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I S S U E N O . 2V O L U M E N O . 1INSIDEHISTORYC R I M E A N D T H E U N D E R W O R L DTHETRIALSOFLIZZIEBORDEN* Stand and deliver: Dick Turpin * the real peaky blinders * h.h Holmes * ANgels in The House**Bootlegging and prohibition * Al Capone * burke and hare * The evolution of the Crime investigation **Peine Forte Et DURe * The Morellos * How to get away with murder in the middle ages *
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Avampato
Christa
Stephen Carver
Dr
Nell Darby
Dr
Rebecca Frost
Dr
James
Mallory
Kevern
Nick
Ruggiero
Anthony
O'Shaughnessy
Patrick
Smith
Conal
Walsh
Robert
Elliott Watson
Dr
John Woolf
Dr
is no escaping the fact that crime has always been
There
part of history. Wherever there is an opportunity then
a
are always those who aim to benefit from it. For
there
issue of INSIDE HISTORY, we have aimed to enter
this
Rebecca Frost investigates the evolution of the myth
Dr
the notorious H.H Holmes. How many did he
behind
kill and how much of what he did (or even, did
actually
do) was the work of his own imagination? Was he
not
for helping to create his own sensationalism
responsible
stories written about him?
the
media, since the early days of the printing press, has
The
been keen to report on murders. Lizzie Borden's
always
was no different. Yet, her particular case raises a
case
of issues. Despite being found innocent of the
number
of her father and stepmother, Borden faced
murders
trials following her acquittal. From her own
many
to media frenzy and of course, the
community,
of history.
perception
criminals have never needed the media to help
Some
to become part of the public imagination. Over
them
they can become glamorous based on the work of
time
writers eager to tell a story. Dick Turpin is one
fictional
case. The image of Turpin is often portrayed as the
such
highwayman, feared by the wealthy and
gentleman
by women. The real Turpin is a completely
adored
story as Dr Stephen Carver will reveal.
different
has unfortunately become a form of
Crime
with many television channels dedicated
entertainment
time to documentaries and movies about famous
air
There is of course an issue with this. How
criminals.
do we really know about these people? How can
much
the fact from the fiction? As historians our job is not
tell
the deeds of these individuals but to pursue
glamourise
truth with the evidence at hand. I only hope that we
the
us as we take you from the Middle Ages right up to
Join
20th Century on this journey of historical crime and
the
Underworld. As Nick Ross from Crimewatch used to
the
"Don't have nightmares...sleep well."
say:
A NOTE
BY THE
EDITOR
"DON'T HAVE NIGHTMARES...
SLEEP WELL"
Nick Ross. BBC Crimewatch Presenter
the criminal underworld throughout time.
E D I T O R
Nick Kevern
C O N T R I B U T O R S
have managed to do just that.
@inside__history insidehistorymag @InsideHistoryMag
to get away with murder in the
How
Ages
Middle
Turpin: The Not-So Dandy
Dick
Highwayman
man: The Evolution of the mth
Self-made
H.H Holmes
of
the St Valentine's Day Massacre
How
the Jazz Age
killed
changing world of Crime
The
Investigations
10
18
22
30
36
40
I N S I D E H I S T O R Y
07
30
I S S U E 0 2 / C R I M E A N D T H E U N D E R W O R L D
C O N T E N T S
07
12
26
48
48
53
26
22
Crushing the Confession
Burke and Hare: Dealers in Death
Angels in the House
The trials of Lizzie Borden
The Morellos: Families at War
The REAL Peaky Blinders
12
18
Prohibition in New York City
44
40
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HOW TO GET AWAY
WITH MURDER IN
THE MIDDLE AGES
WORDS BY CONAL SMITH
Watch any film or TV series set in the middle ages, or
a middle ages-esque environment such as Westeros,
and you are likely to come across barbarism. Heads
are chopped off and men are hanged for anything,
including the smallest of crimes. While there may be
some exaggeration, go back to the middle ages and
almost all serious crime was certainly punished in this
way. Murder, serious theft and burglary of goods over
12 pence(!) were capital offences for anyone over the
age of 10. Here, however, are a few ways that a crafty
criminal could try to avoid the noose.
Although in some cases it was possible to claim
sanctuary indefinitely, it was more common that a
criminal would need to make a choice within 40 days.
Either they must opt to go into permanent exile,
receiving safe passage as they left the country, or
they had to present themselves to a court. Presenting
one’s self to a court meant facing the full force of the
King’s justice, and so the option of fleeing England to
start a new life overseas could be a route to avoiding
this.
Plead benefit of the Clergy
If you were a member of the clergy (priest, monk or
nun), you escaped the King’s justice automatically.
Instead of being tried in the King’s courts, you would
be tried by your fellow churchmen in a Church court.
Here punishments tended to focus more on penance
than punishment. Though standing in the village
square in nothing but your small clothes sounds far
from pleasant, it certainly sounds preferable to
hanging. Surely this was only open to real members
of the clergy though?
Wrong. ANYONE could claim benefit of the clergy.
The ‘proof’ if one can call it that was merely the ability
to read a passage in latin. Still think that sounds
tough as you had to learn Latin? Wrong again. There
was a set passage, which became known as the ‘neck
verse’ that was used to test this. Hence, even if you
could not speak latin, you could learn psalm 51 by
heart and then simply recount it when the bible was
placed in front of you to test whether you were
indeed clergy. While you might not completely get
away with murder, being liable for a Church
punishment, a simple bit of preparation was a
surefire way to avoid execution for murder. This route
even went on far beyond the middle ages, not being
finally abolished until 1823!
Sanctuary
Even if you had not put in the requisite preparation
to plead benefit of the clergy, the Church still
provided a clear route to avoiding the death penalty.
There was a legal ability to claim sanctuary in a holy
place, until its abolition in 1624. If a criminal was able
to reach a Church or Cathedral, their pursuers were
not able to enter a holy place and arrest them,
something which could be seen a desecrating a holy
site.
8 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
There was a legal
ability to claim
sanctuary in a holy
place, until its
abolition in 1624.
Victory taken
as clear proof
of innocence
Trial by Combat
A far riskier route, but one which could see you
serving no punishment whatsoever, was dependent
on presenting yourself to the authorities. Once
arrested, if there was some element of doubt over
your guilt you could request trial by combat rather
than the more common trial by jury. This system was
in place from the Norman Conquest and meant that,
so long as your accuser was not someone deemed
unable to fight (through age, sex or disablity), you
could challenge them to single combat. In a 60 foot
square arena, the two of you would engage in a fight,
either to the death or until one of the participants
yielded, with a victory taken as clear proof of
innocence; for the authorities this also had the
benefit of sometimes avoiding the need to employ a
hangman!
The three possibilities hitherto described are some of
the purely medieval routes of escape available to you,
but there were also some routes that continue to be
employed far beyond the period and even in some
cases up to this day.
In the first instance of course there is the simple
route of fleeing as far and as fast as possible. While
there were medieval methods to catch a fugitive,
such as the hue and cry, the reach of these attempts
were geographically very restricted. Secondly, one
could admit guilt, but then try and obtain a royal
pardon. For those who could afford it this could
sometimes be bought. However, more common in
the Later Middle Ages are the many violent criminals,
including murderers, who received a royal pardon in
return for military service overseas. If a guarantee of
hardship and risk of violent death did not appeal, the
modern mafia staple of witness intimidation would
also have been available to you dependent on wealth
and influence, particularly given the lack of forensic
evidence to ensure a conviction without sworn
testimony.
So there you have it, if you committed a murder in
the middle ages there may have been no way of
guaranteeing escaping the long arm of the law.
However, there were plenty of options to choose
from in an attempt to avoid swinging for your crimes.
Conal Smith is part of the
editorial team at the
VersusHistory Podcast
WORDS BY NICK KEVERN
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 9
CRUSHING THE
CONFESSION
WORDS BY PATRICK O'SHAUGHNESSY
IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA
O'Shaughnessy is the Head of History at a
Patrick
international school in the Middle East.
prestigious
is a Co-Editor of the Versus History Podcast and
He
writes on various subjects related to History.
regularly
is currently writing a book which focuses on
Patrick
causes and events of the American Revolution.
the
If your English ancestors stood trial for a crime in a
court of law before 1772, the sentence - if convicted -
could be extremely severe. For instance, when the
Gunpowder Plotters were convicted of ‘high treason’
against King James I in January 1606, they were
publically hung, drawn and quartered before of a
hostile and highly unsympathetic crowd in London.
The potential punishments for those convicted of a
crime during both the Tudor and Stuart eras (1485-
1714) could include - but were not limited to - being
beheaded, death by hanging and being put in the
stocks, depending on the severity of the crime that
one was found guilty of committing. Capital
punishment was constant during this time of great
political, social and cultural flux. Following the demise
of the Stuart dynasty in 1714, the punishment dished
out to offenders during the reigns of the first three
Georgian monarchs who reigned between 1714-1820,
could still involve the death penalty. By 1800, the
application of the death penalty was extended to
cover over 200 different crimes, including theft.
Transportation of convicted felons was also used until
1867, during the reign of Queen Victoria. As Historian
E.P Thompson argued, ‘The commercial expansion,
the enclosure movement, the early years of the
Industrial Revolution - all took place within the
shadow of the gallows.’ It is clear, therefore, that the
huge societal shifts which were taking place in
Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries did not
axiomatically lead to changes or reform in the
criminal justice system.
The application of capital punishment and the
banishment of convicted criminals to distant colonial
outposts is generally well known and documented.
However, a lesser-known, but perhaps equally
barbaric feature of the criminal justice system until
1772 was an inherent part of the prosecution stage,
rather than the punishment decreed as part of the
sentence. If prosecuted in a court of law for a capital
offence (e.g: murder or treason) during the reign of
King George III (1760-1820) or a monarch preceding
him, your English ancestors would have been faced
with a simple choice. To plead ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ of
the stated crime in a court of law. Right? Actually, it’s
wrong!
The choice of plea facing the accused at the start of a
trial was not a simple binary between ‘innocent’ on
the one hand and ‘guilty’ on the other. There was a
THIRD option. This is where things get slightly
complex but very interesting. We can safely assume
that a plea of ‘guilty’ in a trial for a capital offence
would have meant almost certain conviction, death
and the subsequent forfeiture of all land and property
owed to the Crown. A plea of ‘innocent’ would have
either resulted in the previous outcome or if one was
lucky, an acquittal (although this was unlikely in
treason cases as these were often a fait accompli).
The third option would have appealed to those with
significant estates and wealth. To avoid the seizure of
all property and estates by the Crown, the accused
could refuse to enter a plea at the start of the trial
when requested to do so. This could result in what
was known as ‘peine forte et dure’. In English, this
meant ‘hard and forceful punishment’. When this
eventuality occurred, the courtroom proceedings
were suspended, as a plea was necessary to proceed.
The defendant was subsequently subjected to a
process of crushing by increasingly heavier rocks,
hence the ‘hard and forceful punishment’ element.
The process was designed to elicit a plea - either
‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ from the defendant - which
would then result in the process of crushing being
terminated and the courtroom trial being resumed.
However, the process of ‘peine forte et dure’ did not
often result in a plea being entered, as one may think,
despite the obvious excruciating and slow death that
would result. The reason for this is to do with the
forfeiture of wealth, assets and titles to the Crown
that a ‘guilty’ verdict in a court of law would entail.
Indeed, if the accused were to perish during the
‘crushing’ process, they would technically die as an
‘innocent’ person. Therefore, the ‘next of kin’ could
inherit the wealth of the deceased, rather than it
being seized for the Crown.
During the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in the
British Colony of Massachusetts, an elderly individual
named Giles Corey, who was born in Northampton in
1611 and emigrated to the American colonies in his
younger years, refused to enter a plea to the court in
his trial for alleged witchcraft. Corey was subjected to
the brutal process of peine forte et dure and was
subsequently crushed to death. Legend has it that
Corey endured the entire crushing process in silence.
