Gangster

“ Dead men have told many tales. More than once a dead man’s tales have brought men to the gallows. But gangsters have not learned this. They are a stupid lot.
One fact consoled Johnny. These gangsters wanted something. They wanted the telltale bullets that were capable of sending their fellow gangster, him of the masked face, to the electric chair or to prison for life. These they would have at all cost. They undoubtedly expected to find them on Johnny’s person. ”

“ It is defined as 'a company of persons acting together for some purpose, usually criminal,' while the term 'gangster' is defined as 'a member of a gang of roughs, hireling criminals, thieves, or the like.' Webster's New International Dictionary, 2d Ed. ”

“ It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine, have made themselves cocks of the forecastle. Standing together, they have established a reign of terror and are ruling the forecastle. All their training in New York in ruling the slum brutes and weaklings in their gangs fits them for the part. As near as I could make out from Wada’s tale, they first began on the two Italians in their watch, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. ”

“ After a sensational series of fights mixed with thrilling detective work, many women, including the young sister, are saved. The operations of the gangsters, in securing victims from the emigrant ships, the railroad stations and the working classes are shown in a manner treated delicately, yet imbued with a powerful moral lesson. ”

“ Best it can do is pick off some of the little ones and forget about the big ones. Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the twenty-six states, and every so often there’s a dividend—more than a workman makes in a lifetime. ”

“ The Attorney General himself appeared before one of the committees and pointed out that crime had become highly organized, with strong political connections and illegal methods of procedure; that gangsters and desperate criminals had equipped themselves with every modern convenience and invention; that modern gangsters have no regard for life, property, decency or anything else ”

“ Mr. Grey ran forward and whatever he could find, he piled up against the door, shutting off their return into the cellar. The gangsters were now trapped in the second house. The government man ran up the stairs, and cautiously emerged from the house, to make sure his own men did not fire on him. Coming out into the open, [208] he directed his men to close up on the house.
In the meanwhile, the gangsters, realizing that their escape was cut off at both ends, set up sub-machine guns at both ends of the house and began to rake every inch of ground within sight. ”

“ GANGSTERS MUST GO
DISTRICT ATTORNEY AMES DECLARES
Police now assured that Owen Conway's rule will end. The gangsters have been a menace to the neighborhood. East side long ago had decided to change for the better. ”

“ They are in gangs of about fifteen or twenty, and over every gang nearly as many soldiers, and an officer, all armed, are placed to force them [308] to labour. At night they are incarcerated in the gaol, and their bed is composed simply of boards without any covering; they are allowed no supper. Admitting their criminality to be great, and their punishment just, still such a system has a degree of barbarity in it which can never prevail except among savage nations. ”

“ When the necessity presents itself for a descent upon the gang after some particularly flagrant outrage, the police have a task on hand that is not of the easiest. The gangs, like foxes, have more than one hole to their dens. In some localities, where the interior of a block is filled with rear tenements, often set at all sorts of odd angles, surprise alone is practicable. Pursuit through the winding ways and passages is impossible. The young thieves know them all by heart. ”

“ You take a turn on the platform together, and he explains the whole mystery. “The fact is,” he begins, “I am Sergeant Witchem, of the Detective police.”
“And your four victims are?”—
“Members of a crack school of swell-mobsmen.”
“What do you mean by ‘school?’ ”
“Gang. There is a variety of gangs—that is to say, of men who ‘work’ together, who play into one another’s hands. These gentlemen hold the first rank, both for skill and enterprise, and had they been allowed to remain would have brought back a considerable booty. Their chief is the Frenchman.” ”

“ Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?
She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage bags—young fellows all in the full force of life—these, and "the gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging—that is going—for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the city meet the gang coming out. ”

“ For them and for all of us, it is past time to end the violence.
At younger and younger ages, boys and girls are turning to gangs. For a child without an involved family, a gang offers a feeling of belonging. For a young person without options for tomorrow, a gang offers a sense of purpose. For all those born in a home cordoned off against danger, with bars on the windows and chains on the doors, life on the streets seems all too often a taste of freedom they have never known. ”

“ Gangland is not dull, and will overlook even a want of courage in one who, for bed and beef stews, freely places his purse at its disposal.
There are two great gangs on the East Side. These are the Five Points and the Monk Eastmans. There are smaller gangs, but each owes allegiance to either the one or the other of the two great gangs, and fights round its standard in event of general gang war.
There is danger in belonging to either of these gangs. But there is greater danger in not. I speak of folk of the Bottler's ways and walks. ”

“ It was an undercurrent of which he had gradually become conscious, the sense of some unseen, guiding power, that moved and swayed and controlled, and was present, dominant, in every den and dive in crimeland. There had been many gang leaders and heads of little coteries of crime, cunning, crafty in their way, and all of them unscrupulous, like the Wolf, for instance, who had sworn openly and boastingly through the Bad Lands, and had been believed for a season, that they would bring the Gray Seal to a last accounting—but it was more than this now. ”

“ Six murderous assaults were made at one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or "hang-out." ”

