The Gangs of New York
Author: Herbert Asbury
Publisher:
Published: 1928
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13:
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Jamaican Gangs of New York
Author: Desmond Skyers
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2017-10-06
Total Pages: 452
ISBN-13: 1543487416
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn search of a better life, these new migrants arrived in New York City from the poverty-stricken and violent ghetto of Western Kingston, Jamaica. Predisposed to violence and experienced in the life of the street, they aged between twenty and thirty-five. They were different from all those that came before them from this exotic island. With the potential for a drug sale at any time, these new arrivals squared-off against one another in the streets of New York City, fighting for control of the illicit yet lucrative cocaine and crack market. From Brooklyn to Queens, Manhattan to the Bronx, the city was divided into three gang strongholds, basically no-go areas. Joe Dog and the Loyalist posse took control of South Jamaica, Queens; Blacka and the Raiders posse control Brooklyn; and Fowl and the Centralist posse controlled the Bronx. In addition to the Jamaicans, there were two black American gangs, one came out of Brooklyn and the other from Queens. When they crossed paths with the Jamaicans, it was war. Then there was the Gem Girls. This was a gang of girls from western Kingston led by a light-skinned lesbian named Patsy. These girls were as ruthless as their male Jamaican counterpart. The desire for instant gratification and material satisfaction was impetus for the violence and killings that followed. None dared to stand in their way. This violence caught the attention of the newly elected mayor Jack Jackson, who established a gang task force, headed up by a no-nonsense former Vietnam veteran named Todd Sullivan. On Todds first day on the job, he shook his head and swore. These fucking Jamaican posses are turning our city into a fucking killing zone. We are going to send every fucking one of them to prison.
Five Points
Author: Tyler Anbinder
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-06-05
Total Pages: 684
ISBN-13: 1439137749
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented. All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. Tyler Anbinder offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapestry of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up. Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.
Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings
Author: Eric C. Schneider
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-01-12
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 0691223300
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThey called themselves "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings." They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They fought--and sometimes killed--to protect and expand their territories. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by West Side Story and infamous by the media. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive. Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores. We learn what it meant to be a "down bopper" or a "jive stud," to "fish" with a beautiful "deb" to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the "Ivy League look." He outlines the unwritten rules of gang behavior, the paths members followed to adulthood, and the effects of gang intervention programs, while also providing detailed analyses of such notorious gang-related crimes as the murders committed by the "Capeman," Salvador Agron. Schneider focuses on the years from 1940 to 1975, but takes us up to the present in his conclusion, showing how youth gangs are no longer social organizations but economic units tied to the underground economy. Written with a profound understanding of adolescent culture and the street life of New York, this is a powerful work of history and a compelling story for a general audience.
The Real Gangs of New York
Author: Wallace Edwards
Publisher: BookCaps Study Guides
Published: 2020-09-12
Total Pages: 89
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK★★★ Is true better than fiction? ★★★ The subject of a classic history by Herbert Asbury and an Academy Award-nominated film by Martin Scorsese, the gangs of The Five Points in New York have become the stuff of legend. But how much is legend and how much is fact? In this short book, we examine the original gangs of the Five Points in New York and see how accurate the film was (spoiler alert: not very) and what Asbury may have gotten wrong in his original research on this era. From the Bowery Boys to the Dead Rabbits, we look at the gangs that operated not just in the Five Points, but also those who wanted a piece of the action there and engaged in gang wars that would leave even modern thugs quivering in their boots!
Low Life
Author: Lucy Sante
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2016-03-08
Total Pages: 542
ISBN-13: 1466895632
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe classic social history of corruption and vice in nineteenth-century NYC: “A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves” (John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review). Lucy Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city’s slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era’s opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn’t work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city’s tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life is one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York’s past but about the present and future of all cities.
All Around the Town
Author: Herbert Asbury
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-07-26
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 1786259664
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the immediate sequel to The Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury expands his purview beyond the Five Corners into a wonderful and surprising history of the whole city of New York. All Around the Town brings to authentic life a memorable range of characters, grifters, murderers and madmen. From “The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island” to “The Wickedest Man in New York” to “The Flour Riot of 1837,” these twenty-three lively and accessible accounts make for top-notch, eccentric popular history as told by a master.
Paradise Alley
Author: Kevin Baker
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-03-17
Total Pages: 708
ISBN-13: 0061748986
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThey came by boat from a starving land—and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains—seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe—as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.
The Yard
Author: Alex Grecian
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-05-29
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1101588578
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror in London comes to an end, a new era of depravity sets the stage for the first gripping mystery featuring the detectives of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. “If Charles Dickens isn’t somewhere clapping his hands for this one, Wilkie Collins surely is.”—The New York Times Book Review Victorian London—a violent cesspool of squalid sin. The twelve detectives of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad are expected to solve the thousands of crimes committed in the city each month. Formed after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure in capturing Jack the Ripper, they suffer the brunt of public contempt. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own... A Scotland Yard Inspector has been found stuffed in a black steamer trunk at Euston Square Station, his eyes and mouth sewn shut. When Walter Day, the squad’s new hire, is assigned to the case, he finds a strange ally in Dr. Bernard Kingsley, the Yard’s first forensic pathologist. Their grim conclusion: this was not just a random, bizarre murder but in all probability, the first of twelve. The squad itself it being targeted and the devious killer shows no signs of stopping. But Inspector Day has one more surprise, something even more shocking than the crimes: the murderer’s motive.
Our Gang
Author: Jenna Weissman Joselit
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1983-11-22
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9780253203144
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOur Gang provides a fascinating historical portrait of the Jewish criminal world from the era of mass immigration through Prohibition and beyond. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins, nature, patterns, location, and impact of Jewish crime from the early years, when it was inextricably bound up with the East Side community as a whole, with criminals living among the more or less law-abiding citizens they preyed upon, to the post-World War I period and the gradual assimilation and absorption of Jewish crime into the mainstream of the American underworld. Parallel with this theme is a broader one: the New York Jewish community's reaction to Jewish crime, evolving from disbelief to denial to concern and the establishment of a network of correctional and preventive agencies, and finally—as the nature of Jewish crime changed, and as the community itself felt a growing sense of security—a sort of acceptance.
