Irish Monikers

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word moniker as “informal: a name or nickname.”

In Light of the Diddicoy, the first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy, one of the first things a reader will notice is that most of the characters have monikers to describe them or some characteristic they possess. Oftentimes, the real names of these characters are never even mentioned. In fact, while doing research for three (long) years, I found many of the Irish-American White Hand Gang members lived and died with these monikers. We’ll get back to the members and their monikers in a minute, but first let’s check out a bit of detail about the word “moniker” and its Irish roots.

English dictionaries often are biased toward, well, the English! Americanized words are often considered not much more than slang, until eventually they become so common, that they are only then accepted as a “real” word that can enter the highly institutionalized (i.e. stuffy) world of the English Dictionary culture.

It is commonly known in Ireland that any words that are regularly used among the Irish, are often not considered of value for mention in the English Dictionaries. Many words that originated from the Gaelic-Irish language and had been adopted into English didn’t become acceptable until they came up from the streets of America. And only then begrudgingly accepted.

Case in point, the word, “slugger.” We’ll delve into the world of gang lingo, slang and gypsy cant on another occasion, but this particular word proves my point, in this instance, very well.

This word “slugger,” if you look in various English dictionaries, word-reference periodicals and etymological websites, is often attributed to a batsman, say, like home run hitting George Herman “Babe” Ruth (also called the Sultan of Swat or the Bambino). A slugger was/is a baseball player who “slugs” the ball. Or a slugger can also be a pugilist, boxer or prizefighter who “slugs” his opponents. Any kind of “heavy blow,” for that matter could describe someone called a slugger.

“To slug,” is the infinitive verb, which in these dictionaries, is traced back to some rare or off-the-wall association (anything except to mention an Irish resource). Some English dictionaries attribute it to the animal, which is a noun of course, and somehow they attempt to make a connection of it being “slow” to a “heavy blow.” How this connection is made, well, maybe you could tell me(?). This “slug” (the gross thing on your sidewalk that you poured salt on when you were a kid) comes from the Norwegian dialect of the word “sluggje”.

And then there is also the bullet slug, that was named due to its resembling the shape of the slow, gross animal on your sidewalk.

Again, these references don’t even come close to explaining the etymology of a word that describes the act of hitting hard, or a blow.

Daniel Cassidy became (somewhat) famous for challenging the Anglophile dictionary establishment with street lingo and Irish gypsy cant and still to this day, after his passing, is sometimes referenced as a rogue.

Unless of course, you know who Daniel Cassidy is. The late Irish-American professor of Irish studies will possibly never get his due credit for his studying a “focloir poca,” an Irish to English pocket dictionary. Mr. Cassidy  grew up in New York and was unknowingly immersed by the Irish slang of his family who traced their arrival to America during the Great Hunger (Irish Potato Famine) to the Brooklyn working-class neighborhood known then simply as Irishtown of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (read my article on Brooklyn’s Irishtown here if you’re interested in Brooklyn’s Irishtown).

In Mr. Cassidy’s now (in)famous book How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, a classic in the battle between savvy Irish street-smarts and the stuffy acumen of the English establishment. With the word “slugger,” and hundreds of others, Mr. Cassidy traces many of today’s accepted vernacular back to old Irish-Gaelic words such as “slacaire,” which in the Irish means “a batter, a beater, a bruiser, a thrasher, one that beats with a mallet or bat; a mauler.”

The Irish “Slacaire” on the city streets of places where the Irish settled, eventually became American slugger. Unless you ask a dictionary, of course.

Even in death, Mr. Cassidy is berated by Anglophiles for what is seen as his muddying the English language with the Irish street lingo that became popular in America. Even though this word, slacaire, which sounds almost the same as spoken in Irish as does the English word slugger, the reference still cannot be found in English dictionaries to this very day.

Now back to the underworld monikers (of course the word “moniker” can be attributed to the word, “munik” in Irish gypsy language called Shelta, again, we can thank Mr. Cassidy for figuring this out) of Auld Irishtown‘s characters. I found that almost every gang member had some sort of nickname.

For Richard Lonergan, it was easy. Since one of his legs was cut off by a trolley when he was eight years old and replaced with a wooden peg, he was monikered “Pegleg.” And since Bill Lovett literally turned into a raving lunatic when drunk, he was nicknamed “Wild Bill.”

For others however, their monikers were not as easy to figure out, such as Cinders Connolly, who never had a first name, as far as my research turned up. As a member of a gang that burned ships whose captains refused tribute to the gang, Mr. Connolly was nicknamed “Cinders” because that’s how he left ships in the harbor, in cinders, as he was a famed pyromaniac. Then there was John Connors, whose nickname was the brief and strange, “Non.” I could only find one reference to his nickname, as he was known as a severe contrarian. He disagreed with everyone about everything. So severe was his case, that it was said a smart and manipulative person could get him to argue both sides of a debate without his realizing it.

Other nicknames from real life White Hand Gang members include the common description of “The Swede.” In reality, his name was the very Irish sounding James Finnigan, but since he was tall, thin and white-haired, apparently that justified his being called a Swede.

Some monikers are longer, however and include two nicknames. Cute Charlie Red Donnelly is one such man. In the 1930s, Pegleg Lonergan’s sister remembered him as a red-haired man, but the reason they called him Cute Charlie was because he was, in fact, very ugly.

Then there’s “Dago Tom” Montague, of course, of Italian descent but lived in Irishtown. And then there was “Needles” Ferry, because he was an early abuser of morphine injections.

“Gimpy” Kafferty had a terrible limp and “Happy” Maloney had a reputation as being a grumpy son-of-a-gun. “Ragtime” Howard was apparently some sort of musician and Peter th’ Buck (yes, that is exactly how they spelled it in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 1914) was a young and jumpy fellow who was always ready for a fight.

One of my favorites, however was Thomas “Tanner” Smith, who actually ran with a Hell’s Kitchen gang called the “Gophers,” (which again had nothing to do with animals). in the Irish “Gopher” is spelled “Comhbha” (pronounced gofa) and means “alliance,” and since Tanner’s gang the Marginals and Owen “Owney” Madden’s gang were combined to form one larger, allied group of thugs, a “Gopher Gang” was the perfect description of two Irish-American gangs that came together to form one.