Whether or not this is true, Corey died an innocent
man in the eyes of the court and could, therefore,
bequeath an inheritance to his immediate family. The
awful spectre of this elderly colonist being crushed to
death may well have been one of the causal factors
behind the eventual conclusion of the Witch Trials in
Salem, along with the growing accusations of
witchcraft aimed at women at the apex of the social
hierarchy. Whatever the truth, the history of peine
forte et dure demands attention as a more brutal part
of Britain’s legal and judicial history.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 11
DICK TURPIN:
THE NOT SO
DANDY
WORDS BY DR STEPHEN CARVER
HIGHWAYMAN
In popular history, the name ‘Dick Turpin’ evokes a
character at once handsome, brave and funny, his cry
of ‘Stand and deliver!’ once causing many a lady
traveller’s heart to flutter. Not as famous as he was in
the seventies, perhaps, when he had his own TV
show, but he remains a real Jack Sparrow, with a set
of adventures ingrained in the national psyche, most
notably his famous ride from London to York in a
night on the equally legendary Black Bess. Like a
Georgian Jesse James, the ‘gentleman highwayman’
is the outlaw king and a symbol of rebellious
Englishness. The reality was, of course, much less
glamorous.
The best original biographical source is a chapbook
entitled The Genuine HISTORY of the LIFE of
RICHARD TURPIN, The noted Highwayman, Who was
Executed at York for Horse-stealing, under the Name
of John Palmer, on Saturday April, 7, 1739 as told by
Richard Bayes and recorded by one J. Cole in
conversation at the Green Man in Epping Forest. Not
that such ‘histories’ are exactly accurate, but this one
was at least based on contemporary witness
testimony and an account of the trial is also
appended.
According to Bayes and Cole, Turpin was born in
Hempstead in 1705. He was taught to read and write
by a tutor called James Smith, then apprenticed to a
butcher in Whitechapel. There he married a local girl
called Elizabeth Palmer, or Millington, depending on
which chapbook you believe. The couple set up in
business in Sutton, but the meat trade was no longer
guilded and unregulated competition was fierce.
Turpin took to stealing livestock until he was spotted,
and a warrant drawn up. Evading capture, he next
briefly tried his hand at smuggling before falling in
with a band of deer poachers known as ‘Gregory’s
Gang’ after its leaders, the brothers Samuel, Jeremiah
and Jaspar Gregory. The gang soon diversified into
housebreaking around Essex, Middlesex Surrey and
Kent, stealing horses, sexually assaulting
maidservants and demanding valuables with
menaces. As a contemporary newspaper reported:
"On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five
rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at
Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened
to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them
where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing
for some time, they threatened to lay her across the
fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would
not do."
Beatings, rapes, scaldings and severe burns were
favourite forms of persuasion, until, pursued by
dragoons with a £100 reward on each of their heads,
several of the gang was cornered at a pub in
Westminster. The youngest, a teenager called John
Wheeler, turned King’s evidence and his compatriots
were hanged in chains. Descriptions of the remaining
outlaws were quickly circulated, including: ‘Richard
Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh colour’d Man,
very much mark’d with the Small Pox, about 26 Years
of Age, about Five Feet Nine Inches high, lived some
Time ago at White-chappel and did lately Lodge
somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a
Blew Grey Coat and a natural Wig’.
"Beatings, rapes, scaldings
and severe burns were
favourite forms of
persuasion, until, pursued
by dragoons with a £100
reward on each of their
heads, several of the gang
was cornered at a pub in
Westminister"
On the run, Turpin held up a well-dressed gentleman
who turned out to be the highwayman, Tom King.
They rode together for three years, living in a cave in
Epping Forest until their hideout was discovered by a
bounty-hunting servant who Turpin murdered. On
the run again, Turpin stole a horse near the Green
Man, at which point Richard Bayes became directly
involved in his own story, tracking Turpin and King to
the Red Lyon in Whitechapel. Turpin took a shot at
Bayes, hitting King instead and escaping in the
confusion. King lived for another week, during which
he cursed Turpin for a coward and gave up all their
secrets. Bayes found the cave, but Turpin was long
gone.
Becoming ‘John Palmer’, Turpin relocated to
Yorkshire as a ‘horse trader’, although he was really
stealing them from neighbouring counties.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD/ 13
The closest we get to ‘Black Bess’ is a black mare
owned by a man called Thomas Creasy that Turpin
stole in York during this period. Returning home
drunk from a shooting party one day, Turpin shot a
cockerel belonging to his landlord for a lark. His
neighbour, a Mr. Hall, witnessed the event and
declared, ‘You have done wrong, Mr Palmer in
shooting your landlord’s cock’, to which Turpin
replied that if he stood still while he reloaded, he
would put a bullet in him too. Hall told their landlord
and Turpin was arrested. Being new to the area,
Turpin could not provide any character witnesses,
and although he claimed to be a butcher from Long
Sutton, something about his vague backstory did not
ring true with the examining magistrate. He was
detained while more enquiries were made in
Lincolnshire, revealing that ‘John Palmer’ was a
suspected horse thief. He was transferred to a cell at
York Castle while further investigations were
conducted.
his corpse being borne through the streets like a
martyred saint, before it was buried in lime to render
it useless for surgical dissection. He supposedly lies in
the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate,
although the headstone that now graces the spot
was not there when an aspiring young novelist from
Manchester called William Harrison Ainsworth looked
for it in 1833.
By then, Dick Turpin had been largely forgotten. As
the eighteenth century progressed, turnpikes,
traceable banknotes, and expanding cities had
encroached into the traditional hunting grounds of
highwaymen and in 1805 Richard Ford’s newly
founded Bow Street Horse Patrol finally wiped them
out. For Ainsworth’s generation, highwaymen
belonged to a vanished world, and were therefore
ripe for romantic resurrection.
The highwayman Dick Turpin, on horseback, sees a phantom riding next to him. Lithograph by
W. Clerk, ca. 1839. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
Because Georgian prisoners had to pay for board and
lodgings, Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex
asking for money, but when the letter arrived
postage was owed which the recipient refused the
pay. It was returned to the post office at Saffron
Walden, where Turpin’s former tutor was now the
postmaster. Smith recognised the handwriting and
informed the authorities. Turpin was indicted for
stealing the black mare, and then identified in court
by his old teacher.
Turpin was hanged at Micklegate Bar in York on
Saturday, April 7, 1739. He was thirty-three years old.
Contemporary accounts agree that he died bravely
and with style, having bought a new frock coat and
shoes for the occasion. As Georgian hangings had a
short drop, he took about five minutes to strangle
under his own body weight. Bayes and Cole describe
Turpin was hanged at
Micklegate Bar in
York on Saturday,
April 7, 1739.
14 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
Richard Turpin shooting a man near his cave in Epping Forrest. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
Ainsworth is the real reason we have the version of
Dick Turpin we do in popular history. Turpin was the
hero of his boyhood, and he and his brother grew up
listening to their father, a prominent lawyer, spin
fireside yarns of ‘Dauntless Dick’ which the boys
would then embellish and enact in the family’s
overgrown back garden. He therefore wrote the
highwayman into his breakthrough novel Rookwood
in 1834. This tidy little gothic romance was an
overnight sensation, making its author a literary
celebrity and inspiring a national craze for Georgian
outlaws. As far as Ainsworth’s massive audience was
concerned, Turpin was the hero of Rookwood, to the
extent that the section entitled ‘The Ride to York’ was
often published separately, cementing the entirely
fictional event to the original’s biography. Ainsworth
based the episode on another apocryphal story in
which Turpin supposedly rode so quickly from a
robbery at Dunham Massey to Hough Green that he
was able to establish an alibi. The original ‘Ride to
Jack Sheppard in Bentley’s Miscellany, which ran
concurrently with Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The original
Jack Sheppard was another unremarkable Georgian
thief who achieved some notoriety in his own day by
escaping from Newgate. Jack Sheppard was another
bestseller but this time the critics turned on
Ainsworth, triggering a moral panic about the
supposedly pernicious effects of ‘Newgate novels’ on
young working-class males. When the valet François
Courvoisier murdered his master, Lord William
Russell, allegedly after reading Jack Sheppard, the
charge against Ainsworth seemed incontrovertible
and his status as a good Victorian and a serious
literary novelist never recovered. This is why we know
a lot more about Dick Turpin than we do him.
But that, as they say,
is another story…
The highwayman Dick Turpin, on horseback, arrives at a tree from which two bodies have been
hanged. Lithograph by W. Clerk, ca. 1839.. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
York’ comes from a legend about the seventeenthcentury
highwayman John Nevison, or ‘Swift Nick’,
which goes back to an account by Daniel Defoe in A
tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain written in
1727.
Dr Stephen Carver is the
Author of THE AUTHOR WHO
The sincerest form of flattery followed, as Turpin was
rehabilitated as a national treasure, inspiring a run of
highwayman plays, novels and penny dreadfuls that
flourished well into the 1860s. After being a footnote
in eighteenth century history, Turpin’s fame was
assured by his nineteenth century fictional
doppelgänger. Almost everything we think we know
about Dick Turpin in national myth comes from the
pages of Ainsworth’s book.
AND WORK OF W.H.
LIFE
published by
AINSWORTH
& Sword books.
Pen
£25.00
RRP:
@drstephencarver
OUTSOLD DICKENS: THE
After an unsuccessful follow-up novel, Ainsworth
returned to the Newgate Calendars in 1839, serialising
16 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
FULL PAGE AD.indd 1 19/08/2019 11:40
BURKE
DEALERS IN
DEATH
WORDS
BY
ROBERT WALSH
HARE
The crimes of William Burke and William Hare are
part of Scotland’s history, living on in popular culture
even today. The subject of films, books and
documentaries, their legacy has long outlived them
and their victims. They also inspired works by Robert
Louis Stevenson and Dylan Thomas. A feature film,
not the first, was made as recently as 2010. Even Sir
Walter Scott (author of Ivanhoe) had an opinion:
“A wretch who is not worth a farthing when alive,
becomes a valuable article when knock’d on the head
and carried to an anatomist.”
In Edinburgh’s West Port district they murdered
sixteen people between November 1828 and
November 1829, selling their corpses to distinguished
surgeon and anatomist Robert Knox. Knox’s full
culpability will always be debated, Burke and Hare’s is
undoubted.
Surgeons always needed cadavers. Bodies of
executed convicts, their principal source, were simply
too few even when dissection formed part of the
death sentence and executions were common. Burke
and Hare briefly solved that problem. Body-snatchers,
grave-robbers and ‘resurrection men’ (resurgam
homo to be exact) found a solution not on the
ground, but under it. Burke and Hare, however, went
even further. In 1995 book Murdering to Dissect:
Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy
Literature, historian David Marshall remarks:
“Burke and Hare took grave-robbing to its logical
conclusion: instead of digging up the dead, they
accepted lucrative incentives to destroy the living.”
Edinburgh Medical School was and remains a highlyrespected
institution, but it had its dark side. Knox
was only one of several surgeons who bought
cadavers without asking where they came from.
Often lacking any other source, Knox and his
colleagues had little choice.
Edinburgh folk of the time were often staunchly
religious and, if not religious, certainly superstitious.
Their belief that a person’s body should remain
interred until the Resurrection made them hate and
fear body-snatchers. The body-snatchers in turn had
a lucrative racket where Edinburgh’s highest society
did brisk business with its lowest.
The fresher the cadaver, the more men like Knox
were prepared to pay and in cash. More could be
learned from fresh cadavers than decomposing ones.
In a society where life was often cheap, death could
be lucrative. A fresh body could fetch twenty guineas.
Families of hanged felons often claimed the body for
burial and sold it to surgeons instead.
The result was an epidemic of grave-robbing. Several
graveyards built watch-towers and employed guards.
Some families, knowing body-snatchers preferred
fresh bodies, rented huge stones. Placed over a new
grave, they prevented it being plundered. Others
used ‘mortsafes,’ iron cages rendering coffins
impregnable.
" The fresher the cadaver,
the more men like Knox
were prepared to pay and
in cash."
Based in a dingy boarding house in Tanner’s Close,
the pair’s first sale wasn’t their first murder. Lodger
‘Old Donald’ had died owing four pounds in rent, a
considerable sum for the time. A late-night visit to
Surgeon’s Square netted seven pounds and ten
shillings, around one thousand pounds today. It was
their first of many encounters with Knox.
