May 14, 2026 • 55 mins
When you find yourself in a real pickle, a tight spot, a dangerous proposition in 1800s Hell's Kitchen, just ask yourself: what would Stumpy Malarkey do? What would Battle Annie do? What would Mallet Murphy do? How will I get out of this? Am I a time traveler? And what's my special nickname? No time to worry about all that. Start throwin' bricks!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous crime. It's a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi sarh. Hello, Hi, how are you doing well?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Happy to see you. How you been?
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I've been amazing nice? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Is that no?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm serious like I was. I spent a good amount
of the time recently outside in my garden.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Oh. I know that makes you have.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I'm just high as a kite off. So oh
it feels so good?
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Are you scared the interns?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
I'm not as good as you, but I'm gonna go
out and get some sun after this.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I can get some sun. You know. It's gorgeous out.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah. I forget touching grass. I'm just gonna absorb.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You know why. I'm also feeling great. I haven't looked
at social media. Oh all day long.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Look at you big winner over here, chicken dinner over here.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
That one kind of hurt a little bit.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
I saw you the muscle Dino.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
It was ridiculous other than what you just did. Aside
from you or you could just state that. Oh.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Into the Chicago Tribune earlier this week, they had a
story that I loved. It was about a Greek led
gambling ring that was in the Northwest Indiana area. So
I'm assuming like around Gary, it was a it was
operating a gambling and extortion ring operating out of Geno's
Steakhouse in Meryllville and U Paragon and Hobart in Indiana.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Now, the reason why I bring this up is not
because like, oh, it's a gambling extortion ring. No, it
was the names. They all had nicknames. It was incredible
by God. So there was James Jimmy the Greek Jaredimos
of course right boom, and then there was Dean Dean
Jim geelamis right. These are the leaders of the Jaredimos
gambling organization. According to the FBI's indictment. The other people
(01:54):
listed in the indictment Elizabeth are Chris Giordomos no nickname.
But then Bassam, Donnie brass Go Ibrahim stop it. There's
snod Sanad Taka Ibrahim. There was Peter Pete Goodi's Pavolopoulos.
There was Flippo, Gigi Roveto, Michael Michael way Out, Campbell,
Michael Wayout, Michael way Out and ihab Eddie Mustafa Steve
(02:16):
Armenta no name, Samuel Nusso no name, but Alexander Alex
Heroes Gagianas. There was Gus Dean's Runner, Kaporus Dean's Runners
his nickname. He was Dean's Runner, all right. And then
Rommy romy Straight Flush man Seur, Rommy Straight Flush. That's
Robby my street name, Rommy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Straight Flo, Michael Waut, Michael Wayo, Rommy Straight F.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Then there was Nanad Butch, Hunky Rhodojja, Marcus Vladimir gans
gans Hey Vladimir gans and Paul Franz aka poly Scarf
and Athena, Jaredimos alias Jaredimos, James Jim Macedonian, Stravowsky.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Jim Macedonian, Yes him Macedonian, Andrew Caesar's Andrew Win and
Giuseppe Joe Palazzo Mansie name is Joe Palazzo, his real name,
Giuseppe Mansy.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I don't know how he's gonna. I don't need to know.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Michael way Out sounds like the name of a DJ
on the rock the Bells Serious XM radio station. I
could hear that old school hip hop because there's the
one that I always used to like. DJ Chuck Chillout
I refer to all the time. There you go, Can
you favor me with DJ Chuck chill out. He just
(03:35):
sticks his name in the middle of everything.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
No reason you did four bars time for.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
DJ chuk chill Out. I'm like, oh, I had no
idea who was playing this song that I can't hear anymore?
Like the Way Out you goror Mirror, that's his totally
DJ chuck chill Out. The other night I was driving around,
he's added like gunfire sound. Was like, oh, it is
getting a little you know, turning dark. You know, sun's
(04:04):
going down in East Ookland. I should get home. Oh no,
that's not from the outside. That's DJ chill Out freaking
me out here.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
He needs to chill out.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
His wardrobe is provided by Dapper Dance. Yes, so that
is ridiculous. And you know what's funny about that. The
other thing that's ridiculous that I was going to tell
you about, what's that Elizabeth nicknames real?
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yes we did it again?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
We sink, Yes, we sink again?
Speaker 5 (04:35):
Do it?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Our cycles are in sync? That I was going to
say to you, do you know what those nicknames? And
you were going to go roll the music. Yeah, this
(05:08):
is ridiculous. Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers,
heights and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free
and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
I know you heard that.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Oh, I heard it, and I heard it. I got
a good historical one for you today. Yes, and it's
kind of a bloody one, all right, but I have
really yes, but I avoided the worst stuff. Yeah, it's
still it's gritty.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
You excized the one percent some of it, most of it.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It all goes down during the Gilded Age.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Oh, nineteenth century, late nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, but the tarnished underbelly of that.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So I want to tell you about the battle Row
Ladies Social and Athletic Club.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
This already sounds great.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I know it's also they're also known as the Lady
Gophers late eighteen hundreds New York gang, headed up by
a woman named Annie Walsh aka battle Annie, aka the
Queen of Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yes, Queen.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
So, in order to understand the battle Row Ladies Social
and Athletic Club on a switch, oh yeah, we're gonna
you're gonna learn way more about this. First, you have
to understand the neighborhood New York City's Hell's Kitchen. Hmmm.
So it's a hip place now, but it certainly was
not always that way.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
No, it was called Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It did not merely tolerate violence. It was basically built
upon it.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Yes, that's where you coolence.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And there are a bunch of different stories about how
it got its name. Some say it was Davy Crockett. Yeah,
King of the Wild Frontier, killed in a bar when
he was only three. That's what My brother was convinced
that it wasn't killed him a like a bear. It
was killed in a bar when he was only three,
(07:05):
so that it was like this amazing run before the
age of three. And then what was this three year
old doing in a bar. It's one of the best
Manda Greens, aside from the one that I was actually
telling you about the other day of you picked a
fine time to leave me, Lucille. Instead of four hungry children,
it's people. Hear it as four hundred children and the
(07:28):
weed in the field. How many kids did they have? Anyway,
Hell's Kitchen. So Davy Crockett, they said that he coined
it when he said, quote, in my part of the country,
when you meet an irishman, you find a first rate gentleman.
But these are worse than savages. They are too mean
to swab Hell's kitchen. Damn well, all right, Davy, keep
(07:51):
that to yourself.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I didn't know we had a poetic license like that.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
The others say that a veteran cop told his rookie partner, quote,
hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's kitchen. And then
another version of that story is the rookie cop called
the area hell, like this is hell, yeah, And then
(08:14):
the veteran cops like, no, brother, this is Hell's kitchen.
This is the place where hell is made, where it's
ingredients were assembled and the heat applied before it was
served to the rest of the city. And then the
rookie cops like, oh my god, I've got to get
transferred out of here. Either way, the place if you were.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Like walking the beat with that guy all the time.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
When he's just waxing eloquent, people are getting stabbed across
the street.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
And he's just like you, look around here, rusty implements,
not a knife.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
So this place notoriously horrible.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
So where is Itabeth? Can you give me a locale?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
New York City's right along the Hudson River, gamesake of
your alma mater, Hudson University. Right, I have to say
the Hudson River never smelled of romance, my friend, it's
no Moon River. Following the Civil War, the Western Shore
in Manhattan was an industrial working waterfront. There were tanneries
(09:20):
which always smell great, dump in chemical waste right into
the water. And then that's next to the slaughterhouses a.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Great okay, so good, just together on a hot day.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Disposing of awful right into the river. Yes, you know,
coal barges tied up to rotting piers.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I would actually hope for the coal, like, can we
just knock out my sense of smell to take it?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Longshorm in of there in the midst of all this,
like working themselves into early graves for pay that barely
covers the rim on like a single airless room six
blocks eas good. So anyway, that's strip of river and
like this like dense compressed neighborhood that grew up behind it,
roughly like between thirty fourth and fifty ninth Street west
(10:10):
of eighth Avenue. That's Hell's kitchen. So it's not metaphorical, Yeah,
not at all. It is a kitchen in Hell.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
There's a lot of blood on the streets. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
The Irish came first, Hey, thanks to the Great hunger,
you know, when England committed genocide and shipped food out
of Ireland, starving her people. Yeah, and that triggered a
great migration in the late eighteen forties. And so these
Irish arrived in New York with nothing, and that was
(10:40):
often literal that they pawned or sold every portable possession
they had in order to afford this Atlantic crossing. And
then they find themselves at the West Side waterfront because like,
no one else wants to live there. You don't need
any skills, you know, for low pay, anyone can get
a gig. They don't care if you're Irish. So they
(11:03):
built shanty towns along the river, as you do. And
then after the war, like there's this construction boom in
the city and so that people are building all these
like proper tenements in that area. So they tear down
the shanty towns, they build the tenements brick and mortar,
but everyone's still poor.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yeah, and they're like cold water walk up flat.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Oh yeah. So it's just like it's as if you
just put like six stories of shanty towns on top
of each other. Yeah. So what like let's talk about that.
