CHAPTER ONE MAKING A NAME Police captain Thomas F. Byrnes was at the corner of Broadway and East Eighth Street, near Astor Place, when he heard the news of the shooting. The word was spreading like wildfire through Lower Manhattan: just after four o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, January 6, 1872, "Jubilee Jim" Fisk Jr., the roguish stock speculator and robber baron, had been gunned down at the Grand Central Hotel, the largest in America and among the most luxurious. His assailant was his erstwhile business partner turned archenemy, Edward "Ned" Stokes, a rival for the affections of Fisk's mistress, a voluptuous failed actress named Josephine Mansfield, better known as Josie. The hotel, located at the corner of Broadway and Amity Street (now West Third), fell within Byrnes's jurisdiction-the Fifteenth Precinct-of which he had been made captain two years earlier. It was a mixed but mostly respectable neighborhood encompassing Greenwich Village and parts of the East Village. Byrnes raced to the Fifteenth Precinct station house on Mercer Street, where he found Stokes already in custody. At just under six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with piercing, almost frightening eyes and a flowing walrus mustache, the thirty-year-old Byrnes cut an imposing figure. He sought to interrogate the prisoner, but the slender, handsome, impeccably dressed Stokes, the same age as the captain, would answer no questions beyond giving his name. Byrnes ordered him placed in a cell and left the station for the crime scene, less than a block away, arriving there about 4:20 p.m. As Byrnes reached the second-floor hotel suite where Fisk lay dying, details of the incident began emerging. The adversarial relationship between Fisk and Stokes was already well known to the public and was blaring daily from newspaper front pages: once business partners in a Brooklyn oil refinery, they became enemies when Fisk ousted Stokes over a charge of embezzlement. In the meantime, the married Stokes had entered into an illicit relationship with the twenty-four-year-old divorcee Josie Mansfield, who preferred him to her rich benefactor. The older (thirty-seven), short, rotund, cherubic-faced Fisk held little appeal for the "Cleopatra of Twenty-Third Street" beyond the money, jewelry, and Chelsea brownstone he had lavished upon her. Virtually all the largesse Fisk amassed was a product of unscrupulous business dealings. Together with his financial partner Jay Gould, Fisk had employed stock manipulation and bribery to wrest control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore, a few years earlier. Fisk then used his political connections with the notorious Boss Tweed, head of New York's corrupt Tammany Hall machine, to gain favors-and buy judges-to further the Erie's interests. In 1869 Fisk and Gould infamously cornered the market on gold during a financial panic, known as Black Friday, that ruined many investors, scandalized the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and enriched Gould and Fisk. Unlike the dour Gould, Fisk wore his wealth on his sleeve, dressing ostentatiously in colorful velvets and silks and adorning his fingers with large diamonds. He sported a finely waxed red mustache. For vanity's sake, he underwrote a New York state militia regiment and had himself elected colonel. Ruthless in pursuit of his enemies, Fisk publicly accused Stokes and Mansfield of blackmail when they conspired to give the newspapers the love letters he had written Josie before she jilted him-letters that the couple said would reveal Fisk's many past financial improprieties. Mansfield sued him for $50,000 for money she claimed he owed her and for libel, prompting Fisk to countersue. He also used his influence to procure a grand jury indictment of Stokes for extortion. Earlier on the day of the shooting, Mansfield and Stokes had appeared in court to testify in her suit against Fisk, who did not attend. After a withering cross-examination, Mansfield broke down in sobs, but Stokes held his own and afterward went to Delmonico's, the city's most fashionable restaurant, for a late lunch of oysters and beer with his lawyers. Stokes's good mood changed when he learned of the grand jury indictment. Enraged, Stokes hired a carriage to help him track down his antagonist. He stopped first at Fisk's Erie Railroad office in the Grand Opera-house at Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue. Upon learning that Fisk had gone to the Grand Central Hotel to visit friends, Stokes had his driver take him there. Stokes combed the hotel in search of Fisk but did not find him. Then, as Stokes stood on the landing of the ladies' staircase, he saw Fisk ascending the stairs below. At point-blank range from about five stairsteps above, Stokes shot Fisk twice with a newly manufactured, four-chamber Colt House revolver; it was destined to become known as the Jim Fisk pistol. The first bullet pierced Fisk's abdomen, and the second struck him in the arm. He turned away and tumbled down the stairs. Doctors quickly concluded that the stomach wound was mortal. After finishing the