‘Old Donald’ had proved worth more dead than alive
but, like their customers, Burke and Hare had a
supply problem. Natural death wasn’t reliable but
serial murder was, especially of people who were
readily missed. With poverty endemic in 1820’s
Edinburgh there were plenty of vagrants, tramps,
drifters and prostitutes. Having already sold the
naturally-deceased their stock-in-trade was entirely
unnatural thereafter.
Victims were lured to Tanner’s Close, plied liberally
with alcohol and suddenly ‘burked.’ ‘Burking,’ a term
used today, smothered the victim’s nose and mouth
until they suffocated. Working together, one
restrained the victim while the other suffocated
them. The victims died quickly with no visible signs of
violence to arouse suspicion, not that their customers
were especially fussy. It also provided fresh,
undamaged cadavers sold at higher prices.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 19
Knowing they could hang for their first murder ( a
miller named Joseph in January 1829) Burke and Hare
had no qualms about fifteen more, selling their
victims to Knox at considerable profit. Their wives also
participated, helping lure victims to Tanner’s Close.
One after another their victims vanished. The more
they killed the more brazen they became, even
murdering a respectable, middle-class victim and
one of McDougal’s relatives. Their last victim was
Margaret Docherty on October 28 1829. The
interference of fellow lodgers Ann and James Gray
ended their killing spree.
The Grays became suspicious when Burke wouldn’t
allow anyone into his room. Sneaking in while Burke
was distracted they discovered Docherty’s body,
informing police even after McDougal offered them
£10 a month as a bribe. By the time police arrived
Docherty had already been sold, but Burke and his
wife told conflicting stories. Both were detained and
Hanged on 28 January 1830 Burke’s skeleton remains
on display at, ironically, Edinburgh Medical School.
Perhaps as many as 40,000 people attended his
execution with soldiers on hand to prevent disorder.
Hare and his wife vanished into obscurity as did
Burke’s widow. The disgraced Knox left Edinburgh,
dying in London in 1862.
Shortly after Burke’s dissection, MP Henry
Warburton’s Anatomy Bill failed to get through
Parliament. In 1832 his second attempt succeeded
after John Bishop and Thomas Williams were hanged
for a similar crime. Warburton’s 1832 Anatomy Act
granted anatomists unclaimed bodies from
workhouses and hospitals, also ending dissection of
executed convicts. Bishop and Williams had attracted
similar notoriety and a grim nickname; The London
Burkers.
William Burke murdering Margery Campbell - the last of the Burke and Hare murders
Credit: WikiMedia
Docherty’s body was discovered at Knox’s dissecting
room the next day. She was identified by the Grays as
the missing woman. Hare and his wife were also
arrested.
The trial was a public sensation and Burke might
have won had Hare not turned King’s Evidence to
cheat the hangman. In return, Hare was released.
Tried on Christmas Eve, 1829 and convicted on
Christmas Day, Burke was condemned to hang.
Passing sentence, Lord Justice-Clerk David Boyle
added an ironic stipulation:
Walsh is the
Robert
of MURDERS,
Author
AND
MYSTERIES
IN NEW
MISDEMEANORS
published by America
YORK
Time
Through
£18.99
RRP:
“Your body should be publicly dissected and
anatomised. And I trust, that if it is ever customary
to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in
order that posterity may keep in remembrance your
atrocious crimes.”
@ScribeCrime
20 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
The execution of William Burke . Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY
ANGELS IN THE
HOUSE:THE NOT SO
ANGELIC VICTORIAN
HOUSEWIVES
WORDS BY
DR JOHN WOOLF
Angels in the House: subservient and submissive,
demure and deferential. The ideal Victorian woman
lived safely ensconced in the heavenly homestead: a
refuge from the rambunctious world outside. Snug in
domesticity she cared for home, husband and child.
She was morally superior, passive and ‘passionless’;
her beauty reflected in ‘domestic pictures’ that
portrayed her as angelic, supportive and subservient
to the husband who, in all things, she willingly and
lovingly deferred…That anyway was the theory—a
pervasive form of patriarchy that permeated
Victorian society and culture. But of course the reality
was more complex. And in the underworld of crime
and corruption women played their part…
Cue the Forty Thieves later known as the Forty
Elephants: a syndicate of working-class women who
stole, blackmailed and extorted their way to notoriety.
Operating from the 18th and into the 20th century, it
was around 1890 that the gang fell under the
five years for her crimes.
Mary’s successor at the helm of the Forty Thieves was
Alice Diamond. Born inside the workhouse, Alice rose
through the criminal ranks to lead the gang with
military precision. She expanded their operation
beyond London; the motley crew (known for their
bewitching looks) travelled the country stealing and
plundering and hiding their loot up their skirts and
knickers.
All the while other women continued to subvert the
stereotype of the Angel in the House. Female
offenders were mainly responsible for minor crimes
such as theft and public disorder. There was a high
rate of female re-offending. Many were forced into
crime through abuse, poverty and destitution; sexual
exploitation was rife. And while women made up only
a small proportion of convicted offenders, their role in
crime was disproportionately discussed. In the press,
leadership of Mary Crane AKA Mary Carr, Polly Carr,
Polly Pickpocket, Handsome Polly and Queen of the
Forty Thieves. In Scoundrels and Scallywags, and
Some Honest Men (1929), Detective Tom Divall wrote:
‘She had rather small features and a luxurious crop of
auburn hair, but she was the most unfeeling criminal
that ever lived. She participated in child stealing,
enticing men into filthy and foul places, and in fact in
everything too horrible to mention. She had been an
artists’ model, and if she had stuck to that business
she might have done well and lived in luxury’.
Instead she wound up behind bars. Charged with
theft on numerous occasions, an 1896 conviction saw
her sentenced to three years penal servitude for
kidnapping a child. After her release Mary resumed
fencing stolen goods and in 1900 received another
the female criminal was depicted as the antithesis to
the Angel in the House: cold, calculating,
promiscuous and monstrous; in medical and legal
circles, she was morally corrupt and mentally
deficient.
Some women began writing about crime, taking aim
at the supposedly safe domestic sphere. Mary
Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational novel Lady Audley’s
Secret (1862) placed crime at the heart of the hearth,
provoking the worrying question: what if the Angel in
the House was secretly a Domestic Devil?
Such a concern captured the Victorian imagination.
And with poison in abundance—arsenic being
particularly ubiquitous in the first half of the century
— the potential for a domestic goddess turned
demonic murderess remained in the realm of
possibility.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWOLD / 23
John Woolf is the author of
Dr
FRY’S VICTORIAN
STEPHEN
and THE WONDERS:
SECRETS
THE CURTAIN ON THE
LIFTING
SHOW, CIRCUS AND
FREAK
AGE
VICTORIAN
Amelia Dyer (below) the
‘Baby Farmer’ poisoned,
starved and strangled
infants in her care—
killing around 400 in a
thirty-year period.
Were there not numerous cases that proved the
point? The twenty-two-year-old servant Eliza
Flemming executed for poisoning her master and his
family in 1815; Sarah Chesham executed for poisoning
her husband in 1851 And in 1873 Mary Ann Cotton
was sentenced to death for the destruction she
wrought with arsenic.
Previously a Sunday-school teacher and nurse, Mary
Cotton murdered a total of twenty-one people
between 1865 and 1872, making her far more prolific
than Jack the Ripper. She hid behind the image of
the Angel in the House to mercilessly murder three of
her four husbands, eleven of her thirteen children,
plus her lovers and her mother. Mary moved across
the north of England collecting the insurance after
the slaughter of her nearest and dearest. And on 24th
March 1873 she drew her last breath at the gallows in
Durham County Gaol: ‘She clasped her hands close to
her breast, murmured in an earnest tone, “Lord, have
mercy on my soul”, and in a moment the bolt was
drawn’.
Mary Cotton murdered a total of
twenty-one people between 1865
and 1872, making her far more
prolific than Jack the Ripper.
Cotton was by no means the only female serial killer.
Amelia Dyer the ‘Baby Farmer’ poisoned, starved and
strangled infants in her care—killing around 400 in a
thirty-year period. She too met her fate at the gallows
on 10 June 1896. Her last words: ‘I have nothing to
say’.
Dyer joined the pantheon of female murderers
executed for their crimes. And she emphatically
disrupted the Victorian notion of the Angel in the
House. It was always just a theory, and one which was
neither universal nor constant, but this maleconstructed
ideology captured a supposed ideal. It
was, however, bloodily subverted by the female
murderers and criminals who dispensed with the
Angel in the House and, in so doing, provoked fear
and loathing throughout Victorian society.
@drjohnwoolf
24 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
IMPROVE YOUR
BOOKSHELF WITH
INSIDE HISTORY
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SELF-MADE
MAN
THE
EVOLUTION OF
THE MYTH OF
H.H HOLMES
WORDS BY DR REBECCA FROST
On May 7, 1896, a man who had gone under the
name of H. H. Holmes was executed for the murder
of Benjamin F. Pitezel. That murder, and Holmes’
execution, both took place in Philadelphia, PA,
although he is today associated with Chicago and
the White City of the Columbian Exposition, thanks
to Erik Larson’s 2003 book. Although Holmes was
only ever put on trial for this single murder, Larson
presented Holmes – birth name: Herman Webster
Mudgett – as a serial killer who lured guests of the
Fair to his Murder Castle so he could take pleasure
in killing them.
In his lifetime, Holmes’ largest confession was to
twenty-seven murders. Some of those he named
came forward to argue that they were, in fact, still
alive, while others could not be proven to ever have
existed. As his very own first mythmaker, Holmes
would have approved of any tale that pushed that
tally into triple digits.
Holmes changed his own story continually during
his lifetime, along with his name, collecting a host
of biographies and pseudonyms. Between his final
capture in Boston in November 1894 and his
execution, he spoke three different confessions,
wrote an autobiography that protested his
innocence, and wrote his single written confession
of twenty-seven murders – although he used his
last words on the gallows to contradict himself yet
again.
"In his lifetime, Holmes’
largest confession was to
twenty-seven murders.
Some of those he named
came forward to argue
that they were, in fact,
still alive, while others
could not be proven to ever
have existed."
The “true” story of H. H. Holmes is further muddied
by the fact that newspapers ran their own
headlines and cobbled together their own
confessions from various sources. blurring facts and
adding to the confusion surrounding what Holmes
himself did, in fact, write or say.
In the twenty-first century, we have been exposed
repeatedly to the narrative of the serial killer in both
fact and fiction. Their stories are therefore
predictable: abusive mother, absent father, and
common childhood traits that it seems any
captured serial killer can adapt to his own
biography. Holmes, in the late nineteenth century,
had no such format. In order to sell his own story,
especially his autobiography in which he claims
innocence, he had to determine for himself what
plot elements would entice readers to pay twentyfive
cents for a copy.
Holmes’ Own Story, published in 1895, was
purportedly written by Holmes while he was
detained in Moyamensing Prison. The
autobiography even includes an appendix entitled
the Moyamensing Prison Diary in which Holmes
first details his day-to-day life as a prisoner and
then, finally, concocts his explanation for why so
many of the Pitezel family – Benjamin as well as
three of his children – were discovered to have died
after being around him. Holmes’ Own Story went to
press before Holmes was put on trial for Pitezel’s
murder, so he had to balance both the story of his
own innocence while competing for audiences’
attention with the lurid newspaper headlines
detailing his life, including such tantalizing tidbits
as bigamy and murder.
Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia PA. The execution of H. H. Holmes,
scene while he was making his final address. Sketched in the Prison by
Newmar, Times artist. From Holmes' Own Story (1895) by Mudgett,
Herman W.
Credit: Wikmedia Commons
Even while in Moyamensing, Holmes was allowed
to read the paper. One morning, in fact, when he
awoke to a commotion outside, he sent for it
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 27
"As his very own first
mythmaker, Holmes
would have approved of
any tale that pushed that
tally into triple digits."
outward appearance and apparent affection for the
children, since he trusted Hatch and Miss Williams
both to care for them out of his own sight. Had
Holmes not allowed them to take the children,
then, he tells his readers, they would still be alive
today.
