Mixed Race Studies

A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy

The New York Sun
2006-08-09

William Bryk

Book Review
A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York
by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

George Washington Appo, the once notorious Asian-Irish-American petty criminal who flourished during the last quarter of the 19th century as a pickpocket and swindler, had pretty much faded into obscurity at his death in 1930, aged 73. Even the street where he lived, Donovan’s Lane (better known as Murderer’s Alley) is gone, buried with the infamous Five Points slum beneath the federal courthouses in Foley Square.

Appo resurfaced in Luc Sante’s 1991 best seller, “Low Life,” which briefly presents him as a buffoon, incompetent even as a crook. If Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s “A Pickpocket’s Tale” (W.W. Norton, 460 pages,$27.95) serves any purpose, it corrects this slur on Appo’s reputation. Appo practiced pick-pocketing as others practice dentistry or law: He was a thorough professional who picked thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pockets during his career, usually making as much money in a day as the average workingman then made in a year. He was imprisoned four times for pickpocketing, all while still relatively young. He apparently accepted jail as an inevitable cost of doing business…

Read the entire review here.

Story Of A Criminal

The Indianapolis Journal
Indianapolis, Indiana
Sunday, 1894-06-17
page 16, columns 1-2

How Green Goods Men Are Protected by Gotham Police.

Tale of Iniquity Unequaled In the Annals of Municipal Corruption—Testimony of George Appo.

NEW YORK, June 16. During the past week the Lexow committee opened up an entirely new line of inquiry on the subject of police protection to the “green goods” business. The principal witness was George Appo, a half-breed Chinaman, son of Quimbo Appo, who is serving a life sentence in Sing Sing for murder. George Appo Is thirty-six years old and he has been a criminal from his early youth, having spent much of his time in prison. His principal occupations have been picking pockets and “steering guys” for green-goods swindlers.

The testimony of Appo was listened to with unusual attention and interest. The witness is a remarkable person, to begin with, and he described in detail the business of the “green goods” swindlers who have been protected in this city by the police. Appo is the son of a white woman and of Quimbo Appo, the Chinaman who committed a shocking murder in the city years ago and is now serving a term of life imprisonment for the crime. Under the name of George Leonard, the witness was sent to prison when only eighteen years old for picking the pocket of Alfred Gilbert, a custom house inspector, and at that time his photograph was placed In the rogues’ gallery as No. 1441. He had previously served a term in prison, and since then he has been in prison several times.

Appo is a small, wiry man, with dark and sallow complexion, black hair and clean shaven face. He has been a desperado as well as a thief, and there are several ugly scars on his face which tell of bloody encounters. He has a glass eye In place of the right optic, which was shot out in Poughkeepsie two years ago. The police have often spoken of him as one of the worst criminals in the city. His calling in recent years, when he has not been inside prison walls, has been that of a “steerer” for the “green goods” game.

When Appo took his seat In the witness chair, Senator Lexow said to him that he had nothing to fear as to his testimony if he told the truth, but if he did not tell the truth he would be liable to punishment for perjury. In reply to questions by Mr. Goff, the witness said that he was thirty-six years old and was born in New Haven, Conn., but was brought to this city when he was only two months old. He was unfortunate when he was a boy, and he was arrested for picking pockets when he was sixteen years old. He was sentenced to prison for two years and six months by Recorder Hackett, and he was so small at the time that there was not a suit of clothes in the prison small enough to fit him.

Nine months after he had served his time he was sent to prison again for the same offense, the same sentence being passed upon him by Judge Gildersleeve. The third time he was sent to prison for picking pockets he got a sentence of three years and six months from Recorder Smyth. He was caught picking pockets again in 1889, but got off with a year in the penitentiary. He also served a term of seven months in a Pennsylvania jail for picking pockets.

Question by Mr. Goff—Have you been engaged in what is known as “crooked business” in this city? A.—The “green goods” business has been my principal business in late years.

Q.—Please explain to the committee the nature of that business? A.—Circulars are sent out stating that duplicates of the genuine money have been printed from the same plates.

Q.—Well, let us understand who are the persons who are engaged in the business. Who is the backer? A.—He is the old gentleman, the man with the bank roll. He has the real money which is shown as “green goods.”

Q.—Who is the “writer?” A.—He is the man who sends out the circulars.

Q.—And the “steerer,” who is he? A.—He Is the man who goes after the people who come In answer to the circulars.

Q.—You mean the men who are swindled. What is the victim called? A.—He is called the “guy.”

Q.—He comes from the backwoods? A.— Yes, and from the cities and towns all over the country.

Q.—Who is the ‘ringer?” A.—He is the man behind the partition who takes the good money which is shown and puts a brick in place of it.

