Rotten Apples: True Stories of New York Crime and Mystery

By Marvin J. Wolf and katherine mader

Rotten Apples is a thoroughly investigated treasure of true crime straight from the streets of The City that Never Sleeps. This bushel of vice, victims, and vengeance spotlights sinister citizens from Boss Tweed and Typhoid Mary to Mark David Chapman and Jack Henry Abbot, plus detailed map references to guide you to the locations where they committed their grisly crimes. You'll be shocked by...

Murder by Morphine
Playboy medical student Carlyle Harris was eager to end his secret marriage to a pretty young woman from the wrong side of the tracks. A lethal prescription seemed to be just what death's doctor ordered. But the eyes of a corpse never lie...

Goodbar, As In Nuts
Roseann Quinn was a young, attractive schoolteacher living the carefree singles life of the early seventies on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The men she took home were strictly one-night stands, but one of them made sure he left his mark on her--eighteen times...

Son of Sam
For more than a year, the man dubbed " The .44 Caliber Killer" held the city paralyzed with fear: spraying death from the muzzle of a high-powered handgun, murdering and maiming more than a dozen young men and women, daring New York's finest to end his bloody spree, and touching off the biggest manhunt in New YOrk criminal history. In the end, he said the devil made him do it...

And--if you think you can take it--much, much more...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antenna Books
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781623061050

Marvin J. Wolf

Marvin J. Wolf served as an Army combat photographer, reporter, and press chief in Vietnam and was one of only sixty men to receive a battlefield promotion to lieutenant. He is the author, coauthor, or ghostwriter of seventeen previous books. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his adult daughter and their two spoiled dogs.

Book preview

Introduction: The Stones Speak

In Central Park, a moment’s stroll from West 72nd Street, lies Strawberry Fields, a meditation area. Featuring a mosaic with a simple yet profound message, Imagine, the area is dedicated to the memory of John Lennon, musician and prophet. It gets its share of visitors.

Now step across the street to the Dakota apartment building on the northwest corner of 72nd. There you can watch a slow, unending procession of visitors to a shrine unmarked except in memory. Nothing commemorates the spot on the sidewalk where Mark David Chapman stood as he shot Lennon to death in 1980 (see chapter 39). Yet for over a decade the faithful from around the world have continued to make pilgrimage. It happens twenty or thirty times a day. The affluent alight from taxicabs. The confident step from buses or appear afoot. The adventurous climb out of the subway. And all stand around for a few minutes, rarely more. They speak in hushed voices, look up and down the street. A few venture to chat with the doorman. But most come merely to be there.

And to listen to the stones speak.

These visitors know all about the tragedy that happened here. They come to this spot, to this hallowed ground, to see for themselves where it happened, to soak in the ambience, to imagine what it must have been like on the fateful night.

For the rest of their lives they will tell family and friends and total strangers that they stood right on the spot where it happened. And that, in some small way, their lives have been just a little different for doing so.

Crimes are part of human history. They reflect the imperfections in what we call civilization. Important crimes—events that change the course of history, or reveal something vital about a historical era—are often understood better by visiting the scene. That’s why we have included at least one location in each chapter of this book.

For example, take the 1964 stabbing of Kitty Genovese. Most accounts of her murder leave readers puzzled. Why did this young woman, who left her car less than a ten-second fast walk from the safety of her doorway, turn away from that safety? Why did she go into the street, where her assailant could follow and stab her? The mystery solves itself with a visit to the site (see chapter 33). The stones speak to anyone listening.

Every city is full of such places. Here the mighty and the famous died, or killed, or stole. There the people rose up against injustice. And over yonder a tragedy took place that still brings tears to the eyes of those who know the story.

However, no city in North America boasts a more astonishing—or more significant—history of crime and mystery than New York. As one of the continent’s oldest major metropolises, a former national capital, the hemisphere’s unrivaled communications center, New York events—including sensational crimes- get media play around the world.

Thus, events in New York’s distinctive neighborhoods are often accorded worldwide publicity. The first movie made by film pioneer Joseph Schenck, who went on to run United Artists and cofound 20th Century-Fox, was a 1913 silent about the scandalous murder of architect Stanford White (see chapter 17).

Later, filmmakers introduced New York’s mean streets to the world with such serials as The Bowery Boys and The Dead End Kids. Famous New Yorkers—and even famous locations, such as Seventh Avenue—have been the subject of countless films. Thanks to these movies and to dozens of television series, the city’s concrete canyons and breathtaking high-rise architecture have become familiar to people around the world. After Los Angeles, the scene of even more movie making, New York is the world’s most photographed city.

