Gotham's Gun

The central figure in Timothy J. Gilfoyle's impressive study considered himself a "good fellow." According to George Appo's autobiography, which operates as the spine of the book, "What constitutes a Good Fellow in the eyes and estimation of the underworld is a nervy crook, a money getter and spender" (p. 60). This fellow takes risks, endures incarceration, and never rats on his friends. Indeed, he hardly ever finks on foes. Gilfoyle brings this code into high relief by meticulously tracking Appo's upbringing in one of New York City's most notorious slums, the Five Points. Sparing little detail, he describes the stench of overcrowded tenements slumping atop streets so putrid that residents lined the alleyways with "stones and boards simply to keep their feet out of the excrement" (p. 19). Poverty and decrepitude helped birth a new generation of thieves as the city advanced rapidly and unevenly toward modernity. With passages from Appo's memoir smoothly interspersed, Gilfoyle's rich narrative draws from an exhaustive array of indictment papers, trial transcripts, state committee reports, annual prison reports, inmate case files, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters. These materials allow him to chart New York City's shift from an amateur police force dealing with a low-murder rate and no bank robberies to a chaotic urban hub teeming with modern-day cops and robbers (p. xiii). He also maps urban decay, municipal corruption, violence, drug abuse, and alternative notions of manhood.

Gilfoyle argues that because historians have chosen to focus on organized crime rather than individual criminals, men like George Appo are an enigma and the inner workings of nineteenth-century criminal life are essentially "uncharted territory" (pp. xv–xvi). Yet studies of the New York underworld and its denizens are not uncommon. From early studies such as Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872) and Charles Sutton's The New York Tombs (c.1873) to edited first person accounts such as The Maimie Papers (1977) to secondary works such as Gay New York (1994) and The Murder of Helen Jewett (1998), arguably little about the nineteenth-century underworld remains hidden.¹

However, histories such as A Pickpocket's Tale are rare. Gilfoyle provides a level of detail that is hardly rivaled. His book makes a stellar addition to historical crime studies as well as works that explore the urban underworld and American justice from the bottom up. This approach highlights individual urban-crime figures and the themes of criminal justice, public policy, and incarceration. Gilfoyle's work also adds to a growing body of narrative histories such as A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (2003). Recounting the 1895 case of three falsely accused black women in Virginia, Suzanne Lebsock combines meticulous research with beautiful prose to furnish a study that is both a historical and literary triumph. In this sense, Gilfoyle's work is certainly on par.

A Pickpocket's Tale begins with Quimbo Appo, a Chinese immigrant in nineteenth-century America. The extraordinary breadth of Gilfoyle's research is readily apparent as he follows Quimbo from his early prospecting days in California during the 1840s gold rush to his move east where he works at a Boston teashop. Transcending substantial social barriers, Quimbo learned to speak English, converted to Christianity, and married Catherine Fitzpatrick, an Irish immigrant. He became the proud father of a healthy baby boy, George, born in 1856 on the Fourth of July. But by 1859 the Appos had fallen on hard times. Catherine started drinking heavily and associating with local Irish immigrants who often called Quimbo a "China nigger" (p. 11). Mounting poverty and other social pressures severely strained the Appos' marital relations. During a violent altercation with his wife, Quimbo fatally stabbed Mary Fletcher, the couple's landlady who tried to intervene. Quimbo's arrest, conviction, and subsequent incarceration for murder marked the complete deterioration of the family. Catherine abandoned George shortly after her...