What a tenements walk in Hell's Kitchen looked and it's
so good. I was feeling so good, and now I'm
(11:44):
going to pretend like I am. I mean, when I
go outside right now, everything smells like jasmine. It's just
all the jasmine in the whole neighborhood is in bloom fabulous.
But I want to talk about what a tenement building
in Hell's Kitchens looked and smelled like like eighteen seventy five.
This is going to require some imagination, and I know
(12:05):
that you and the rude dudes have that. So imagine
dozens and dozens of families crammed into these buildings that
are designed for far lower occupancy. Single rooms would have
like parents, children, random borders. There were communal toilets in
the rear yard, and those were shared by fifty or
(12:28):
sixty people. Oh goshould you imagine? Oh yeah, I can't
share a house with one other person in one everybody
needs their own bathroom. Yeah, And so there's no line.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
People are in there like.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah. So there's no adequate plumbing, no reliable heat. Light
comes in through windows that are like four feet away
from a brick wall, so you're just getting the barest
of light you have, just this stink of humanity, whole smoke,
the rendering plans, don't forget those, the slaughterhouses, tanneries, everything. Okay,
(13:06):
that's just like a couple of blocks.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
And then adding like the mugginess of that humid there's
no wind really hitting me.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
And so of course, you know, it's not too much
of a stretch to think like there's gonna be a
lot of gangs and violence that come out. This is
not peaceful, happy living. No Eleventh Avenue was called death Avenue, Yeah, right,
And that's because the New York Central Railroad ran its
freight line at grade level on that and so trains
(13:40):
were killing people with such regularity that the railroad started
hiring these men called west Side cowboys, and they would
ride horses ahead of the trains, waving red flags as
a warning. Kids were always playing on the tracks, drunk
slept on them, so the cowboys had to earn their pay.
(14:00):
Just were like they had a lot of work.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
So they should have gotten like a cowcatcher on the
front of the train, just splitt in the whatever's there.
I guess I probably wouldn't help big enough.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
He had all these saloons, right, They were like the
neighborhood civic institutions, hundreds of them. One estimate said that
there was a saloon on pretty much every block within
Hell's Kitchen, sometimes multiple ones on a block. Your vegetables, right,
it was more than okay, yeah it was. It was
(14:30):
in better neighborhoods. You know, you had churches, banks, social clubs,
community centers. That's what the that's what the saloons had
to be in Hell's everything.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So there's kids in one side of the cash.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
In your wages there. You could get your mail sent there,
you could find out, like you know, who's hiring. You
could learn which cop on which beat, could be paid
to look the other way. It's on the take here
hear the news from Ireland. You could settle a debt,
start a fight, and a friendship, began a criminal enterprise.
And so some of the saloons, their back rooms were
(15:04):
pretty much like courtrooms where disputes were adjudicated because they
had their own law and it wasn't applied in any
kind of consistent way. But you know, they weren't going
to be able to take someone to court anywhere else.
The police they played a very interesting role here. I
bet they did a lot of cops in Hell's Kitchen
(15:24):
were Irish Catholic men who'd grown up in neighborhoods not
too dissimilar from what they were now patrolling, and so
they had personal and family connections to the people they
were supposed to be arresting. And then they also operated
within that Tammany Hall patronage of course, so their careers
dependent on political loyalty rather than how effective they were
(15:48):
as law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
You didn't need to be good, you needed to be loyal, yeah,
And so.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You have this kind of like negotiated coexistence going on.
So the gangs were operating in exchange for delivery votes
and suppressing rival political organization the New York the Gangs
of New York. And then when that would break down,
then the violence was just like off the chart, and
it broke down a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
So by the time each other or handled with nails driven.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Through the yes, exactly. So, by by the time of
the nineteen hundreds, Hell's Kitchen had this mythology around it.
Its name had spread way beyond the block that first
earned it. You know, that Moniker in the imagination of
the rest of New York. It was like a shorthand
(16:38):
for a specific kind of urban muck. Yeah, yeah, And
so it didn't have like the elegant menace of the Bowery,
It didn't have like the exotic dangers of Chinatown. It
was like raw and intimate and filthy. Yeah, and like
it didn't soften as the new century is advancing. If anything,
(16:59):
this can solidation of gang power during the late eighteen nineties,
nineteen hundreds and nineteen tens just made life. They're more dangerous.
Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going
to talk about the gangs of New York, all right, Zarin,
(17:35):
we're back.
Speaker 6 (17:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I smeared some pig blood on my lips as lipstick
to get ready for it.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Too perfect. I stuck a knife in my undypants and
I'm gonna pull it later. Okay. So we're in this
setting of Hell's Kitchen eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds,
and in that setting, we're going to begin with the
Gopher Gang. The Gopher Gang was one of the most
(18:00):
formidable criminal enterprises in the whole history of New York City.
And I know you'll want to step to me on
that talking about the Five Families. Yeah, whatever, But these
guys these guys had grit. So it was an early
twentieth century New York street gang, the Gopher Gang, that
(18:21):
counted among its members Goo Goo Knocks, James Biff Ellison,
and Onny Madden.
Speaker 6 (18:29):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Although it was based in Hell's Kitchen, it grew to
control most of Manhattan for a while. Their territory covered
fourth to forty second Street, seventh to eleventh Avenue, so
a little narrow. The name comes from like their methods.
So they used to hide in the cellars of buildings
(18:50):
in the neighborhood after they would pull a crime. So
they do something up on the street, go down into
the basements. So they literally disappeared into this under ground
architecture of Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
This is like when we would have the like elevators
that go out through the sidewalk. Yes, right, then you
can disappear from the outside of the building inside the building.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So they would literally disappear and then come back out
to strike and then vanish again before the cops could come.
So it was like really tactically effective. But zaren it
was also deeply symbolic in this essay, will all right,
So these are men and women of the basement of
(19:32):
the alley of the stairwell, and they're invisible to polite
society until they want to be seen. And it's like boom,
now you saw it, okay, the dark Yes, So the
Gopher Gang, it was like an amalgam of all these
other local street gangs. In the eighteen nineties, it had
more than five hundred members.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Damn son.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, they ran deep. They needed structure and leadership though
with that many people.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
So regular meeting.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
They were led by a committee that was made up
of senior members, guys like Marty Brennan, Newburgh Gallagher and
Stumpy Malarkey. That that name sounds a little offensive to
be honest, Like I was desperate to learn more about
Stumpy Malarkey, but the information on the guy was just thin,
(20:24):
just mention of his name, not anything else. And so
I went all the way through like newspapers, dot com,
we need a I need a sponsorship, ps. And it
was the same way, like he was name dropped in articles,
but there was never anything of substance to him, like
what was his actual first name? What's his story? So
I started to develop a theory as I do what Elizabeth,
(20:45):
I was wondering if This was a fake name invented
by yellow journalists at the time. Like I said, it's
it's borderline offensive. It's offensive.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
So I can't name my dog Stumpy Malarkey.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's like what someone would call an irishman to insult him.
Like you know, if a journalist dropped it in an
article about the Gopher game, like snuck it in there
as like a jab or a lark or like a
nasty cut of the Irish I can see how like
subsequent papers and writers then writing about the Gopher Gang,
and then authors and then websites would run with it.
(21:21):
Of course, so as you know, we love good nicknames.
As you proved out in the beginning, this one's too
good to pass up. But I am a mind of
that it is an invented character, and that's something to
keep in mind with this whole story I'm telling you today. Okay,
we know the gang existed, there are particular people we
know for sure existed, and there are activities we know
(21:44):
for sure happened. But some of these characters are composites.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
There's a lot of anti Irish discrimination that shows up.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
And it shows up in it, but or not even
anti Irish, but just like some of them are composite
characters created by the press. Okay, Like they'll hear that
something happens, that someone does something or has in particular characteristics.