New York crimes, culprits, and corruptions have often set national precedents—or standards—ranging from the sublime to the bizarre. For example, the first recorded attempt at capital punishment in New York failed miserably. A slave, the property of the Dutch West India Company, was murdered. The only suspects were nine other slaves.

All pleaded guilty. The mandatory sentence was death, but the judges, who were practical businessmen, felt that destroying nine valuable slaves for the death of one was a bit extravagant. The nine were ordered to draw lots. The loser was to hang. The man with the short straw was Manuel Gerritt, known all over town as Manuel the Giant—by far the biggest man in Manhattan. They attempted to hang him twice. But each time the ropes around his neck burst under his weight. This was too much for the starchy burghers standing around watching the execution. After all, they had to pay for those broken ropes. In disgust, they asked the governor to pardon him—and Manuel the Giant returned to work, having beaten the hangman.

In 1672 the city hangman, Ben Johnson, was sentenced to death for robbery. He was ordered to hang himself! Johnson refused, insisting to colony judges that no one else could legally perform his duties. After much head scratching at the bench, his sentence was commuted to a public flogging, followed by banishment from the colony. New York’s criminals have been beating the death penalty on weird technicalities ever since.

The city’s unsavory tradition of hell-hole prisons dates all the way back to the Revolutionary era. Thousands of American prisoners of war, mostly seamen in private service, were being held on British men-of-war anchored off Brooklyn. Neglected, ill-fed, abused by guards, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer—for years all but forgotten by their countrymen—the prisoners wrote countless letters to George Washington, asking for release and begging for provisions in the meantime.

In 1842, when Charles Dickens visited New York’s central prison, The Manhattan House of Detention (The Tombs) he became outraged. Do you thrust your common offenders…into such holes as these? he wrote. Do men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness breathing this filthy and offensive stench! Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!

More than 150 years later things haven’t changed much. Prisoners awaiting trial in city courthouse holding cells and on Rikers Islandstill complain about appalling conditions. Reformers still call for change. And politicians still duck, pointing at tight budgets and fearing any move that might make them appear soft on crime or criminals.

On the plus side, it was a New Yorker—Jacob Hays—who invented the art of criminal investigation. In 1802, at the age of thirty, Hays was appointed high constable, chief of the daytime police force. (There was a separate night watch.) He held this post for forty-eight years, along the way earning the epithet of Old Hays.

For almost thirty years Hays was the only peace officer patrolling New York’s streets between dawn and dusk. Rarely missing a day, and rarely getting more than six hours’ sleep a night, Hays became the city’s most famous citizen. Short, wiry, bald, and incredibly strong, he walked with a distinctive strut, reeking of self-importance. Hays came to know every serious criminal—hundreds of men and women—on sight.

Armed only with an oaken staff, he was nevertheless a formidable fighter, often disabling men twice his size. He developed an ingenious technique for stopping riots and street fights that has never been bettered. He would quickly circle a crowd, using his staff to knock off the stovepipe hats men wore in that era. As soon as a man bent over to retrieve his hat, Hays would give him a shove that sent him sprawling. In minutes most of the rioters were on the ground, while the others held their sides in laughter.

Old Hays invented such elementary detective tactics as tailing a suspected thief to determine his home, haunts, and colleagues. He was also the first American policeman to administer the third degree, although he left the use of brass knuckles and rubber hoses to his successors. Hays’s method was to crack a suspect’s knuckles with his staff, or kick his shinbone, all the while bellowing: Good citizens will tell the truth!

Old Hays was also the first to confront a suspected murderer with the victim’s body in hopes of getting a confession, a technique later perfected by the French. Unlike some who followed in his wake, Hays never flinched at arresting the high and mighty. One day in 1817 he jumped aboard Commodore Jacob Vanderbilt’s Hudson River steamboat to serve an arrest warrant. When Vanderbilt refused to come quietly, Hays picked him up bodily, threw him on the dock, and hauled the protesting tycoon off to jail.

New York has also had its share of bizarre crimes and colorful criminals. Among the former was a 1942 murder in an East Harlem restaurant. The only witness admitting to seeing anything out of the ordinary was the victim’s parrot. After the murder he greeted police with cries of Robber! Robber! Robber!