After being convicted of the murder of their father,
however, Holmes changed his story and included
the three Pitezel children as victims in his
confession to twenty-seven murders. He had
immediately and was able to read in the headlines
that the bodies of two of the Pitezel children had
been found even before the detective had been
able to make his way to the prison to question him
about them. Holmes was therefore not caught
unawares and had already had the chance to set
his story in order before confronting Detective
Geyer.
The papers also helped direct him to discover what,
exactly, was holding the public’s attention during
this pre-trial publicity, and Holmes then adapted
what he read into his autobiography by placing the
most scandalous traits on others. In Holmes’ Own
Story, Pitezel himself becomes a drunk who not
only fails to support his family monetarily but
discovers himself to have taken a second wife after
a night of serious drinking. Holmes himself was
rumoured to have taken – and murdered – a string
of mistresses, including Miss Minnie Williams,
whom he resurrected for his autobiography. Miss
Williams became a fallen woman who had freely
slept with multiple men before she met Holmes, a
seducer against whom he was powerless. To add
insult to injury, Holmes even included the idea that
the children’s deaths were, in fact, Miss Williams’
idea, and that she convinced her new paramour to
commit the murders and frame Holmes because
she was jealous of Holmes’ new wife. Holmes
himself, of course, repented of his weakness and
refrained from allowing himself to be overcome by
any other such fallen women, remaining faithful to
his – supposedly only – wife.
The majority of the murderous traits ascribed to
Holmes in the newspapers were transferred to the
fictitious figure of Edward Hatch. Hatch claimed to
be married to Miss Williams, a statement Holmes
indicates he suspects to be untrue and physically
resembles Holmes. This, of course, means that any
time a witness came forward to state that Holmes
had been seen with the children, the man in
question had actually been Hatch. Holmes himself
even laments that he was fooled by Hatch’s
already profited from the sale of his book and now,
just weeks prior to his execution, sold his new story
to the Philadelphia Inquirer – even though it, too,
soon proved to be false.
Holmes the con-man began creating his own tall
tale during his lifetime, and would be pleased that
he is still being spoken and written about today,
while the mystery remains: how many people did
he murder? It is a secret Holmes took to the grave.
28 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
"How many people did he
murder? It is a secret Holmes
took to the grave."
Above: World's Fair Hotel, better known as H. H.
Holmes Castle. Circa 1890's. Credit Wikimedia
Above right: August 11, 1895 Joseph Pulitzer's "The
World" showing floor plan of Holmes "Murder
Castle" and left to right top to bottom scenes found
inside it-including a vault, a crematorium, trapdoor
in floor and a quicklime grave with bones
Rebecca Frost is the author of
WORDS OF A MONSTER:
ANALYZING THEWRITINGS OF H.H
HOLMES, AMERICA'A FIRST SERIAL
KILLER
RRP: $29.95
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 29
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave
her mother forty whacks. When she
saw what she had done, She gave her
father forty-one.
THE
TRIALS OF
LIZZIE
BORDEN
WORDS BY NICK KEVERN
In April 2015, Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River
Massachusetts became the unusual place that
journalists found themselves flocking to. They were
there because a grave site was vandalised with green
and black paint. It was not the first time that the grave
site in question was targeted and indeed that of the
individual who laid beneath. Her name will forever be
linked to the double murder of her father and step
mother in 1892. She was the prime suspect who,
despite her acquittal for murder, would later became a
key part of America’s criminal history, spawning
movies, books, articles and even operas. Even today,
the curious can stay the night at her old house where
the now infamous crimes took place. The green and
black paint that defaced her final resting place was
simply another trial Lizzie Borden would face.
On the 4th August 1892, there was a frenzy of police
activity at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Upon their arrival the grim discoveries of the crime
scene awaited them. Upstairs, the body of Abby Borden
laid on the floor of the bedroom. The first blow hit her
at the side of her head with wounds that corresponded
with that of a hatchet being the most likely murder
weapon. 17 further blows continued ensuring that she
was dead. Her body was colder when compared to the
second victim with the police concluding that she was
the first to be murdered.
Downstairs the body of Andrew Borden was discovered
slumped on the couch in the sitting room. His face was
unrecognisable following his attack. Struck 11 times
with a hatchet to his head, police were convinced that
he was asleep as he was murdered. His body was still
bleeding from his wounds suggesting that it was a very
recent attack. They calculated his time death at
approximately 11 am.
Rumours would soon circulate in the press about the
double murders. Ranging from a “Portugeuse
Labourer” eager for his wages from Andrew Borden
Andrew Borden, father of Lizzie Borden, slain in his house in Fall River.
Police forensic photograph. 1892 The Burns Archive./ WikiCommons
being a suspect, to Abby Borden being attacked "by a
tall man who struck the woman from behind." The
appetite for coverage of the crimes was reaching
fever point. Two days after the murders, the media
had turned their attention to the Andrew Borden’s
daughter, Lizzie.
The media circus that surrounded the case would act
as the first of many trials for Lizzie Borden. Soon there
were reports that she had attempted to purchase
prussic acid the day before the murders from Eli
Bence who was a clerk at S.R Smith’s Drug Store. The
Boston Daily Globe would also report that Lizzie and
her stepmother were no longer on speaking terms.
Family members would however, contradict these
claims. The newspapers had their target firmly in
their sights.
The police were inclined to agree with the media.
Puzzled by the lack of blood anywhere except on the
bodies of the victims, they were convinced that the
murderer came from inside the household. The
suspicion was firmly with Lizzie. Her older sister,
Emma, was out of town during the time of the
murders and her uncle, John Morse (who was staying
with the Borden Family) was out visiting his nephew
and niece in town.
Further suspicion grew with Lizzie’s story. She
claimed that she was in the barn loft outside the
house preparing for an upcoming fishing trip yet the
dusty floor of the barn loft revealed no footprints. Her
" On the 22nd August at her
preliminary hearing, Judge
Josiah Blaisdell pronounced
her “probably guilty”
confused and contradictory answers at the inquest a
few days later led to her arrest. On the 22nd August at
her preliminary hearing, Judge Josiah Blaisdell
pronounced her “probably guilty”. It was enough for
her to face a grand jury at court for the murder of her
Father and stepmother.
During the trial itself, Lizzie never took the stand. The
vast majority of the case against her relied heavily on
circumstantial evidence with the defence offering
little in terms of hard evidence. It wouldn’t take long
for the Jury of 12 men to reach their verdict. With only
90 minutes of deliberation they found her “Not
Guilty”. In many cases, Borden would have been left
to continue her life peacefully but this was no
ordinary case. More questions were left than actual
answers. Even to this day the murders of Andrew and
Abby Borden remains unsolved. However, the mud
had firmly stuck to Lizzie as she now faced the trial of
public opinion.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 31
The Borden murder trial—A scene in the court-room before the acquittal - Lizzie Borden,
the accused, and her counsel, Ex-Governor Robinson. Illustration in Frank Leslie's
illustrated newspaper, v. 76 (1893 June 29), p. 411.Credit: Library of Congress/Wikicommons
It would not take long for the first book about the
case to hit the bookshelves. “The Fall River Tragedy: A
History of the Borden Murders,” was written by Edwin
H. Porter who was a reporter for the Fall River Daily
Globe. Porter believed that Lizzie was guilty of the
crimes. Sold for $1.50, the book proved to be popular
as the case was still fresh in the public’s imagination.
For those who believed that Lizzie had gotten away
with murder, this book proved them to be correct.
For those who believed her to be innocent, it could
have possibly swayed them. No matter where Lizzie
would go, the case would never be far away. More
books would be released during Lizzie’s lifetime as
amateur and professional sleuths gave their opinions.
Lizzie never left Fall River. Opting to stay she would
soon become a pariah within the community. Having
moved to Maplecroft in the richer part of town she
undoubtedly heard the children singing the now
famous skipping rope about her. She was also later
detail. The film insinuates that there is a valid
explanation for the lack of blood anywhere other than
on that of the victims. It suggests that Lizzie
commited the murders whilst naked and bathing
after each murder. The same idea would later be
repeated in 2014 as Christina Ricci portrayed Borden
for a new generation.
“Lizzie” starring Chloe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart
was released in 2018. This interpretaion of the
murders implies that both Lizzie Borden and the
housemaid, Bridget Sullivan were both involved
suggesting that they were also intimate and that
Andrew had sexually abused Bridget.
As a new generation learns more about the murders it
is these interpretations that have continued to put
Lizzie Borden on trial even to the present day. There
will be more written and documented about the case
as time goes on as the trials of Lizzie Borden continue.
Photo from the made for television film "The Legend of Lizzie Borden
"starring Elizabeth Montgomery. 1975
Credit: WikiMedia
snubbed by the Christian Endeavor Society where
prior to the murders she had served as the treasurer.
Alienated from former friends and family members,
Lizzie often sat on the pew alone in church as the
community distanced themselves from her. At the
time of her death at the age of 66, the vast throng of
people attending her trial had dwindled to only a
handful of mourners at her funeral.
Discover more about Lizzie Borden
TRIAL OF LIZZIE
THE
A TRUE STORY
BORDEN:
Cara Robertson
by
published by Simon &
Now at peace, the trials of Lizzie Borden should have
ended but in reality they had only just begun. Such
was the interest in the murders it would not take
long for new areas of the media of regain an interest.
“The Legend of Lizzie Borden” starring "Bewitched"
actress Elizabeth Montgomery aired in 1975. A new
interpretation of the murder was revealed in graphic
Schuster
RRP: £15.99 Amazon
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 33
The Morellos:
Families at War
Words: Anthony Ruggiero
Images: WikiMedia
The Morello family was the United States’ earliest mafia
family, who were based in the Italian Harlem of Manhattan.
Giuseppe Morello founded the crime group during the
1890’s after his had migrated from Sicily to New York. Prior
to living in the United States the Guiseppe had already
began engaging in criminal activity, which forced them to
move to the United States. This mafia family was into
different types of criminal activities such as murder,
conspiracy, extortion, counterfeiting and racketeering.
However, following a series of legal problems and later the
Mafia-Camorra war, the gangs power began to rapidly
decrease. Regardless of this, the group had a significant
impact on organized crime in the early twentieth century.
Prior to immigrating to the United States the family had
already been involved in criminal activity. Giuseppe
Morello was born on May 2nd, 1867 in Corleone, Sicily. His
father, Calogero Morello, had died when he was five years
old, after which his mother, Angelina, got remarried to a
Corlonesi mafia member named Bernado Terranova. It
was Terranova who had introduced Sicilian mafia to
Morello. Like other Mafia members, Morello was forced to
leave Sicily in 1892 and went to the U.S. Another reason
cited for his immigration was being a suspect for
murdering and running a counterfeiting ring. Even
though, he reached the U.S., back in Sicily, the Italian
government had found him guilty of counterfeiting case.
In his absence, he was found guilty in September 1894 and
was sentenced to imprisonment for 6 years. Hence, he
never came back to Italy.
Giuseppe Morello arrived in New York from Corleone in
1892. He was followed six months later by his mother, stepfather,
four sisters and his step brothers; Nicola, Circo,
Vincent Terranova The family stayed in New York for a year,
but after failing to find any work they travelled to
Louisiana. For a year Morello worked with his father
planting sugar cane before moving on to Bryan, Texas
where he found work as a cotton picker. However, after
Louisiana was struck with a malaria epidemic in 1896, the
family relocated back to New York. In New York, Morello
worked with his father as an ornamental plasterer, with his
step brothers. He eventually opened a coal basement, but
quickly sold it, and in 1900 he opened a saloon on 13th
Street, soon followed by a second saloon on Stanton
Street. Due to bad business, Morello closed the Stanton
Street saloon and sold the one on 13th Street in 1901.
Ignazio Lupo, who would later become a powerful
member of the gang and also marry into the family,
arrived in New York in 1898. Lupo was fleeing arrest in
Palermo after killing a business rival in the wholesale
grocery business.
The gang’s early focus was on counterfeiting US currency.