They don't know the name of that person. They know
the name of one other person. They kind of combine
them up.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We've come across this a lot with nineteenth century newspapers
out west. They did this in this city, they did this.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Theory is that there's no way the press is going
to be able to get in any way close to
any of these gangs. So they're going to be hearing
this third fourth hand.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
From cops, possibly cops.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
That's the main that's their main source, and so you know,
at long last, the gophers are the insiders here. Everyone
else is the outsiders. So tales are told, Cops share stories.
The public loves the exciting stuff. The press gives them
what they want. They give a name to someone they
can't confirm, and then it's like it's sort of like
(22:47):
if you see someone on a regular basis in public,
like you cross paths with them at a coffee shop
all the time, or like you ride the same bus,
you don't know them at all and you never speak
to them. Sure, but you start referring to them in
your head as like big.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Pants Joe, totally sammy good eyes see exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
And then one day big pants Joe steals a chair
at the coffee shop from like a woman with a baby.
And then you start telling people this, like big big
pants Joe, he steals chairs. And then a friend of
yours is at a cafe across town. He sees another
guy steal a chair from a table, and your friend's like,
there goes big pants Joe. But it's not the same guy.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
How this works there, it's all coming together.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
That's what That's what's called journalism. That's how that works.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
I like how you're educating me on journalism as a
former journalist.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Explaining journalism to a journalist is so good. But guess what,
you know a reverse card. I was a journalist before
you were.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Boom boom boom, full circle again exactly. But you know what,
can never quit the game, neither one of us anyway. Okay,
so we're in Hell's Kitchen talking about the Gopher Gang.
So we do know that there was a committee that
guided the Gopher Gang, and we know that the committee
met semi regularly at their headquarters known as Battle Row.
(24:04):
It's a saloon wondering and the owner was named Mallet Murphy.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
He's got a big wood Oh yeah, hammer Mallet and
that's like he knows he loves crack nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It was a pseudonym for the guy. He was actually
for a while considered like the overall leader of the
Gopher Gang. And he got the name because he always
carried around a giant wooden mallet when.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
You can go to fights fights. Okay, do you think
he was like maybe a butcher used to used to
tenderize meet and he's like, you know what, you can.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Meet with that, alright, But no, he was just like
olden times, big pants Joe.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And so they go to the saloon to Battle Row.
They chat about robberies, like hey, what are you doing?
Split up profits from like the Manhattan bordellos, and illegal
gambling operations.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Over last meetings minutes, Yes, old business, new business, Robert.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Rules of I second, I second to the approval of
those Do.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
We have a quorum for this meeting?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
I want, I want to call the question? And so
the like the battle Rose Saloon was a legitimate business,
but it was also a social club, a treasury, a
court room, and a war council, a middle school, and
a middle school out front the toilet. So the Gophers,
they weren't just brawlers. They're this organized criminal enterprise. And
(25:25):
they had a strict code of conduct that required members
to commit crimes, like in order to play by the rules,
you have to be a crimer. And so they would
do things like burglary, to murdered, armed robbery, muggings, assault, extortion, and.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
The assault would be for for a fee, like you
like I want this guy to be assaulted, you pay them,
they go assault them, so that it's like a real
criminal organization. It wasn't just like we're beefing with.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
The bad boys. Bad boys for hire. And so the
main source of their income, though for years, was plundering
the freight car and the train depot of the New
York Central Railroad. That the New York City Police were
not able to do that, and sometimes they just didn't
want to, and so the gang would unload goods from
(26:13):
the train and then just set up like pop up
storefronts nearby, and they'd sell the stuff off cheap and
then be gone with the win. And the railroad got
really tired of it, so they finally they put together
a special private police force of ex officers who had
like personal scores to settle. So they're like, I've never
got a chance to bust that guy when I was
(26:34):
on the streets, but now there are no rules and yeah,
and the railroad pay and they would say that, and
so they like patrolled the rail line crack skulls. It
was brutal. Yeah, And so the gang then they but
they had like this broader organizational structure too. They started
(26:55):
employing younger apprentice gang members, like they had like a guild.
Well you know how like the cops, because the cops
are a gang and they have the explorers, like Junior.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Had some friends who did that.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, well the Ghost the Gopher gang had the baby Gophers.
Really yeah, it was like their explorers, yes exactly. And
they had like other subordinate gangs like franchisees if you will.
That included the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, not the band
(27:28):
that was so long Z, the Rhodes Gang and again
like the Roads Gang. I was like, so what's their deal,
Randy Rhoads, Nick Roads Rhodes Scholars, like, come on, come through, No,
I can't find anything on It spelled like r h
O D r h O D E s And so
(27:50):
this franchise model extended their influence like way beyond the
core membership of you know, five hundred, so it's even
larger and they can call them in when they need
like auxiliaries. It was an organizational logic that was foreshadowing
the more formal structures of Prohibition era organized crime. Oh interesting,
(28:11):
that's kind of where they drew it from. So the
Gopher Gang didn't operate in isolation. There were five major
gangs that controlled the criminal world in New York between
eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty Hudson Dusters, the Five Pointers,
the Wios, the Eastman Gang, and the Gophers.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
So these are who like the Italian and Jewish gangs,
had to replace in the lteens and twenties.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yes, so the Five Pointers based in the old Five
Points district, they were the Gophers primary rivals. Okay, I
was wondering how that works out citywide supremacy. Their leadership
under Paul Kelly brought like even more organizational sophistication, and
that was the real forerunner of mafia structures in the
(28:59):
following decades.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
So this was the.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Predecessor of the Five Points gang, where you had people
like al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Torrio making their start totally. Yeah,
the Hudson Dusters. They ran the area between West Greenwich
Village and the waterfront, and they were like the direct
territorial competitors with the Gophers. The Wios were an older
(29:24):
gang and their territory overlapped with Five Points and they
they were known because they had like a price list
for criminal services, like a broken arm is this much?
And broken legs will cost you this all the way
up to murder, which was probably like market price, you know,
fixed prices on here. So in their early nineteen tens,
(29:44):
the Gophers were led by one lung current.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
One lung current. They had just one lung I was guessing.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And he was notorious for his attacks on lone patrolmen.
So like most police just didn't even bother to patrol
healths kitchen, and when they did it was in large groups.
But every now and then one would get peeled off
from the pack.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Is it a punishment, like you gotta go down, I
don't know and get beat up by one lung.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Car One lung would jump them and steal their uniforms.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
You got beat up by a man with one loud There's.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
A really great article in September seventh, nineteen nineteen edition
of the New York Tribune. It's supposedly an interview with
a train flagman named Danny. Danny only had two teeth anyway.
He was regaling the writer with tales of Hell's Kitchen,
which he passed through on the regular on the train.
Here's an excerpt. Every night the bunch would hang out
(30:40):
over in the corner waiting for something to turn up.
If nothing turned up by itself, they would see that
something did. There was always something cooking in Hell's kitchen.
I remember the time right in the middle of the
street when one lung current bet he couldn't dick a
CoP's coat home to his name, and he did. She
made some kind of military coat for herself. Soon all
(31:01):
the dames on Eleventh Avenue were wearing them. They would
send out their guys to go get them cops coats
to show their love wasn't dead. Danny said that he
couldn't mention the names of leaders of the gang because
everybody was so tough it was hard for one man
to stand out. Above the others. Danny, in his Loyalty
said that the Gas House Gang and Monk Eastman's outfit
(31:23):
were a bunch of Willie boys on a vacation from college.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Right boys on a vacation.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Danny wants to be tight with the Gophers. Not only
a boy, he's a golf golf boy. Happy Jack Mulrainey
was another go. He was called happy Jack because he
always appeared to be smiling, but it was because he
suffered from I should not laugh from a partial paralysis
of his facial muscle, and he hated people making remarks
(31:55):
about it. He was a total sociopath and so like
he would put the herd on anyone who made a
comment like what you laughing about?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Killer clown?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah? Exactly. There's this guy Onie Madden. He was born
in Leeds, England, and he was like a big boss.
His identity in his story those are solid. He shows
up a lot in the papers like good looking dude.