Tanner, in fact, in the Irish, actually means “bold, intrepid,” as Tanner

Tanner Boyle, the scrappy brawler from The (original) Bad News Bears.

Smith was known as a fierce fist fighter and a man with an iron will. Another perfect description for a scrappy fist fighter like the short and rugged brawler in the 1970s classic movie, The Bad News Bears.

But anyway, why would we want the English Dictionary nerds to accept Irish lingo and monikers as normal anyway? If they did accept it, well, then it would cease to be lingo, right? No more street cred, am I right?

So, here’s to staying on the fringe, Póg mo Thóin!!

Eamon

Lusitania, 1915

The panoramic photo above is actually from 1907 at the Chelsea piers of Manhattan, well before the outbreak of World War I. On this day (actually yesterday) in 1915, it was sunk by a German U-Boat off the coast of Kinsale, Ireland just months before Liam Garrity, protagonist of Light of the Diddicoy (first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy), was to set out for New York in a similar Atlantic crossing.

There are all kinds of connections between the White Hand Gang, Liam Garrity, and the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915. Here are a few:

Owney “The Killer” Madden, who was also described as “that banty little rooster” eventually became known as a big shot in the crime world and owner of the Cotton Club in Harlem.

Thomas F. “Tanner” Smith, was an early 20th Century gangster along the Chelsea piers. As a young man, he became leader of a gang called the Marginals. Also known as the Irish Paddy Gang that was closely linked with the infamous 10th Street murderer, Owney Madden and the Gopher Gang in Hell’s Kitchen.

Although Tanner Smith had a less than Irish-sounding surname and Madden was actually born in England (of Irish parents), these were two of the last remaining Irish street-level gang leaders in Manhattan. Their downfall from street-level gangster was precipitated by the NYC Strong Arm Squad combined with some (mostly Jewish) gangsters who were leaders of the Labor Slugger Wars and their willingness to turn over on their comrades for shorter jail terms.

I’m getting further away from the Lusitania, but I must digress a bit more before closing the circle.

Tanner (which means “bold, intrepid” in the Irish language) and Madden, leader of the Gophers (which means “alliance” in the Irish) were great allies during the 1900s and early 1910s and together they kept the docks of Manhattan in the hands of the Irish, even as things were changing quickly.

Eventually, Madden was sent to prison, but later became a famous half-legitimate mobster/businessman (Cotton Club owner). Tanner got into all kinds of trouble, but eventually settled on boss stevedore at the Chelsea docks before being shot in the back while playing cards.

In Light of the Diddicoy, Tanner Smith is an ally of Dinny Meehan, leader of the White Hand Gang of the Brooklyn waterfront. Meehan was born in a saloon over Hudson Street in Manhattan and was raised on the street by Smith before moving to Brooklyn in 1900 as an 11-year old.

Charles Becker, probably the most famously known member of New York’s Strong Arm Squad that was put into place specifically to combat against street gangs (before Murder Inc.). Becker was eventually executed for murdering a gangster on his own, which gives you an idea of how the police were seen in Progressive Era New York City.

When Tanner is down and out and Dinny’s White Hand Gang is on the up-and-up, Dinny tries to help out his old buddy by hiring him to kill a Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) recruiter, Thos Carmody (in real life, this man’s name was Frank Madden, but the surname of this minor character had to be changed due to causing confusion). The devastating consequence of this attempted murder-for-hire is not resolved until the third book of the Auld Irishtown trilogy.

Okay, anyhow, back to the Lusitania! (I get started on writing about the era and just can’t stop myself, sorry).

In October of 1915, four months after the sinking of the Lusitania, Light of the Diddicoy opens with Liam Garrity leaving Ireland for New York. It is a terrible time for traveling across the Atlantic as the German Imperial Navy had established dominance over the sea lanes via their U-Boat fleet.

It is a sign of desperation that a 14-year old is sent during war-time to America. The type of desperation that has always embodied the emigration of the Irish.

Symbolism is very important in the first and third chapters of Light of the Diddicoy, and the dangers of the Atlantic crossing is set up as a horrifying experience set in the hull of an outdated ship (RMS Teutonic) via the steerage class.

Garrity has never traveled before and is alone, save the ninety or so other Irish third-class citizens who are jammed together in a callous dorm in the stern of the ship. English stewards round them up cruelly and the sound of the choppy English accent sets Garrity’s fears alight.

After the ship has begun moving, Garrity’s imagination takes over. He can’t see anything outside, so his ears play tricks on him. He believes he hears wild men somewhere in the distance, but which is only the men of the fireman’s castle “feeding the old bitch” coal to keep her devilish fires going.

He then hears what he believes are the sounds of U-Boats under the ship, but then admits he wouldn’t know what the sound U-Boats would make anyhow.

The Lusitania sinking off the Head of Kinsale, Ireland, 1915.

His fears of being torpedoed take him over while the ship heads into an Atlantic storm. Everyone in steerage is sent flying across floor as the ship bobs and “gesticulates” in the ocean, and Garrity thinks of the old sea-faring songs that romanticizes the death of Irish peasants during the Atlantic crossing. These are reminiscences of the casket ships that had starved Irish within their hulls during the Great Hunger (Potato Famine), though we are set in the heart of the late Industrial Age of iron-casked ships.

The sea as seen as a monster.

Garrity cannot stop thinking of the Lusitania and other ships that were sunk and that fate must be calling him, as so many other Irish had been called, for a death in the Atlantic. Sucked in by the “great vaginal drink” that is the sea.

Anyhow, when I saw the 98th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, which took place just months before the beginning of Light of the Diddicoy, I thought we could put together some connections about the era. I feel sad that World War I and Progressive Era New York is not as popularly remembered as others, though maybe it’s an opportunity for this book to thrive.

Eamon

Press Release: Light of the Diddicoy To be Published

Well, it is finally official. A contract has been agreed upon and signed between myself and Three Rooms Press for the first book of the Auld Irishtown trilogy, Light of the Diddicoy.

I am very happy to announce that a new friendship/relationship has begun. Peter Carlaftes of Three Rooms Press and I have been speaking about Light of the Diddicoy for a few months now and we found that we both have a strong interest in publishing this Historical Novel that takes place in Brooklyn, New York from October 1915 to April 1916.

