A Pickpocket's Tale
The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"A true story more incredible than fiction." —Kevin Baker, author of Striver's Row
In George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as an exemplar of the "good fellow," a criminal who relied on wile, who followed a code of loyalty even in his world of deception. Here is the underworld of the New York that gave us Edith Wharton, Boss Tweed, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
George Appo, the antihero of this fascinating historical study, was a pickpocket and con man who gained notoriety after testifying in 1894 about police corruption and even played himself on Broadway. Historian Gilfoyle, who in City of Eros wrote about prostitution in New York, uses Appo's autobiography as a starting point for an exploration of the urban demimonde and the varieties of criminal experience in the Gilded Age. We follow Appo through Gotham's teeming sidewalks and streetcars as he casually picks pockets for spending money and then smokes it away in opium dens where the classes and races mingle. Sooner or later he runs afoul of New York's police and court system, almost as corrupt and chaotic as the criminal subculture they regulate. Then he's off to an archipelago of correctional institutions, from a shipboard reform school to Sing Sing, a prison-industrial hellhole where convicts are contracted out as factory laborers and disciplined with such tortures as the "weighing machine." Gilfoyle paints a Hogarthian cityscape peopled with gang ruffians, gentleman swindlers, dirty politicians, cunning shysters and evangelical reformers, all depicted with a sympathetic understanding of the rigors of life on the margins. The result is a colorful, evocative social history. 60 illus.