His nickname was Onie the Killer, So we'll just leave
that beat where Jesus playing it. He was like the
(32:24):
most famous alum of the Gopher Gang. He graduated from
the Hell's Kitchen Street Crime and moved into bootlegging. He
went to sing, sing for a.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
While, we don't need to know why, graduated.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Became a bootlegger and then co owner of the Cotton Club,
what Harlem's celebrated venue of the nineteen twenties. Wow. And
then we have my favorite part. The Lady Gophers.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
This was a group that was headed up by a
woman named Annie Walsh aka Battle Annie. And so like
her story is kind of like, let's call it obscured
by the fog of legend. Two principal sources for her
story are Herbert Asbury's nineteen twenty seven book The Gangs
(33:11):
in New York and the earlier reporting of New York
Herald Knight editor William Davenport, whose account of the Hell's
Kitchen Underworld Asbury drew upon really heavily for his book.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
He was like a crime police night court reporter. Correct.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
And so there are those that think that he Davenport
just like made a bunch of stuff up. But like
I said earlier, yeah, but it's not that he's making
up what happened. It's like he's filling in outbollishing. Yeah.
And so was there a leader of the Lady Gophers.
Of course, Yes, was she a big boss? Yes? Was
her name actually Annie Walsh. Maybe his accounts came from
(33:54):
these really extensive interviews that he did with cops who
patrolled Hell's Kitchen. So like they may have exaggerate, I
read it a bit, but the truth is there. The
truth isn't there somewhere.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
He's the legend.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah. So Annie built up a gang of like minded women,
and they were domestic workers by day, serious bruisers by night. Yes,
they'd gather in the back room of a saloon near
Tenth Avenue. They'd drink and carouse and drink and joke
and drink, and then Annie would be, like, when she's
(34:25):
really in her cups, she would remember some beef that
she had with like a housewife on thirty eighth Street,
like she insulted me, or maybe she said something about
my kid. And then that's when Annie Walsh became battle Annie.
So she'd get all her followers behind her and she
would just like descend on the offender with her. Yeah,
(34:46):
but it wasn't like hair pulling and face scratch like
these ladies showed up with weapons like rolling pins, scalding
water bricks. Yeah, they didn't play. So she had this
crew of Amazon like absolute valkyries, just reaking havoc on
the streets, or at least that's how the papers told it.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Well, I believe started the French Revolution.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Once closer to the truth is that these were women
of a working class Irish neighborhood who organized other women
for collective action. Yes, was it often violent, probably, but
it wasn't born of like petty bickering like the papers one.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
No, I wouldn't imagine that. I was imagining like just
like the men, they were like gonna beef basically right right.
The come from a hearts gravel culture. They've been you know,
battling for centuries exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
So she she gets described in the press as the
Queen of Hell's Kitchen and quote the most feared brick
hurler of her time. And that tells us something important
just about how she's perceived. She wasn't just known as
like a street fighter. She was this territorial sovereign. You know,
she ran the joint. The organization that she built is
(35:58):
really one of the most remarkable ones in the history
of American organized crime because it mirrored the Gopher Gang
and it practiced a sort of violence not seen from women,
but it also had like a social function and a
means of protection and agency for women in this urban underworld.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
Yeah, they could turn to their fellow women and be like,
we need to go beat up this guy who's beating
up his wife.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah. So the Lady Gophers were also known as the
Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club. Social and Athletic
Club was like this standard euphemism of the era for
organizations that were in practice, you know, gang affiliates or
political machines. So Tammany hall patronage networks were just like
riddled with these things. And so by giving her organization
(36:42):
this really respectable sounding title, Annie was kind of mimicking
or mocking civilized society, and she was wrapping a fighting
force in the language of like civic associations. And the
irony was not lost on the women themselves, I bet not,
or the police who had to deal with them. So
(37:03):
let's stop here and take a break. Apologies to those
listening on Spotify. We recently learned that they stick extra
ads between our ad breaks, which are carefully engineered.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Well, that ain't right.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, sometimes they get cut right in the middle of
a sentence. That's not something that we can control, and
we feel really badly about it. Anyway, have some ads, Zaren,
(37:44):
Elisabeth Zaron. We're talking Hell Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yeah, we are, sister.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
We're talking gangs, and we're talking lady gangs now specifically
the Lady Gophers aka the Battle Row Ladies Social and
Athletic Club. I love that name.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yes, Weedies.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
It's a great trivia team name if you ask me. Yeah,
out there for grabs. I mean I like our trivia
team name Steve Harvey Oswald, never letting that go. But
this one's out there every anyone wants it. And the
gang led by Annie wall shka Battle Annie. She put
the structure to this group of wild women, and she
(38:23):
welcomed new members into the fold. She didn't actually just
welcome them, she trained them. Zaren, close wandering. I want
you to picture it. It's nineteen oh one. You are
a young mother who lives in Hell's Kitchen in New
(38:46):
York City. Your parents came here from Ireland looking for
a better life. What they found was only slightly better
than what they left. Your mom was a devout churchgoer.
Your father had a backbreaking job at the docks with
a side gig as a fence for the Gopher Gang.
When you reached young womanhood, you hooked up with a
fella also on the periphery of the gang. He is
(39:07):
not the best provider, and he's always getting into scraps.
You work as a scullery maid for some fat cats
during the day. You clean up after those pigs, wash
their dishes, grub their floors. Your little sister and your
mom watch after your baby during the day, and you're
fed up. You want more in life. You're walking home
from work when a woman stops you in the street.
(39:30):
Drunks pass by you on the sidewalk. A tinker's cart
rolls by, all manner of pots and pans, rattling in
the back. She asks if you know battle Annie. You've
heard of her, you say. The lady asks if you
want to join the Lady Gophers become a member of
the battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club. You're stunned.
(39:51):
This would be a whole different life for you. You'd
be more than a mom and a wife and a maid.
You'd be a gangster. How do I sign up?
Speaker 3 (39:59):
You ask.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
The next night, you find yourself in a back room
at the battle Row Saloon, A feisty Gal stands before
a crowd of other women. She commands the room. Everyone
else in there is like you, new to the Lady Gophers.
Some of you look nervous, some of you look blaise,
All of you are transfixed. As piano music floats in
(40:23):
from the front room, punctuated by the occasional whoop or
clatter of glass battle. Annie tells you that you're all
there for training. You'd heard about this, that the first
order of business was to train you all in the
martial arts. Fighting without weapons. Anyone could wield a pipe
or a broken bottleneck. Annie wanted the ladies to be
(40:46):
able to brawl bare handed. Two other veteran gang members
join Annie at the front of the room. Now, ladies,
Annie says, you have to do more then slap and grab.
You have to use more strenuous activity. Yeah, with your
teeth than with your nails. You look down at your
(41:06):
coal stained fingernails, at the chemical burn marks from the
harsh cleaners you use all day. Yeah, these will do
just fine, you tell yourself. You run your tongue over
your jagged teeth into the pit where one of your
molars used to be. Oh, yeah, these will do just
fine too. The women flanking Annie now demonstrate fighting techniques
(41:27):
thumbs to eye sockets, elbows to the bridge of noses,
pulling at ears, fighting down between the thumb and forefingers,
knees to the groin. A woman at the front makes
a wise crack. Sounds like me and my old man
on a Saturday night, She hollers. The crowd around your laughs,
you chuckle, Annie tells the group that may be the case,
(41:50):
but you'll be the one standing when it's over. From
now on, she and the gang of compatriots demonstrate more
moves and encourage the crowd to practice on each other.
But not for real. Ill just pretend real gentlely. After
a while of this, more women enter the room and
pass around bottles of beer and whiskey. Welcome to the
Battle Row, Ladies, Social and Athletic Club, Annie shouts. You
(42:13):
are all now lady gophers. The crowds hears you take
a long pull from a bottle of booze, stare at
the ceiling, and revel in your new identity. Yes, welcome
to the gang's Errand so, when called upon battle, Annie
could assemble a fighting force of between fifty and one
(42:35):
hundred women within hours. Yeah, they'd show up. They'd be
strapped clubs, bricks, knives, like.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
He was very celtic.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
We're gonna go, like I'm wondering if they had like
the body of drums, like it's just get me all
worked up. And so the women were like reserve backup
in fights over territorial disputes with other gangs. And the
speed of mobilization was what was really incredible with them.
It's not like they weren't just like this casual collection
(43:06):
of allies.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
They try and go like phone each other. They got
to put like candles in the window or something, and
I think they just read I.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Guess would be they'd probably have younger girls running building
to building and popping in and grabbing people, and you know,
once word gets out, then they're all like telling everybody
people sells and yeah yeah. And so we've got this
organized reserve force with a command structure, a common purpose.
