No. 627
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
April 26, 2022

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Raid on the Broadway concert saloons, New York.
April 26, 2022
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There is something about the transitory, enigmatic nature of the following little story that charms me.  I always enjoy those moments when The Weird suddenly appears, slaps you in the face with a dead fish, and just as quickly and inexplicably vanishes for good.Our tale takes place on a pleasant English Sunday, May 5, 1924.  A young woman named Betty Bone went on the bicycle ride of 15
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Strange Company - 9/21/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
 A Song Written in Memory ofThe St. George Murder.(excerpt) In St. George, Me., as you shall hear,It proves to be the fatal year -That Mrs. Meservey, in the prime of life.By a murderer's hand has lost her life....Nathan Hart is the murderer's name,Father and husband think of the shame,Did he forget all woman kind,Seek like a beast some prey to find?...God in His written book doth say, 
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Murder By Gaslight - 9/19/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Demi-Monde Excursion. | A Rattling Main.

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Anxious For a Funeral

Joseph Biberich, of San Francisco, has his wife measured for a coffin before she is dead. [more]

Joseph Biberich, a San Francisco. Cal., man, was arrested the other night for disturbing the peace. Blberich has been married only six months, and his wife lies on her deathbed, cared for by a nurse and attended by kind-hearted neighbors. Biberich got drunk and tried to drive tho nurse from the bedside.Then the police interfered.

The nurse says he has openly threatened to poison his wife, and has pinched and beaten her while she lay powerless in bed. He called in an undertaker and had his wife measured for a coflin. Then be purchased a burial lot and made arrangements for the funeral. His wife has some property which, the nurse says, Biberich wants to get hold of.


The National Police Gazette, October 10, 1891

Raid

If there is in New York one spot more infamous than another, that spot is the section of Broadway on the east aide, between Bleecker and Houston streets. Hell gapes widely here for all who may pass after 7 o'clock in the evening. From Bleecker to Spring street there are at least three hundred abandoned females employed in those dens of infamy known to the public as concert saloons. During the last twelve months, this evil has grown to almost gigantic proportions, yet nothing was done to abate it until the evening of the 22d inst., when sixty-eight concert saloon waiter girls were arrested, together with three or four of the managers and proprietors of the dens.

Illustrated Police News, February 1, 1872.