After almost two years, with only the parrot as a lead, Detective John J. Morrisey finally realized the parrot couldn’t have been repeating the victim’s last words because the bird couldn’t learn new phrases that quickly. It took many repetitions before he was capable of recognizing regular customers and calling out their names. What the parrot had actually been saying was not robber but Robert, the name of a long-time customer. Morrisey tracked the man down, confronted him with the parrot, and got a confession that led to a conviction.

In 1901 Herbert L. Osgood began work on a history of New York. He found plenty of original crime reports and other official material in the city’s police archives. But in 1914, in the name of economy, the department scrapped enormous quantities of historical records. Much of this material was recycled into paper products useful to our British allies in their war against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

When we began our own paper chase, the absence of such original records forced us to turn to secondary sources, such as old books, newspapers, and magazine accounts. In her quest for material, our bicoastal researcher, Ellen Malino James, obtained volumes from the New York Public Library that archivists told her hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years.

There have been literally tens of thousands of crimes in New York. Choosing the few that could fit between the pages of a single book was a long and involved task. In the end, we chose the ones that met the following criteria:

The crime was significant. For example, if the crime was a murder, than either the killer or the victim had to be famous, or the crime itself had to have been of singular significance to the community. Or, it simply had to be unusual enough to attract our interest.

There is an identifiable location. If not the scene of the crime itself, then an address where one of the participants lived or worked.

The crime or criminal or victim had to represent something significant about the era in which the incident occurred.

While we made exceptions, we tended to pass by complex white-collar crimes such as those committed by Wall Street titan Ivan Boesky, about which several books have been written. For the same reason, and because there was no way of identifying even approximately the scene of the action, we left out the story of Subway Vigilante Shooter Bernhard Goetz.

We also omitted the Rosenberg case, among the most interesting examples of espionage crime in U.S. history. We did this not because the case remains controversial and disputed, but because most of its action occurred outside New York City.

For the same reason we declined to include the Lindbergh kidnapping. It’s true that Bruno Hauptman worked in Manhattan as a carpenter (in the Majestic Hotel at 115 Central Park West, where wealthy socialites and Mafia dons such as Frank Costello lived for decades). Hauptman’s house in the Bronx still stands. And the ransom money that put police on his trail was discovered at a Bronx gas station. Nevertheless, the crime for which he was executed actually took place in New Jersey.

We chose to end with the horrifying tale of the Central Park Jogger. More than any other single crime, the issues raised by this case have crystallized the most serious issues facing contemporary New Yorkers.

While there are hundreds of books about New York crimes, we believe this is the first history of New York crime. Certainly it is the first to guide the reader to crime scenes. This selection of the bizarre, the fascinating, the imaginative, and the improbable is meant for sipping, one story at a time.

We also hope you will find opportunities to view the locales of some of New York’s most interesting events of the last three hundred years. If you don’t live in New York, just keep in mind a bit of 1930s folk wisdom: Sooner or later, everyone in the world will walk past the stone lions guarding the New York Public Library. And, by the way, an interesting murder was committed in a building still standing just around the corner from the library (see chapter 11). And the name of the man who brought down the most infamous scoundrel of his era remains etched in the stone above the library entrance (see chapter 8).

Enjoy this book—and save it as a companion for your pilgrimages. And listen to the stones.

MARVIN J. WOLF and KATHERINE MADER

Los Angeles, October 11, 1990

Chapter 1 (1689)

Terminally Stubborn

CAPTAIN JACOB LEISLER (with cane): His convictions cost him his life. (Culver Pictures)

Jacob Leisler was a self-made man—almost. Born the son of a penniless minister in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1640, he came to Nieuw Amsterdam as a Dutch West India Company mercenary soldier in 1660. Still penniless, Leisler married an affluent Dutch widow just before the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam became the British Crown colony of New York in 1664.

Her money allowed Leisler to establish a modest trading business, buying and selling furs, imported liquor, and other commodities. By the 1680s he was prominent among the city’s wealthy elite.

Leisler’s wealth, energy, and military training also brought him to a position of leadership in the militia. These were citizen-soldiers, serving without pay during time of need. Wealthy men such as Leisler raised companies of about a hundred men, often contributing cash for their equipment and supplies. New York had six militia companies, each commanded by a captain. By 1689 Jacob Leisler was the leading captain of the New York City militia, and a widely respected figure.