So in military terms, war fighter terms, if.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
I may thank you, Fred, you're putting it in my
understanding the language.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Annie Walsh was something like a quartermaster and a field
commander simultaneous. And so there were other notable Gopher affiliated
women who operated alongside Annie.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Their real sergeants.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Ida Burger a ka I to the Goose.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
The goose.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
She was a dance hall guy and a lady of
the night. There was there was this guy, chick Tricker.
Chick Tricker, Yeah, chick Tricker was the leader of the
Eastman Gang, and he convinced Ida the Goose to bail
on the Gopher gang. This sounds like mad lips and
then come dance for his boys at the Cafe Maryland
(44:19):
on West twenty eighth Street. The Gophers did not care
for this, and Annie's included in that. So one night
some of the Gophers went to the cafe to retrieve Ida,
and they came in guns of blazing. Her boyfriend, who
was a member of the Eastman Gang, hid behind the bar,
and Ida looked over and was like, are you efane
(44:39):
kidding me? She was so disgusted by his cowardly move
she pulled him up from behind the bar and was
let and she shouted out, hey yous, come out and
take it. And the boyfriend didn't make it out of
the bar, but Ida did and she headed home with
the Gophers. Uh I was wondering, yes, And then we
(45:00):
have Sadie Ferrell aka Sadie the Goat. Yeah, so her
story is to be taken with a grain of salt,
maybe like a larger green.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Than everyone else's, but a salt.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, But I'm gonna tell it anyway. So she went
around mugging men in the hell's kitchen, and like when
she would happen upon a man walking alone, she'd head
butt him the glassy kiss she'd had like a goat.
And that's how she got her nickname. So she'd work
with this male accomplice who had then been the guy again,
(45:31):
this time with a sling shot, and then Sadie would
rob the guy. And Sadie had beef with a woman
named Gallis mag And Mag was six feet tall. She
worked as a bouncer at a bar called The Hole
in the Wall at two seventy nine Water Street in Manhattan,
(45:51):
over kind of south of the Lower east Side, in
the Seaport neighborhood. And so in the Asbury book The
Gangs of New York, this is how mag Is described quote.
It was her custom, after she'd felled an upsteperous customer
with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth
and so drag him to the door amid the frenzied
(46:12):
cheer of the onlookers. If her victim protested, she bit
his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street,
she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of
alcohol behind the bar. She was one of the most
feared denizens on the waterfront, and the police of the
period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they'd
(46:33):
ever encountered.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
She got an ear collection, of course, she had an
air collection of trophy.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
She didn't just bite the ears off of fellas. She
bit Sadie the Goat's ear off too.
Speaker 6 (46:44):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So, one night Sadie was walking in Hell's Kitchen and
she saw some guys trying to come aboard a freight
ship like pirates would do. But they couldn't pull it off,
like they didn't have sea legs, and the crew was
just like laughing at and pushing him back like the
crew was yeah. So Sadie watched him try and try again,
and she was appalled, and so she called the guys
(47:05):
over like hey, hey, get over here, and she's like,
look for a cut, I'll get you on that boat.
And she did. Yeah, somehow she overtook like all the
crew on the boat. And then from that moment on
she became the boss of all this pirates. She becomes
a river pirate, and so they went for bigger and
(47:27):
bigger boats, and then they even raised the Jolly Roger
flag on one that they claimed for themselves. So they
would cruise up and down the Hudson River looking for victims,
and they stole goods. Sometimes they held people for ransom,
you know whatever. She was a menace and then people
started fighting back a little too much, and so Sadie
(47:48):
was like, you know what I'm done. This is too
much of a bother. So she goes back to Hell's
kitchen and becomes known as Queen of the Waterfront. And
she pulled all manner of crimes, and she was in
the orbit of the Lady Gopher. And then she and
Gallis Mag they made up. Mag fished Sadie's ear out
of the pickle jar behind the bar where she kept
(48:09):
it and gave it back to Yeah, it was probably
smaller than the others oh hair. So Sadie takes her
own ear where is it in a locket on a
chain around her neck. From then on out, BFFs oh.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
I thought she was gonna have it like, you know,
dipped in metal or a.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Pickled up of course. So one of the most historically
significant aspects of the pack is it. Yeah, take a
look of battle Annie's career and that of the Lady Gophers.
Was their participation in violent labor disputes in the late
(48:48):
nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
Please tell me they weren't like hired out like the Pinkertons.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Well, the Lady Gophers often worked as paid strike breakers
for businesses or they worked for labor unions. There you
go through a number of violent disputes, so there were
very few strikes that went down in which Battle Annie
didn't provide female muscle for quote biting and scratching, either
picketers or strike breakers.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
So she was an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah, So she and the Gophers, they had no allegiance
to either side workers or owners. It didn't matter to
Annie and the Gophers who they attacked as long as
they got paid paid. Yeah, They're like, let me get paid.
And so she wasn't like an ideologist of labor or capital.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
She had a job to do.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
She was an entrepreneur of violence.
Speaker 6 (49:35):
This is what she was.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
And she was operating in the open market. The Gopher
gangs collapse, like its rise, was a process rather than
a single events. So there were all these forces that
came together to erode the organization over the first two
decades of the twentieth century. One of the leaders became
(49:58):
involved in this like years long with another member. It
was a local bar tender named William Lennon that went
down over a card game. And that wasn't the only
internal fracture that was weakening them at this critical moment
in history. So the railroad remember they had their own
police force. Well, they just keep ramping it up and
(50:19):
throwing money at the police officers. So the special police
are going into Hell's kitchen and just beating Gophers from
one end of the neighborhood to the other, or, as
one of the cops said, from hell to breakfast. That's
where we get that color. The guy Ony Madden, he
went to jail and he was the gang's like dynamic leader.
(50:43):
He got yanked from the game when they needed the most.
One lung Current died in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
He finally went down, finally went down.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
And then everything just chipped away at the gang's power.
So by the end of nineteen nineteen, most of the
survive all pretty much all almost all the surviving gang
members were in jail.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
I think also just World War One itself would have
changed to the dynamic of the city totally, what people
are willing to tolerate, and how brutality looks, and so exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
By nineteen twenty, Gophers didn't exist anymore. It ceased to exist.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
They pretty much left with the war.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah, so what happened to Annie Walsh in those years
isn't recorded with any reliability. So like her documented activity
is like pretty much eighteen seventies to kind of like
eighteen nineties. Whether she lived to see the full decline
of the gang that she served, whether she died imprisoned,
(51:39):
or just like aged out kidney her kidneys could have
turned to dust, we don't know. She could have become
a zombie.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
She could have gone riding off to El Dorado looking
for that gold.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
Probably, I think that's most likely. But the silence is revealing, right, definitely,
because the lives of where king class women in Gilded
Age New York were not considered worth preserving in institutional memory.
So her story survived not just not because anyone thought
she deserved this commemoration, but because she was so extreme,
(52:15):
like she was violent enough, organized enough, feared enough to
be useful as local color in the journalism and popular
history of men who found her exotic.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
She sells papers as like a little adornment to.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
The a nice little audience. Right, So, Zaren, what's your
ridiculous takeaway?
Speaker 3 (52:35):
Well, now I want Scorsese doesn't have many films left
in his uber to make. I know, I'd like him
to make a Gang of New York too, The Lady
goes Lady Gophers.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
I would love to see that. That's my ridiculous takeaway.
I want more. I want more about the Social Club.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
Yes, definitely, even if they have to.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
I mean, the thing is is, it's like a lot
of it is men manufactured myths, but manufactured mys I mean,
really there is anything true. But I think you could
juice it up enough, Zaren, to make a screenplay out
of it. Saren, I'm talking to you, my screenwriting buddy.
(53:18):
And in that note, Dave, let's polish this off with
a talkback.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Yeah, here's one.
Speaker 6 (53:28):
Oh my god, I went cheat, y'all when Zaren made
this sound during this latest episode about the ranch milk
Cheke mashup situation. I would stop the episode to coup
(53:49):
lead this talkback, and she just felt that so deeply
in my soul.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
You get what she does to me.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
It can't help bodily reaction, can't help it, baby, can't
help it. Well. See, I think that's the thing is.
I think rude dudes either feel like me where it's
devilish and we think it's disgusting, but it's so entertaining
to watch you smell this, yeah, totally, to watch you
get tortured. Yeah, and then there are the rude dudes
(54:19):
who are tortured like you see, and it works out.
