Aaargh

The first known crime in what is now New York City occurred in the 1620s, when the Lenape Indians scammed their new Dutch friends by selling them Manahattan island twice. Ever since, the city has been a bubbly cauldron of vice, mayhem, and chicanery. From the crooked coppers of the mid-19th century and their adversaries, the Dead Rabbits, Plug-Uglies, and Hudson Dusters, through the reign of the Jewish Kosher Nostra mobsters such as “Lepke” Buchalter and “Bugsy” Siegel, the bloody rule of the Italian hoods, the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach, and the crack-murder epidemic, New York has been one endless film noir. But who knew there were pirates, too?

“An 1850 police report estimated the presence of between four hundred and five hundred pirates in New York City,” writes Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews and other true-crime sagas, in his new book. “To the police, a pirate was any criminal who made his living on the water, attacking and robbing ships beyond the jurisdiction of the landlocked coppers….Most river pirates were boys, twelve to eighteen years old, divided among a dozen or so outfits. The Slaughter Housers worked out of Slaughter House Point; the Patsy Conroys worshipped their martyred founder; the Short Tails were known for their favorite kind of coat.” They competed with the Swamp Angels, the Border Gang, the Buckoos, and the Daybreak Boys, who struck at dawn then escaped into the sewers.