A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy

George Washington Appo, the oncenotorious 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.Later, Appo joined a gang of swindlers in the green goods racket, which involved taking greedy and dishonest small-town businessmen who thought they were purchasing counterfeit money made with stolen government plates for pennies on the dollar. Though he found swindling more lucrative than pickpocketing, Appo lost one of his eyes when a deal went bad with a paranoid gun-packing Southerner.George’s father, Quimbo Appo, was one of New York’s earliest Asian Americans. Quimbo’s habits of murder and assault probably made him among the most notorious. He died mad in 1910 in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, believing himself “lord of the world,” raving about his infinite power and authority, having spent nearly half his life in state custody for crimes of violence.George, though, may have had a far more substantial effect on American life, particularly popular culture.To be sure, he appeared as himself in G.W. Lederer’s hit production of the melodrama “In the Tenderloin,” which was vaguely based on Appo’s career as a swindler. But more importantly, as Mr. Sante noted, Appo’s manner of speech and body language during his 1894 testimony before a state investigating committee on police corruption, reported in every city newspaper and picked up across the country,could be found reproduced almost note for note in any Warner Brothers B-movie of the 1930s: the ‘dese, dem, and dose,’ expressions like ‘youse guys,’ ‘dead game sport,’ ‘chase yerself,’ ‘wot t’hell,’ ‘hully gee’ (or ‘chee’), the refrain of ‘see?’ the lateral slicing motion made with the hand palm down, the crook talk of come-ons and come-backs, of ‘easy marks,’ the admission ‘he trun a scare into ‘em.’Some years ago, apparently, Mr. Gilfoyle found Appo’s 90-page autobiography among the archives of Columbia University. Though uneducated and illiterate for much of his life, Appo had a natural flair for writing. Mr. Gilfoyle uses the autobiography as the scaffolding from which hangs his own 460-page book. In fact, it’s a pity that the autobiography, which provides the most interesting passages in Mr. Gilfoyle’s book, was not published instead. This is for two reasons. First, Appo is a better writer than Mr. Gilfoyle, at least in the sense of drama, pacing, and storytelling. Second, most of Mr. Gilfoyle’s book is not really about George Appo. Instead, Mr. Gilfoyle discusses in a succession of somewhat academic digressions certain features of Appo’s times, such as the prison operations, criminal procedure, and economic realities of the 19th century: Appo often seems merely a means to pontificate on the evils of 19th-century society.The book’s surprising weakness stems from Mr. Gilfoyle’s apparent aversion to discussing the continuing effect of Appo and his kind on American popular culture, particularly as stereotypes of the New York City criminal class.That influence is probably far more important in affecting American life and personal style than anything Appo did in his larcenous lifetime.Appo proudly aspired to be a “good fellow.” Mr. Gilfoyle conscientiously defines this as meaning “a nervy crook,” one who displayed courage, loyalty, wit, and guile in making a dishonest living, lavished his ill-gotten gains upon his friends and companions, and accepted the consequences of his actions, however dire. But though Mr. Gilfoyle carefully cites the sources for this usage, back even to such early 20th-century true crime classics as Hutchins Hapgood’s “Autobiography of a Thief,” he apparently can’t bear to mention the term’s continuing use, most famously in the title of the popular motion picture, “Goodfellas.”That is strange, because in the very next footnote, on “wise guy,” he cites journalist Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguys,” upon which “Goodfellas” was based. After all, the essence of the American experience is popular culture, which molds our frames of reference on nearly every question with much more power than any academic historian can exert.None of this should distract us from this book’s central truth: George Appo did not turn an honest dollar from his adolescence, when he turned from newsboy to pickpocket, until the turn of the 20th century, when he became an undercover agent for reformers striving to eradicate crime and corruption. He spent much of his life in one degrading form of imprisonment after another, from a prison ship to the Tombs, and that properly evokes our sympathy. But that emotion should have limits, and Mr. Gilfoyle sometimes loses sight of them. After all, one should assume that the people whom Appo pickpocketed had worked hard for the money he stole.For example, part of Appo’s complaints about the difficulties of going straight is that employers not unreasonably refrained from employing a convicted thief and swindler and backers would not set him up in a small business. Life is tough that way.Another is that he could not lead the extravagant, easy life of booze and broads and gambling to which he was accustomed on the wages of a manual laborer. Life is tough in that way, too.Mr. Gilfoyle leaves us with a sense of sadness for Appo and his wasted life. But one shouldn’t forget that most of his contemporaries, who grew up in similar circumstances of poverty and discrimination, led honest lives of hard work. They did not believe their poverty entitled them to steal their neighbor’s hardearned dollars. That remains the untold story of Victorian New York.Mr. Bryk last wrote for these pages about historic urban fires.

A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy

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