Q.—And the “turner,” who is he? A.—He is supposed to be the son of the old gentleman. He sells the “green goods” and then places it within reach of the “ringer.”

Q.—Then there is the “tailer,” who is he? A.—He is the one who follows the victim after the game is played and sees him safely out of the city.

Q.—What is the place called where the game is played? A.—The “turning Joint.” It is usually an empty store in which is a desk with a shelf and a partition behind it.

Q.—How are the victims brought to the place? A.—They are directed to go to a hotel in Poughkeepsie or Fishkill on the Hudson River, or to some place in New Jersey about fifty miles from New York, where they are met by the “steerer,” who takes them to this city and leads them to the “turning joint.”

Q.—What division is made of the money taken from the victims? A.—The writer gets 50 per cent, and the backer gets 50 per cent. They pay the other men. The “steerer” gets 5 per cent. The “turner” gets $10 and the ‘”ringer” and “tailer” get $5 in each case.

Q.—How do the “writers” get the names and addresses of persons to whom the circulars are sent? A.—From the mercantile agency lists mostly.

Q.—What do the circulars contain? A.—They say that duplicate issues of money have been obtained, and the victims are asked to answer by telegraph. A bogus newspaper clipping is sent with the circular stating that the money cannot be told from the genuine money. A record is kept of each man to whom a circular is sent. If the record is “John Howard. No. 106,” the man is told to sign a telegram “J. H. 106.” If the writer gets an answer from that man he reports a “come-on.” Then instructions are sent to the man, telling him the hotel to which he must go to meet the messenger.

Q.—Are instructions cent by mail? A.—Yes, but the answers must always be sent by telegraph.

Q.—How are the telegrams sent to the right address? A.—Any address may be given, but the telegraph operators under stand the meaning of the messages and send them to the right address.

Q.—How does the “steerer” know how to meet the right person? A.—He has a password. It may be “speedy return” or “good luck.”

Q.—When the victim is taken to the “turning joint” what is the mode of operation there? A.—A large sum of good money is shown to him as “green goods” and he is allowed to examine it. If he agrees to buy it the “turner” places it in a box or satchel on the shelf behind the desk. The old gentleman sits by as a matter of form, but says nothing. Then the “turner” says he will make out a receipt, and he lifts the lid of the desk, which shuts the box on the shelf from view for an instant. There is a panel in the partition, and when the lid of the desk comes down the “ringer” has changed the box with the money for a box with a brick in it.

Q.—What is done with the victim then? A.—He is sent home with the brick. The “steerer” puts a scare into him and tells him that he must keep quiet until he gets home. He tells him that the country near the city has been flooded with the “green goods” and that he may get fifteen years in jail if he is caught with any of it here. The “steerer” usually carries the box to the station and sees the victim safely on the train, while the “tailer” follows them. When the victims are on the cars again they are allowed to go. They seldom come back. If they do the “tailer” pretends to be an officer and scares them by telling them they can be sent to jail. He tells them that the are as bad as the men who got their money and the best thing they can do is to go back home.

Q.—At what rate is the pretended sale of “green goods?” A.—The least sum take from a victim is $300, for which he is told he is to get $3,000 In “green goods” and also $250 in the same goods for expenses in travel.

Q.—Did you ever know of a victim who came back being taken to a police station to have at scare put into him? A—I know of such a case, but I do not want to in—criminate a friend, and I will not tell about it.

Q.—Tell about it in a general way without mentioning names. A.—I brought a man from Philadelphia on a Sunday morning and took him to a hotel until I could take him to the “turning joint.” He was a marshal from Tennessee and he had been here before, but I didn’t know that then. When I took him to the room where the “turner” was waiting he said he had $80 to invest and wanted $15,000. The “turner” said that the safe was locked and could not be opened, but the money would be sent by express. He showed $85 as samples of the goods. The man took the money, stuffed it into his pocket, pulled a revolver of forty-eight calibre and pointed it at the “turner.” I got the revolver away from him and passed it to the “turner” who ran out. The “ringer” also ran, leaving me alone with the man. I picked up a spittoon, but he drew a bowie knife and cut me across the hand. (The witness displayed a scar in proof of the story.) Then the man ran after the “turner” and caught him in the street, but a policeman took them both to the station. They were both let go at the station and the man went back home. I was not arrested.

Appo Will Serve Six Months

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Thursday, 1895-10-03
page 12, column 2
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection

George Appo, the Chinese half-bred, who obtained notoriety especially through his testimony before the Lexow senate investigating committee, and who pleaded guilty to assault in the third degree in the stabbing of Policeman Michael J. Rein of the West Thirtieth street station on April 9, was this morning sentenced to six months in the penitentiary by Judge Cowing in Part II, New York general sessions.

