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

George Appo lived a fascinating and revealing life - one that touched on Chinese immigration and the California Gold Rush (his father), Irish immigration (his mother), criminal activity in New York's notorious Five Points neighborhood, the very beginning of the opium culture in the U.S., political corruption and reform, the Broadway stage, as well as major upheavals in how America thought about medicine, psychiatry, and prisons. In "A Pickpocket's Tale," Timothy J. Gilfoyle uses lengthy exceprts from Appo's previously unpublished autobiography as a narrative structure and launching point for his own interesting and informative excursions into all of these topics. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable, and educational, portrait of a pivotal time in America's country.

A Pickpocket's Tale is a close, intimate look inside of New York's underworld in the nineteenth century. Ostensibly about one criminal, the half Chinese, half Irish George Appo, the book is more a sociological work about the institutions of crime and punishment as they existed then. Born in poverty in 1856 (or -8), Appo began as a newspaper boy, then graduated to the career of pickpocket. He served time in all kinds of detention centers, from Sing Sing to Eastern State Pen in Philadelphia, to a stint on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island, to a short period in the Matteawan Hospital. The book gives its reader an in-depth look at everything from street crime in the Five Points district up to Appo's short-lived careers in acting and law enforcement. Appo was an obscure figure who was given a one-sentence mention in Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York, but Appo really was an archetype of his time and situation. What was amazing to me was that, even though he was nearly illiterate for a long period and never went to a day of school in his life, he still managed to write a memoir of his extraordinary life. In all I thought this was an excellent book about the crime life of New York City in the nineteenth century and is better perhaps even than Herbert Asbury's classic book.

George Appo's own previously unpublished biography is interwoven into Gilfoyle's outstanding book and tells readers first hand what life was like in the "new" Sing Sing prison, the infamous Tombs - NYC's massive city jail, and of course the newly created institutions for the criminally insane in the late 1800's. Appo survived on the streets like thousands of boys from Five Points and eventually learned to read and write in prison - fortunately for today's readers. George's gentle nature and philisophical view of his life and his situation is very apparent in his writing, but contradicts the sum of his experiences as a prolific pickpocket and con man. The combination of the author's well researched presentation along with Appo's humble first hand account of his life is fascinating. A special opportunity for a glimpse into a wild and exciting era not really that long ago. You will enjoy this book.

I first saw this book featured in the book section of THE WEEK magazine. So I picked it up to know more about the scams of the day and the criminal underworld protocals as well. But my ulterior motive was to examine how the coming gilded age of corporate power was reflected in the underground economy and how justice and prisons were being affected. It is a window of the past that looks into todays corporate influence in our current systems, and how they are being corrupted. It is worth the price of the book to find that the times and modus operandi have really not changed. The power that moneyed interest bring to bear on public institutions is an ever evolving process that needs to be checked by the people, NOT by the market! Still it is George Appo who comes onto the stage at a time when organized crime was getting its engine in gear and revving up for the roaring twenties. A culture personified by Appo. The others made the money, and Appo did the time. Appo took the rap, but never ratted out. He carried the culture up to a man of honor. One of the few who walked the walk/ and didn't talk.

You probably never heard of George Appo, although he wrote an autobiography. He was a reformed and washed-out criminal by the time he told his story in the early twentieth century, and although he got through 99 typewritten pages, it must have been tough for him. He had never gone to school, and his limited reading and writing skills were whatever he could pick up from fellow convicts in prison. When Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a historian at Loyola University in Chicago, found the unpublished memoir in the archives of the Society for the Prevention of Crime in New York, he must have realized that Appo's story had lain unpublished because there wasn't much of a market for its mass of run-on sentences (it only has thirteen paragraphs) and spans of inarticulateness. Still, it was in some ways an epic story of eventual success in life, but it was far to dark to be the sort that Horatio Alger might have penned. Appo had been a child criminal, a prisoner in some famous nineteenth century jails, a pickpocket and confidence man, an opium addict, a celebrity, and a quietly reformed charity case and employee of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. Gilfoyle has taken Appo's narrative, quoting from it extensively, and expanded upon its many facets to produce _A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York_ (Norton), a detailed history of Appo, the social and geographical locales in which he worked, and of the many famous, infamous, and unknown people he brushed up against. Appo grew up on the streets, selling papers and learning to pick pockets. New York in the nineteenth century was just the place for a pickpocket to make a living. There were plenty of crowds, and people crowded into streetcars where jostling was taken for granted. Appo was tough, but his toughness extended to his being able to take punishment from other criminals or from legal authorities, not in physically harming his victims. He worked in the realm of crooks who thought themselves "good fellows": they worked carefully, with dexterity and guile rather than muscle; they spent lavishly on themselves and their cronies, and they never squealed, even when wronged. There was truly some honor among these thieves. Appo generally made a good living, but with thousands of pickpocketing attempts, he was going to be caught some of the time. Much of Gilfoyle's history tells about his many and varied incarcerations, within the reform school ship _Mercury_, the Egyptian-style Tombs prison in New York City, and Sing Sing, the prototype for making industrial laborers of convicts, who suffered from filthy conditions, overcrowding, and torture from stupid and untrained guards. Appo rightly charged that it drove prisoners to insanity, death, and suicide. He graduated from pickpocketing to bunco schemes, but eventually testified to a government committee not against his fellow "bunco steerers", but about the schemes in general and especially the complicity of the police that