Free Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set by Joe Bruno

felt, in order to save face and be consistent with his orders, he had no other choice but to kill her. And that he did. As a result, Coleman was arrested and convicted of murder. On January 12, 1839, Coleman became the first man ever to be hanged at the newly constructed Tombs Prison.
    After Coleman's death, the men in the Forty Thieves drifted into other street gangs: including the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, and the Bowery Boys.
    In the early 1850's, a juvenile street gang sprung up in the Five Points called the Forty Little Thieves, which consisted of homeless children of both sexes, from the ages of 8 to 12, who emulated the escapades of the old Forty Thieves. The head of the gang was Wild Maggie Carson, only 12-years-old herself.
    The Forty Little Thieves soon outgrew their gang, and their members became assimilated into the older and more famous gangs; all except for Wild Maggie Carson, who was taken off the streets by Reverend Lewis Morris Pease, founder of the Five Points House of Industry. Under Pease's guidance, Little Maggie got a legitimate job sewing buttons. According to Pease, when she was 15, Little Maggie met and married a well-to-do gentleman. And she lived happily ever after.
    That is, according to Pease.
     
    F lour Riots of 1837
    The flour problem began with the 1835 Great New York City Fire, which destroyed almost 700 downtown buildings. Nearly the entire New York City financial center, including the city's lifeblood - the banks - was burned to the ground. Unable to obtain loans, owners of factories and other downtown businesses, were not able to rebuild, putting tens of thousands of New Yorkers out of work.
    By 1837, New York City had sunk into the depths of a recession. With no jobs and no money, people's diets sometimes consisted of little more than simple buttered or jammed bread. The poor of the city began to panic, when they discovered that flour, needed to make their daily bread, would become so expensive they would not be able to afford to buy it.
    Matters were made worse, when reports from Virginia and other wheat producing states said there was a scarcity of wheat, from which flour was made, and a rise in price was inevitable. At the beginning of January 1837, wheat started at $5.62 cents a barrel. Within days, it had risen to $7 a barrel; then to $12 a barrel. There were rumors that in a few weeks, wheat would go to an incredible $20 a barrel.
    The hardest hit were the poor people, who lived in the slums of the Five Points, Bowery, and the Fourth Ward areas on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Besides the increase in the price of wheat, meat prices had doubled and coal to heat their hovels rose to $10 a ton. People became desperate, and poor souls who were not normally crooks felt they had no choice but to commit petty crimes in order to put food on their family's table.
    On February 1, 1837, news circulated that New York City had only four weeks supply of flour left and that the large flour and grain depot in Troy, New York, contained only 4,000 barrels of flour, rather than the usual 30,000 barrels. The newspapers began sensationalizing the issue, when they stated in their editorials that certain merchants were hoarding wheat and flour in anticipation of the rising prices.
    The Tammany Hall politicians were adept at causing unrest between the poor Irish, who populated the slums of Lower Manhattan, and anyone with either money or prestige. Never letting a crisis go to waste, Tammany Hall began spreading unfounded rumors that England was refusing to send flour to the United States. The message was compounded by the untruth that the Old Mother Country's intention was to starve the poor Irish in America, as a repayment for the rancor between Ireland and England which had existed for centuries.
    On February 10, 1837, a crowd of nearly 6,000 slum-dwellers, from the Five Points, Fourth Ward, and Bowery areas, met at City Hall Park. Running the meeting from atop the steps of City Hall were Tammany