Speaker 3 (54:22):
Yeah, both sides of that coin. Everybody win twisted twisted coin.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
And everybody wins on my twisted coin. That's it for today.
You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com.
We're also at Ridiculous Crime on both Blue Sky and
on Instagram. We're on YouTube at Ridiculous Crime Pod, and
you can email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Most importantly, as I always say, leave a talkback on
(54:47):
the iHeart app. They're amazing and we love, love love them.
Reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton. And
Zer and Burnette, produced and edited by Dirty Dave Cousten,
King of Atlanta, starring Annals Rutger as Judas. Research is
(55:09):
by Marissa Brown aka Marissa the Shark and Jabbari Davis
aka Fists Davis. The theme song is by Thomas Lee
aka Tommy two Bites and Travis Dunton aka The Hammer Post.
Wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred producer Dave Cousten's
wardrobe by Mister Guy of Beverly Hills. Guest hair and
(55:29):
makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive producers are retired
Cops Out for Blood Ben Bowen and Noel.
Speaker 5 (55:37):
Brown reds Quime Say It One More Times Crime.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more Podcasts.
My Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous crime. It's a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hi sarh. Hello, Hi, how are you doing well?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Happy to see you. How you been?
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I've been amazing nice? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Is that no?
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm serious like I was. I spent a good amount
of the time recently outside in my garden.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Oh. I know that makes you have.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I'm just high as a kite off. So oh
it feels so good?
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Are you scared the interns?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
I'm not as good as you, but I'm gonna go
out and get some sun after this.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I can get some sun. You know. It's gorgeous out.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah. I forget touching grass. I'm just gonna absorb.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You know why. I'm also feeling great. I haven't looked
at social media. Oh all day long.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Look at you big winner over here, chicken dinner over here.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
That one kind of hurt a little bit.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
I saw you the muscle Dino.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
It was ridiculous other than what you just did. Aside
from you or you could just state that. Oh.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Into the Chicago Tribune earlier this week, they had a
story that I loved. It was about a Greek led
gambling ring that was in the Northwest Indiana area. So
I'm assuming like around Gary, it was a it was
operating a gambling and extortion ring operating out of Geno's
Steakhouse in Meryllville and U Paragon and Hobart in Indiana.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Now, the reason why I bring this up is not
because like, oh, it's a gambling extortion ring. No, it
was the names. They all had nicknames. It was incredible
by God. So there was James Jimmy the Greek Jaredimos
of course right boom, and then there was Dean Dean
Jim geelamis right. These are the leaders of the Jaredimos
gambling organization. According to the FBI's indictment. The other people
(01:54):
listed in the indictment Elizabeth are Chris Giordomos no nickname.
But then Bassam, Donnie brass Go Ibrahim stop it. There's
snod Sanad Taka Ibrahim. There was Peter Pete Goodi's Pavolopoulos.
There was Flippo, Gigi Roveto, Michael Michael way Out, Campbell,
Michael Wayout, Michael way Out and ihab Eddie Mustafa Steve
(02:16):
Armenta no name, Samuel Nusso no name, but Alexander Alex
Heroes Gagianas. There was Gus Dean's Runner, Kaporus Dean's Runners
his nickname. He was Dean's Runner, all right. And then
Rommy romy Straight Flush man Seur, Rommy Straight Flush. That's
Robby my street name, Rommy.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Straight Flo, Michael Waut, Michael Wayo, Rommy Straight F.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Then there was Nanad Butch, Hunky Rhodojja, Marcus Vladimir gans
gans Hey Vladimir gans and Paul Franz aka poly Scarf
and Athena, Jaredimos alias Jaredimos, James Jim Macedonian, Stravowsky.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Jim Macedonian, Yes him Macedonian, Andrew Caesar's Andrew Win and
Giuseppe Joe Palazzo Mansie name is Joe Palazzo, his real name,
Giuseppe Mansy.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I don't know how he's gonna. I don't need to know.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Michael way Out sounds like the name of a DJ
on the rock the Bells Serious XM radio station. I
could hear that old school hip hop because there's the
one that I always used to like. DJ Chuck Chillout
I refer to all the time. There you go, Can
you favor me with DJ Chuck chill out. He just
(03:35):
sticks his name in the middle of everything.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
No reason you did four bars time for.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
DJ chuk chill Out. I'm like, oh, I had no
idea who was playing this song that I can't hear anymore?
Like the Way Out you goror Mirror, that's his totally
DJ chuck chill Out. The other night I was driving around,
he's added like gunfire sound. Was like, oh, it is
getting a little you know, turning dark. You know, sun's
(04:04):
going down in East Ookland. I should get home. Oh no,
that's not from the outside. That's DJ chill Out freaking
me out here.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
He needs to chill out.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
His wardrobe is provided by Dapper Dance. Yes, so that
is ridiculous. And you know what's funny about that. The
other thing that's ridiculous that I was going to tell
you about, what's that Elizabeth nicknames real?
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yes we did it again?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
We sink, Yes, we sink again?
Speaker 5 (04:35):
Do it?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Our cycles are in sync? That I was going to
say to you, do you know what those nicknames? And
you were going to go roll the music. Yeah, this
(05:08):
is ridiculous. Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers,
heights and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free
and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
I know you heard that.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Oh, I heard it, and I heard it. I got
a good historical one for you today. Yes, and it's
kind of a bloody one, all right, but I have
really yes, but I avoided the worst stuff. Yeah, it's
still it's gritty.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
You excized the one percent some of it, most of it.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It all goes down during the Gilded Age.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Oh, nineteenth century, late nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, but the tarnished underbelly of that.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So I want to tell you about the battle Row
Ladies Social and Athletic Club.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
This already sounds great.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I know it's also they're also known as the Lady
Gophers late eighteen hundreds New York gang, headed up by
a woman named Annie Walsh aka battle Annie, aka the
Queen of Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yes, Queen.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
So, in order to understand the battle Row Ladies Social
and Athletic Club on a switch, oh yeah, we're gonna
you're gonna learn way more about this. First, you have
to understand the neighborhood New York City's Hell's Kitchen. Hmmm.
So it's a hip place now, but it certainly was
not always that way.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
No, it was called Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It did not merely tolerate violence. It was basically built
upon it.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Yes, that's where you coolence.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And there are a bunch of different stories about how
it got its name. Some say it was Davy Crockett. Yeah,
King of the Wild Frontier, killed in a bar when
he was only three. That's what My brother was convinced
that it wasn't killed him a like a bear. It
was killed in a bar when he was only three,
(07:05):
so that it was like this amazing run before the
age of three. And then what was this three year
old doing in a bar. It's one of the best
Manda Greens, aside from the one that I was actually
telling you about the other day of you picked a
fine time to leave me, Lucille. Instead of four hungry children,
it's people. Hear it as four hundred children and the
(07:28):
weed in the field. How many kids did they have? Anyway,
Hell's Kitchen. So Davy Crockett, they said that he coined
it when he said, quote, in my part of the country,
when you meet an irishman, you find a first rate gentleman.
But these are worse than savages. They are too mean
to swab Hell's kitchen. Damn well, all right, Davy, keep
(07:51):
that to yourself.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I didn't know we had a poetic license like that.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
The others say that a veteran cop told his rookie partner, quote,
hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's kitchen. And then
another version of that story is the rookie cop called
the area hell, like this is hell, yeah, And then
(08:14):
the veteran cops like, no, brother, this is Hell's kitchen.
