No. 600
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 29, 2023

The Swindling Beggar

July 11, 2011
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The Scottish-born James Oliphant worked as a surgeon in Newcastle.  In 1755, he married one Margaret Erskine, and the pair went on to have two children.  From all appearances, the family was one of solid 18th century middle-class respectability.This seemingly ordinary household took a very dark turn in May of 1764.  One of Oliphant’s two maidservants unexpectedly became so ill she had to quit her
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Strange Company - 3/27/2023
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When Patrick  H. Doherty joined the Fall River Police Department in 1885, he might have been astounded to learn that he would be involved one day in two notorious murder cases- both involving hatchets and axes.  Patrick Doherty was born in Peoria, Illinois on August 10, 1859 to John and Mary Walsh Doherty.  Later the family moved east to Fall River, and we find Patrick Doherty living at 104 Columbia St. (off South Main) and working as a laborer for a time employed by Fall River Iron Works and the Fall River Line steamboat company.  He married Honora (Nora) E. Coughlin on April 25, 1887 at the age of 28, when he was employed at the Fall River Police Department as a patrolman.  The couple would have seven children:  Charles T., Frank., Grace, Robert, Helene, Margaret (called Marguerite), and John. Doherty, (as were several other patrolmen), was promoted to the rank of captain after their work in the case of the century, the Borden Murders of 1892.  Doherty had arrived at #92 after George Allen on the morning of the murders, and was very quickly in the thick of the action, questioning Lizzie upstairs, looking at the bodies with Dr. Dolan, running down to Smith’s pharmacy with Officer Harrington  to question Eli Bence, prowling the cellar for weapons with Medley, Fleet and Dr. Bowen, and making note of Lizzie’s dress.  Doherty stayed on the job on watch at the Borden house until he was relieved at 9 p.m.  When it came time for the inquest, it was Doherty who slipped down to 95 Division St. to collect Bridget, who had been staying with her cousin, Patrick Harrington after the murders.  He would testify at the Preliminary and the 1893 trial in New Bedford. In the midst of the excitement in New Bedford as Lizzie’s trial was about to get underway, yet another hatchet killing took over the front page, the murder of Bertha Manchester on May 30th.  It was a brutal attack to rival the Borden’s with the weapon being most likely a short-handled axe or possibly a hatchet. Doherty went out to the Manchester place with Marshal Hilliard, Captains Desmond, and Connors and Inspector Perron  on June 6th with the  suspect, Jose Correa de Mello, who revealed his hiding place for the stolen  watch taken from the victim and her purse at that time.  De Mello served time and then was sent back to the Azores, banned from stepping upon U.S. soil again. The Dohertys moved to 1007 Rock St. in 1897 and Patrick was pleased to walk his daughter Margaret (Marguerite) down the aisle in 1913. Patrick Doherty retired from the force in 1915 and succumbed to interstitial nephritis on June 28, 1915.. He, and some of his children are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Fall River. Resources: Ancestry.com, Parallel Lives,: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and her Fall River, Find-a-Grave.com. and Yesterday in Old Fall River: A Lizzie Borden Companion Fall River Globe June 28, 1915
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 3/3/2023
Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway. [“Subway Steps”] Gussow would […]
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Ephemeral New York - 3/27/2023
An article I recently wrote for the British online magazine, New Politic, is now available online. The article, “The Criminal Origins of the United States of America,” is about British convict transportation to America, which took place between the years 1718 and 1775, and is the subject of my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: […]
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Early American Crime - 12/17/2021
 17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
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Murder By Gaslight - 3/25/2023
Roped-inOmaha Daily BeeJune 25, 1884(Click image to enlarge)  OSSIBLE VICTIM OF THE JEFFERSON R. SMITH GANG.  Omaha Daily Bee June 25, 1884 COLORADO. Col. Fletcher, a tourist from Boston, was roped-in by the bunko men of Denver and relieved of $1,000. NOTES: $1,000.00 in 1884 is the equivalent of $33,472.95 in 2023. According to the Rocky Mountain News there were at least two,
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 3/12/2023
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 engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
The Old Shell Game | Recruiting For Sin's Army

The Swindling Beggar

Blind Beggar

Boston, 1894 - The 1890s were golden years for begging. Economic times were hard and no one was doing well, but those who were physically unable to work had very few options but begging. They would beg on street corners or go from house to house asking for help. It was also a generous and trusting time; the disabled, deformed, and impaired were a reminder that things could be worse. Nearly everyone could spare a few coins for the less fortunate. But begging had become so lucrative in major cities that most beggars were actually able-bodied swindlers.[more]

They usually worked in small groups that would meet after a day’s begging to pool their money and divide it up at some pre-agreed rate. The group would have one leader who would take a small amount from each day’s take and maintain a cash reserve to be used to pay bail and fines, and to tide them over when donations were scarce. Each morning they would dress up to appear in distress, wrapping bloodstained bandages around their bodies, or painting scars and lacerations on their skin, or building up the inside of one shoe to force them to limp.

Each man would take a section of the city beg there until he became too familiar on the street to make any more money or he was driven off by the police. Often the men would sell pencils or other cheap knick knacks to make arrest for vagrancy less likely. They would sometimes hand out pre-printed cards, with verses such as this, to stimulate giving::

A Cripple’s Appeal

Don’t cast this from you, reader,
But read my story through;
I, like many other unfortunates,
Must ask the aid of you.
Misfortune has befallen me,
Like many more before,
My appeal, I wish to tell you,
Is to keep hunger from the door,

'Frisco-Slim</p

One band of swindlers well known the Boston Police was led by a man known as Frisco Slim. Even nickname was a fraud; weighing over 200 pounds he was anything but slim. Frisco Slim had lost a finger at some point in his life, possibly in a brawl while gambling. He would augment this disability by treating the skin of his arm with a chemical to simulate a bad burn, giving the impression that he had been the victim of a debilitating accident. Frisco Slim had two lieutenants named English Harry and Sheeny Si. Though they were professional beggars like Frisco Slim, they all claimed to have regular occupations when questioned by police. Slim was a painter, Harry a bartender, and Si a railroad brakeman. They kept a dirty tenement room in Boston’s West End, furnished only with filthy mattresses and vermin haunted blankets.

English-Harry

They were always on the lookout for new gang members, especially young people who proved to be the best earners. In 1894 Frisco Slim came across a young orphan boy from Connecticut who was traveling alone. Enticed by promises of making up to ten dollars a day doing nothing, the boy followed Slim back to the room the gang’s West End room. They put his arm in a plaster cast, gave him the nickname, Kid Johnson, and sent him out to beg.

Kid Johnson proved to be a prodigious earner, but his career of begging in Boston was not long lived. Sometime during the winter of 1894-1895, the Boston Police raided Frisco Slim’s lair, arresting Slim, English Harry, Sheeny Si, and several other members of the gang, including Kid Johnson.

Sheeny-Si

The hardened criminals were put in jail, but police held out hope that young Kid Johnson could be reformed. They took pains to find him a good job as a clerk with opportunity for advancement. He tried it for a while, but Kid Johnson soon bolted. He left behind a letter thanking his friends at the police department for their kindly care and regretting that their hope in him had been disappointed. He was already hooked on the easy life and left Boston to join the knights of the road.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Sources:

  • Eldridge, Benjamin P., and William B. Watts. Our rival, the rascal a faithful portrayal of the conflict between the criminals of this age and the defenders of society, the police. Boston, Mass.: Pemberton Pub. Co., 1897
  • Riis, Jacob A.. How the other half lives; studies among the tenements of New York.. New York: Charles Scribners's Sons, 1890