An earthy sort, Leisler was short and stocky, and not much given to fashionable clothes or the showy pretenses of wealth. Although he was a shrewd trader, he had a softer side too. He once bought the freedom of a Huguenot family about to be sold into servitude to pay for their passage from France. Leisler was by turns profane and religious. And stubborn. Irredeemably—and terminally—stubborn.

A deacon in New York’s Dutch Reformed Church, like most Protestants, Leisler regarded Catholicism, which he denigrated as Popery, with fear and loathing. The struggle between these two religions raged worldwide and was intense and unremitting. To seventeenth-century Protestants, Popery was as much a threat as international communism was to twentieth-century Westerners.

Catholics in turn regarded Protestants as heretics in the devil’s employ. New York’s royal English patron, the duke of York, became James II, king of England, in 1685. He was a Catholic. And it was his intention to force Catholicism not only upon England, but also on all his American colonies.

In 1688 Britain’s Protestant majority revolted against James II and secretly invited William of Orange, ruler of Holland, to replace him. William was a Protestant. So was his wife, Mary, the daughter of James II.

The problem was that James liked being king. The only way to get rid of him was to start a war. So, in November 1688 William of Orange invaded England. After most of James’s troops refused to fight, the king did the right thing—he ran for his life.

Across the Channel lay the safety of France, where a Catholic, King Louis XIV, reigned.

William of Orange became King William III of England. With Queen Mary as co-sovereign, he restored freedom of religion in England and her colonies. Unfortunately this was also the beginning of the second Hundred Years War between France and England. Most of it was fought in Europe. In the New World, that distant backwater of empires, the century of struggle was known as the French and Indian Wars.

During this period in New York, Francis Nicholson, New England’s ranking Crown official—an appointee of James II and a staunch Catholic—refused to declare William and Mary sovereigns without official notification.

New York’s Protestants didn’t much care for Nicholson. And they also worried that James might come storming back to England at the head of a French Catholic army. They knew a declaration of war between England and France was imminent.

Anti-Catholic revolts broke out in Queens, Westchester, and Suffolk. Nicholson put them down with British troops. This caused the Protestants to begin to question Nicholson’s loyalties. Maybe, it was whispered, he was still James’s man.

Nicholson was his own man. Worried about a French attack from Canada, he began repairing Fort James, at the southern tip of Manhattan. He ordered the militia to drill regularly. And he sent most of the regular army north, to counter a possible French invasion down through the Hudson River Valley.

About this time a shipment of wine arrived in New York. The consignee was Jacob Leisler. When the tax collector asked Leisler to pay the usual import duties, Leisler refused. The tax man was a Catholic, appointed by ex-king James. Leisler would not pay a Catholic for fear the money would wind up in James’s purse. Leisler’s fellow merchants followed his lead. They, too, refused to acknowledge the tax collector’s authority.

Meanwhile rumors of war continued to fly thick and fast. In this climate every word supposed to have been uttered by Nicholson was subject to distortion and exaggeration. It was said that Nicholson was conspiring with Catholics on Staten Island. Donegan, the former governor, was supposedly making preparations to burn the city rather than yield it to the Catholic French. And some said that James himself was en route to establish a beachhead in Hoboken with a French army.

New Yorkers became increasingly alarmed. All they had to defend the city’s 3,500 inhabitants were the six militia companies. Nicholson set up a system for the militia companies to take turns occupying Fort James in twenty-four-hour shifts.

One evening it was the turn of Captain Abraham De Peyster’s company. His deputy, Lieutenant Henry Cuyler, sent a sentry to guard the fort’s main entrance. But then a regular army sergeant told the sentry to leave: Governor Nicholson hadn’t given any such order.

This ended up in a shouting match between Nicholson and Cuyler, who insisted he was under his captain’s orders. Nicholson reminded Cuyler that he, not the militia captain, commanded both the fort and all of New York.

I’d rather see the town on fire than be commanded by you, Nicholson screamed at Cuyler.

By the time that ill-chosen remark got around town, Nicholson was thought to have said he would torch New York. And that he would massacre the city’s Dutch. In response a sergeant in Leisler’s largely Dutch company led a group of militiamen to their captain’s house.

Brandishing his sword, the sergeant told Leisler that Nicholson had sold them out. They would all be murdered. And he begged Leisler to lead them to the fort and take it from Nicholson.