This would ultimately result in them becoming the focus
of the New York Secret Service branch, with agents
specially trained to detect bogus bills and tracking down
street pushers with the hope of capturing the counterfeit
manufacturers. The first major arrests happened on June
11th, 1900, when Giuseppe Morello was captured along
with Colagero Meggiore. They were accused of selling
counterfeit money and held on $5000 bail. The arrests had
grown out of a Secret Service investigation that began
when counterfeit $5 bills were being passed in Brooklyn
and North Beach. Morello and Meggiore were believed to
be the suppliers of the money, which was described as
‘being printed on very poor paper with crude
workmanship’. However, due to their being a lack of
evidence, Morello was able to avoid any jail time.
However, legal troubles still continued for Morello, when
an anonymous letter was sent to Detective Petrosino of
the NYPD, the Secret Service raided a powerful band of
counterfeiters on May 22nd, 1902. The letter claimed that a
gang had been manufacturing coins at a cottage in
Hackensack, New Jersey, rented by Salvatore Clemente, an
acquaintance of Nicholas Terranova. Agents also raided a
barbershop that was being used to distribute the currency,
which resulted in the arrests of Vito Cascioferro and
Giuseppe Romano. Cascioferro was one of the most
34 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
GIUSEPPE MORELLO 1902
IMAGE: WIKICOMMONS
powerful Mafia leaders of the time; he managed to escape
conviction with an alibi that he worked at a local paper
mill. The alliances that Morello formed in these
counterfeiting were of mixed ethnicities. The 1900 arrests
were a mixture of Italians and Irish criminals. Working with
already established gangs in New York was a necessity due
to the technical, mechanical, and network requirements of
the counterfeiting business.
Giuseppe Morello started a real estate company in 1902,
‘The Ignatz Florio Co-Operative Association Among
Corleonesi’; the company was involved in the construction
and selling of properties in New York. The names listed on
the incorporation as directors were Morello, Antonio
Milone – a man who would later be involved with their
counterfeiting schemes and Marco Macaluso. The
company eventually collapsed, hindered by the economic
downturn in 1907. The Bankers Association of America
later investigated it. In 1902 Morello acquired a saloon on 8
Prince St. in Manhattan, which became the official
meeting place for the gang. From Prince St. Morello
launched his empire employing several enforcers whose
Another major event that placed the Morello gang in the
eyes of the public was The Barrel Murder in 1903.
According to the The New York Times, on April 14th, 1903, a
barrel was discovered with a man’s body inside. The body
was been gruesomely mutilated. Police believed the barrel
that had once been used for shipping sugar was dumped
from the back of wagon in the early hours. On the base of
the barrel was stenciled ‘W.T’, and on the side “G 228”. The
victim was thought to have been from a fairly prosperous
background, due to his “clean person, good clothes and
newly manicured nails”. The following day, Secret Service
agents, who had been tracking the Morello gang for over a
year in connection with counterfeiting, claimed to have
seen the victim with various members of the gang in a
butcher’s shop in Stanton Street on the evening of
Monday, April 13th.
As a result on April 15th, eight members of the Morello
gang were arrested. The police had been watching the
gangs usual hangouts: a Stanton Street butcher shop, a
cafe at Elizabeth Street and a saloon Prince Street in
Manhattan. Each member of the gang was found to
Fifth Avenue in New York City on Easter Sunday in 1900 (Wilimedia)
sole job was to kill anyone Morello requested. For example,
Guiseppe Catania, a Brooklyn grocer, was found murdered
on July 23rd, 1902. The Secret Service believed that Catania
had been a member of the Morello gang involved with
counterfeiting. They suspected the gang had disposed of
him due to his habit of drinking, talking too much, and
had argued with gang members whom he had fights over
debts owed to them. It was later revealed by the Secret
Service that Morello had Catania killed.
Further legal problems continued in January 1903, Morello
was charged with passing counterfeit money. It was
discovered that $5 bills were being replicated in precise
imitation to the currency issued by the National Iron Bank,
Morristown, NJ. They were printed in Italy and shipped to
New York in empty olive oil cans. Other suspects refused to
implicate Morello in the case and he walked free. Several
members of the Morello gang were sent to prison,
including Giuseppe De Primo.
armed, with either a knife or a pistol. The members that
were arrested included Giuseppe Morello, Tommaso Petto,
Joseph Fanaro, Antonio Genova, Lorenzo LoBido, Vito
LoBido, Dominic Pecoraro, and Pietro Inzerillo. When
Morello was interrogated and later taken to view the body
in hopes that he would identify whom the person was he
refused, and it was widely feared that Morello and his gang
would be released because there was no evidence to hold
them in police custody. However, police continued
searching and would soon locate where they thought the
murder had been committed. It was a pastry shop on
Elizabeth Street in Manhattan called, Dolceria Pasticceria,
run by Pietro Inzerillo, it was there they found an identical
barrel to the one used in the murder, even bearing the
same inscriptions. Sawdust, and some burlap, on the floor
of the shop had also been found in the base of the murder
barrel. The barrel was eventually traced to Wallace &
Thompson bakery, where their record books showed an
entry of a sugar order, made by Pietro Inzerillo in February
of that year. Thus, police continued to investigate the
situation further.
36 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
Eventually, the body was identified as Benedetto Madonnia,
the brother-in-law of Giuseppe De Primo, who identified his
body and was still imprisoned by counterfeiting money
since January of that year. De Primo revealed that Madonnia
was not part of any counterfeiting scheme and had lived in
Buffalo, New York. He revealed that he had traveled down to
Manhattan to collect $25,000 dollars owed to De Primo and
suspects that the gang killed him instead of giving him the
money. However, despite this admission by De Primo, this
was not enough to detain Morello and six other of his
associates. Initially, on April 25th, Tommaso Petto was
formally charged with committing the murder. Petto, when
arrested on April 15th, had been found in possession of pawn
ticket number, dated April 14th 1903. The ticket had been
traced to a watch that had belonged to the murder victim
that had been described to by the victim’s stepson to the
police. However, this was the only evidence that police
would find linking Petto to Madonnia’s murder and he too
was later released from prison on January 29th, 1904.
Although, the gang and its leader were able to avoid any
serious conviction despite committing numerous offences,
it was not long before Giuseppe Morello would be arrested.
On November 15th, 1909, Secret Service agents met with
officer Carraro from the police and went to Morello’s home
where they arrested him in connection with a counterfeiting
operation in Highland, New York. According to police
reports he was taken from his bed Morello and placed in the
front room with his son while agents searched the house.
While the were searching his home, Morello passed two
letters to his wife to hide, however Carraro discovered them,
Carraro and the agents would later find four more letters
hidden inside a baby’s diaper. A Secret Service agent, Flynn,
described what a letter would entail and how it was used:
A threatening letter is sent to a proposed victim.
Immediately after the letter is delivered by the postman
Morello just “happens” to be in the vicinity of the victim to
be, and “accidentally” meets the receiver of the letter. The
receiver knows of Morello’s close connections with Italian
malefactors, and, the thing being fresh in mind, calls
Morello’s attention to the letter. Morello takes the letter
and reads it. He informs the receiver that victims are not
killed off without ceremony and just for the sake of
murder. The “Black-Hand” chief himself declares he will
locate the man who sent the letter, if such a thing is
possible, the victim never suspecting that the letter is
Morello’s own. Of course, the letter is never returned to the
proposed victim. By this cunning procedure no evidence
remains in the hand of the receiver of the letter should he
wish to seek aid from the police.
These letters and others discovered linking him to the
counterfeiting operation in Highland, New York was enough
evidence to finally convict Morello, thus sending him to
prison.
With Morello in prison, new leadership of the Morello gang
needed to be decided. There were the Terranova brothers,
Ciro, Vincent and Nicholas who were highly considered.
Other possible candidates included the Lomonte brothers,
Fortunato and Tomasso, the cousins of Giuseppe Morello.
They operated a hay and feed business in Manhattan.
Giuseppe Morello’s young son, Colagero was also in
consideration for leadership of the gang. However, the
Terranova brothers soon left the gang after failing to
secure leadership and formed their own gang called “The
White Doves.” Rocco Tapano, whose uncle, Benedetto
Madonnia, had been killed by the gang years earlier, killed
Colagero in 1912 in retaliation of the murder. Nicholas
Terranova later killed Tapano for Colagero’s murder.
Fortunato Lamonte, who had began to increase his power,
was killed in 1914 by associates of ‘Toto’ D’Aquila, a mob
moss in the Gambino crime family, who was looking to
remove Lomonte from gaining too much power. He also
had him killed for the recent killing of D’Aquila’s friend,
Giuseppe Fontana, a long time Morello associate who had
left the gang. Overall, this time period was filled with
much turbulence for the once powerful gang.
Chaos ensued following the start of the Mafia-Camorra
War. The Camorra was a large coalition of mafia groups,
who were all from Naples, Italy. The situation began to
escalate on June 24th 1916 when a meeting took place at
Coney Island between the Morello gang, the Neapolitan
gang and the Neapolitan Coney Island gang. The idea of
the meeting was to negotiate the expansion of gambling
dens in lower Manhattan. Even though the Morello’s and
the Navy Street gang worked together for sometime,
including jointly removing, Giosue Gallucci, a crime boss
once affiliated with the Camorra, from Harlem, the
Neopolitans believed they could have taken over the
Harlem rackets if they could eliminate the Morellos. They
devised a plan where they would attempt to lure the
entire leadership down to Brooklyn and ambush them. On
September 7th 1916, Nicholas Terranova and Charles
Ubriaco travelled downtown to meet with the Navy Street
gang; they were both ambushed and killed.
The Morello gang and the Brooklyn Camorra were officially
at war. The Camorra conducted various plans to take out
the rest of the Morello leadership, but they were either
discovered or were never completed, however the
Camorra in Philadelphia would later murder four
associates of the Morello gang. The Navy Street gang
managed to take over the Morello businesses for a short
period in 1918. A Harlem gambler claimed that for a short
duration he had to travel to Brooklyn each week to have
his books checked. The Camorra even tried to move in on
the Morello’s artichoke business, but the wholesale dealers
refused to give in to their threats. Although, eventually the
two sides met a deal where a ‘tax’ of twenty-five dollars
was paid on every carload of artichokes that were
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 37
delivered. Coal and ice merchants who had worked with
the Morellos also proved hard to threaten, and the
Camorra’s did not profit much from this corporate takeover
then they had imagined. At this point the Morello gang had
been defeated and D’Aquila was the new major crime boss.
However things would once again shift in the Morello
gang’s favor when, in 1920, Giuseppe Morello was released
from prison after serving ten years of his fifteen year
sentence. By this time former Morello crime family
member, Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria had gained
influence over several gangs and become very powerful.
After aligning himself with former loyal gang members,
Morello unsuccessfully attempted to have Masseria killed.
Due to his unsuccessful attempts Morello would align
himself with Masseria and the rising organized crime
leader, Lucky Luciano. However, Giuseppe Morello would
later be gunned down in 1930, thus never being able to fully
regain the prominent status the gang once possessed.
The Morello gang was significant group that had a
significant impact on organized crime in the early
twentieth century. During their prominence, the gang
managed to make headlines in the media for their
counterfeiting schemes and murders in which a majority of
its membership managed to avoid conviction for a period
of time. Although, the group would eventually collapse
following the fall of their leader and founder, their inability
to establish new leadership, and its lost to the Camorra; the
gang will always be remembered as the first major
organized crime group in American history.
Giuseppe Morello would
later be gunned down in
1930, thus never being
able to fully regain the
prominent status the gang
once possessed.
Anthony Ruggiero is a High School History Teacher
in New York City. In addition to teaching, he has
been published previously in History Is Now
magazine, Tudor Life magazine, Discover Britain
magazine, The Odd Historian magazine, and the
Culture-Exchange blog.
Featered Reading
THE WILD EAST:
GUNFIGHTS,
MASSACRES AND RACE
RIOTS FAR FROM
AMERICA'S FRONTIER
by Ian Heron
Published by Amberley
RRP £20
Photograph of the Navy Street gang in Brooklyn, New York used as a prosecution exhibit at trial in 1918 (slightly cropped)
38 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
COMING SOON
A NEW HISTORY
PODCAST JUST
FOR YOU
INSIDE
HISTORY
www.insidehistorymagazine.co.uk
COMING SOON
A NEW HISTORY
PODCAST JUST
FOR YOU
When the Peaky Blinders television series first aired in
2013 it had all the hallmarks to become a smash hit.
