Ida Burger, known in the underworld of New York as Ida The Goose, was a popular American dance hall girl and a prostitute during the turn of the century. She was the subject of a major gang war between members of the Gopher Gang and saloonkeeper Chick Tricker's faction of the Eastman Gang. [1]
After being lured away from Hell's Kitchen by a member of Tricker's gang, she performed as the belle of the Cafe Maryland and refused the Gophers' demands to leave her newfound West 28th Street home.
Allowing the matter to be settled between the Gophers and his own underlings, four men entered the Cafe Maryland in October 1910. After drinking for several minutes, Burger protested their presence and the four gunmen opened fire on the six rival gang members seriously wounding five of them. Burger's lover, hiding behind the bar with two bartenders, was forced to come out and face the Gophers. Burger, apparently disillusioned by his cowardice, allegedly shoved him out into the open and supposedly said "Say youse! Come out and take it." With the lone gangster on his knees, each of the four Gophers fired a bullet into his head before returning with Burger to Hell's Kitchen. [2]
In March 1910, she was convicted of aiding and abetting of Alexander Devoe, who had escaped from Sing Sing Prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of police informant Lefty Boyle, and was held at Sing Sing Prison with bail set at $1,500. [3]
The Lenox Avenue Gang was an early 20th-century New York City street gang led by Harry Horowitz; it was considered one of the most violent gangs of the pre-Prohibition era. It was based in Harlem in Upper Manhattan, New York City, around 125th Street, in what was then a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
Paul Kelly was an American mobster and former boxer, who founded the Five Points Gang in New York City. He had started some brothels with prize money earned in boxing. Five Points Gang was one of the first dominant street gangs in New York history. Kelly recruited young, poor men from the ethnically diverse immigrant neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan. The Five Points Gang included some who later became prominent criminals in their own right, including Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Frankie Yale.
The Hudson Dusters was a New York City street gang during the early twentieth century.
The Gopher Gang was an early 20th-century New York street gang who counted among its members Goo Goo Knox, James "Biff" Ellison, and Owney Madden, born in England of Irish ancestry. Based in the Irish neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, the Gopher Gang grew to control most of Manhattan with their territory covering Fourth to Forty-Second Street and Seventh to Eleventh Avenue.
"Big" Jack Zelig was an American gangster and one of the last leaders of the Eastman Gang.
The Westies were a New York City-based Irish American organized crime gang, responsible for racketeering, drug trafficking, and contract killing. They were partnered with the Italian-American Mafia and operated out of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan.
James Michael Coonan is an American mobster and racketeer from Manhattan, New York who served as the boss of the Westies gang, an Irish mob group based in Hell's Kitchen, from approximately 1977 to 1988. Coonan was incarcerated and began serving a 75-year prison term in 1988.
Owen Vincent "Owney" Madden was an English-born gangster of Irish ancestry who became a leading underworld figure in New York during Prohibition. Nicknamed "The Killer", he garnered a brutal reputation within street gangs and organized crime. He ran the Cotton Club in Manhattan and was a leading boxing promoter. After increased attention from law enforcement in New York, Madden moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1935, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1965.
Edward "Monk" Eastman was an American gangster who founded and led the Eastman Gang in the late 19th and early 20th century; it became one of the most powerful street gangs in the city. His aliases included Joseph "Joe" Morris, Joe Marvin, William "Bill" Delaney, and Edward "Eddie" Delaney. Eastman is considered to be one of the last of the 19th-century New York City gangsters who preceded the rise of Arnold Rothstein and the Jewish mob. Later, more sophisticated, organized criminal enterprises also included the Italian American Cosa Nostra.
The Irish Mob is a usually crime family–based ethnic collective of organized crime syndicates composed of primarily ethnic Irish members which operate primarily in Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and have been in existence since the early 19th century. Originating in Irish-American street gangs – famously first depicted in Herbert Asbury's 1927 book, The Gangs of New York – the Irish Mob has appeared in most major U.S. and Canadian cities, especially in the Northeast and the urban industrial Midwest, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago.
James T. Ellison, better known as Biff Ellison, was a New York City gangster affiliated with the Five Points Gang and later a leader of the Gopher Gang. He was noted for his propensity for physical violence as well as a dapper appearance that led The New York Times to describe him as "looking like a prosperous banker or broker" and contemporary chroniclers as "smooth-faced, high-featured, well-dressed, a Gangland cavalier" and "a fop in matters of dress".
Edward "Eddie The Butcher" Cummiskey Jr. was a New York mobster who served as a mentor to Jimmy Coonan, leader of the Westies. Cummiskey is reputed to have shown Coonan how to dismember and dispose of murder victims by scattering their remains into the waters around the sewage treatment plant operated by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection at Randalls and Wards Islands, notably in the Hudson River. Cummiskey was murdered by hitman Joseph Sullivan on August 20, 1976, in a bar.
Dan Mulcahy, known by the pseudonyms of Louis Harris and Dan the Dude, was a New York criminal and the longtime owner of the Stag Cafe at 28 West 28th Street, in the vice district of Satan's Circus. The cafe was a popular hangout for many of the criminals in New York's underworld. Dan was most noted as a fixer and confidant of New York's numerous con men, many of whom came from out of town and used his establishment as their unofficial base. "In olden times [around 1910-1915] in Dan the Dude's place," it was said, "you could see a hundred con men there at once, and not one of them would be a native New Yorker."
Invisible Stripes is a 1939 Warner Bros. crime film starring George Raft as a gangster unable to go straight after returning home from prison. The movie was directed by Lloyd Bacon and also features William Holden, Jane Bryan and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay by Warren Duff was based on the novel of the same title by Warden Lewis E. Lawes, a fervent crusader for prison reform, as adapted by Jonathan Finn.
Ladies They Talk About is a 1933 pre-Code American crime drama directed by Howard Bretherton and William Keighley, and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, and Lyle Talbot. The film is about an attractive woman who is a member of a bank-robbery gang. It is based on the play Gangstress, or Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles. In 1928, Dorothy Mackaye, #440960, served less than ten months of a one- to three-year sentence in San Quentin State Prison.
Thomas F. "Tanner" Smith was an American criminal and gang leader in New York City during the early 20th century. He was the founder and leader of the Marginals, or "Irish Paddy Gang", which was active in Greenwich Village and along the Hudson River waterfront from around the turn of the 20th century until his murder in 1919. He was closely associated with Owney Madden and the Gophers; he and Madden briefly ran the Winona Club together until the New York City Police Department closed the clubhouse around 1910.
The Whittemore Gang was a group of bank robbers active in the Mid-Atlantic and Eastern United States during the mid-1920s. Led by Richard Reese Whittemore, the gang, including his wife Margaret, went on a year-long crime spree committing payroll, bank and jewelry robberies in Maryland and New York before their capture in 1926.
The era of American film production from the early sound era to the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934 is denoted as Pre-Code Hollywood. The era contained violence and crime in pictures which would not be seen again until decades later. Although the Hays office had specifically recommended removing profanity, the drug trade, and prostitution from pictures, it had never officially recommended against depictions of violence in any form in the 1920s. State censor boards, however, created their own guidelines, and New York in particular developed a list of violent material which had to be removed for a picture to be shown in the state. Two main types of crime films were released during the period: the gangster picture and the prison film.
Frank "Chick" Tricker was an American gangster in New York who, as a member of the Eastman Gang, served as one of its last leaders alongside Jack Sirocco.
This is a list of organized crime in the 1910s, arranged chronologically.