When Leisler refused, the sergeant took the fort, bloodlessly. He simply walked into the sally port with half a hundred men. Not a man to lose face, when Leisler learned what had happened, he went to the fort and took command. That night he sent a few soldiers to Nicholson’s house to collect the keys to the fort’s armory. This time Nicholson refused.

Leisler then went to City Hall to talk with the town council. There was confusion in the air, and he wanted to clear things up. At this point Captain Charles Lodowick marched his militia company of one hundred armed men into the council chambers and demanded the keys.

Nicholson surrendered the keys.

A few hours later the six militia captains met at the fort to talk things over. Consensus was impossible. Representatives of the richest elements—fur traders, aristocrats, lawyers, merchants, and officials appointed by the Crown—opposed a break with Nicholson, whom they saw as the colony’s lawful leader.

The other faction—small shopkeepers, farmers, artisans, seagoing men, and small-time traders—thought Nicholson was a traitor. They felt he was a secret agent of King James, and allowing him to retain the reins of power risked slaughter by the Papists. It was rich against poor.

Those with the most to lose favored the status quo.

Leisler, though himself a rich trader, emerged as the head of the poorer faction. He wanted Nicholson out. He was a very effective orator—and a very stubborn man.

In the end, despite misgivings, all six captains signed a paper taking power. Today we’d call this a coup. But these men apparently had no personal ambitions. It was their plan to take turns running New York until explicit orders arrived from England.

In those days, of course, there were no transatlantic telephones.

There were no satellites. There were no means of communication with the mother country faster than sailing ships, across a vast and often wild ocean.

It took almost two years to get word from England.

In the meantime Leisler slowly maneuvered his fellow captains out of control. He appealed to the masses. He spoke their language. He shared their fears. In time he was proclaimed lieutenant governor of New York and empowered to use Crown tax money to defend the colony.

With that, Leisler became the absolute master of New York. And with this power came a certain degree of megalomania. Leisler’s word became law. Anyone speaking against him was jailed. Yet he was not an evil man. He executed no one. He expropriated no property. He did not seek to enrich himself. He was merely convinced that he alone knew what was best. And he was stubborn.

After Nicholson and all the Catholic priests in the colony had fled, a letter arrived from England. It was addressed to Nicholson, or to whomever was preserving the peace and administering the laws in his absence. Although the letter was somewhat ambiguous, it seemed to confirm Leisler’s power as acting governor of the New York colony.

Leisler convened the first congress of American colonies in New York on May 1, 1690. He wanted to attack the French in Canada, and he called upon the leaders of the other colonies to form a joint expeditionary force.

Leisler spent most of his personal fortune on this enterprise, but in the end there was no invasion. The French had made enemies of the Iroquois, a vast confederation of Eastern Woodland Indian tribes. The French spent so much time and effort skirmishing with the Iroquois that they could never mount an invasion of New York, which lay all but defenseless before them.

While this was great good luck for the colony, the failure of his Canadian campaign infuriated Leisler. He issued absurd decrees and enforced them at gunpoint, which naturally estranged him from his constituents—the poor and middle classes. Old women taunted him in the streets.

In September 1690 William and Mary named Colonel Henry Sloughter as the new governor of New York. He set sail for the New World a few months later, but his large fleet was scattered by a fierce storm. The first ships to arrive in New York were led by Sloughter’s lieutenant governor, Richard Ingoldsby.

Backed by a small force of regulars, Ingoldsby asked Leisler to surrender Fort James to him. Leisler said he would do so, but only upon receipt of a letter signed by King William or by Sloughter himself. The problem was, all the documents were on the Archangel, Sloughter’s frigate. Leisler refused to acknowledge Ingoldsby’s authority.

After a four-day standoff, Ingoldsby disembarked his troops, marched them to City Hall, and demanded the release of Crown officials Leisler had jailed for refusing to submit to his authority.

Leisler saw this move as proof of a Catholic plot to overthrow him and take New York for James. He had more militia than Ingoldsby had regulars. The Crown officials stayed in jail.

Six weeks passed. Sloughter had yet to appear. Ingoldsby recruited a militia of anti-Leisler citizens and integrated them with his regulars. He confronted Leisler, who gave him two hours to send his militia back to their homes. Ingoldsby refused.

Leisler had his troops fire on the king’s men. One was killed. Several were wounded. This was too much for some of Leisler’s men. Several dropped their muskets and headed for home.