The release date is scheduled well in advance for anyone who is interested. We are shooting for St. Patrick’s Day, 2014. And we will certainly have a party! And it most certainly will take place in New York, the perfect setting for a perfectly relevant release date of a book about the Irish-American struggle in the “Big Onion,” as the Irish used to call it, but is better known today as the “Big Apple.”

Three Rooms Press is a New York City based publisher that is known for supporting local writers and poets and local topics as well Dada Poetry and has published work from the legendary Punk bassist Mike Watt of the Minutemen. I first watched Peter Carlaftes recite poetry at the Cornelia Street Cafe‘s Son of A Pony reading series in 2009. He had emotion as he read. I saw him yell, speak softly and even come close to tears on stage. After making my way through the poetry circuit in the city, there was much that I’d rather not have seen or listened to. But Peter jumped out at me.

I noticed he and Kat Georges, who hosted the Son of a Pony, were close and often sat next to each other at parties and poetry readings at other locations. I have since found out they are engaged. They seem perfect for each other because I have heard Kat recite poetry as well and she is equally as passionate and equally as brilliant.

In fact, Peter and Kat were present at this recording of me in early 2010 at a Manhattan recording studio… (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4klSTQmsPs). After a few drinks, I finally got the guts to go up and talk to Peter (who himself had two beers in his grip) and attempted to start a conversation. He mentioned my Irish name and surname and told me about his growing up in the Bronx around a bunch of Irishers. When I started to speak, he noticed I had an American accent.

“You’re not Irish,” he said.

That kind of direct approach is exactly what I look for in people, particularly when it comes to getting feedback from my writing as it has always been my opinion that those who are concerned about hurting your feelings and give fraudulent compliments to avoid confrontation are the least likely to help a writer improve upon his/her work. As it has turned out, Peter’s feedback has been very helpful and together I feel we have a great opportunity.

For me, Three Rooms Press and Light of the Diddicoy is a perfect marriage. I am very proud to be associated with a publisher as gritty as Three Rooms Press. Dada Poetry, punk rock, NYC writers/poets and now… Eamon Loingsigh.

Don’t forget: St. Patrick’s Day, 2014!

Eamon

Dinny Meehan

Dennis L. “Dinny” Meehan is a perfect example of what I call an “open character.” He has the perfect combination of being known historically as a leader, yet there is not much documented about him during his life. Not even a single identifiable photo or mug shot. An author’s dream.

A lot is missing about Dinny Meehan, and the reason is well known. In those days, the Irish were infamous for their secret societies (Fenians, Molly Maguires…) and a deeply ingrained code of silence. This code of silence was so pervasive that this researcher believes that the White Hand Gang often gave false and misleading information to the police and newspapers to obscure knowledge of their structure. As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, the Irish-Americans of that era (and earlier) had the greatest distrust of law and preferred to deal with problems and quarrels by their own methods. Consequently, many murders and beatings went unsolved or unreported in Irishtown and the dock neighborhoods of Brooklyn. No one wanted to go to the witness stand and talk about what they saw, because if they did they would be labeled a “stool pigeon” or a “tout” (two Irish words that have been brought into the English language via American slang, both meaning informer or spy). The penalty for talking was death or banishment. No other thing in Irishtown was enforced as strictly.

With a lot of information about Dinny Meehan missing, I had to think long and hard about him when researching the Auld Irishtown trilogy. I didn’t want to be reckless and run away from how he truly was, from what information we do have as the leader of a gang of laborers along the Brooklyn waterfront. At the same time, I could use my imagination to characterize him as a symbol of his time and place in the world.

Some things are known about him, such as his boasting that he would never be sent to prison. He had a long record of arrests for theft, but most importantly he was charged for murder and went to trial for it in 1912, three years before Light of the Diddicoy, the first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy begins.

We also know that after he died, he was described by police as “the most desperate gangster in Brooklyn.” At his funeral, thousands showed up and paid homage. The waterfront was literally shut down for the day.

A year or so after his death, a man showed up at the Poplar Street Police Station and wanted to make an admission. He lied while under oath because years earlier, Dinny Meehan told him that if he told the truth on the witness stand, he wouldn’t live long. The fact that a man waits until after Dinny’s death to come forward, I think, says a lot about the gang leader’s ability to “persuade.”

After reading thousands of articles in the periodicals of the time, pulling his death certificate and some police reports, the one thing that the police and other gang members said of his best qualities was his bringing together all the wild Irish-American gangs in the area. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Brooklyn, the Irish-American gangs fought against each other street for street. Or in this case, pier terminal for pier terminal as they made their money by exacting tribute from immigrant longshoreman, local businesses and shipping companies. But when it became apparent that the Italian “Black Hand” underworld was gaining ground on the Gowanus piers and in the southern Brooklyn rackets and aspired to move north where the ship traffic was much denser (where the Irish-American gangs still held sway), Dinny Meehan apparently worked diligently to persuade the local Irish-American gangs to work as one. Or as close to one as possible. By naming his umbrella organization the White Hand Gang in reaction to the Italian Black Hand, and reaching out to Irish-American gang members from the Navy Yard all the way down to Red Hook, Dinny Meehan was successful in consolidating a very duplicitous and dangerous constituency to work, essentially, for him to keep the Italians south of Red Hook.

So, it could certainly be said that he had leadership qualities. Another thing he was known for was taking a direct part in gang raids, fights and murders. This was common among the Irish-American gangs as opposed to the Italians, who sent lower level men among a hierarchy to do the dirty work. Whereas an Italian gang leader of the pre World War I era New York such as Frankie Yale, Paolo Vaccarelli (aka Paul Kelly) or Johnny Torrio would dress elegantly and not get blood on their hands directly, an Irish-American gang leader would most definitely go into battle himself, right alongside his brothers.

But, just as in an Italian gang, some members had to take a fall and in the case of Dinny Meehan, who hired gang lawyers for himself, but not necessarily for all of his men, some within the gang felt he abused his power.

The Hanon Shoe factory employed many working class Irish in the area we now call DUMBO, then called Irishtown.

For instance, the gang stole thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from a local shoe factory called Hanon Shoes. Meehan and others were arrested when some of the shoes were found by the police. Yet only a man named Edward Gilchrist, a member of the gang, was convicted while Meehan and the others went free.

