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

a passing policeman, clubbed him over the head and stole his winter police coat. Curran gave the coat to his girlfriend, and after a few alterations, she produced a swell model with a military cut.
    Other Gophers followed this trend, and soon there was an epidemic of police officers staggering back to their station house on West 47 th Street, blood dripping from their heads and dressed only in their shirts, shoes, and trousers. This prompted the police captain of that precinct to send groups of four and five cops into the Gophers' domain. They bludgeoned enough Gophers that their sartorial vogue soon ended.
    Another Gophers leader was Happy Jack Mulraney, called Happy Jack because his face was set in a permanent smile. Mulraney’s  smile was not intended, but, in fact, caused by a quirky paralysis of Mulraney's face muscles. His cohorts enjoyed inciting the psychopathic-killer Mulraney into a rage, by telling him someone had made fun of his unintentional grin.
    One day, Paddy the Priest, a bar owner on 10 th   Avenue and a close friend of Mulraney’s, made the horrible mistake of asking Mulraney why he didn't smile out of the other side of his face. Mulraney immediately shot Paddy the Priest in the head, killing him instantly. Then adding insult to injury, Mulraney emptied Paddy the Priest's cash register. For his temporary lapse in judgment, Mulraney was sentenced to life in prison.
    In August of 1908, several Gophers wandered out of their West Side domain, and smack into the middle of a shootout on the Lower East Side between Monk Eastman's gang and Paul Kelly's Five Pointers. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, the Gophers opened fire, shooting at members of both warring gangs.
    One Gopher later said, “A lot of guys were poppin' at each other, so why shouldn't we do a little poppin' ourselves?”
    For years, the Gopher's main source of income was plundering the freight cars and the train depot of the New York Central Railroad, which ran along 11 th Avenue. The New York City police was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to stop these shenanigans. So, the railroad organized its own “police force,” which was comprised mostly of ex-cops, who had been brutalized by the Gophers in the past and were looking for revenge. This “police force” went into Hell's Kitchen, beating the Gophers from one end of the neighborhood to the other, or as a member of the “police force” said, “From hell to breakfast.” Sometimes they used clubs, and if needed, they fired guns. Being former policemen and well-trained in firearms, they were much better at gunplay than were the Gophers.
    In 1917, after the arrest of One Lung Curran, and with Madden still in jail and Mulraney in prison for life, the Gophers gradually dissipated. By 1920, the Gophers street gang ceased to exist, only to be replaced in later years by another murderous group called “The Westies.”
     
    G reat New York City Fire of 1835
    It was the worst fire in New York City's history. But that didn't stop the poor Irish, living in the slums of the Five Points, from going on a dazzling display of looting, which led to one of the biggest free champagne parties in the history of America.
    The city was in the throes of one of the coldest winters on record. On the days preceding “The Great Fire,” the temperature had dropped as low as 17 degrees below zero. By the night of December 16, 1835, there was two feet of frozen snow on the ground and the temperature was exactly zero frigid degrees. It was so cold, both the Hudson River and East Rivers had completely frozen.
    Around 9 p.m., a watchman (the precursor to a New York City policeman) named Warren Hayes was crossing the corner of Merchant (now Beaver Street) and Pearl Street, when he thought he smelled smoke. Hayes looked up at the last floor of a five-story building at 25 Merchant Street, rented by Comstock and Andrews, a famous dry-goods store, and he spotted smoke coming out of a window. Unbeknownst to Hayes, a gas