Two days later Sloughter’s fleet hove into New York Harbor. A messenger rowed out to the Archangel to bring Sloughter up to date. At the head of hundreds of troops, Sloughter marched to City Hall. He read aloud his commission papers and presented them to the council. Then he ordered Leisler to surrender.

Leisler had come too far to give up easily. In an irrational moment he sent word that he would not turn over the fort until he had a letter addressed to him personally. A letter signed by King William.

About midnight Sloughter sent a second demand, identical to the first. Leisler sent his son-in-law, Jacob Milbourne, with a reply. It was against his principles, said the note, to surrender Fort James at night. Milbourne was thrown in jail.

The next morning Leisler sent a conciliatory note. He said he had no personal desire to hold the fort and that he would surrender it. But first he wanted a few things cleared up.

Sloughter ignored the note and offered amnesty to Leisler’s troops if they would surrender. Only Leisler, Milbourne, and his closest aides would be punished.

Leisler’s militia was not prepared to face the king’s regulars. Meek as sheep, they marched from the fort. Leisler, Milbourne, and six others were arrested and charged with treason and murder. The victim was the lone British soldier killed in the skirmish between Leisler’s militia and Ingoldsby’s troops.

The trial lasted a week. All eight were convicted and sentenced to hang. But Sloughter was a reasonable man. He pardoned all but Leisler and Milbourne and then hesitated to carry out their executions until an appeal to Parliament, dispatched the day Leisler was convicted, had been heard.

But in his two years of despotic rule, Leisler had made powerful enemies among New York’s aristocracy. They relished the thought of seeing Leisler dancing at the end of a rope. So they hatched a plan, inviting Colonel Sloughter to a wedding feast. They filled him with liquor—some of it confiscated from Leisler’s stores. They bent his ear about Leisler’s wicked ways, and they put a quill in his hand and encouraged him to sign Leisler’s death warrant.

Sloughter’s hand was shaking as he signed. But the signature was genuine.

On the morning of May 16, 1691, Jacob Leisler and Jacob Milbourne mounted the steps of a gallows near the East River. Despite heavy rain there was a large crowd. Many in it were outraged. Leisler was still their hero, the man who had saved New York from Popery and mass murder. Others were glad to see their deposed despot die.

Leisler was permitted a brief speech before meeting his fate. With a noose around his neck, he told the crowd, So far from revenge do we depart this world that we require and make it our dying request to all our relations and friends that they should in time come to be forgetful of any injury done to us. A few moments later Leisler and Milbourne were dead.

But it was not quite the end of the Leisler Rebellion. Leisler’s many friends petitioned Parliament, protesting that whatever his failings as a governor, he had acted in the belief that he was legally obliged to govern. In 1695 Parliament upheld Leisler’s and Milbourne’s appeals and restored their confiscated estates to their heirs. In 1702 the New York colonial assembly awarded a substantial indemnity to each of their families.

LOCATIONS

The fort seized by Leisler was built between 1624 and 1634 by the Dutch. It was known successively as Fort Amsterdam, Fort James, Fort Wilem Hendrick, Fort James (a second time), Fort William, Fort William Henry, Fort Anne, and Fort George. The site later served as the Governor’s Mansion until the capital was moved to Albany, in 1790.

Later, John Avery’s tavern occupied the site. Still later the site became known as Steamship Row; leading shipping companies headquartered in mansions there. Today the site at the foot of Broadway, directly below Bowling Green and bounded by Whitehall, State, and Bridge streets and Battery Place is occupied by the Museum of the American Indian, a magnificent building with ornate roof statuary. A glassed booth in front shows maps of old New York and contemporary sketches of the fort in its various incarnations.

Leisler and Milbourne were hung from a gallows near what is now Park Row and Spruce Street beneath the Manhattan terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 2 (1712)

THE ALEHOUSE PLOT

MARY BURTON: Her testimony doomed dozens to agonizing death. (Culver Pictures)

Long before Tama Janowitz wrote Slaves of New York, there were slaves in New York. Real slaves. Black slaves. Thousands of them. And hundreds of Indian slaves, too.

New York’s first black men arrived in 1625—some historians say 1626—on a ship from West Africa. These eleven forced immigrants were sold into slavery the day they arrived. Two years later they were joined by three black women, also slaves.

Slavery became a business in New York in 1646. The first slave ship exchanged a cargo of black human beings for a cargo of salted pork and dried peas.

By 1711, this human-commodity trade had become so valuable that New Yorkers began trading slaves on Wall Street. A slave market sprang up along this crooked avenue, which meandered beneath the fortified wall protecting the city from marauding Indians.

