A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

Abstract

George Washington Appo was a pickpocket, con artist, actor, opium addict, snitch, and frequent prisoner. Appo made no important discoveries nor did he found any great enterprises; he cannot even be considered one of Eric Hobsbawm's “primitive rebels,” prefiguring a strain of political resistance through his banditry. George Appo lived and died a minor criminal. So the first question that comes to mind when reading A Pickpocket's Tale is, Why should anyone, much less a historian, care about someone like Appo? In his painstakingly researched yet lively biography, Timothy J. Gilfoyle provides a convincing answer: Appo himself may have been insignificant, but he offers a valuable window into the shadowy world of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century New York. A Pickpocket's Tale is structured around a ninety-nine-page memoir that Appo wrote late in his life. Gilfoyle uses this source as a springboard. When Appo recalls learning his criminal trade on the streets of New York as a nine-year-old boy, the author launches into a description of the street life of the city and the world of “street arab” bootblacks, paperboys, and pickpockets. When Appo is arrested as a teenager, Gilfoyle describes the infamous House of Refuge where he was sent, and the harsh discipline, lax training, and sexual activities aboard the Mercury, the shipboard “reformatory” on which Appo ended up sailing the Atlantic Ocean. By accompanying Appo, we learn the techniques of pickpockets and cons such as the “green goods game.” We visit the “dives” and opium dens that provided the social life for Gotham's criminals and, since Appo was ethnically half-Chinese, we also learn something about the political structure of New York's Chinatown. Sometimes the connections are a bit tenuous. One chapter is devoted to the colorful street gangs of New York, in particular the Whyos and their leader Danny Driscoll. Appo's crimes demanded finesse, not strength, and he was never a member of a gang, but he did, in passing, mention Driscoll in his memoir, and that is justification enough for a detour.