Five Points Gang
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Five Points Gang was a 19th-century criminal organization based in the Sixth Ward (The Five Points) of New York City.
Contents |
[edit] The Five Points
In an area of Manhattan the carfax where five streets (Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter) and Little Water (extinct)) converged was known as "The Five Points". This area lay between Broadway and the Bowery, and is roughly the northern part of today's downtown. By the 1820s this district was already starting to fall into disrepair and disrepute, and was even then considered as a slum area of the city. There were many gambling dens and "houses of ill repute" in the Five Points area, and it had a reputation as a dangerous place to travel, a place where many people had been mugged, particularly at night. In 1842 Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled at the horrendous living conditions he found there [1]. In that decade a movement to reform the district was undertaken by various church groups intent on helping the Five Points inhabitants. Abraham Lincoln also (reluctantly) visited the Five Points area in 1860.[2] The Sixth Ward also had a reputation as being an area with a corrupt political process, particularly after the American Civil War (in one election, more ballots were counted than actual registered voters in the area).
[edit] Origins
By the 1870s a wave of Italian and Jewish immigrants were settling into the area as criminal gangs were beginning to vie for control of the money to be made from illicit activities. Gangs such as the Whyos, replacing the Dead Rabbits, were composed mainly of Irish members and they fought with the predominantly Jewish gangs such as Monk Eastman's Eastman Gang, who were also terrorizing New York neighborhoods, but in the Five Points area a thug named Paolo Antonini Vaccareli, also known as Paul Kelly, was forming a gang of his own, which he called The Five Points Gang. This group would become the most significant street gang in American history and ultimately change the way criminal groups operated in America. During the gang's later years, Kelly's second in command was a brutal criminal named Johnny Torrio, who would help form a national crime syndicate in the United States. The Five Points Gang had a well-earned reputation for brutality, and in battles with rival gangs they would often fight to the death. Kelly and Torrio recruited members from other gangs in New York to join the Five Points organization, looking for the most capable and brutal members from rival gangs to join their own. From the James Street Gang came another notable recruit, Al Capone, later to become one of the most notorious criminals in the country. It was Johnny Torrio who initially sent for Capone to come to Chicago to help him with racketeering he had established there. The man who would later become the most powerful criminal in the country, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, also joined the Five Points crew.
[edit] Rise to power & conflict with the Eastmans
As the Five Points Gang became more experienced and organized, Kelly and his lieutenants saw the money that could be made by supporting corrupt politicians in their election bids. By threatening voters, falsifying voter lists and stuffing ballot boxes, the gang helped corrupt city officials of the infamous Tammany Hall era retain power. At the turn of the century the only real opposition to the Five Pointers was from Monk Eastmans' gang. The rivals were disputing a strip of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, both laying claim to the right to carry on their criminal conduct there. In 1901 a Five Pointer shot Eastman in the stomach, but Eastman survived the attack. Soon after, a Five Pointer was shot and killed by a member of the Eastman crew. By 1903 the feud came to a head and there was an all out gang war between the two groups. In one incident Kelly, Torrio and fifty Five Pointers were in a gun battle with a similarly sized force of Eastmans' gang. Police were called to the scene but had to retreat due to the severity of the battle, which went on for several hours. Three men were killed outright and many were wounded in the battle, and when the police finally gained control of the situation, Monk Eastman was arrested. He spent only a few hours in jail, however, as a Tammany-controlled judge released him after he swore he was only an innocent passerby when the battle broke out. Due to the general public anger at this battle in the streets of New York, a Tammany Hall deputy named Tom Foley brought Kelly and Eastman together and told them that neither would enjoy any political protection if they did not resolve the border dispute. The gang leaders shook hands on the deal and peace was restored, but not for long. Within two months the war was raging again, and once more the leaders of the rival gangs were brought together for a meeting. At this time, however, it was determined that the two men should meet each other in a boxing match, with the winner's gang receiving the disputed territory and the acknowledgment that they were the "Top Crew" in the city.
On the appointed day, hundreds of men from both gangs met at an abandoned warehouse in the Bronx section of New York. Eastman and Kelly fought each other for two solid hours, each determined to show he was the better man. Kelly had been a boxer in his younger days, and was said to make a better showing in the earlier rounds, but Eastman was a larger man and fought ferociously. At the end of the match, neither man had been knocked out, and the match was declared a draw. The gang leaders told their men that they were still at war. At this point the Tammany Hall bosses decided to back the Five Points crew, and to withdraw any legal or political help to Eastman and his gang. In 1904 Eastman was beaten unconscious by a policeman who had foiled a robbery while it was taking place, and Eastman was convicted of the crime and sentenced to a ten-year term in Sing Sing. When his successor Max "Kid Twist" Zwerbach was murdered in 1908 by members of the Five Points Gang, the Eastman crew began to crumble.
[edit] Final years
Kelly survived an attempt on his own life, shot three times by two of his own lieutenants, James T. "Biff" Ellison and Pat "Razor" Riley, in a gun battle inside one of his own nightclubs. Pressure from Tammany Hall forced him to keep a lower profile after this incident. He subsequently became more involved in the nascent labor union rackets and he ended up dying of natural causes in 1936.
After Monk Eastman was finally released in 1909, he was never able to regain the leadership of the criminal organization he had started, and fell into a life of petty crime and numerous jail terms. Within a few years, Eastman joined the army as a 44-year-old man to fight in World War I, and had a distinguished military record fighting in combat as fearlessly as he had on the streets of New York. He received an honorable discharge in 1919, but a year later was shot 5 times and killed by a Prohibition agent. He was given a funeral with full military honors.[3]
The rackets and criminal activities that the Five Points Gang had established were taken over by the Mafia gangs that were becoming more powerful in the first twenty years of the century. Former Five Pointers like Torrio, Capone and Luciano became the new leadership of these groups and expanded their operations on a national and international basis. With the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, profits from bootlegged liquor became a huge earner for these groups, and what had been the Five Points Gang were absorbed into these Mafia families.