Stylish, gruesome and dark. Telling the story and
exploits of Thomas Shelby and his family, the Peaky
Blinders were ruthless in their criminal endeavours.
Aimed with razors within the peaks of their paperboy
hats the gang would profit from illegal bookmaking
and target anyone who got in their way.
Set after the First World War in 1919 the series would
continue to show their rise to power over time. Whilst
the series has been a massive success it has also
gained a lot of attention from historians. The truth
about the Peaky Blinders gang in Birmingham
maintains the dark gritty aspect of the series but the
Shelby family were certainly not a part of it.
The real gang first came to prominence in the media
on the 24th March 1890 in the Birmingham Mail. The
article stated that:
"A serious assault was committed upon a young man
named George Eastwood. Living at 3 court, 2 house,
Arthur Street, Small Heath, on Saturday night. It
seems that Eastwood, who has been for some time a
total abstainer, called between ten and eleven o'clock
at the Rainbow Public House in Adderly Street, and
was supplied with a bottle of ginger beer. Shortly
afterwards several men known as the "Peaky Blinders"
gang, whom Eastwood knew by sight from their living
in the same neighborhood as himself, came in."
Thomas Gilbert
Stephen McNickle
Professor Carl Chinn is a historian specialising in the
real role that the gang played in Birmingham. The
author of The Real Peaky Blinders is quick to point out
that the timeline for the series is completely wrong.
"By the early 20th century the Peaky Blinders had
disappeared. The idea that the Peaky Blinders took
their name from their flat caps in to the peaks of
which they has sewn razorblades is a false one. It's a
myth, there is no evidence at all to support it."
The timeline and the razorblades has now been ruled
out as merely poetic licence. There is no doubt that
the gang still terrorised the people of Birmingham.
Professor Chin continued to say that: "People were
scared of the Peaky Blinders in the 1890s...they caused
mayhem where they were aloud to and they picked
on the innocent."
42 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
Rather than being led by Thomas Shelby, the gang
was likely to have been led by Thomas Gilbert. Gilbert
frequently changed his surname in order to avoid
detection and often went under the alias of Kevin
Mooney. He is believed to have initiated many of the
land grabs during the reign of the Peaky Blinders.
Most of the gang were from middle class with jobs
and even businesses.
The land grabs by Gilbert and others allowed for the
gang to grow from their original stomping ground of
Small Heath. With each land grab the gang was able
to insert their influence over local businesses. It also
allowed them to recruit more youthful members of
the gang.
One such recruit was Harry Fowles. Referred to as
"Baby-faced Harry", Fowles was part of the youth
culture that the Peaky Blinders aimed to encourage.
Arrested in 1904 for stealing a bike, the 19 year-old
would have made his way to the holding prison on
Steelhouse Lane in Birmingham where we would
spend the night before going through the tunnel to
the magistrates. It would have a similar fate for any of
the gang who got caught.
Fowles was not the youngest to get caught and
punished. David Taylor was only 13 years-old when he
was arrested for possession of a loaded firearm.
Others like Stephen McNickle and Earnest Haynes
were also arrested. West Midlands police records
described them as: "foul mouthed young men who
stalk the streets in drunken groups, insulting and
mugging passers-by."
Parliament. Yet the gang that stood up to Billy
Kimber never did anything of the sort. Instead
they ran with some joining Kimber's gang. In
short, the fearsome Peaky Blinders that is
portrayed is simply great television. The real
gang, whilst still feared by the people of
Birmingham, were the starter for Billy Kimber's
main course of gangs in the Midlands of England.
"foul mouthed young men who
stalk the streets in drunken
groups, insulting and mugging
passers-by."
Harry Fowles
Earnest Haynes
The influence of the gang would soon decline. The
emergence of Billy Kimber's Birmingham Boys would
soon take over. Whilst the series portrays it other way
around, it would Kimber (who was a former Peaky
Blinder himself) who faced the rival Sabini gang.
One key reason why the gang began to fade was the
that it opted to expand its empire into racecourses.
The escalation of violence between the Peaky
Blinders and the Birmingham Boys saw many leaving
Birmingham into the safer countryside. Over time
their influence, contacts and lands were usperted by
Kimber's gang.
Peaky Blinders - The Real
Story of Birmingham's most
notorious gangs by Carl
Chinn published by John
Blake Books
RRP: £8.99
It is somewhat bemusing that the story ends there.
The series would of course continue seeing Tommy
and his gang take over and even go on to enter
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 43
IF ORGANIZED CRIME
COULD MAKE IT IN NEW
YORK... Words: Christa avampato Images: Wikicommons
IT COULD MAKE IT
CHRISTA AVAMPATO IS AN AWARD WINNING
AUTHOR AND FILM-MAKER. SHE IS ALSO A WRITER
FOR THE WASHINGTON POST AND GUIDE FOR
ANYWHERE!
UNTAPPED CITES IN NEW YORK.
“The parties were bigger...
the pace was faster…and
the morals were looser,”
F. Scott Fitzgerald on
Prohibition
Organized crime had a heavy hand in the transport of
alcohol around New York. Rum Row originally lived 3
miles off the coast of New York where that waters
were no longer in any government’s legal jurisdiction.
Modern-day pirates who captained a line of boats
carrying liquor (including but not at all limited to
rum) from the Caribbean, Canada, and Europe
dropped anchor to create a kind of alcoholic
bazaar. Speakeasy owners would travel out to Rum
Row, shop for what they wanted, and then have it
secretly delivered via organized crime networks on
speedboats that would attempt (and often succeed)
to outrun the Coast Guard.
The early haunts of organized crime have been
largely erased from today’s New York City. Yet, this is
where organized crime grew from a ragtag set of
small-time criminals to a slick and brutal machine. In
many ways, the structure of organized crime today—
now an international, highly-intricate web—traces its
inspiration and roots to New York, particularly the era
from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. From the
Gangs of New York to The Godfather, this is where
and when crime became big business. harmony and
speed.
Rival gangs (known then and now as “families”)
formed and feuded in the mid-1800s as waves of
immigrants began to pour into Ellis Island from
Europe. They fought over territory, power, and the
control of goods flooding New York as it rapidly
became the largest port city in the world. The Lower
East Side, Little Italy, and Five Points neighbourhoods
are the stages on which these battles played to their
often-fatal end.
Nineteenth-century organized crime remained fairly
small and localized by today’s standards until New
York, and the entire country, handed its families an
enormous gift with unintended and unforeseen
consequences: Prohibition. From 1920 to 1933, the dry
movement nearly a century in the making prohibited
bootlegging—the illegal manufacture, distribution,
and sale (but not the drinking) of alcohol. Almost
immediately, bootlegging gave crime families a hot
commodity with enormous demand and even bigger
profits.
No other city had a hankering for liquor more than
New York, and no other city had as many crime
families either. Though Al Capone’s infamous Chicago
bootlegging market is a favourite of historians, New
York was the crown jewel of alcohol during
Prohibition. Throughout the era, New Yorkers
consumed more alcohol than any other city in the
country. There were anywhere from 32,000 to 100,000
speakeasies and 5,000 nightclubs in New York by
1925.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress
To make things more difficult, the government
campaigned and won the battle to move Rum Row
out to 12 miles off the coast. Criminals like a challenge
and though this new line made it more difficult for
crime families to bootleg liquor, it also made them
more inventive. The speedboats got faster, the liquor
got more expensive, and they developed
sophisticated networks to get the liquor around the
city to speakeasies once it arrived on land.
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 45
One family even started a legitimate cab business
with alcohol as its only passenger to shuttle it around
right under the noses of the police.
Additionally, the crime families figured if the
government was going to make it more difficult for
alcohol to get to land, then they would stage parties
on the boats that rivalled any Mardi Gras before or
since. Organized crime built the Wild West of the
1920s on Rum Row, and controlled access to and
from it. Yes, the boats were full of liquor. They were
also full of every other illicit activity someone might
want. Anything came and went out there. Those
ships comprised a lawless land on an open sea, and it
kept organized crime afloat despite government
crackdowns.
While the rich and well-heeled New Yorkers in the
1920s took their drinks in midtown-Manhattan’s
glamorous spots like the 21 Club (which is one of only
two remaining original speakeasies in the city), thrillseekers
made their party in Harlem.
Black and Tans, as they were often called because
they literally created space for the mixing of people of
different races, were tucked away in every
"It is the prohibition
that makes anything
precious." Mark Twain
conceivable space: basements and backyards of
brownstones, backrooms and second floors of
legitimate bars and restaurants, and industrial-like
structures like garages and workshops. Plentiful
hooch joints and buffet flats with fanciful names
offered much more than booze—full homemade
meals (the more you eat, the more you drink!),
dancing, floorshows, and music were all on offer.
The liquor, laughter, and love flowed to the
soundtrack of a new kind of music that would be
celebrated the world over long after the Prohibition
parties ended, and that soundtrack was jazz. Before
they were household names, the biggest names in
jazz got their start in the speakeasies of Harlem
supplied by organized crime’s advanced bootlegging
operation. Jazz and its stars are so closely tied to the
Prohibition era that there is an argument to be made
that jazz may not have become the worldwide
phenomenon it was without Prohibition. As Mark
"Having seen and examined the two Siamese
Youths, Chang and Eng, I have great pleasure in
affirming they constitute a most extraordinary
Lusus Natuare; the first instance I have ever seen of
a living double child; they being totally devoid of
deception, afford a very interesting spectacle, and
are highly deserving of public patronage. " (2)
Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, aged eighteen,
with badminton rackets. Coloured engraving by JLB,
1829. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Created by Elmer Simms Campbell in 1932
Originally for Dell Publishing Company for their magazine Manhattan
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
A reciprocal relationship between medicine and
freakery had been established. On the one hand,
the managers of Chang and Eng benefited from
these medical endorsements. At the time, medicine
was slowly modernizing and becoming more
professional, gaining social respectability and
cultural authority, so these attributes were
transferred onto Chang and Eng’s freak show. The
display of deformity was often associated with lowclass
itinerant fairs, so this backing from medicine
Mugshot of Charles "Lucky" Luciano in 1936 Italian-American mobster and
one of the most powerful mob bosses during Prohibition. Luciano was
reportedly making millions of dollars in bootlegging profits by the mid-1920s
(Wikimedia Commons)
Twain famously said, Prohibition is what makes
things precious.
The Alhambra Ballroom had Billie Holiday on its staff
before they discovered she could sing, and thankfully
they quickly made that discovery. With the hardhitting
talents of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and
Count Basie, the Alhambra became one of the most
famous clubs in the world known for its epic swing
dance battles. It continued its business into the 1960s.
The Sugar Cane Club did not have the longevity of
the Alhambra, but during Prohibition its crowds were
legendary. Its location on 135th Street and Fifth
Avenue was a stronghold in the Harlem Renaissance
movement that showcased a blossoming of African
American art, writing, and music. As a speakeasy and
nightclub, it was home to jazz giants such as Bessie
Smith, Ethel Waters, and Louis Armstrong.
Owned by Ed Smalls, Small’s Paradise was the setting
history points to when discussing racially integrated
speakeasies. Smalls was the only African American to
own a Harlem speakeasy during Prohibition. The
dancing and roller skating waitstaff, over-the-top
floorshows, and big names in music were its
hallmarks, and they played well into the morning
hours. Their breakfast and its matching 6am
performance were renowned. Like the Alhambra,
Small’s had a life beyond Prohibition. In 1943, Malcolm
Little was a waiter at Small’s. Less than a decade later,
he would become one of the most famous men in
the world—Malcolm X.
New York’s origin story of its organized crime scene
provides us with one of the most tangled, fascinating
periods of time in the U.S. Music, racial integration,
politics, commerce, culture, and immigration are all
threads in its web, and history is still weaving the
fabric of its stories and legacies.
