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involvement in some sort of gang. Of all the gangs in the city, those on the West Side of Manhattan were known to be the most audacious. At night, local cops had to walk the beat in “strong-arm squads” of four or five to avoid being bushwhacked by hoodlums. Street gangs like the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, and the Tenth Avenue Gang flourished amongst the poverty and urban squalor so characteristic of the neighborhood.
    The most powerful of the early Hell’s Kitchen gangs was the Gophers, so named because they usually met in tenement basements. At their peak in 1907, they were believed to have as many as 500 members. Primarily an Irish gang, they burglarized shops along the gaslit streets at night, ruled the saloons and pool halls, and staged frequent raids on the docks and the Hudson River Railroad, later renamed the New York Central Railroad.
    The Gophers were themselves a throwback to an earlier era of gangsterism when, in the late nineteenth century, New York City was at the mercy of nearly a dozen ruthless street gangs concentrated in the notorious Five Points area of lower Manhattan. Comprised largely of Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland during and after the Great Potato Famine, the Five Points gangs staged outlandish daytime robberies, engaged in nighttime gang wars and remained the bane of law enforcement throughout the latter part of the late 1800s. The Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, and the Kerryonians were known and feared, but the most violent of all were the Whyos, led by the likes of Red Rocks Farrell, Googy Corcoran, and Baboon Connolly.
    Neither the Five Points gangs nor the Gophers engaged in what would later be commonly referred to as organized crime. The turn-of-the-century gangs were undisciplined and relatively disorganized. There were none of the lucrative rackets that would come later in the Twenties with the passing of the 18th Amendment, otherwise known as Prohibition. Occasionally the Gophers could rent themselves out as bullyboys or enforcers for various political candidates, but much of their time was spent fighting among themselves—an Irish proclivity which amazed and appalled the less violent Dutch and German settlers of the era.
    The Gophers were to continue in the tradition of the Five Points gangs, reigning over Hell’s Kitchen for twenty-odd years in all manner of professional mayhem. Although no single member was as powerful or well known as Monk Eastman, the most prominent gangster of the era, they nonetheless established a pantheon of memorable psychopaths.
    There was Happy Jack Mullraney, who had a partial paralysis of his facial muscles that made it appear he was always laughing. Mullraney was known to be very sensitive about his disfigurement. One night he was in a saloon on 10th Avenue and he said something that irked Paddy the Priest, the saloon’s owner and a longtime friend of Mullraney’s. Paddy sneered, “Why don’t you try laughing out of the other side of your face, Happy Jack?” Mullraney pulled out a revolver and put a bullet in Paddy’s skull.
    There was One Lung Curran, known for his occasional withdrawals to a tubercular ward at Bellevue Hospital. Curran’s girlfriend once complained she didn’t have a warm coat for the winter, so One Lung promptly went out, blackjacked a policeman and relieved him of his jacket. After Curran’s girlfriend had it tailored, other women in the neighborhood expressed envy. Their boyfriends reacted accordingly, and before long the streets of Hell’s Kitchen were populated with coatless policemen.
    The Gophers were known to be so turbulent and so fickle that very few of their leaders held that distinction for more than a few months. Nonetheless, they remained a force to be reckoned with until 1910, when the New York Central Railroad organized a special security contingent to take action against them. Many of the railroad’s recruits were former policemen who had taken beatings at the hands of the Gophers and were now