In North America the New York slave market was second only to Charleston’s. By 1741 one in five of New York’s eleven thousand residents was black. They were all slaves, except for a tiny handful of elderly freedmen in the Bowery.

Slaves lived by strict laws. If three or more were found congregating on a public highway, all were subject to flogging. Nor were slaves permitted to carry such implements as axes or clubs except when actually on their master’s property.

Nevertheless New York slaves found occasional opportunities to meet away from the suspicious eyes of their white owners. A favorite spot was an orchard near Maiden Lane.

There, on April 6, 1712, twenty-three slaves embarked on a desperate gamble. They set fire to the house of Peter van Tilburgh. As the occupants ran out, they were murdered or maimed by the conspirators, who wielded axes, knives, and guns.

These were not simple savages extracting violent revenge on their oppressors. The rebellious slaves hoped by their example to incite a general uprising of Manhattan’s slaves. Their ultimate goal was to take over the city.

The gamble failed. Although eleven whites were killed and six wounded, other slaves refused to join the revolt. When the rebels tried to escape northward into the wilderness, militiamen tracked them to a thicket and demanded their surrender. Rather than face white justice, six of the slaves took their own lives.

The rest were tried swiftly. All were found guilty. One, a woman, was hung. Two slaves were burned at the stake. Another was hung in chains for weeks until he starved to death. One was lashed to a heavy wheel while all his bones were broken with hammers. The others were flogged. In all, only two of the twenty-three rebels survived the hideous lesson in slave justice.

This incident, however, lingered in New York’s collective consciousness. So much so that when rumors of another planned slave revolt began to circulate in 1741, colony authorities took draconian measures to snuff out the flame of resistance.

The trouble centered around a scruffy tavern near Comfort’s Tea-Water Well. Water from this well was prized for its purity by households all over Manhattan. Hundreds of slaves daily fetched buckets of water for their masters’ afternoon tea. Comfort’s Well became virtually the only place in New York where slaves could legally congregate as they waited their turn to draw water.

The tavern near the well belonged to John Hughson, a white shoemaker. In his home behind the tavern lived his wife, daughter, barmaid Margaret Salingburgh, who was also known as Peggy Kerry, and sixteen-year-old Mary Burton, an indentured servant. Hughson was friendly with the blacks, and his grog shop became a hangout for

slaves, who formed themselves into social clubs.

But where does a slave get money for the ale and Geneva-brand gin Hughson so liberally dispensed? By stealing. Members of the Geneva Club, Smith Fly, Free Masons, and Long Bridge Boys, all social clubs based at Hughson’s, were New York’s first criminal gangs. Total membership of these clubs ranged somewhere between three hundred and a thousand. Hughson bought the stolen loot and fenced it. The blacks took the biggest risks, but Hughson took the biggest share of the rewards.

A state of undeclared war then existed between England and France. Spain, ruled by a French king, was France’s ally. Early in 1741 an English man-of-war captured a Spanish vessel. Spain had outlawed slavery. The blacks among the captured ship’s crew were free men.

However, when the Spanish ship reached New York, these black men were sold into slavery. They did not take well to their new circumstances. They were sullen. They displayed no fear. They did not behave like slaves. In fact they threatened to kill their new masters and take over the city.

The new slaves quickly found Hughson’s groggery a convivial place to meet. Their militancy propelled them into leadership of the criminal bands headquartered there. Not long after, the city noticed a sharp increase in the number of burglaries and other robberies. On February 28, 1741, Hughson’s gangsters pulled off their first major job. A large sum in silver coin and several valuable pieces of silverware were pilfered from Robert Hogg’s tobacco shop.

Mary Burton, Hughson’s indentured servant, detested her master and decided to get even for his mistreatment of her. So she told a neighbor that the silver was stolen by slaves who hung out at her master’s alehouse. And that Hughson had set the job up.

The neighbor went to the police, who arrested Hughson, his wife and daughter, and the barmaid, known just then as Peggy Kerry. For good measure Mary Burton was arrested as well, along with Prince and Caesar, two of the slaves she implicated.

After a search, the loot was found buried on Hughson’s property. He was charged with receiving stolen goods; the blacks were charged with stealing them.

On March 18, while the accused were confined awaiting trial, a fire broke out in the Governor’s Mansion in Fort George. Fanned by a brisk southeast wind, flames consumed