Murals of Dizzy Gillespie, jazz legend
Photos by Christa Avampato, 2019
Murals by Brandan "B-Mike" Odums and Marthalicia Mattarita
135th Street in Harlem
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 47
From speakeasies to illegal bootlegging the "Jazz Age"
was a time to let your hair down. But for Al Capone it
was business and those who crossed him paid the price.
Dr Elliott.L.Watson argues that although Capone helped
to create the Jazz Age...he also destroyed it.
WORDS BY
HOW THE ST.
VALENTINE'S DAY
MASSACRE KILLED
DR.ELLIOTT L.WATSON
THE JAZZ AGE IMAGES: WIKICOMMONS
For those who were fortunate enough to take part
in it, the Jazz Age was a time of unprecedented
bullishness in almost every aspect of American life.
As banks loosened up credit and factories massproduced
cheaper consumer goods for customers
who could now, at least on paper, afford them, a
deep-seated belief in the fundamentals of a
deregulated economic model took hold. Provided
this seemingly preternatural prosperity continued,
the electorate would continue to vote into office
the apparent architects of it – the Republican Party.
To many Americans, this loosely-bound pact made
perfect sense: the Democrats under Woodrow
Wilson had led the US into war and austerity,
despite initially promising not to do so. Republican
Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover had all
built their electoral campaigns around the popular
post-war inclination towards small government and
non-intervention: a ‘return to normalcy’. The pact
between government and people, as long as it
seemed to profit both parties, would continue.
significance, than in the city of Chicago. And it was
only Chicago that would see the rise of a criminal
who would generate such national renown and
caché as Alphonse Gabriel Capone.
Al Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899 on the 17th
January - coincidentally the date upon which
Prohibition would, 21 years later, begin. A natural
When the dam holding back the economic waters
burst in October 1929 with the Wall Street Crash,
this pact was swept away by a deluge of mass
unemployment and social deprivation. As many
historians tell it, this is the point in American history
at which the relationship between Americans and
their government fundamentally altered, from one
of a distant paternalism, to one characterised by a
people-driven expectation that the government
needed to be more responsible for their welfare. As
Hugh Brogan told it in his ubiquitous Penguin
History of the United States of America, “From every
quarter the clamour began to rise for Washington
to tackle the problem directly”. However, the
erosion of the pact had begun eight months earlier,
not with the loss of billions on Wall Street but with
the murder of seven men in a garage on Chicago’s
North Side.
The moment the 18th Amendment to the US
Constitution was ratified on the 16th January 1919,
the federal government set itself upon a path that
would lead to an explosive growth in organised
criminal activity across America. As the nation’s
demand for alcohol continued despite its
prohibition, black markets proliferated to satisfy it.
Initially, these black markets were served by ad hoc
individuals and groups looking to make quick
money. However, once it became clear the
staggering sums that were to be made
bootlegging, those involved in the black markets
became increasingly more sophisticated; more
organised. Perhaps nowhere in the United States
saw the coalescing of criminal activity around
Prohibition more obviously and with greater
proclivity for violence saw him develop
relationships with gangs of ever-increasing
sophistication, from the Junior Forty Thieves,
through the Brooklyn Rippers to the powerful Five
Points Gang. As he exited his teens, Capone moved
to Chicago and, under the tutelage of Johnny
Torrio, began to make his name on the streets and
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD / 49
in the tabloids. After barely surviving a brutal
assassination attempt, Johnny Torrio retired and, at the
tender age of 26, Alphonse Capone inherited control of
the Chicago Outfit.Unfortunately for Capone, the Outfit,
though powerful, was not the only gang in Chicago; the
North Side Gang, led by Bugs Moran, was a dangerous
thorn in the side of Capone. In an attempt to remove the
thorn, Capone ordered the murder of Moran. The
location chosen for the attack was a trucking garage at
2122 North Clark Street - the erstwhile HQ of Moran. The
event itself is reasonably familiar to many: at midmorning
on the 14th February 1929, 7 associates of the
North Side Gang were lined up against one of the walls
inside the garage and mown down with Thomson
‘Tommy’ guns. Two of the victims - John May and James
Clark - were finished off with shotgun blasts to the face.
Moran was not among the dead. Although the debate
still continues as to the identity of the trigger men, it is
generally accepted that they were operating on the
orders of Capone. What is perhaps less familiar, is the
impact that the event had on the course of US history.
The temperance movement was very much a rural,
protestant phenomenon. Its success in gaining national
support had as much to do with across-the-
Congressional-isle political opportunism as it did with a
genuinely progressive attempt to improve the overall
‘health’ of the country. Nonetheless, come to the cities
Prohibition did. And it levied a heavy tax on the
inhabitants of those cities who, for the majority of the
1920’s, were willing to pay it. The tax came in the form of
ever-increasing Prohibition-related violence (the
homicide rate across the US went up by 78% during this
period), the growth in criminal activity amongst the
general populace (the number of federal convicts rose
by 561%), as well as the ‘multiplier effect’ of black market
money that helped support and expand other illicit
industries. This ‘tax burden’ was shouldered by the
urban-dwellers for a number of reasons, perhaps the
foremost of which was self-interest: they wanted to
continue drinking and the gangsters supplied their
demand - by ‘bootlegging’. Additionally, most of the
direct Prohibition-generated violence that beset the big
cities was gangster on gangster - crimes that could be
ignored by the public, provided the liquor kept flowing.
And flow it did. Particularly in Chicago.
Perhaps more than any other American city, alcohol
shaped the very character of Chicago. In 1907, an early
tabloid-style journalist - George Turner - asserted that:
“The liquor interests are vastly more extended in
Chicago that any other. The city spends at least half as
much for what it drinks as for what it eats” (1)
However, it was more than the mere drinking culture of
Chicagoans that allowed for a toleration of the kind of
"The city spends at
least half as much for
what it drinks as for
what it eats”
violence not witnessed in other American cities at
the time. Capone is credited with introducing the
Thompson submachine gun to the Jazz Age. So
closely was the notorious ‘Tommy gun’ associated
with the city that it was actually monikered the
‘Chicago typewriter’. Even more than this, bombs
became a signature of the Chicago gangster - a
choice of weapon that was not to be found in any
other American city. Chicagoans liked their beer, yes,
but there was more to their apparent acceptance of
criminality than the desire to quench a thirst.
Criminals enjoyed more freedom in their city than
any other because of the unprecedented
relationship that those criminals who supplied the
illicit demand enjoyed with the authorities. Chicago
was the corruption capital of the country.
The astronomical sums of money that were
generated by the bootlegging of alcohol were swift
to convince those in authority in Chicago that
Capone’s frequent statements of merely providing
‘light pleasures’ were truisms. Writing in his
influential 1929 study, Organized Crime in Chicago,
John Landesco rued, “The gangster does not
exaggerate when he says that he has never seen a
straight election”. If Chicago was the corruption
capital of the country, then William Hale Thompson
was its mayor. Literally. ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, perhaps
more than any other prominent politician in North
America, celebrated his close relationship with
organised crime - particularly Al Capone, who partly
financed his run for mayor in 1927. Thompson also
maintained a publicly ‘relaxed’ view of the
enforcement of Prohibition, as enshrined in the
Volstead Act: he frequently sequestered a boat that
was permanently moored in Belmont Harbor on
Lake Michigan for ‘fishing’ with his buddies. The Fish
Fans’ Club was well known as one of his private
drinking holes.
As much as the politicians were in a cash-covered
bed with the bootleggers, the average Chicagoan
found the economic benefits of driving a beer truck
or waitressing at a speakeasy too attractive to turn
down. Here again, Landesco speaks to the
irresistibility of Prohibition’s black-market financial
gains to the inhabitants of Chicago, “...when he sees
his hardworking father laboring for a few dollars a
day and accumulating nothing, and the bootlegger…
riding in limousines…” (2). When a Prohibition Agent
50 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
might earn as little as $1,200 per year (and an already
overburdened policeman even less), enforcing the
Volstead Act in Chicago became, if not impossible,
then very unlikely. That was, until the St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre.
It is unfair to characterise Chicagoans as being
indifferent to the violence and criminality staining
the fabric of their city - they weren’t, they were
weary. For years Chicago’s politicians and authorities
had campaigned on platforms of crime reduction,
but none had been inclined, once in power, to
pursue the gangsters. Indignation was
commonplace; action was rare. Until the 14th
February 1929. The photographs of the crime scene
were nationally syndicated and public revulsion led
to a typically American response: market forces
brought powerful pressures to bear on both the local
and, more importantly, the federal government to
act. For the Chicago Crime Commission - a civilian
organisation of prominent legitimate city
businessmen - enough was enough. Before the FBI
plagiarised the format for themselves, founder of the
CCC – Frank J. Loesch – responded to the massacre
with a list he called Public Enemies, “...of the
outstanding hoodlums, known murderers… which
you and I know but can't prove...”. As he explained
it, “The purpose is to keep the publicity light shining
on Chicago's… gangsters.” (3). At the top of Loesch’s
list was the newly minted Public Enemy No. 1:
Alphonse Capone.
The influential CCC convinced President Hoover that
the situation in Chicago merited federal involvement
- the likes of which had been unheard of during the
rugged individualism of the Jazz Age (excepting
Prohibition itself), and almost unimaginable in the
halls of a Congress dominated for a decade by the
Republican Party. Though paling in comparison to
the federal interventions of the New Deal, the
immediate post-Valentine’s Day Massacre era saw
some of the first steps towards a remoulding of the
relationship between Americans and their
government. Many began to shift away from the
traditional expectation of a broadly noninterventionist
national government, towards a
government that responds to certain social needs.
Recognising the shift, Hoover established the
National Commission on Law Observance and
Enforcement – more colloquially known as the
Wickersham Commission. The Commission was
tasked, at the national level, with examining the
criminal justice system under the 18th Amendment.
Its findings were unsurprising: the negative effects of
Prohibition would require an overhauling of its
enforcement, including rooting out endemic
corruption. Hoover sent the ‘feds’ to investigate the
massacre, apparently going so far as to tell the
treasury Department to “...get that man”. And get
Capone they did - on the less ‘newsworthy’ crime of
tax evasion.
In Chicago’s next Mayoral election, the louchely
corrupt Mayor Thompson was dumped out of office
by an exhausted electorate who chose reform
candidate, Anton Cermak, by a 17-point margin.
Thompson would be the last Republican Mayor of
Chicago. This exhaustion translated across the
United States. In the 1930 Congressional elections,
the Republicans lost 52 seats in the House of
Representatives and 8 in the Senate, to the reformpromising
Democrats. In the gubernatorial elections
held in the same year, the Democrats gained 7 seats,
one of which was a landslide victory for Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Roosevelt would go on to the presidency
and do three things in quick succession: cancel the
18th Amendment, declare a ‘War on Crime’, and
introduce the National Firearms Act. This act was the
first of its kind and would, among other actions, ban
weapons such as the Thompson gun and sawed-off
shotguns - the basic tools of the organised crime
trade. Of course, the Wall Street Crash and ensuing
Great Depression have the lion share of responsibility
for the profound political sea change witnessed after
1929, but the tide had turned in America before the
October collapse on Wall Street: it started in Chicago
when the Jazz Age was killed at 2122 North Clark
Street.
Notes/Sources
(1). The City of Chicago, A Study of the Great
Immoralities appeared in McClure's Magazine in
April 1907 (vol. 28, pp. 575-92)
(2) Bergreen, Laurence (1996). Capone: The Man and
the Era. Simon and Schuster. pp. 365–366.
(3) Ibid
Dr Elliott. L. Watson is the
author of BLOWING UP
THE NAZIS: WHAT YOU
DIDN'T KNOW MAY BLOW
YOUR MIND
RRP: £7.99
@thelibrarian6
52 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
From hounds
to hair: the
changing
world of crime
investigations
DR NELL DARBY
It was early September, 1888, and the body of Annie
Chapman, the second canonical victim of ‘Jack the Ripper’,
had just been discovered in the back yard of a house in
Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Already, both the public and
the press were asking why the individual believed to have
committed both murders had not been caught and
identified. Ordinary men and women offered their
unsolicited advice, including a newspaper reader who
called himself ‘Whitechapel Workman’. He pondered,
“Why do the police not employ
bloodhounds to trace the
[Whitechapel] murderer? He
could not commit such a crime
without being covered with the
blood of his victim, and this
would help the dogs to trace
him.”
