The Urban Underworld

      The Urban Underworld

Through this time, a new generation of criminals was born. It was a secret world of informal yet intricate pickpocket networks, walls, drug users, and men of faith who structured their everyday lives around common illegal activities. One judge found that these practices represented creative lawlessness focused on extravagance, greed, and the pursuit of great wealth. Now, there was a new “division of offenders.” Some of these illegal undertakings were regional, encouraged by modern inventions such as the railroad and the telegraph, economic advances such as standardized paper currency, and current poisoning havens such as “dives” and opium dens. Appo had hardly seemed to be a candidate for any illegal activity at first glance; his diminutive size and physical appearance evoked no fear. He was less than five feet, five inches in height by the age of eighteen and weighed a mere 120 pounds. It all seemed small about him: his thin forehead, short nose, slim jaw, and tiny ears that sat low on his head. Although Appo face showed features of the Irish heritage of his mother, his copper-colored skin recalled some of the Chinese of his father. A pickpocket, confidence man, and heroin user, he spent his teenage years and most of his adult life living off his illegal activities.

On prosperous nights in the 1870s and 1880s, he earned more than six hundred dollars pilfering the wallets of those around him, equal to a professional manual laborer’s annual wage. The elaborate trust scheme is known as the “green goods game” was much more lucrative. According to one, the most popular operators—”gilt-edged swindlers”— accumulated fortunes over $100 thousand. By 1884 America’s most well-known investigator, Allan Pinkerton, described the game of green goods as “the most lucrative of all the swindles,” Appo made money. Still, his life was not a story of self-taught frugality and upward mobility by Horatio Alger. As a young child, Appo estranged from his parents as the offspring of a racially mixed, immigrant union. Effectively orphaned, the young boy grew up in New York’s poor neighborhoods, Five Points and Chinatown. He never had a day of his life attending school. Appo practically raised himself on the streets of Gotham, becoming a newsboy and eventually a pickpocket and drug abuser.

This modern infant culture of newsboys, bootblacks, and pickpockets, fueled by international immigrants and rural native-born migration, mocked the ascendant Victorian morality of that period. New York didn’t need Charles Dickens to invent Jean Valjean to create Oliver Twist or Victor Hugo. George Appo had Gotham.

Young experiences in Appo continued into adulthood. He lived for more than three decades by harnessing his criminal talents. Appo patronized New York’s first opium dens, engaged in the first scientific opium smoking study, and starred in one of America’s first crime-popularizing theatrical productions. He was tried on at least ten occasions by judge or jury. A decent fellow is engaging in criminal activity while displaying courage and bravery, a “nervous crook,” in the words of Appo. Good fellows like Appo didn’t rely on threats of heavy arms to get their way. They avoided aggression, instead of using wit and wile to make a living. Theirs was a world of deceit and artifice. A decent fellow was lavishing his wealth on others when he flourished. Such mettle, pluck, and camaraderie suggested a degree of trustworthiness, reciprocity, and dependability.

Above all, a decent fellow was trustworthy, able to withstand, in Appo’s words, “the repercussions and retribution of an indictment for the evil deeds of some other fellows both within and outside the prison. The world of George Appo had been an oral one. For these men, the writing wasn’t a common or shared experience. Appo, just put, wrote the way he’d been thinking. His memoir is in some respect’s incomplete, and in others inarticulate. He provides precise information about things that occurred when he was a student three decades ago. Some days he’s curiously quiet about more recent encounters. Autobiography riddled with grammatical errors. The text typed in; ninety-nine lines comprise just 13 paragraphs. Written in a first-person, stream-of-consciousness mode, the manuscript gets plagued by run-on sentences linked together by abundant and distracting. But secret chronicles of pickpockets and steerers of green goods, drug addicts, and convicts depict a New York as crucial as the more conventional accounts of famous people and events, albeit lost or misunderstood. It was unusual here to paraphrase British writer and social reformer, William T. Stead,