Goodfella

The memoir of a New York pickpocket in the 19th century has recently been discovered. Timothy J Gilfoyle, author of A Pickpocket's Tale, lets a ripping yarn get bogged down in the details. Review by William Grimes

A pickpocket's tale: the Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. By timothy j gilfoyle. Published by WW Norton & Company,
€12.95

Sometime in the early years of the 20th century, George Appo, a worn-out career criminal took up a pen and set down his life story. In semi-literate English – he learned to read and write late in life, while in prison – he described a miserable childhood on the streets of New York, a career as a pickpocket and confidence man, years spent addicted to opium and innumerable encounters with the criminal-justice system, such as it was in 19th-century New York.

Timothy J Gilfoyle, a historian at Loyola University in Chicago, discovered Appo's memoir in the records of the Society for the Prevention of Crime in New York, where Appo worked as an undercover investigator, and jumped at what must have seemed a golden opportunity. Appo's testimony of criminal New York in the 19th century is a rude bridge between the worlds of Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York and Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist, but Gilfoyle, who explored the sexual economy of New York from 1790 to 1920 in City of Eros, never quite capitalises on his find. A Pickpocket's Tale promises a richly reimagined otherworld of New York's Five Points slum and the corrupt political system that made the city a playing field for criminals of every cast. Instead, it is a series of detailed, rather dry footnotes to Appo's autobiography, which is served up in lengthy excerpts and provides the book's narrative drive.

Gilfoyle has done a fine job of research, providing a wealth of material on opium dens, the varied forms of punishment at prisons like Sing Sing and the fine points of the notorious swindle known as the green-goods game. Some of this bears on Appo's experiences and makes compelling reading, but a lot of it is digressive and distracting. There are fascinating bits of information in Gilfoyle's forays into penal theory, jurisprudence and the lives of various notorious New Yorkers, but the material often has more to do with his long hours in the library than with Appo's story, which is a good one.

Appo was the son of a Chinese father, Quimbo Appo (whose real name, as his son spelled it, was Lee Ah Bow) who learned English and married an Irishwoman, but murdered his landlady after an argument. George, aged 3, was taken in by a family living in the Five Points in Lower Manhattan, New York's most crime-ridden neighborhood. He never went to school. Instead, he sold newspapers, learned how to pick pockets and embarked on a life of crime, heavy drinking and drug addiction.

In his memoir, to be published next year by Rutgers University Press, edited by Gilfoyle, Appo comes across as intelligent and likable. He lived by a code that placed a premium on being a "good fellow". A good fellow was brave – a "nervy crook", as Appo put it. He was loyal, dependable, generous when his pockets were full, and never ratted.

"Many times I have been assaulted by would-be toughs and I have defended myself and never howled for the police for satisfaction in the courts, even while I got the worst of the fight," Appo wrote.

Appo spent more than a decade jailed and was, as he wrote, assaulted many times. Once mid-swindle, a victim shot Appo in the head. He lost an eye.

At Sing Sing, guards threw him over a table and beat him with a paddle, knocking out his front teeth. Time and again, he woke up in the hospital, head bandaged, simply asked for his coat and left, ready to pick pockets, put over the con known as the 'flimflam' or lure marks into the green-goods game.

Gilfoyle does fine job describing the life of the pickpocket. He explains, for example, that a shift in men's fashions to shorter frock coats, exposed the front pockets of the pants and proved a boon to pickpockets. Even better was the sack coat, with its multiple outside pockets.

Gilfoyle never explains the flimflam, but he explores the intricacies of the green-goods game. This was essentially the ancestor of the Nigerian email appeal. Victims answered a circular promising high-quality forged banknotes at a price of $100 for $1,000 of counterfeits. They were shown real currency, but in midtransaction a bag filled with blank paper or sawdust was switched for the bag with the cash.

Appo did some of his finest work as a middleman for a green-goods kingpin. His downfall came when he was hauled before a committee of the state senate investigating police corruption. He told investigators little, but criminals and police, made nervous by exaggerated newspaper stories, assumed he had spilled the beans on their activities and turned on him. His criminal career was effectively over.

Appo reformed. The world of honest work had always been closed to him, but late in life he became a combination employee and charity case for the Society for the Prevention of Crime before dying, at 73, in 1930. Appo expressed no bitterness about what his life might have been. He took his hard knocks without complaining. He was a good fellow right to the end.p

©New York Times