This also happened to Thomas Burke, who was convicted of the 1912 murder of a bartender, yet Meehan and three others were released. Burke (in the trilogy, Pickles Leighton is set up), although a member of the White Hand Gang, did not have the same lawyer representing him as the others. So, does that mean Burke was not as loyal to Meehan? Was he set up? Certainly, others in the gang could surmise that Meehan could be guilty of “framing” some of his own men. And when gangsters have aspirations to take power for themselves, which happened often, this damning evidence was used to justify disloyalty among some men who maybe never wanted to join Meehan’s umbrella organization in the first place.

Bill Lovett (center) escorted by police to a trial where he was charged for murder. Five years younger than Dinny Meehan and a ferociously violent young man, he was considered the future of the White Hand Gang.

So, this is the frame of the story that describes the biggest threat the Irish-American White Hand Gang was up against. Not the Italians, not the law, not the local businesses that hated them and not the unions, the biggest threat to the gang was themselves. And the face of that disloyalty to Meehan is characterized by none other than his biggest nemesis, “Wild” Bill Lovett, former leader of the Jay Street Gang that was gobbled up by the White Hand.

Of course, if anyone knows anything about the classic Irish tragedy, it is the stool pigeon, the tout. Better known today as the traitor the sell out. Failed Irish rebellions against the British colonialist empire are full of them and the tragic consequences are deeply ingrained in the Irish lore.

And of course, Auld Irishtown has its own tragic characters and consequences. And although the White Hand Gang had many enemies in New York, including time itself, the war between Dinny Meehan, the leader of the gang, and Bill Lovett, a young up-and-comer is a symbolic one.

Brooklyn’s Irishtown

I was at first made aware of an “Irishtown” in Brooklyn by an elder through word of mouth, which of course is the ancient form of Irish storytelling. My grandmother, who was born in Brooklyn in 1917, first made mention in passing when telling of stories from her childhood in the humble tenement neighborhoods. Because her family was forced to move often due to their financial state, she got to know many of the old Brooklyn neighborhoods.

My grandfather James Lynch (b. 1915), who was a much better listener than a talker (of course, that made him a great bartender) agreed. ”Yes, yes, there was once an Irishtown in Brooklyn,” he said. “Certainly was.”

It was the mid 1990s I suppose when I heard these rumors. At that time, however, I was still dreaming of becoming a writer. But as the hierarchy of wants go, it was drinking alcohol and collecting girlfriends that I was more interested in. As wild and hot-tempered as any young man without a disciplined childhood, I was not as enamored with research as much as I was sex and whiskey and long nights enjoying both.

Come 2003 and the world makes the connection of Irish-immigrants in the 19th Century and the Five Points section of Lower Manhattan when Martin Scorsese’s classic “Gangs of New York” was released.

I had yet to finish my first book then, but I suppose the idea of a novel about Brooklyn’s Irishtown started to mingle in my mind. Like any writer, I felt I could have written a better screenplay for Gangs of New York. It lacked realism, was not shot in New York and kind of mashed multiple historical events together conveniently for the benefit of the big screen.

But I had yet to clear my own head. With a young family needing my full attention, I put off my writing aspirations.

In August of 2009, I ran across a collection of articles about the White Hand Gang in Brooklyn’s “Irishtown.” Again there was a reference that I connected to the stories of my grandparents’ childhoods. After three years of research and many, many hours spent at the Municipal Archives on Chambers Street in Manhattan, I had come to the conclusion that I was going to write a trilogy called “Auld Irishtown.”

The only problem? There was no really true, or official labeling of a neighborhood called Irishtown. It was informal. And consistent with the Famine Irish that settled there who often could not read or write, and more often didn’t believe in writing anything down as they preferred the oral passage of their stories, Irishtown was never a declared section. There were other names for the neighborhoods they lived in such as Vinegar Hill, the Navy Yard and Brooklyn Heights, and now we have DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), but Irishtown was never recognized as an actual place in Brooklyn.

So, how could I name a trilogy of books after something that never truly existed on official records? Isn’t that an unintelligent thing to do? How could I prove that at least some people called it Irishtown, even though those people were usually of the lowest rung of Brooklyn society? Well, I had a job to do. And I am going to prove my grandparents correct, even as they knew it wasn’t ever listed on a map and no trolley ever passed through it or an elevated train over it. Here we go then.

The earliest mention of an Irishtown in Brooklyn was actually further south than our destination of Brooklyn Heights and Vinegar Hill. In the book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 the original Irishtown was “Below the Heights of Gowanus” where “Brooklyn rolled south to the sea. Here the landscape of scattered farms and villages was largely untouched by the 1830s boom, with one exception.” Fort Hamilton where “wharves rose along the shore for landing supplies. Fort Hamilton village, also known as Irishtown… its shacks housed construction workers, many of them recent immigrants, and the Irish women who did laundry and opened small stores.”

Of course, this was some years before the famine, but already we see the makings of the slums where Irish immigrants live in “shacks” along the waterfront where the ships load and unload goods. A theme we will find all the way through the Marlon Brando film “On the Waterfront” of 20th Century fame and later even.

In A History of the City of Brooklyn by Henry Reed Stiles, by April of 1844 the Irish immigrant neighborhoods have moved north to Cobble Hill. That Spring found great tension between the nativists and the Irish, “when a riot between the native Americans and the Irish in the neighborhood of Dean and Court and Wykoff streets.” It took two companies of uniformed militia to quell the riot.

Cover of the book “The Great Hunger” by Cecil Woodham-Smith, a book my grandfather gave me.

Of course, it wasn’t until 1845 that the great blight of the potato in Ireland, worsened by the British attitude toward the Irish tenant farmers would force more than one million into coffin ships bound for Canada, Boston, Australia and the pier neighborhoods of the New York harbor.

After that, we have many sightings of Irish living in the same neighborhoods where the ships had unloaded them close to the Fulton Ferry slip. Still in a terrible state after their journeys, we see Stiles describe the area.

“In January of 1847, the ship fever broke out in Hudson Avenue, near Tillary, having been imported by a ship load of Irish emigrants, and continued to rage in that and other localities in the 1st, 2nd, 5th and 6th wards, during 1847 and ’48.”

A sketch of a typically chaotic scene of Famine Irish coming off a coffin ship.

