- of members, flourished under the local control exercised by the corrupt political machine known as Tammany Hall.

In exchange for safe meeting and hiding places, and protection from conscientious law enforcement officers, gangs insured that "proper" voting kept Tammany politicians in office. Although most gang members were men, women and children also participated in fights, murders, thievery, prostitution, fencing, and all other available illegal activities. Gang activity peaked in the late 19th century, but thereafter declined due to the decreasing influence of Tammany Hall and the arrival of Patrolman (later Captain and Police Inspector) Alexander S. Williams.

This book is neither an analytical treatise on the problems leading to gang membership or the effects of gang warfare on members or victims, as it might be if written by today's historians or sociologists. Nor is it a source for solutions to gang activity. It is, instead, a recounting of the numerous gangs that operated in New York City over the course of a century. Asbury discusses such gangs as the Bowery Boys, Dead Rabbits, Daybreak Boys, and Whyos that stalked the Bowery, Five Points, and the East River waterfront, as well as individuals such as Bill "The Butcher" Poole, free-lance criminal Albert E. "Hicksey" Hicks, Louie the Lump, Monk Eastman, and the brilliant fence, Marm Mandelbaum, to name just a few of the groups and people covered.

He also discusses the devastating draft riots -- that lasted for one week in early July 1863 -- in which white New Yorkers protested the Conscription Act and the federal government's expectation that they should fight for the freedom of southern black slaves. The abysmal poverty, violence done by and to gang members, and political intimidation are described in unflinching detail. The book, in one respect is like the movie: it is not for the squeamish.