This is the place where hell is made, where it's
ingredients were assembled and the heat applied before it was
served to the rest of the city. And then the
rookie cops like, oh my god, I've got to get
transferred out of here. Either way, the place if you were.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Like walking the beat with that guy all the time.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
When he's just waxing eloquent, people are getting stabbed across
the street.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
And he's just like you, look around here, rusty implements,
not a knife.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
So this place notoriously horrible.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
So where is Itabeth? Can you give me a locale?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
New York City's right along the Hudson River, gamesake of
your alma mater, Hudson University. Right, I have to say
the Hudson River never smelled of romance, my friend, it's
no Moon River. Following the Civil War, the Western Shore
in Manhattan was an industrial working waterfront. There were tanneries
(09:20):
which always smell great, dump in chemical waste right into
the water. And then that's next to the slaughterhouses a.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Great okay, so good, just together on a hot day.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Disposing of awful right into the river. Yes, you know,
coal barges tied up to rotting piers.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I would actually hope for the coal, like, can we
just knock out my sense of smell to take it?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Longshorm in of there in the midst of all this,
like working themselves into early graves for pay that barely
covers the rim on like a single airless room six
blocks eas good. So anyway, that's strip of river and
like this like dense compressed neighborhood that grew up behind it,
roughly like between thirty fourth and fifty ninth Street west
(10:10):
of eighth Avenue. That's Hell's kitchen. So it's not metaphorical, Yeah,
not at all. It is a kitchen in Hell.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
There's a lot of blood on the streets. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
The Irish came first, Hey, thanks to the Great hunger,
you know, when England committed genocide and shipped food out
of Ireland, starving her people. Yeah, and that triggered a
great migration in the late eighteen forties. And so these
Irish arrived in New York with nothing, and that was
(10:40):
often literal that they pawned or sold every portable possession
they had in order to afford this Atlantic crossing. And
then they find themselves at the West Side waterfront because like,
no one else wants to live there. You don't need
any skills, you know, for low pay, anyone can get
a gig. They don't care if you're Irish. So they
(11:03):
built shanty towns along the river, as you do. And
then after the war, like there's this construction boom in
the city and so that people are building all these
like proper tenements in that area. So they tear down
the shanty towns, they build the tenements brick and mortar,
but everyone's still poor.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yeah, and they're like cold water walk up flat.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Oh yeah. So it's just like it's as if you
just put like six stories of shanty towns on top
of each other. Yeah. So what like let's talk about that.
What a tenements walk in Hell's Kitchen looked and it's
so good. I was feeling so good, and now I'm
(11:44):
going to pretend like I am. I mean, when I
go outside right now, everything smells like jasmine. It's just
all the jasmine in the whole neighborhood is in bloom fabulous.
But I want to talk about what a tenement building
in Hell's Kitchens looked and smelled like like eighteen seventy five.
This is going to require some imagination, and I know
(12:05):
that you and the rude dudes have that. So imagine
dozens and dozens of families crammed into these buildings that
are designed for far lower occupancy. Single rooms would have
like parents, children, random borders. There were communal toilets in
the rear yard, and those were shared by fifty or
(12:28):
sixty people. Oh goshould you imagine? Oh yeah, I can't
share a house with one other person in one everybody
needs their own bathroom. Yeah, And so there's no line.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
People are in there like.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah. So there's no adequate plumbing, no reliable heat. Light
comes in through windows that are like four feet away
from a brick wall, so you're just getting the barest
of light you have, just this stink of humanity, whole smoke,
the rendering plans, don't forget those, the slaughterhouses, tanneries, everything. Okay,
(13:06):
that's just like a couple of blocks.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
And then adding like the mugginess of that humid there's
no wind really hitting me.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
And so of course, you know, it's not too much
of a stretch to think like there's gonna be a
lot of gangs and violence that come out. This is
not peaceful, happy living. No Eleventh Avenue was called death Avenue, Yeah, right,
And that's because the New York Central Railroad ran its
freight line at grade level on that and so trains
(13:40):
were killing people with such regularity that the railroad started
hiring these men called west Side cowboys, and they would
ride horses ahead of the trains, waving red flags as
a warning. Kids were always playing on the tracks, drunk
slept on them, so the cowboys had to earn their pay.
(14:00):
Just were like they had a lot of work.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
So they should have gotten like a cowcatcher on the
front of the train, just splitt in the whatever's there.
I guess I probably wouldn't help big enough.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
He had all these saloons, right, They were like the
neighborhood civic institutions, hundreds of them. One estimate said that
there was a saloon on pretty much every block within
Hell's Kitchen, sometimes multiple ones on a block. Your vegetables, right,
it was more than okay, yeah it was. It was
(14:30):
in better neighborhoods. You know, you had churches, banks, social clubs,
community centers. That's what the that's what the saloons had
to be in Hell's everything.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So there's kids in one side of the cash.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
In your wages there. You could get your mail sent there,
you could find out, like you know, who's hiring. You
could learn which cop on which beat, could be paid
to look the other way. It's on the take here
hear the news from Ireland. You could settle a debt,
start a fight, and a friendship, began a criminal enterprise.
And so some of the saloons, their back rooms were
(15:04):
pretty much like courtrooms where disputes were adjudicated because they
had their own law and it wasn't applied in any
kind of consistent way. But you know, they weren't going
to be able to take someone to court anywhere else.
The police they played a very interesting role here. I
bet they did a lot of cops in Hell's Kitchen
(15:24):
were Irish Catholic men who'd grown up in neighborhoods not
too dissimilar from what they were now patrolling, and so
they had personal and family connections to the people they
were supposed to be arresting. And then they also operated
within that Tammany Hall patronage of course, so their careers
dependent on political loyalty rather than how effective they were
(15:48):
as law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
You didn't need to be good, you needed to be loyal, yeah,
And so.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You have this kind of like negotiated coexistence going on.
So the gangs were operating in exchange for delivery votes
and suppressing rival political organization the New York the Gangs
of New York. And then when that would break down,
then the violence was just like off the chart, and
it broke down a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
So by the time each other or handled with nails driven.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Through the yes, exactly. So, by by the time of
the nineteen hundreds, Hell's Kitchen had this mythology around it.
Its name had spread way beyond the block that first
earned it. You know, that Moniker in the imagination of
the rest of New York. It was like a shorthand
(16:38):
for a specific kind of urban muck. Yeah, yeah, And
so it didn't have like the elegant menace of the Bowery,
It didn't have like the exotic dangers of Chinatown. It
was like raw and intimate and filthy. Yeah, and like
it didn't soften as the new century is advancing. If anything,
(16:59):
this can solidation of gang power during the late eighteen nineties,
nineteen hundreds and nineteen tens just made life. They're more dangerous.
Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going
to talk about the gangs of New York, all right, Zarin,
(17:35):
we're back.
Speaker 6 (17:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
I smeared some pig blood on my lips as lipstick
to get ready for it.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Too perfect. I stuck a knife in my undypants and
I'm gonna pull it later. Okay. So we're in this
setting of Hell's Kitchen eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds,
and in that setting, we're going to begin with the
Gopher Gang. The Gopher Gang was one of the most
(18:00):
formidable criminal enterprises in the whole history of New York City.
And I know you'll want to step to me on
that talking about the Five Families. Yeah, whatever, But these
guys these guys had grit. So it was an early
twentieth century New York street gang, the Gopher Gang, that
(18:21):
counted among its members Goo Goo Knocks, James Biff Ellison,
and Onny Madden.
Speaker 6 (18:29):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Although it was based in Hell's Kitchen, it grew to
control most of Manhattan for a while. Their territory covered
fourth to forty second Street, seventh to eleventh Avenue, so
a little narrow. The name comes from like their methods.
So they used to hide in the cellars of buildings
(18:50):
in the neighborhood after they would pull a crime. So
they do something up on the street, go down into
the basements. So they literally disappeared into this under ground
architecture of Hell's Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
This is like when we would have the like elevators
that go out through the sidewalk. Yes, right, then you
can disappear from the outside of the building inside the building.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So they would literally disappear and then come back out
to strike and then vanish again before the cops could come.
So it was like really tactically effective. But zaren it
was also deeply symbolic in this essay, will all right,
So these are men and women of the basement of
(19:32):
the alley of the stairwell, and they're invisible to polite
society until they want to be seen. And it's like boom,
now you saw it, okay, the dark Yes, So the
Gopher Gang, it was like an amalgam of all these
other local street gangs. In the eighteen nineties, it had
more than five hundred members.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Damn son.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, they ran deep. They needed structure and leadership though
with that many people.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
So regular meeting.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
They were led by a committee that was made up
of senior members, guys like Marty Brennan, Newburgh Gallagher and
Stumpy Malarkey. That that name sounds a little offensive to
be honest, Like I was desperate to learn more about
Stumpy Malarkey, but the information on the guy was just thin,
(20:24):
just mention of his name, not anything else. And so
I went all the way through like newspapers, dot com,
we need a I need a sponsorship, ps. And it
was the same way, like he was name dropped in articles,
but there was never anything of substance to him, like
what was his actual first name? What's his story? So
I started to develop a theory as I do what Elizabeth,
(20:45):
I was wondering if This was a fake name invented
by yellow journalists at the time. Like I said, it's
it's borderline offensive. It's offensive.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
So I can't name my dog Stumpy Malarkey.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's like what someone would call an irishman to insult him.