These were the Famine Irish. The most destitute people on earth at the time. Literally showing up in Five Points and Brooklyn’s Irishtown shoeless and wearing rags after a grueling journey across the Atlantic. Running from the famine for any shore that would have them. Many of them, their numbers still undocumented today, died on the way. If you can imagine wearing nothing but worn, stitched rags during a winter crossing, either stuck in the hold of a clipper with the pigs or on the deck with the driving wind, rain and sleet, then maybe you can begin to understand the horror of their realities. These were the people that would make the Irishtown of Brooklyn. The survivors of a horrific predicament.

For 1849, Stiles describes a certain part of every year in Irishtown as “the cholera season.”

Racism against the Irish was always present, and in 1854 in the neighborhoods of Irishtown, “riots had broken out between the Irish and parties affiliated with the Know-Nothing party.”

The Irish Brigade was called The Fighting 69th, which the University of Notre Dame named their mascot after.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, an Irishman from Brooklyn, Captain William Hogan of the Tandy Light Artillery, “commenced among his countrymen the organization of an artillery company, which eventually did good service with the Irish Brigade (The Fighting 69th).”

In Brooklyn By Name, a book by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Brooklyn’s Irish neighborhood is established. “By the middle of the (19th) century, nearly half of Vinegar Hill’s residents were Irish, many of them dockworkers at the Navy Yard, and the neighborhood was informally called “Irish Town.”

In different articles in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and other newspapers and books, Brooklyn’s Irishtown is described as a slum along the waterfront where clapboard houses of two stories reside amongst the alleys and the myriad of winding streets by the water. These shacks sway with the wind and often crumble into the dirt roads. When earlier the Erie Canal became fully operational, the ports and piers, wharfs and docks of New York became the busiest in the world. Brooklyn played a heavy role in importing and exporting of goods and for the Irish working class immigrants in the dock neighborhoods, there was plenty of labor work to done.

Of course, the Irish are not known simply as workers. They played very hard too. They are characterized as being heavy drinkers, but also as being deeply suspicious of the law. In fact, one of the biggest features of the people of Irishtown is their blatant disregard for law. Mixed with their old-country tradition of making “poteen” or “mountain dew,” caused a war in Brooklyn.

By the end of the Civil War, there were illegal whiskey distilleries all over Irishtown and for many, it was a boom era. Why were they illegal? Well, not a one ever paid a red penny in taxes to Uncle Sam. It was a black market economy, and for those who had their own distilleries with plenty of taverns and saloons to supply a very thirsty Irish population, it created a lavish few new-rich Irish that even they couldn’t have foreseen.

In a comical feature article in the New York Times of March 18, 1894 called KINGS OF THE MOONSHINERS: Illicit Distillers who ruled in Irishtown, the author and an “old-timer” recall the suddenly rich Famine Irish as being overtly gaudy in their wild spending sprees.

Men like “Ginger” Farrell, “Ned” Brady and John Devlin (Irish surnames, of course) were “men of robust physique, bluff manners and iron determination” and “had wild, barbaric notions of what constituted real luxury.”

In fact a man named Grady was, “the chief purveyor of ornaments for the gang.” A rogue jeweler in Irishtown, Grady supplied the new-rich rascals with “headlight diamond studs” and half-pound gold watches and other jewels that were “dazzling in their luminous intensity.”

They also organized huge balls and dances in the pier neighborhood, “a lavish display of jewelry did not limit their extravagances. Most of them kept fast horses and played high games of poker. The festivities of Irishtown were held mainly… on Adams Street.”

Typical depiction of the Irish sharing his ill-begotten goods with the “evil” Catholic Church.

The power of these illegal distillers and their ilk had reached into politics so deeply that many of the Brooklyn Democrats of the 1890s started out with connections to the spend-thrift illegal distilleries in the 1860s and ‘70s.

The cops too, they were dealt with firmly and quickly so that the black market could continue. When a police officer “made himself obnoxious, his transfer to some other district was easily secured” by request from the illegal distillery owners to their connections in downtown Brooklyn.

“The extent of the moonshine traffic was never fully known to outsiders. The whole neighborhood was a unit in defense of the stills,” the article goes on to describe.

But the party would have to end and in Brooklyn’s Irishtown it would not come without a brawl. Uncle Sam wanted his share, but the “bhoys” of Brooklyn wouldn’t budge. Thus began the Whiskey Wars of 1869-1871. And where else could you have a “Whiskey War” than in good old Irishtown?

Prohibition was passed in 1920, but the first war against federal officials over liquor happened along the Brooklyn waterfront.

Raids began in the neighborhood from local and federal agents. And here and there a few barrels were turned over in the street. But soon the connections set in and patrolmen were paid well to give information to the distillers for information concerning an upcoming raid.

Always though, there was a commotion. A fight with officers, women parading their children in the streets feigning fear of authorities and doctors summoned when the usual victim got clapped on the noggin. It was a calamitous affair, entering the neighborhoods, officers would remember. And not much whiskey was ever detained to boot.

“Raids by revenue officers… were always warmly received,” an old-timer remembered in the NY Times article. “As the minions of Uncle Sam’s authority moved through… the dangerous thoroughfares, showers of stones and like missiles saluted them. Men, women, and children would cluster on the roofs armed with anything they could throw. Sometimes they would tear down the chimneys of their habitations to fling the bricks streetward.”

The message was simple. “Stay out of our neighborhoods.”

But when an officer was (inevitably) killed on an “Irishtown thoroughfare,” the marines stationed at the Navy Yard were summoned. “Armed sentries surrounded the lawless section.”

The book Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corp. confirms the role of the marines when it says, “Between 1867 and 1871, Marines from the Brooklyn barracks sortied into Brooklyn’s ‘Irishtown’ on nine separate occasions to help federal revenue officers break up illegal distilleries.”

Blockaded cellars were broken into by the authorities and “hogsheads of illicit fluid were smashed and emptied into the gutters… When the bluecoats had completed their labors, not an illicit distillery remained in Irishtown.” And finally, the war was over in Brooklyn.

The late 1870s, ‘80s and ‘90s sees Brooklyn overcome with industrialization and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge provides the Irishtown men plenty of work.

“The erection of factories and warehouses,” was changing the character of Irishtown, the old timer in the NY Times said.

The economy of the Brooklyn waterfront was dependent on the shipping companies. Trucking companies, stevedoring companies, ship building, warehousing, coffee companies, corrugated box-making companies and even bomb making companies called Irishtown their home now.

