ON A flight back from New York recently, while listening out for bird strikes, I read a book about a man called George Appo, writes Frank McNally.
Although you wouldn't know it from his name, Appo is one of the more colourful characters from the history of Irish-American crime. He didn't feature in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, set in Manhattan's notorious Five Points district. But that was also his milieu, where he grew up in the 1850s amid slums and squalor and streetnames including "Murderer's Alley".
Appo might have enjoyed a life of middle-class respectability. His Chinese father – real name Lee Ah Bow – was for a time a successful tea entrepreneur, who did what many Chinese New Yorkers did in those years by marrying an Irishwoman.
Catherine Fitzpatrick gave her son his looks and, it seems, not much else. She took to drinking at some point. Her husband took to objecting to this violently, and forbidding her from fraternising with other Irish women who were “leading her astray”. At times, friends feared for her life at his hands. In the event, it was the landlady he finally murdered in a violent rage.
With his father in jail, the infant Appo was soon abandoned by his mother. A New York version of Oliver Twist, he was reared by neighbours and the streets. He never spent a day in school.
During a long criminal career, he tried many different things. But his small stature, combined with a gentle manner that somehow survived throughout his life, recommended him to a particular line of larceny then booming.
The 1860s would in time be recalled by pickpockets as the crime’s halcyon days. This was partly due to changing fashions – notably a rise in the hem-lines of frock coats. In any case, Appo was especially skilful. On an outing to a fair in Toronto once, he collected $600 – the annual salary of a skilled labourer – and 22 watches.
But such success carried risks. He became, in the cliché, known to the police, who sometimes took the precaution of arresting him in advance of big public events. And apart from the threat of jail, where he spent years, such front-line crime had more immediate dangers. During his life on the streets, Appo was assaulted at least nine times, shot twice, had his throat cut, and collected more than a dozen scars.
He had the talent for more sophisticated, confidence-based crime, clearly. Only his lack of literacy held him back, until at last he got his big break via the so-called “Green goods trade”. This was a forerunner of the modern-day “Nigerian scam” which thrives on the internet. It too exploited technological breakthroughs, particularly railroads and the telegraph. But mostly it exploited a public still getting used to the idea of a national banking system.
The trick involved criminals pretending to have stolen or discarded engraving plates from the US treasury. In fact they had no such thing. The bait was always real banknotes, a case of which would be “sold” at cut price to the victim and then, during an orchestrated moment of distraction, switched with an identical case, often containing sawdust.
It was a hugely lucrative business in its day, with a hierarchy of exponents topped by “capitalists” (the men who provided the cash and organisation) and “writers” (of the cryptic circulars that advertised the scheme, typically targeting gullible businessmen with cash-flow problems, or southerners with a post-war grudge against the federal government).
Bottom of the pile were the front-men, who escorted targets to and from the rendezvous. Appo became one of these, working for the racket’s Mr Big, a man called James McNally.
No relation to the diarist (I swear), McNally was wealthy, well dressed, handsome, and like many of his circle (including Appo) an opium addict. He had the air of a stockbroker, though he was quite open about his criminal entrepreneurship. He even argued that it was honourable activity, since it involved meeting each target “face to face, man to man, and if he loses his money, he certainly ought to, because he is a bigger crook than I am”.
This paradox underlay the whole business. The scam’s beauty from a criminal viewpoint was that victims could hardly complain to the police (who were usually paid off anyway). And on the rare occasions when a case reached court, judges struggled to find illegality in a situation where the only obvious crime was the one the victim had attempted to perpetrate on the US treasury before being foiled.
It could be argued that the fraudsters were encouraging respect for the banking system. Even so, this scheme too had its risks, especially for front-men. Victims could resort to violence, and they did. In one dispute, Appo lost an eye.
What saved the rest of him and ensured he reached the age of 73 was his basic good nature. He found religion at some point – or it found him, in the form of evangelist reformers who believed he could be saved. He became an upstanding member of society, eventually, and wrote a memoir.
The book was crude. But it provided the framework for Timothy Gilfoyle's A Pickpocket's Tale: the Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. Painstakingly researched, this shines a fascinating light under the stones of the city of Edith Wharton and Henry James. And while it's not exactly an airport novel, I can confirm that it also works quite well as a distraction from the thought of geese hitting your plane.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com