{"id":52403,"date":"2017-03-13T01:41:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T01:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52403"},"modified":"2017-03-13T01:41:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T01:41:00","slug":"a-good-fellow-and-a-wise-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52403","title":{"rendered":"A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Sun<\/a>
\n2006-08-09<\/p>\n

William Bryk<\/strong><\/p>\n

Book Review
\nA Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York<\/em><\/a>
\nby Timothy J. Gilfoyle<\/a><\/p>\n

George Washington Appo<\/a>, 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<\/a> (better known as Murderer’s Alley) is gone, buried with the infamous Five Points slum<\/a> beneath the federal courthouses in Foley Square<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Appo resurfaced in Luc Sante’s<\/a> 1991 best seller, “Low Life<\/a>,” which briefly presents him as a buffoon, incompetent even as a crook. If Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s<\/a> “A Pickpocket’s Tale<\/a>” (W.W. Norton, 460 pages,$27.95) serves any purpose, it corrects this slur on Appo’s reputation. Appo practiced pick-pocketing<\/a> 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…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1245,5,459,20],"tags":[12557,12559,12558,2711,596,26446,26445,14194,14193,26444],"class_list":["post-52403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-usa","tag-george-appo","tag-george-w-appo","tag-george-washington-appo","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-sun","tag-the-new-york-sun","tag-timothy-gilfoyle","tag-timothy-j-gilfoyle","tag-william-bryk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52404,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52403\/revisions\/52404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}