The immigration of Italian, German, Jewish and every other nationality changed the environment as well. Never again were the Irish to dominant the neighborhood. It would forever be known as a working class neighborhood where the ships let off, but not as “Irishtown.”

Even with all the industrialization that took over Brooklyn, still some of the old wood-framed, pre-Civil War buildings remained as evidenced by a blog (Artists Without Walls) post from 2011 refers, “in a neighborhood that was called Irish Town… The neighborhood was populated by poor Irish immigrants who lived in over-crowded, wood framed houses that were, more often than not, firetraps. My family experienced the consequences of these living conditions when… my great great grandfather… died in a house fire on August 31, 1884.”

Irishtown was situated west of the Brooklyn Navy Yard (in white) on this map in Vinegar Hill and underneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.

By the early 1900s, the Irishtown families had settled in stable jobs along the waterfront businesses and the building of the Manhattan Bridge in 1909 again provides work. But the lowliest of the Irishtown poor became members of the gangs. These gangs were intertwined with the stevedoring companies and the unions and often were hired by one to kill or maim a rival of another.

The “Shape Up” practice of forcing hopeful longshoreman to “prove” their worth by running faster than the others was entrenched as it had been established many years earlier. Most “fellas” in Irishtown had to pay up front to work unloading or loading a ship, unless they were “in.” That usually meant you were from an original Irish family or were friends with the Irish-American gangs that dominated the waterfront rackets. Those rackets included collecting “tribute” from pierhouses, shipping companies, trucking companies and, most importantly, from immigrant longshoreman.

There were many Irish-American gangs in Irishtown then. Most notably was the White Hand Gang whose headquarters was a two-story shack and saloon under the Manhattan Bridge at 25 Bridge Street.

Sketch from Meyer Berger’s The Eight Million of a trenchcoated gangster and a girl (presumably Anna Lonergan) on his arm.

Irishtown had always been a place of great ruckuses and wild rumpuses, but it was the dock gangs that gained it the reputation of being a dangerous place. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Meyer Berger, in his book The Eight Million, wrote that “Records in the Medical Examiner’s office show that in the ten years from 1922 and 1932, there were 78 unsolved murders in the section of Brooklyn called Irishtown–the rough cobbled area between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Fulton Ferry, under and around the approaches to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.”

The article was about an aged Anna Lonergan who, in her younger years, was known as “Queen of Brooklyn’s Irishtown Docks,” as she was the sister of Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan and widow of two of the White Hand Gang’s most notorious leaders “Wild” Bill Lovett and Matty Martin. All of whom died by the bullet in dock gang wars.

Some other evidence that justifies the naming rights of the area as once called Irishtown is the opening sentence of the book Where the Money Was whose author was quite possibly the world’s most famous bank robber, Willie Sutton. In the opening chapter named, “Irishtown Made Me,” Sutton describes his birth like this, “I was born on June 30, 1901, on the corner of Nassau and Gold in a section along the Brooklyn docks known as Irishtown.”

Sutton said that in Irishtown, men like Dinny Meehan and Bill Lovett, leaders of the White Hand Gang, were the local boys’ heroes and that “Scarface Al Capone was a member of the (rival) Italian mob, and it was common knowledge in later years that he had gone to Chicago because the Irish mob played too rough.”

The White Hand Gang at that time was brought together in order to fend off the rise of the Italians, whose practice of kidnapping and ransom was generally described as “Blackhanded.” But the main business of the gangsters of Irishtown was the dock labor racket and the loading and unloading of ships and trucks, and 25 Bridge Street was the saloon where they were headquartered.

Here is a description from the November 21, 1923 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (p. 2), which was in the very long obituary of the recently murdered Bill Lovett, “They assemble in the morning and wait for a call to work on the docks. The system under which they work is about like this: Brown or Smith gets a consignment of goods and wants somebody to help his truckman. He goes to 25 Bridge St., sees the boss of the local, and men are sent to load the consignment on the truck. For this, they get so much a package. That part of old Brooklyn is a wilderness of weather-beaten houses what is known as the bridge district.”

So, by 1923, even a local is no longer calling the area Irishtown. Instead, it is the Bridge District. Again, the old neighborhood is remembered by the locals and the old-timers. So popular were these stories, that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle kept regular space in their pages for old-timers to talk about the old times.

In this July 13, 1941 edition, one old-timer wrote in to say he was “born in Irish town, Bridge and Prospect streets over Redman’s Saloon, back in 1892.” Later he moved to Concord Street where his family, “lived on the third level with the El.” Meaning the Elevated train used to pass by his window burning coal and making a big racket. He was also proud that he used to sell the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on the street as a youth and remembers hocking the paper to interested readers when President McKinley was shot.

Another old-timer was Patrick Larney, who spent 57 years in Irishtown when he decided to write in 1940 to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s “Old-Timer’s” Section. He knew the area well since he represented it in the State Assembly and the Board of Alderman. He spoke of the Christmas tradition in Irishtown and sent in this poem:

“Well I do remember that cold day in November
I left the old home I love so well
and moved to a place decorated with lace 
and then became a swell. 
I cannot forget that old home I left
In that town of great renown
I long to go back to that old-fashioned shack
in dear old Irishtown…
Where I spent my boyhood days and where I wore a crown.
I moved to a place where I don’t know a face and now I wear a frown.
I long to go back to that old-fashioned shack in dear old Irishtown.”

On All Saints Day, November 2, 2012, my family laid to rest my grandmother after she lived a long and prosperous 95 years. In the months before her passing, I made a promise to her that since she kept the stories alive, I would dedicate my next book to her and that I was out to prove, by hook or by crook, that the Irishtown of her childhood would be made real from the clutches of rumor.

Humbly, she thanked me. Yet I could tell it made her a bit uncomfortable to receive that kind of attention. I reminded her, however, that if it weren’t for her and others like her, the old-timers, that the memories of “Auld Irishtown” could not have been passed to me.

For which I will now pass to you.

Frankie Yale

Francesco Ioele moved from Italy to Southern Brooklyn in 1901 as an eight-year old and quickly became known as a strong fighter in the streets. Among the many Italians that emigrated to New York at the time, he was groomed for greatness. Underground greatness, that is.

At some point, probably when he arrived in Brooklyn, he changed his very ethnic-sounding last name to Uale, only later to again change it to Yale.