“ A country house with a portico is a fine field for the display of genius in burglary. One of the gang scales the portico after dusk, most likely at the family dinner-hour, gets from the roof of the portico through a convenient window, and then quietly admits his accomplices. In all such robberies there is generally one member of the gang, the cleverest and best educated, who has no active part in the crime. He does all the intellectual work, schemes and directs the whole business; but though the police know him and would give their eyes to catch him tripping, he never tumbles into their trap. ”

“ Experience shows that the vicious become more vicious by confinement in the chain gangs, and it not infrequently happens that individuals, after having been degraded by a first sentence, become outcasts and spend from a half to two-thirds of their lives thereafter in prison. The chain gang system can hardly be 128 urged in any sense as a reformatory, and from the frequent returns thereto of the criminal class can be hardly styled as a first-class preventive of crime. ”

“ The gang is an institution in New York. The police deny its existence while nursing the bruises received in nightly battles with it that tax their utmost resources. The newspapers chronicle its doings daily, with a sensational minuteness of detail that does its share toward keeping up its evil traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as bad as the worst. The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement-house growth. ”

“ He explained to me how the gang waylay the unwary traveller, enter into conversation with him, and have him suddenly seized, when the superior throws his own girdle round the victim's neck and strangles him, pressing the knuckles against the spine. Taking off his own girdle, he passed it round my arm, and showed me the turn as coolly as a sailor once taught me the hangman's knot. The Thug is of any caste, and from any part of India. The profession have particular stations, which they generally select for murder, throwing the body of their victim into a well. ”

“ Doubtless, too, the boys’ grief when a hostile gang wrecks their property or runs off with their bats and balls reinforces powerfully the law of meum et tuum. Certain it is that experienced educators regard as vastly more serious the case of the lad who goes off to steal by himself for his own profit than that of the one who steals in company with his fellows and for the advantage of the gang.
The predatory activities of the gang do, then, in no small measure, tend to cure themselves. So far as they do not, they will naturally have to be put down by force in the interests of law and order. ”

“ The jargon of the thief and the yeggman is common among these boys’ gangs. They talk casually of murder and robbery as though these were familiar events in their lives. They lay tentative plans for the robbery 45 of stores or saloons with no more real intention of commission than the schoolboy football player has of actual achievement when he imagines what he would do if his team were playing Yale. They talk easily and knowingly of “turning off” various people in the neighborhood, by which they mean robbing them. ”

“ A child is arrested for burglary and is tried on the specific charge of “entering an inhabited dwelling in the night season with intent to commit a felony.” Yet this may have been simply an unguided expression of the child’s dramatic play instinct. The boys may have organized into a gang of robbers and may, for the game of the thing only, have committed the burglary. Thus there was no criminal intent on the part of the marauders.
Gang fighting, another common and serious offense, is a product of the complex gang organization which is the basis of all boy life in the streets of New York. ”

“ But there are also some persons, chiefly brought up or brought down in our cities, who practise crimes, apparently, for sheer love of evil. These gunmen gangs are the most depraved and malignant members of the community; they will not work, and they rob and murder not from want or passion, but because the suffering of their victims gives them pleasure and ministers to their pride and self-esteem. Most of these gangs, as we have too much reason to believe, stand in with the police, giving them a percentage of their plunder, and getting protection from them for their misdeeds. ”

“ The very gang training he has had when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He’ll go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done that12 very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called on parade it would be a big procession. ”

“ It is the old story; only the worst and most vicious form of the gang spirit has a chance of finding expression in these streets. And so gang warfare has become not the exception but the rule, and the violence and ferocity with which the small boys pursue their feuds excites the alarm of the entire neighborhood. ”

“ No one thought of resisting his control, and if any became discontented they left the gang—a step by no means desirable, for our safety lay in the strength of the camp. There is scarce a gang but is at feud with some other gang or gangs, and when they meet, nothing but the flight of the weaker, or some other overruling cause, prevents a battle, in which murders are not unfrequently committed.
"Under the tuition of Betsy, I became a most expert beggar, as you witnessed this morning. My contributions to the common stock often equalled the amount of all the others put together. ”

“ This does not mean that every thief ought to be treacherously assassinated in his sleep, or even that every thief ought to be publicly executed after a fair trial, but that every gang, as a gang, ought to be completely broken up, and that whatever severity is indispensably necessary for that end ought to be used. ”

“ Another gang accomplished 160 miles in twelve days, in company with a party of sixty—men, women and a child—before they found an eligible occasion. [Pg 64] They preferred committing murder in the evening, when the travellers would be seated on the ground, mingled with themselves, talking, smoking, singing, and playing the sitar. Where it could be done without suspicion, three Thugs were allotted to every victim. ”

“ The first thing considered by a gang of the finest experts is a desirable bank's location and the chances for getting safely [Pg 323] away with the plunder. Every transportation facility is carefully considered. As the work is almost invariably done at the season of the year when wagon roads are impassible, railroad time tables are carefully considered. In these days of the telegraph and telephone the gang must be under cover in a large city or concealed with friends by the time the crime is discovered, which, at the utmost, is about six hours after the crime has been committed. ”