The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo

Bedford/St. Martin’s
2013
208 pages
Paper ISBN-10: 0-312-60762-8; ISBN-13: 978-0-312-60762-3

George Appo (1856-1930)

Edited with an Introduction by:

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Professor of History
Loyola University, Chicago

Through the colorful autobiography of pickpocket and con man George Appo, Timothy Gilfoyle brings to life the opium dens, organized criminals, and prisons that comprised the rapidly changing criminal underworld of late nineteenth-century America. The book’s introduction and supporting documents, which include investigative reports and descriptions of Appo and his world, connect Appo’s memoir to the larger story of urban New York and how and why crime changed during this period. It also explores factors of race and class that led some to a life of crime, the experience of criminal justice and incarceration, and the masculine codes of honor that marked the emergence of the nation’s criminal subculture. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support.

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

W. W. Norton & Company
2006
480 pages
5.5 × 8.2 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-32989-6

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Professor of History
Loyola University, Chicago

In George Appo’s world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as an exemplar of the “good fellow,” a criminal who relied on wile, who followed a code of loyalty even in his world of deception. Here is the underworld of the New York that gave us Edith Wharton, Boss Tweed, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Preface

In 1840 New York City had no professional police force, a low murder rate, and no bank robberies. Within decades, however, this changed; serious crime proliferated and modern law enforcement was born. By 1890 Gotham’s police budget had grown more than sixteenfold and became New York City’s single largest annual expenditure. Detective work was transformed into a public and private specialty. The murder rate had doubled, and larceny comprised one-hall to one-third of all prosecuted crime in the state. Newspapers regularly reported that illegal activities were rampant, the courts and police powerless. New York City had become “the evillest [sic] spot in America.” For the first time, observers complained about “organized crime.”

A new criminal world was born in this period. It was a hidden universe with informal but complex networks of pickpockets, fences, opium addicts, and confidence men who organized their daily lives around shared illegal behaviors. Such activities, one judge observed, embodied an innovative lawlessness based on extravagance, greed, and the pursuit of great riches. A new “class of criminals” now existed. Many of these illicit enterprises were national in scope, facilitated by new technologies like the railroad and the telegraph, economic innovations like uniform paper money, and new havens for intoxication like “dives” and opium dens. For the first time both criminals and police referred to certain lawbreakers as professionals.

George Appo was one such professional criminal. At first glance Appo hardly seemed a candidate for any criminal activity; his diminutive size and physical appearance evoked little fear. By age eighteen he stood less than five feet five inches in height and weighed a slight 120 pounds. Everything about him seemed small: his narrow forehead, short nose, compact chin, and tiny ears that sat low on his head. Although Appo’s face displayed features of his mother’s Irish ancestry, his copper-colored skin reminded some of his father’s Chinese origins. Appo s brown eyes were less noticeable than his pitch-black hair and eyebrows, the latter meeting over his nose. The tattoos E.D. and J.M. were inscribed on his left and right forearms, respectively.

But Appo was one of New York’s most significant nineteenth-century criminals. A pickpocket, confidence man, and opium addict, he lived off his criminal activities during his teenage years and much of his adult life. On successful nights during the 1870s and 1880s, he earned in excess of six hundred dollars pilfering the pockets of those around him. equivalent to the annual salary of a skilled manual laborer. Even more lucrative was the elaborate confidence scheme known as the “green goods game.” The most successful operators—”gilt-edged swindlers” according to one—accumulated fortunes in excess of one hundred thousand dollars. By 1884 America’s most famous detective, Allan Pinkerton, identified the green goods game as “the most remunerative of all the swindles,” “the boss racket of the whole confidence business.

Appo made money, but his life was hardly a Horatio Alger tale of self-taught frugality and upward mobility. The offspring of a racially mixed, immigrant marriage, Appo was separated from his parents as a small child. Effectively orphaned, the young boy grew up in the impoverished Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods of New York. He never attended school a day in his life. Appo literally raised himself on Gotham’s streets, becoming a newsboy and eventually a pickpocket and opium addict. This new child culture of newsboys, bootblacks, and pick-pockets, fed by foreign immigration and native-born rural migration, mocked the ascendant Victorian morality ol the era. New York needed no Charles Dickens to create Oliver Twist or Victor Hugo to invent Jean Valjean. Gotham had George Appo.