There isn’t a whole lot that is known about him before 1917 when he was charged under the Sullivan Law and sent to the penitentiary for having a loaded revolver without a permit. Also that year he opened a club on Coney Island called The Harvard Inn.

At the Harvard Inn, his friend Johnny Torrio talked him into hiring a young man with even more potential than Yale. That youngster was Al Capone who would later move with Torrio and take over the Chicago bootlegging rackets after Prohibition in 1920. As a young bouncer at The Harvard Inn, however, Capone met a girl named Lena Galluccio who, as a brash meathead from the slums of Brooklyn, spoke to her in a tone that apparently did not make her older brother Frank (a seasoned gangster) very happy and slashed Capone across the face with a knife, and it was there that the moniker “Scarface Al” was born.

As a Brooklyn crime boss, Yale’s territories expanded in Brooklyn after the Mafia-Camorra War and his influence gained followers as he was known as the “Prince of Pals.” He was known as being a good storyteller and prone to giving large handouts with advice attached like when he gave an older gentleman money and told him to “get a horse, you’re too old to walk.” He got rich as a business man over the next few years by way of extortion, a gaggle of brothels and the “protection” racket (the New York style of business insurance at the time). He also owned a funeral home and when he was hospitalized in 1921 for a gunshot wound he sustained during a shootout in Park Row, Manhattan, he threateningly told his shooters through the newspapers that he was “an undertaker.”

A 1910 newspaper article describing the Black Hand methods

La Mano Nera was an ancient Italian form of kidnapping and extortion that found its way onto the streets of Brooklyn during the era. In English, it’s called The Black Hand, which was a form of crime, not a gang. As the media and journalists were not savvy of the street-wise gangsters or the intricacies of the Italian families and their territories and were often given bad or misleading information, the term “Black Hand” eventually changed and became a description for what was believed by reporters/editors/police to be a specific gang that was of Italian ethnicity.

Whatever they were called, the Italians were gaining big ground in Southern Brooklyn. And they were trying to move north too. Where the dock rackets were most plentiful and provided a stable income too, as the Brooklyn docks were very much at the heart of New York’s shipping ports and piers, the main port of entry/exit of manufactured goods into/out of the United States.

But the incumbent Irish (who had mostly arrived a generation or two ahead of the Italians) was around this time nothing more than a collection of wild gangs that fought each other, pier-for-pier, from the Navy Yard all the way down to Red Hook. Under the leadership of Dinny Meehan, who called his headquarters a saloon under the Manhattan Bridge on the waterfront, he gathered these “wild bhoys” together, however loosely, and called this umbrella group of Irish-Americans the White Hand Gang. A term that was inspired by the Italian Blackhanders to their south.

So there you have it. The Whitehanders (Irish-Americans) versus The Blackhanders (Italian-Americans). Sounds like you have the making of an easy book to write about, doesn’t it? The Irish versus the Italians for dominance of the sweet dock rackets? Well, no. Actually. They rarely fought at all, although some rogue authors (that at first threw me plenty of curves when I was researching) would have you believe otherwise.

There were a few spats here and there, but most of the tension was behind the scenes. For example, the New York Dock Company owned a lot of property along the waterfront at the time. World War I government contracts were being handed out back then, and the NY Dock Co. owned much of the Piers, industrial rails and traincars, acres of warehousing units, storage space and stevedoring companies in the area that reaped the benefits of those handouts. The Irish and Italian gangs often fought only to get the rights to extract tribute from the holdings of the NY Dock Co.

Another good example of the Irish and Italians fighting behind the scenes were the unions, such as the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) and the International Workers of the World (IWW). The two groups of gangs fought for control within the ranks of the unions in order to be involved in the financial benefits of the general strikes and the big money negotiations with shipping companies like the Cunard Line and White Star Line (RMS Titanic). Instead of confronting each other on the docks or the streets with sticks and shovels and revolvers, the Irish and Italians of Brooklyn fought for prominence or “sway” in the heavily industrialized waterfront business.

Looking north from Red Hook along the Irish-held docks and the tenement neighborhoods to the east (color sketch, 1911).

In Light of the Diddicoy, the first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy, 14-year old Liam Garrity goes with Dinny Meehan and a couple bodyguards to see an executive (Jonathan Wolcott) at the NY Dock Co. The gang is often hired to protect the company’s property, although the White Hand Gang demands large payments under the threat of trashing or burning the company’s valuable holdings.

After Wolcott complains about the White Hand Gang being out of control and violent and compares them to a bunch of thieving monkeys, Meehan asks who gave Wolcott the box of fine cigars that sat on his desk. It is revealed then that Wolcott is being courted by Frankie Yale and the rival Italians in the south. This is a powerful threat to the White Hand Gang’s stronghold of the dock rackets. Wolcott then hires the gang to kill an ILA recruiter that is gaining ground on their property (no bigger threat to a company’s power than the unions). But Meehan doesn’t forget being slighted by Wolcott and in the end, he gets his revenge not only on the Italians, but puts a powerful foot down on the NY Dock Co.’s property and the unions all at once when a donnybrook breaks out in Red Hook.

The New York Dock Company’s main building was/is a huge concrete structure that faced the Buttermilk Channel and New York Harbor on Imlay Street, Red Hook

So if you’re looking for some tabloid trash about Irish Micks versus Italians dagos, you’ll not find it here. The reality of life in the Brooklyn neighborhoods along waterfront is, to me, much more important than a sensationalized, untrue depiction. Life was tough enough. No need to embellish the truth. My grandparents (and great-grandparents through other family members) told me many stories from the era that described a devastatingly tough lifestyle. The gangs were a reality that existed because the conditions were so bad that by sticking together (often by ethnicity), they could support each other and their families. And for me, this “need” to survive in bad conditions is the art in this trilogy. As this blog is called, it’s an artofneed. So, we’ll stick more to truth than fabrication here.

It was true, however, that Frankie Yale was no friend of the old Irish-American gangs of the north. And the Whitehanders were very explicit in their disgust of the “wops and guineas” in the south, but the Blackhanders were just one of many enemies the White Hand Gang had in the Irishtown section of Brooklyn under the bridges.

Although, things between the Brooklyn rivals did come to a head on Christmas night in 1925, when Al Capone came back to Brooklyn for his son’s surgery and happened upon a dive where Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan and a few other Irish “fellers” drank themselves into a stupor.

But that’s a story for another day.

