A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York Book

In the gas-lit world of nineteenth century New York lurked a class of men who considered themselves "professional thieves" and who spoke their own language, which the novelist Herman Melville called "that foulest of all human lingoes." One man privy to this jargon was George Appo. The son of a Chinese tea merchant father and an Irish immigrant mother, Appo would grow up as an orphan adrift in New York's roughest district, Five Points. Though once a successful businessman, his father Quimbo was haunted by secrets of a criminal past in the California gold fields. Soon after George's birth, Quimbo's prior misdeeds divided the family. The young George was left with his mother while his father was packed off to Sing Sing to serve time for the murder of Mexican prospectors. Unable to care for her child, Catherine Appo left George with a friend in Five Points. In order to survive in this impoverished world of brazen prostitutes, corrupt policemen, and indolent addicts, George Appo cultivated the art of picking pockets and became a "good fellow" crook. Though unable to read or write for much of his life, Appo penned his autobiography with the help of a fellow inmate during one of the many prison sentences he served as an adult. This manuscript serves as the foundation for Timothy Gilfoyle's A Pickpocket's Tale, which adds flesh to the skeletal structure of Appo's narrative to provide a comprehensive overview of criminality, courts, and incarceration in the era of Boss Tweed.
This tale is populated with percentage coppers, swaggering politicians, inert opium addicts, and dance hall girls, who fit Dickensian stereotypes, but Gilfoyle skillfully avoids overdramatizing the narrative. Through its portrayal of Appo as a relatable antihero, the text argues that the illicit careers chosen by people like George Appo were adopted as a way to survive and escape burdensome social and economic conditions. Criminality provided an appealing and more lucrative alternative to dangerous 13-cents-per-hour gigs in steel mills and other factories. Unfortunately, crime came at a cost. The stigma of any previous incarceration or involvement in criminal activity marked a man for life in New York, making less influential criminals easy prey for policemen and political machines.
As a child pickpocket and later as a participant in the "green goods game," a counterfeiting swindle, serving time was a regular occurrence for Appo. Appo's autobiography provides brief snippets of his experience in some of the most notorious correctional institutions of his day, including the Mercury packet ship for criminal youth, Blackwell's Island, Sing Sing, Clinton and the Tombs. Gilfoyle builds upon these succinct anecdotes to detail the institutional framework set up to deal with the dispossessed, the poor, and the mentally ill flitting from shadow to shadow in the alleyways of the metropolis. His writing exposes the corruption of the legal system in order to finally give George Appo a fair trial, albeit both posthumously and metaphorically.
The discerning reader will wonder why, in a work focused on a mixed race thief inhabiting an era characterized by the Great Migration and such legislation as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Gilfoyle does not address the salience of race relations in this burgeoning and diverse metropolis. Despite deficiencies such as this omission of a discussion of race relations in the New York underworld, this text invites both scholarly and recreational historians into a criminal environment made possible by gaslight and mass transportation while still conveying a successful argument. Gilfoyle's work showcases an innovative way to integrate a primary source document into an important narrative of the city's underworld while illuminating the distinctive voice of a forgotten figure who, despite experiencing all aspects of the criminal justice system and boasting involvement in several criminal networks, might otherwise remain unknown to all but a few scholarly readers in the Columbia University archives. By delving into each detail provided in Appo's autobiography, Gilfoyle uncovers the world of the marginalized without exaggeration or sensationalism. He carves a place in history for Appo and his vilified compatriots, ultimately reframing traditional historical narratives by elevating "history from below."