On July 4, 1857, a crowd gathered in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. A dead rabbit was impaled on a spike and raised above the crowd like a battle flag. Men with butcher cleavers and pistols poured out of Mulberry Street by the hundreds. The Bowery Boys met them head-on from Orange Street.
The fighting lasted two full days. Eight men died. Nearly 100 were wounded badly enough to be carried away. An estimated 1,000 people fought in the streets on the most patriotic day on the American calendar. The police could not stop it. In 1857, New York City had two separate warring police forces that could barely stand the sight of each other.
The riot was not chaos. It was the collision of two worlds that had been building toward each other for decades. One world was Irish Catholic immigrants, starved off their land by famine, packed 40 to a room in the worst tenements on the continent. The other world was native-born Protestant Americans who watched the Irish arrive by the hundreds of thousands and felt something they called patriotism, but which functioned a lot more like fury.
Most people know this story from Martin Scorsese’s film, with Daniel Day-Lewis in a top hat with a glass eye and a cleaver. The film earned every one of its award nominations. But it is a gateway to a true story much stranger, much darker, and much more consequential than anything Scorsese put on screen. What was really happening in the Five Points was the birth of organized crime in America.
The Five Points gets its name because five streets converge at one intersection in Lower Manhattan. Anthony Street, Cross Street, Orange Street, Little Water Street, and Mulberry Street. Into those few square blocks, starting in the 1840s, the Irish Famine poured one of the largest forced migrations in Western history. Between 1845 and 1852, roughly 1 million people died in Ireland. Another million emigrated. A huge portion landed in New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
The neighborhood sat on top of a former pond called Collect Pond, which the city had filled in poorly in the early 1800s. The ground underneath was always wet and unstable. Buildings sank. Cellars flooded. Landlords packed as many human beings as physics would allow. The most notorious building in the neighborhood was called the Old Brewery. It had been built in 1792 as an actual brewery and converted to a tenement in 1837. Five stories of interconnected rooms housed up to 1,000 people at any given time.
The legend, reported seriously in newspapers of the era, was that the Old Brewery averaged one murder per night. That was probably an urban legend. But the fact that the legend was believable tells you everything about what the Five Points had become. The building was torn down in 1852 by the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Their first act upon taking possession was to cart away the bones they found in the basement and the walls.
The Dead Rabbits evolved out of an earlier gang called the Roach Guards in the 1830s. By 1857, carrying that impaled rabbit as their banner, they were New York’s largest criminal operation, mostly Irish Catholics. On the other side of the fight stood the Bowery Boys. They were not imported criminals. They were American-born working-class Protestant men. Butchers, tanners, volunteer firefighters. They aligned themselves politically with a movement called the Know-Nothings, officially the American Party, a nativist organization that ran candidates on an explicit anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic platform.
Out of this collision, two men emerged who defined the era. The first was William Poole. The second was John Morrissey. You cannot understand one without the other.
William Poole was born in 1821 in Sussex County, New Jersey. He was a butcher by trade, which is where the nickname came from. He was physically enormous for the era, a bare-knuckle brawler considered almost impossible to knock down. He was also a volunteer fireman, which in mid-19th century New York was not a civic act so much as a gang affiliation. Firehouses were territorial. They fought each other on the way to fires. Poole’s firehouse was his crew long before he formalized it into the Bowery Boys.
John Morrissey is the flip side of the same coin. Born February 12, 1831, in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. His family brought him to America in 1833 and landed in Troy, New York, barely above poverty. By his teenage years, Morrissey was working as a collection agent for local crime figures. He was not a large man, but he was made of something that resisted pain in a way that frightened people. He had a nickname, Old Smoke. The story goes it came from a brawl where he was knocked backward into a fireplace, his coat caught fire, and he got up and continued fighting.
In 1853, Morrissey became the bare-knuckle heavyweight boxing champion of America after defeating Yankee Sullivan in a brutal fight in Boston Corners, New York. He was 22 years old. The Tammany Hall machine noticed immediately. Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization that functioned as New York City’s real government throughout most of the 19th century, understood a fundamental truth about urban politics. You need men who can deliver votes.
The way the system worked was this. The gang leaders controlled specific neighborhoods and specific voting precincts. On election day, the gangs deployed what were called repeaters, men who voted multiple times at multiple polling places under different names. The gang bosses provided the manpower. Tammany Hall provided the political cover and the patronage. The exchange was simple and ironclad. You deliver the votes, we deliver the contracts, the jobs, the police protection.
William Tweed rose through this system to become its absolute master. By the 1860s, Tweed controlled the Democratic Party in New York, which meant he effectively controlled the city itself. The courthouse that still bears his name, the New York County Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, was supposed to cost $250,000 to build. The final cost came in somewhere between 13 million and 50 million dollars, depending on which set of books you believe. One plasterer billed the city for nearly 1 million dollars for 9 months of work.
But Tweed wasn’t just stealing. He was building. The machine he constructed delivered real services to real people that no other institution was delivering. Tammany Hall helped Irish immigrants get naturalized. It helped them find housing and jobs. The corruption and the community service were completely intertwined.
Poole despised Morrissey, not just as a rival, but personally, specifically. Morrissey was everything Poole’s worldview told him shouldn’t exist. An Irish Catholic immigrant who had become powerful, celebrated, wealthy on American soil. Morrissey hated Poole back with equal intensity because Poole and the Bowery Boys were the organized expression of the hatred that had followed Morrissey since his family came off a boat as penniless foreigners.