What’s a Diddicoy?

What once are derogatory, offensive terms often change in time. “Irish” was once a terrible and oppressive thing to be called. In the ports of New York, Boston and New Orleans and in the Pennsylvania mines, the Southern mountains and anywhere else in the United States after the Famine, to be named such a thing was akin to spitting in your face. The Irish were clan-like, fiercely communal people who fenced themselves off from the incumbent Anglo-Saxon culture.

They worked hard, sure. But they played like animals. Bare-knuckle fist fighters that fought each other for the spirit in it and the fun. For blood and boast. Pride in the prowess of their ancient surnames. Gamblers that played a foreign card game called “faro” with words that harkened to an ancient language. The language of a nomadic Celtic past that had been banished from the mainland of Europe centuries earlier by Julius Caesar. Pushed to the Western-most islands of the continent. Now pushed passed the isle of Ireland, they took to the sea and landed in a new world. Born to soldier and brawl.

When a black man calls himself and his friends the one word that makes whites cringe, I can feel the symbolism in the meaning behind it. And I commend him for it. For wanting to change the meaning of it. Take the meaning over. What once was derogatory now is changing. Changing it themselves though. That’s a power to behold. The power of words and the power to change meaning.

Like the Irish in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, African-Americans have fenced themselves off from the Anglo-Saxon culture. Many have mixed their race with whites, whether on purpose or of rape. If there is one thing that mystifies the people of homogenous countries, it is the idea of the typical American being of mixed race. An entire country of mostly mixed-blooded people clashing together to make the most powerful culture the world has ever known. All were once desperate to leave their homogenous cultures like traveling gypsies running from war or famine, or were enslaved, only to land in a mish-mash of mixed raced people.

That is a Diddicoy. A mixed-blooded gypsy. 

In Ireland still to this very day, a group known generally as Travelers roam the boreens (country roads) in caravans challenging each other to bare-knuckle fights for the right to boast. One-on-one they fight with almost no rules between them, other than honor. Some of them are part Romani, some of them are not sure if they have any true Romani gypsy blood as they almost all carry Celtic or Norman surnames like the Joyce’s and the Doherty’s. There are many derogatory terms for them like Tinkers, Pikeys or the Pavee and of course, Diddicoys. 

In Chapter 7 of Light of the Diddicoy, the first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy, an immigrant is shot at 25 Bridge Street, the saloon that the White Hand Gang calls headquarters under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, 1915. Detective William Brosnan, a 53-year old Dubliner turned New York cop investigates as the immigrant takes his last breath on the floor among the mortar hods and shovels in the corner of the saloon.

The candles that light the saloon flicker when the front door is opened and the sounds of the trolleys rushing overhead along the Manhattan Bridge rail tracks breaks the silence inside. Brosnan is attempting to extract information from Paddy Keenan, himself a native of a small town outside Kilkenny, Ireland and the saloon’s tender. When Keenan, who is known as the gang’s Minister of Information, refuses to part with any knowledge of the shooting, Brosnan slams his hand on the bar and looks upstairs where the office of the gang’s leader is, Dinny Meehan. Brosnan then points his finger at Keenan and says, “This gang ain’ nuttin’ but a bunch o’ thiefs an’ diddicoys, anyhow. They’re days’re numbered, ye heard it from me right here and now!”

It takes a Dublin jackeen who knows English slang to describe the gang as Diddicoys, as the word comes from the derogatory description of a mix-blooded Romani-gypsy, particular to England. But a good description it is. You see, I spent three and a half years reading articles about the White Hand Gang and its members. When you pull police reports and death certificates and any description you can find of the lifestyle and habits of the Irish-American gangsters along the Brooklyn waterfront of the era, you find out a lot about them.

What I found in them that is most glaring is a complete lack of regard for law, as most gangsters do, of course. Actually, calling it a “lack of regard” isn’t strong enough. Not close enough. I would rather describe it as a complete distrust in law.

An excellent description of the mentality of the people who lived in what used to be called Irishtown in Brooklyn, which nowadays we call DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and Vinegar Hill, was Willie Sutton’s book Where the Money Was. He said the people who lived where he grew up didn’t believe in even the most basic organizations such as hospitals because it was said “they’d give ye the black box.” This black box symbolized death and the reason the Irish always got it was because the hospital administrators didn’t believe the Irish were worth the bed. And when someone more upstanding arrived at the over-crowded hospital, they had to make room. So they gave the black box to the Irish to give the bed to more law-abiding, respected citizens. Sounds crazy and superstitious, but that was his description. And I found a consistency to that in my own research of the White Hand Gang members of Brooklyn’s Irishtown.

After reading so much about these gangsters and coming across Sutton, the greatest bank robber of his time, I began to put it all together. It suddenly made sense: These Irish-Americans were the offspring of victims of possibly the worst, most atrocious and horrific miscarriage of justice the world has chronicled. They were the Famine-Irish that settled originally along the waterfront in Brooklyn. The ones that survived the casket ships and the Great Hunger of 1845-1852, An Gorta Mor, it’s called in Irish. It was law that starved their people and their children to an emaciated death in the ditches and road-side graves back in Ireland. Over a million dead and a million more sent to places like the Five Points in Lower Manhattan and “Auld Irishtown” in Brooklyn. Their tenant farms replaced by cattle, a more suitable income for English landowners in Ireland.

It was law that sent them to foreign lands. And it would be law that instilled the greatest distrust in them.

It would not be unlikely to assume that some, if not many, of the original Famine-Irish were actual gypsies, for there is a great relation to gypsy culture and the gangsters of Irishtown in Brooklyn. Not just in the disbelief in man-made law, but the superstitions, the thieving from the established people, the tradition of bare-knuckle fighting, the powerful belief in honor and, of course, the great Code of Silence that pervaded men and women who lived underneath the bridges in Brooklyn.

There are countless examples of a gangster getting shot and refusing to name his perpetrator. “I got mine, I’ll make sure he gets his” was usually the answer. The Traveller community in Britain and Ireland still think this way. They do not seek law to settle their disagreements, they seek blood. Whether it be retribution or a challenge. Just as was done in Irishtown and the Diddicoys of the White Hand Gang. A challenge is a challenge. One-on-one. Man against man with no weapons and no rules. Just a pair of fists and a man’s will. That was the character of the people of Auld Irishtown.

Eamon