deed, Stokes flung away his gun and looked to make his escape. A hotel doorman and bellboy had witnessed the shooting, while other onlookers heard the shots and saw Stokes take flight. When the hotel proprietor called out, "Stop that man!" Stokes ran downstairs to the hotel barbershop. He slipped and fell on the shop's marble floor and was overcome by several men, including some guests who leapt from their barber chairs with lather and towels still covering their faces. The arresting officer on the scene was Henry McCadden, one of Byrnes's Fifteenth Precinct patrolmen. Informed by hotel employees that Stokes was the shooter, McCadden took the prisoner up to the victim's suite, where Fisk was surrounded by doctors and friends such as Gould and Boss Tweed. McCadden asked Fisk whether Stokes was the man who shot him, to which Fisk responded affirmatively. The New York Herald misidentified McCadden as Byrnes and spelled his name as "Burns," a reflection of how little known Byrnes was at the time. When Byrnes got to the hotel a few minutes after McCadden, he took control of the investigation and began questioning witnesses. Per common practice at the time, he had them arrested and held at the station house until they could make their statements. Byrnes spent the next several hours shuttling back and forth between the hotel and the precinct station, a two-minute walk from one to the other. In his cell, Stokes asked for some cigars, and being a chain cigar smoker himself, Byrnes indulged the prisoner's request. Stokes lit cigar after cigar and smoked furiously, flinging them away one by one. At the station around seven o'clock, Byrnes was told that Fisk was not going to survive. Although witnesses had orally identified Stokes as the assailant-and Fisk had as well-Byrnes thought it important to obtain a written statement from Fisk before he died. Courts demanded the strongest of evidence to convict one of murder in those days, when the death penalty beckoned. Byrnes therefore summoned the city coroner, who customarily recorded the victim's "antemortem" statements, and took him to the hotel, where an informal jury of hotel residents was impaneled to hear Fisk's testimony. Fisk attested that Stokes was the man who shot him. Around the same time, a hotel clerk gave Byrnes the Colt revolver that a female guest had found on a sofa in the women's parlor. Byrnes placed a mark on it so it could be identified later at trial and showed the gun to several people in the hotel to impress it upon their memories. He also retrieved a bullet that was found on the stairs and matched it to the Colt pistol. "Matched" is probably an overstatement, though, since forensic ballistics did not yet exist. A law enforcement officer could eyeball a bullet from a crime scene and say whether, in general, it could have come from the type of firearm found there, but there was no way to determine definitively that this bullet was fired from that gun. Fisk died the next morning at ten forty-five and, despite his widespread reputation as a crook, was mourned by thousands. Byrnes took possession of the body pending the coroner's arrival. He then transported Stokes from the precinct station cell to the Tombs, the notoriously dank jail and court complex built in the Egyptian style over a poorly drained swamp pond that previously had served as the city's main water supply. On the way over, Byrnes rejected Stokes's request that they stop for a drink at a bar. Stokes was held at the Tombs pending his trial for murder, at which Byrnes testified about the arrest, the gun and bullets, and Fisk's antemortem statement. Stokes's lawyers presented three theories: that he acted in self-defense, believing Fisk would shoot him first; that Fisk died due to poor medical treatment; and that Stokes was temporarily insane. Although Stokes claimed Fisk had a gun, no other witness had seen him with one, and Byrnes testified that a thorough search of the premises had found no such second weapon. The first trial ended with a hung jury, and the second produced a first-degree murder conviction, for which Stokes was sentenced to be hanged. But the conviction was overturned on appeal due to a technicality: a new witness came forward to claim-falsely-that he had seen a gun in Fisk's hands. In the third trial, the jury compromised on a verdict of third-degree manslaughter, and Stokes was sentenced to four years in state prison. Jim Fisk was the most famous private citizen murdered in American history to that point; as an assassination, its notoriety was exceeded only by Abraham Lincoln's seven years earlier. And although Thomas Byrnes's role in the affair was modest-Stokes was identified and in custody before Byrnes was at the scene-it did bring him public notice for the first time. Four months after the murder, the still relatively unknown Byrnes was back in the papers. On May 24, 1872, one of his detectives, William Henderson, was shot and nearly killed by a man he was in the process of arresting just outside the Mercer Street station. Cop killers were hunted down by men in blue as relentlessly then as now, so when the assailant, Robert Crawford-who