Their feud culminated on the night of February 24, 1855, at Stanwix Hall, at 579 Broadway, near Prince Street. A man named Louis Baker, a close associate of Morrissey’s, walked into the main bar, approached William Poole, and shot him through the chest from close range. Poole did not go down immediately. He grabbed two knives from the lunch counter and threw them. He fought. But the wound was through the heart.
Eleven days later, on March 8, 1855, William Poole died at his home, 33 years old. His reported last words, carried in every newspaper in the city, were, “Goodbye, boys. I die a true American.” His funeral on March 11 attracted somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 mourners. Songs were written. His death became a political event for the Know Nothing movement.
Louis Baker fled to the Canary Islands. He was eventually returned, tried, and acquitted three separate times because witnesses kept changing their stories and juries kept deadlocking. Nobody ever did a day in prison for the murder of Bill Poole.
The man who almost certainly ordered his killing, John Morrissey, went on to become a United States Congressman. That is corruption in plain sight with a face everyone recognized.
By 1863, the tensions that had been building through all of this ignite in what becomes the largest civil insurrection in American history outside of the Civil War itself. The trigger is the Enrollment Act. Congress passed a military draft. Any man between 20 and 45 could be conscripted to fight in a war that many working-class New Yorkers, particularly Irish immigrants, saw as somebody else’s fight. And if you had $300, you could pay a commutation fee and buy your way out of the draft entirely.
On July 13, 1863, a Monday morning, the riots began. The first attacks were organized. Draft offices were targeted. The superintendent of police was beaten so badly he was left for dead in the street. Within hours, the violence shifted from anti-draft protest to something uglier. The rioters, many of them Irish working-class men, began targeting the black community of Manhattan.
The Colored Orphan Asylum on 5th Avenue, which housed over 200 black children, was burned to the ground on the first day. The children were evacuated minutes before the mob arrived. Eleven black men were lynched over the five days of rioting. Hundreds of black New Yorkers fled the city permanently. The published death toll was 119. Some historians put the real number significantly higher. Over 1.5 million dollars in property was destroyed. The rioting was finally suppressed only when Union Army regiments, some of them fresh from Gettysburg, were deployed in the streets of their own city.
Tammany Hall actually came out of this stronger. When the army restored order and the politicians started asking how this happened, the answer the machine provided was simple. Only we can keep these people calm. The riots that the machine’s own politics helped produce became the justification for expanding the machine’s power.
Now, what did Scorsese get right and what did he invent? The visual texture of the Five Points, the cramped streets, the mix of nationalities, is remarkably close. The nativist versus immigrant tension at the core of the story is not invented. It is the defining conflict of that era.
But the film kills Daniel Day-Lewis’ Bill Cutting during the draft riots of 1863. The real William Poole was dead eight years before those riots, shot in a Broadway saloon in 1855. He never saw the city burn. Amsterdam Vallon, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, is entirely fictional. There was no priest’s son who returned for revenge.
Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book, The Gangs of New York, which Scorsese adapted, is itself a vivid and entertaining mix of documented history and outright embellishment. Scorsese knew this going in. He was making myth, not documentary. What the film gets most right is the relationship between the gangs and political power. Tammany Hall was not separate from the gang world. It was the gang world with a cleaner address.
The film ends with the draft riots and the implication that this world simply collapsed into the modern city. But those gangs did not disappear. They evolved. In the 1890s, a man named Paul Kelly, born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli in southern Italy, looked at the remnants of the Dead Rabbits and other Five Points outfits and saw raw material. He formed the Five Points Gang. He recruited across ethnic lines, something the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys had never done. He built something that looked less like a street gang and more like a criminal corporation.
A young Johnny Torrio worked for Kelly. So did a kid named Al Capone. So did Charles Luciano, who went by Lucky, who would eventually restructure the American Mafia so thoroughly that the system he built in 1931 still echoes in how organized crime operates today.
The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys were not anomalies. They were the first iteration of something that the city, and eventually the country, would keep producing in different forms. The Five Points taught a specific lesson. Violence plus political access plus neighborhood loyalty equals power. That lesson did not die in the Draft Riots. It got handed down generation to generation.
The system that Boss Tweed perfected, trading gang muscle for electoral control, was the same system the Prohibition Era Mafia families would use. The same logic that made Bill Poole a political symbol made Al Capone a celebrity. The same dynamic that forced Irish immigrants to build criminal infrastructure for survival would repeat itself with Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, and black communities shut out of legitimate economic life. Different names, different neighborhoods, identical machinery.
The Five Points was torn down in stages. The neighborhood was eventually demolished in the early 20th century to make way for Columbus Park and the expansion of what became the civic center of Lower Manhattan. The courts and government buildings that stand there now were built partly on top of the ground where the old brewery stood, where the Dead Rabbits marched, where Bill Poole drank his last drink a few miles north.
New York paved over the whole thing and put the law on top of it. But sometimes you read about a RICO indictment, or you watch a congressional hearing about corruption, or you see the way a political machine delivers services in exchange for votes and loyalty. And you recognize the shape of it. The exact same shape. What was born in the Five Points never really left. It just changed its clothes.