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

last updated 8 January 2015

New York City in the late 1800s was a good place to be a bad man. The streets teemed with petty swindlers, shady businessmen, and warring gangs. The ranks of government weren't much better, from the corrupt beat cop on up to the clubhouse bosses. George Washington Appo was a con man, a pickpocket, a criminal from childhood who served time in Sing Sing, used drugs heavily, and frequently had his teeth knocked in. His wasn't an unusual life for lower-class men in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City. What was unusual was that Appo eventually reformed, and even learned to read and write. He left posterity a unique first-person memoir of his nefarious life.

Nearly a century later, Timothy Gilfoyle discovered the unpublished memoir in a private archive, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Drawing upon the document's rich cache of information, anecdote, and language, he's produced an 'œinstructive and somewhat chilling depiction' of the era's criminal underclass. While crime offered urchins like the young Appo a way out of penniless despair, said Matthew Price in The New York Observer, pickpockets of the era were often punished more severely than murderers. Gilfoyle keeps the big picture in mind as he follows Appo from one underworld haunt to the next. His accounts of the routine cruelty of jail life 'œmake for hair-raising reading,' and you'll learn more about opium dens and long-defunct swindles than you could ever want to know.