It’s not surprising that the public wanted to offer their
views on how to catch serious offenders. Criminal
investigation techniques in the late Victorian era were
developing, but while some methods were, to a certain
extent, unchanging - such as searching individuals and
properties, conducting interviews with witnesses and
suspects, and trying to collect as much evidence as
possible - some of the science involved in investigations
was still in its infancy, and there was still a residual belief in
older, more esoteric techniques from past centuries.
Although the police subsequently tried to use
bloodhounds, miscommunication meant that they did not
succeed, leading to one provincial newspaper noting, ‘It
would be amusing, if there was not such a terribly tragic
side to the affair, to note how all the police plans seem to
be bent towards catching the culprit after the next
murder.’ However, the idea of dogs tracing scents had
logical roots in their success in poaching - a common
offence, particularly back in the 18th century.
Another old method of crime investigation that was used
in the Whitechapel murders, though, was never going to
succeed. This was optography - the photographing of a
victim’s eyes, in the belief that dying eyes preserved the
image of the last thing or person they had seen before
being killed. Prior to the invention of photography, people
would simply look into a murder victim’s eyes in the hope
of seeing an image in the victim’s pupils or elsewhere on
their eye’s surface: a shadowy image of a man, perhaps,
who could be loosely (very loosely) recognised in a local
village as being a particular individual. The technique
reflected general attitudes of superstition rather than
science, but after the development of photographic
techniques, it continued to be used and regarded as
‘science’, with retinas being photographed. Two ‘Ripper’
victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly,
were said to have had their eyes
photographed - surprisingly, to
no avail.
In Manchester, when Sarah
Jane Roberts was
murdered in 1880,
a photographer was
commissioned to
photograph her
‘eyeballs’ in the
hope that they had
recorded an image of
her killer. A surgeon at
the Manchester Royal
Eye Hospital
commented that if
Sarah’s eye had been
removed immediately
after her murder and
examined, it might be
possible to ‘trace the
outlines of the
murderer, or the
weapon used in the
murder.’ The police,
though, delayed obtaining
the pictures from the
photographer, having
doubts about their value -
suggesting that not all police
forces thought this was the best
way of investigating a serious
crime.
Luckily, in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, scientific methods
with more chance of locating the
perpetrators of crimes were being
developed, as it became recognised
that humans had some distinctly
individual characteristics that could
help identify them. In 1901, New
Scotland Yard introduced a fingerprint
classification system, and the
following year, an analysis of
fingerprint left at the scene of a
burglary in south London resulted in a
middle-aged labourer named Harry Jackson being
convicted of the crime at the Old Bailey.
54 / CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD
This case had shown the reliability of fingerprint evidence,
and it was used to good effect again in 1905. In March of
this year, Thomas Farrow, who managed a shop in
Deptford, and his wife Ann, were bludgeoned
to death. A fingerprint smudge was found
inside their cash box, which didn’t match
the relatively few prints Scotland Yard
had on file. However, brothers Alfred
and Albert Stratton had been seen
near the house by a witness the
morning of the murders. They
were brought into the police,
and subsequent fingerprint
analysis showed that Alfred
Stratton’s thumbprint
matched the smudge on
the cash box. Just this
small but crucial piece
of evidence was enough
to convict both brothers,
and they were hanged
for the murders. These
were the first convictions
for murder in an English
court that had resulted
from fingerprint analysis.
It’s more difficult to use
footprints in crime scene
investigations simply because
the majority of people
committing crimes tend
to be wearing shoes or other
footwear. Yet although feet
have a pattern or set of
ridges that is unique and
can be matched to an existing
print on record, just as a
fingerprint can, footwear can
also be used to identify a
perpetrator.The patterns
left by a shoe can be studied
and matched to other prints,
showing the likelihood of one
person being responsible for more
than one crime. Footwear
analysis can also help police
determine how tall an individual is
by the size of their feet; and their
weight can be assessed by how
deep the print is in the ground, and
whether it was damp or dry at the time.
This sounds like a modern type of crime investigation
technique - yet it’s said that the technique had been used
in 1786, to solve a Scottish murder case. A young girl had
been killed; footprints in a marsh near her home were
analysed, and found to have been left by boots worn by an
individual who had been running (the prints were left
deep into the mud of the marshland). An impression was
made of the boot prints, and through comparing to boots
worn by mourners at the girl’s funeral, a culprit was found.
In the Victorian era, police constables similarly used boots
as a means of identification, and followed the impressions
made by footwear as criminals fled the scenes of their
crimes. By the 1930s, footwear analysis was being formally
undertaken, with the FBI in America creating a ‘shoeprint
file’ with hundreds of examples.
Science is like water, in that it keeps moving on: it
develops, it progresses, as people’s knowledge increases.
Crime investigations have undoubtedly benefitted from
scientific advances; but the work of our ancestors in this
field should not be mocked or underestimated. They used
the means they had to hand to try and solve crimes;
although some methods to us now seem absurd - such as
the concept of optography - to our ancestors, it seemed
more logical, with the use of the very modern
photographic methods giving it a scientific bent - or at
least, the Victorians thought so. Other techniques we
recognise as more valid, such as following scents or blood
trails; fingerprint analysis and footwear analysis, have a
longer history than we might expect. One wonders,
though, what Victorian investigators, for example, might
have been able to do with microscopic hair analysis, or
DNA testing: would Jack the Ripper have been caught
with the help of modern forensic science, for example?
The police’s reputation might have improved as a result,
and a whole money-making industry would never have
existed.
Dr Nell Darby is the author
of LIFE ON THE VICTORIAN
STAGE published by Pen &
Sword
RRP: £12.99
CRIME AND THE UNDERWORLD/ 55
INSIDE
BOOKS
Jack the Ripper has been pushed from the pages in Hallie
Rubenhold’s widely acclaimed book. He haunts each
chapter, of course, stalking ever closer. But there is no
hunt for the elusive, gruesome figure. Instead, The Five
offers an unflinching and uncompromising account of the
lives of his ‘canonical’ victims.
This shift in focus makes for challenging and timely
reading. It demands readers question the way these
women – Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane
– have frequently been remembered and depicted. In
doing so, it raises difficult questions about persisting
injustices and inequalities.
The Five charts their lives because they were human
beings. They were sisters, wives, daughters and mothers.
Their stories encompass farms in Sweden and streets in
Knightsbridge. Their stories extend back – before
Whitechapel, before 1888 – and Rubenhold has
painstakingly pieced them together.
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD
PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
The Five: The untold lives of the
Women killed by Jack The
Ripper
Author: Hallie Rubenhold
Publisher: Doubleday
Language: English
"This book is notable
beyond its ties to a famous
killer, because it’s not about
him. It is a book about
society, about life."
These biographies are carefully situated in their historical
context, resulting in a detailed exploration of the social
history of this period. In particular, frequent references to
costs, earning potential and expanding families drive
home the economic realities of life for working-class
women. It is a powerful and emotive narrative. It is not an
easy read. Prostitution is also a central aspect of The Five.
The consideration of how it was conducted, defined and
perceived makes for compelling reading. Additionally,
Rubenhold argues that there is no hard evidence that
three of the five women engaged in prostitution.
This book is notable beyond its ties to a famous killer,
because it’s not about him. It is a book about society,
about life. It is a book about five women: Mary Ann “Polly”
Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine
Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
Hardback/Paperback/ebook/
Audiobook
The Five was reviewed by Mallory James. Mallory is the
author of Elegant Etiquette in the Nineteenth Century
published by Pen & Sword @_MalloryJames
It is a sobering thought that until the closing years of the
twentieth century, Britain’s courts were technically able to
impose the death penalty for a number of offences; both
civil and military. Although the last judicial hangings took
place in 1964, the death penalty, in theory at least,
remained for a number of offences. During the twentieth
century, 865 people were executed in Britain, and of those
only 3 were ever posthumously pardoned. This book
details each and every one of those executions, and in
many cases highlights the crimes that brought these men
and women to the gallows.
The book also details the various forms of capital
punishment used throughout British history. During past
centuries people were burned at the stake, had the skin
flayed from their bodies, been beheaded, garrotted, hung,
drawn and quartered, stoned, disemboweled, buried alive
and all under the guidance of a vengeful law, or at least
what passed for law at any given period. This book spares
no detail in chronicling these events and the author has
painstakingly collected together every available piece of
evidence to provide as clear a picture as possible of a time
when the law operated on the principle of an eye for an
eye.
The author, Gary M. Dobbs, is a true-crime historian and
has spent many hours researching the cases featured
within these pages to bring the reader a definitive history
of judicial punishment during the twentieth century, and
this carefully researched, well-illustrated and enthralling
text will appeal to anyone interested in the darker side of
history.
"During past centuries
people were burned at
the stake, had the skin
flayed from their
bodies, been beheaded,
garrotted, hung, drawn
These biographies are carefully situated in their historical
context, resulting in a detailed exploration of the social
history of this period. In particular, frequent references to
costs,
and
earning
quartered,
potential and expanding
stoned,
families drive
home the economic realities of life for working-class
women. disemboweled, It a powerful and emotive narrative. buried It is not an
easy read. Prostitution is also a central aspect of The Five.
The alive consideration and of how all it was under conducted, defined theand
perceived makes for compelling reading. Additionally,
Rubenhold argues that there is no hard evidence that
guidance of a vengeful
three of the five women engaged in prostitution.
law"
This book is notable beyond its ties to a famous killer,
because it’s not about him. It is a book about society,
about life. It is a book about five women: Mary Ann “Polly”
The full story on why Derek Bentley was
given a posthumous pardon in 1964
Details all 865 people who were executed
in Britain in the 20th Century
Covers the entire history of judicial
punishment from beheadings to hangings
The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to
be hanged in Britain, is presented
Discover why capital punishment was
finally abolished in the United Kingdom
A Date with the Hangman:
A History of Capital Punishment
in Britain
Author: Gary Dobbs
Publisher: Pen & Sword History
Language: English
The scene was set for a classic Western showdown. On a
dusty main street, a sheriff backed by townspeople faced
down a gang of heavily armed hired gunslingers. Tension
rose, hard words were exchanged, and someone drew
first. A few minutes later 10 men were dead or dying, and
several more suffered gunshot wounds. The hired guns,
those that remained on their feet that is, fled. But this was
not a shoot-out in the Wild West of Wyoming or Montana
or South Dakota in the 1880s, or a Hollywood re-imagining
of such an event. This was not Dodge City or Abilene. This
was the West Virginia mining town of Matewan in 1920. By
contrast the more celebrated gunfight at the OK Corral in
Tombstone lasted 30 seconds and left three dead. And
Matewan was not an aberration.
"The first book to show that
during the era of Wild West,
the most dangerous place to
be was in the Wilder East,
far from the American
frontier."
▪Largely forgotten stories about the
making of America
▪Widespread use of primary sources
by an experienced journalist with an
eye for a story
The Wild East: Gunfights,
Massacres and Race Riots far
from America's Frontier
In the era of the post-Civil War Wild West, it can be argued
that the most dangerous place to be was in the East. It was
the inevitably violent outcomes of massive social upheaval
– race wars with lynchings and massacres, heavily-armed
confrontation between infant trade unionism and the
forces of capitalism, murderous feuds between corrupt
lawmen and the early Mafia.
These were confrontations in which the US government
bombed and marginalized their own citizens, the law was
twisted for private ends, and "fake news’” became the
norm.
Author: Ian Hernon
Publisher: Amberley
Language: English
Hardback
Ian Hernon
A print journalist since 1969 and a lobby correspondent in
the Commons since 1978. Ian Hernon covered the Troubles
in Northern Ireland and more mayhem in the Middle East.
He ran the oldest Parliamentary news agency for 15 years.
He was the deputy editor of Tribune for five years. He is the
author of a dozen books including the best-selling
'Britain's Forgotten Wars'.