Appos youthful adventures persisted into adulthood. For more than three decades he survived by exploiting his criminal skills. Appo patronized the first opium dens in New York, participated in the first medical research on opium smoking, and appeared in one of Americas first the theatrical productions popularizing crime. On at least ten occasions he was tried by judge or jury. As a result he spent more than a decade in prisons and jails. Therein he experienced New York’s first experiment in juvenile reform with the school ship Mercury, as well as the lockstep, dark cells, and industrial discipline of American penitentiaries. He personally witnessed the lunacy found in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the easy escapes from the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary, and the corruption associated with the nation’s largest jail: New York’s “Tombs.” During various incarcerations Appo’s teeth were knocked out, and he encountered a wide array of prison tortures. Life outside prison was even bloodier. On the street Appo was physically assaulted at least nine times, shot twice, and stabbed in the throat once. More than a dozen scars decorated his body.

Above all George Appo was a “good fellow,” a character type he identified and wrote about. A good fellow engaged in criminal activities while displaying courage and bravery, “a nervy crook,” in Appo’s words. Good fellows like Appo did not rely on strong-arm tactics to gel their way Instead they avoided violence, employing wit and wile to make a living. Theirs was a world of artifice and deception. When successful, a good fellow lavished his profits on others. He was “a money getter and spender.” Such mettle, pluck, and camaraderie implied a level of trustworthiness, mutuality, and dependability. Above all a good fellow was loyal, willing to withstand, in Appo’s words, “the consequences and punishment of an arrest for some other fellow’s evil doings both inside and outside of prison.”…

Read the entire Preface here.

“A Problem for Which There Is No Solution”: Eurasians and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 15, Number 3, October 2012
pages 271-298
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0022

Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations; Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 1898, journalist Louis J. Beck offered the reading public what he saw as a valuable case study in “heredity and racial traits and tendencies.” This case study was none other than the infamous “half-breed” criminal George Washington Appo (1856–1930), whose name was virtually a household word for New Yorkers of the time. Born to an Irish mother and the “Chinese devil man” Quimbo Appo, a notorious criminal in his own right, George Appo was a preeminent celebrity criminal of the 1890s. A notorious pickpocket and “green-goods man,” George was catapulted to national fame after appearing as a star witness in the dramatic Lexow Committee investigation that brought down New York’s Tammany Hall. Taking sensationalism to a new level, the “king of confidence men,” as the Boston Globe called him, had even appeared on the stage, playing himself in George Lederer’s theatrical melodrama In the Tenderloin to national acclaim. To cap it all off, the World voted Appo among “The People Who Made the History of 1894.”

But Beck was not much interested in the details of New York police corruption, nor in the new low point to which American theater had sunk: his true concern was the Chinese Question. Beck was the author of New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places, published by the Bohemia Publishing Company in 1898. Part tourist guidebook, part amateur ethnography, part muckraking exposé, this amply illustrated volume was the first full-length book on New York’s Chinese Quarter, and would in time become a frequently quoted source for Chinatown history. Beck promised his audience that his book would shed light on the vexed Chinese Question by presenting the city’s Chinese residents through the unbiased lens of the reporter. At the heart of the Chinese Question was this—could the Chinese in time become assimilated, and patriotic, American citizens, or did their “racial traits” render this impossible, warranting their exclusion from the nation? Beck offered George Appo’s biography as food for thought:

George Appo was born in New York City, July 4, 1858 [sic], and is therefore an American citizen, and should be a patriotic one, but he is not. His father was a full-blooded Chinaman and his mother an Irishwoman. He was an exceedingly bright child, beautiful to look upon, sharp-witted and quick of comprehension. For ten years he was the pet of the neighborhood where his parents dwelt. . . . At the age of ten he became a pickpocket.

Beck’s decision to dedicate an entire chapter to the celebrity criminal stemmed from his conviction that this “noted Chinese character” was “well worth investigating,” not only for the light his story shed on the operation of the green-goods business, but, more important, “because he is the first one of the new hybrid brood” to gain public attention. As such, Beck argued, “The question which naturally presents itself to the thinker is: ‘What part will the rest of his tribe take in our national development?’”

It was a question that was on the minds of many journalists, social reformers, travelers, and others as they toured America’s Chinatowns and saw growing numbers of “half-castes” on the streets and in doorways. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, such “mixed” children could be found virtually wherever Chinese immigrants had settled across the country. When pioneering Chinese American journalist Wong Chin Foo reported on the New York Chinese for the Cosmopolitan in 1888, he asserted that there were over a hundred “half-breed” Chinese children in that city alone. Although their absolute numbers were small, their anomalous looks drew attention and aroused curiosity. Observers attached a special significance to these children that went beyond their numbers. For many, they represented the future shape of the Chinese American population, for better or worse. Some regarded these “hybrids” as living specimens that offered a chance to see firsthand the…