happened to be the brother-in-law of Commodore Vanderbilt-fled the scene and hid out in Vanderbilt's home, Byrnes personally led a posse of his men to apprehend him. They found all entrances to the Commodore's massive redbrick mansion at 10 Washington Place barred and the inhabitants denying that Crawford was concealed there. Though not in possession of a warrant, Byrnes obtained police chief James Kelso's permission to forcibly enter the Commodore's edifice if he was satisfied the fugitive was hiding in there. After Byrnes told Vanderbilt he was prepared to break down every door if necessary and search the entire premises, Crawford was produced and taken into custody. The next day, Byrnes arrested Paul Lowe, the twenty-two-year-old son of the ex-governor of Maryland, for shooting three men, including one of his own friends, in a Saturday-night melee on Mercer Street. After interviewing several of those involved, Byrnes tracked down Lowe, who was preparing to escape to Maryland, and obtained his confession. A month later, Byrnes was in the headlines again, praised for quickly solving the burglary of the Van Tine silk manufacturing company just below Union Square. Acting on a tip, Byrnes and Detective Henderson, since recuperated from his shooting, staked out a pair of locations on Wooster Street and arrested coachmen carrying trunks of stolen silk dresses and ladies' apparel. All $4,000 worth of the pilfered goods was recovered. This time, in its report on the incident, the New York Herald got Byrnes's name right. It would not be misspelled again. CHAPTER TWO A COP IS BORN Or maybe the New York Herald had gotten Byrnes's name half right the first time. The future star policeman was born on June 15, 1842, in County Wicklow, Ireland, just south of Dublin, the youngest of three sons of a man listed as William "Burns" in census records and city directories. William Burns was born in Ireland between 1805 and 1810 and married Rose Doyle, a woman the same age or a little younger. They emigrated with their three sons to America in 1845, crossing the Atlantic on the freight and passenger ship Yorkshire, in steerage, with the toddler Thomas on board. The family of five thereby joined the multitudes of fellow countrymen who left their native land in the wake of the great Irish potato famine. Three daughters would follow, all born in New York between 1845 and 1852. Contrary to the only biography of Thomas Byrnes, which heavily fictionalizes his early years, his parents were not named James and Ellen; they did not settle in the fetid Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, the worst slum in America; his mother was not a laundress; and his father was not a garment worker and labor agitator who became a drunken bartender and left the family. Byrnes did not have a younger brother, Deven, who died of cholera at age twelve, nor did one of his sisters hold on to her job as a housemaid "by giving in to the sexual demands of the master of the house." There was no kindly Father Coogan of St. Patrick's Cathedral, then located on the Lower East Side, who provided comfort and support to the family. The reality is less sentimental. William Burns, a laborer and porter, moved his family into the old Fifth Ward of Manhattan adjoining the Hudson River, the area now known as Tribeca. Though far from the fashionable neighborhood of expensive lofts and fine restaurants it would become a century and a half later, it was not a place of squalor. Rather, it was transforming from a primarily residential area to a center for textiles and dry goods, buoyed by the growing shipping business along the Hudson River piers. The Washington Market at Chambers Street was the city's premier open-air venue for wholesale produce. In 1855 the Burnses were living with five other families in a five-story brick dwelling at 30 Jay Street, near the original warehouse headquarters of the American Express Company, then an express mail and package delivery service. All thirty-seven of the inhabitants, including the eight Burns family members, were either born in Ireland or were of Irish parentage. By that time, 25 percent of the city's population of six hundred thousand were Irish-born, and more Irish lived in Manhattan than in any city in the world except Dublin. Viewed by many as rowdy drunkards, the Irish faced severe discrimination. Any family of eight would have felt crowded and without privacy in what were three or at most four rooms, some of them windowless. Almost certainly the Burnses lacked running water; at best, they may have had access to a nearby tap connected to the relatively new Croton Aqueduct reservoir at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, where the main branch of the New York Public Library and Bryant Park now stand. But indoor toilets in such tenement houses were still years away. Lacking central heating, the buildings were cold and damp in winter, while they baked during New York's hot, humid summers. Excerpted from Rogues' Gallery: The Birth of Modern Policing and Organized Crime in Gilded Age New York by John Oller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