Like you know, if a journalist dropped it in an
article about the Gopher game, like snuck it in there
as like a jab or a lark or like a
nasty cut of the Irish I can see how like
subsequent papers and writers then writing about the Gopher Gang,
and then authors and then websites would run with it.
(21:21):
Of course, so as you know, we love good nicknames.
As you proved out in the beginning, this one's too
good to pass up. But I am a mind of
that it is an invented character, and that's something to
keep in mind with this whole story I'm telling you today. Okay,
we know the gang existed, there are particular people we
know for sure existed, and there are activities we know
(21:44):
for sure happened. But some of these characters are composites.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
There's a lot of anti Irish discrimination that shows up.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
And it shows up in it, but or not even
anti Irish, but just like some of them are composite
characters created by the press. Okay, Like they'll hear that
something happens, that someone does something or has in particular characteristics.
They don't know the name of that person. They know
the name of one other person. They kind of combine
them up.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We've come across this a lot with nineteenth century newspapers
out west. They did this in this city, they did this.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Theory is that there's no way the press is going
to be able to get in any way close to
any of these gangs. So they're going to be hearing
this third fourth hand.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
From cops, possibly cops.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
That's the main that's their main source, and so you know,
at long last, the gophers are the insiders here. Everyone
else is the outsiders. So tales are told, Cops share stories.
The public loves the exciting stuff. The press gives them
what they want. They give a name to someone they
can't confirm, and then it's like it's sort of like
(22:47):
if you see someone on a regular basis in public,
like you cross paths with them at a coffee shop
all the time, or like you ride the same bus,
you don't know them at all and you never speak
to them. Sure, but you start referring to them in
your head as like big.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Pants Joe, totally sammy good eyes see exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
And then one day big pants Joe steals a chair
at the coffee shop from like a woman with a baby.
And then you start telling people this, like big big
pants Joe, he steals chairs. And then a friend of
yours is at a cafe across town. He sees another
guy steal a chair from a table, and your friend's like,
there goes big pants Joe. But it's not the same guy.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
How this works there, it's all coming together.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
That's what That's what's called journalism. That's how that works.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
I like how you're educating me on journalism as a
former journalist.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Explaining journalism to a journalist is so good. But guess what,
you know a reverse card. I was a journalist before
you were.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Boom boom boom, full circle again exactly. But you know what,
can never quit the game, neither one of us anyway. Okay,
so we're in Hell's Kitchen talking about the Gopher Gang.
So we do know that there was a committee that
guided the Gopher Gang, and we know that the committee
met semi regularly at their headquarters known as Battle Row.
(24:04):
It's a saloon wondering and the owner was named Mallet Murphy.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
He's got a big wood Oh yeah, hammer Mallet and
that's like he knows he loves crack nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It was a pseudonym for the guy. He was actually
for a while considered like the overall leader of the
Gopher Gang. And he got the name because he always
carried around a giant wooden mallet when.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
You can go to fights fights. Okay, do you think
he was like maybe a butcher used to used to
tenderize meet and he's like, you know what, you can.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Meet with that, alright, But no, he was just like
olden times, big pants Joe.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And so they go to the saloon to Battle Row.
They chat about robberies, like hey, what are you doing?
Split up profits from like the Manhattan bordellos, and illegal
gambling operations.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Over last meetings minutes, Yes, old business, new business, Robert.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Rules of I second, I second to the approval of
those Do.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
We have a quorum for this meeting?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
I want, I want to call the question? And so
the like the battle Rose Saloon was a legitimate business,
but it was also a social club, a treasury, a
court room, and a war council, a middle school, and
a middle school out front the toilet. So the Gophers,
they weren't just brawlers. They're this organized criminal enterprise. And
(25:25):
they had a strict code of conduct that required members
to commit crimes, like in order to play by the rules,
you have to be a crimer. And so they would
do things like burglary, to murdered, armed robbery, muggings, assault, extortion, and.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
The assault would be for for a fee, like you
like I want this guy to be assaulted, you pay them,
they go assault them, so that it's like a real
criminal organization. It wasn't just like we're beefing with.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
The bad boys. Bad boys for hire. And so the
main source of their income, though for years, was plundering
the freight car and the train depot of the New
York Central Railroad. That the New York City Police were
not able to do that, and sometimes they just didn't
want to, and so the gang would unload goods from
(26:13):
the train and then just set up like pop up
storefronts nearby, and they'd sell the stuff off cheap and
then be gone with the win. And the railroad got
really tired of it, so they finally they put together
a special private police force of ex officers who had
like personal scores to settle. So they're like, I've never
got a chance to bust that guy when I was
(26:34):
on the streets, but now there are no rules and yeah,
and the railroad pay and they would say that, and
so they like patrolled the rail line crack skulls. It
was brutal. Yeah, And so the gang then they but
they had like this broader organizational structure too. They started
(26:55):
employing younger apprentice gang members, like they had like a guild.
Well you know how like the cops, because the cops
are a gang and they have the explorers, like Junior.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Had some friends who did that.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, well the Ghost the Gopher gang had the baby Gophers.
Really yeah, it was like their explorers, yes exactly. And
they had like other subordinate gangs like franchisees if you will.
That included the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, not the band
(27:28):
that was so long Z, the Rhodes Gang and again
like the Roads Gang. I was like, so what's their deal,
Randy Rhoads, Nick Roads Rhodes Scholars, like, come on, come through, No,
I can't find anything on It spelled like r h
O D r h O D E s And so
(27:50):
this franchise model extended their influence like way beyond the
core membership of you know, five hundred, so it's even
larger and they can call them in when they need
like auxiliaries. It was an organizational logic that was foreshadowing
the more formal structures of Prohibition era organized crime. Oh interesting,
(28:11):
that's kind of where they drew it from. So the
Gopher Gang didn't operate in isolation. There were five major
gangs that controlled the criminal world in New York between
eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty Hudson Dusters, the Five Pointers,
the Wios, the Eastman Gang, and the Gophers.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
So these are who like the Italian and Jewish gangs,
had to replace in the lteens and twenties.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yes, so the Five Pointers based in the old Five
Points district, they were the Gophers primary rivals. Okay, I
was wondering how that works out citywide supremacy. Their leadership
under Paul Kelly brought like even more organizational sophistication, and
that was the real forerunner of mafia structures in the
(28:59):
following decades.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
So this was the.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Predecessor of the Five Points gang, where you had people
like al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Torrio making their start totally. Yeah,
the Hudson Dusters. They ran the area between West Greenwich
Village and the waterfront, and they were like the direct
territorial competitors with the Gophers. The Wios were an older
(29:24):
gang and their territory overlapped with Five Points and they
they were known because they had like a price list
for criminal services, like a broken arm is this much?
And broken legs will cost you this all the way
up to murder, which was probably like market price, you know,
fixed prices on here. So in their early nineteen tens,
(29:44):
the Gophers were led by one lung current.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
One lung current. They had just one lung I was guessing.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And he was notorious for his attacks on lone patrolmen.
So like most police just didn't even bother to patrol
healths kitchen, and when they did it was in large groups.
But every now and then one would get peeled off
from the pack.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Is it a punishment, like you gotta go down, I
don't know and get beat up by one lung.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Car One lung would jump them and steal their uniforms.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
You got beat up by a man with one loud There's.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
A really great article in September seventh, nineteen nineteen edition
of the New York Tribune. It's supposedly an interview with
a train flagman named Danny. Danny only had two teeth anyway.
He was regaling the writer with tales of Hell's Kitchen,
which he passed through on the regular on the train.
Here's an excerpt. Every night the bunch would hang out
(30:40):
over in the corner waiting for something to turn up.
If nothing turned up by itself, they would see that
something did. There was always something cooking in Hell's kitchen.
I remember the time right in the middle of the
street when one lung current bet he couldn't dick a
CoP's coat home to his name, and he did. She
made some kind of military coat for herself. Soon all
(31:01):
the dames on Eleventh Avenue were wearing them. They would
send out their guys to go get them cops coats
to show their love wasn't dead. Danny said that he
couldn't mention the names of leaders of the gang because
everybody was so tough it was hard for one man
to stand out. Above the others. Danny, in his Loyalty
said that the Gas House Gang and Monk Eastman's outfit
(31:23):
were a bunch of Willie boys on a vacation from college.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Right boys on a vacation.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Danny wants to be tight with the Gophers. Not only
a boy, he's a golf golf boy. Happy Jack Mulrainey
was another go. He was called happy Jack because he
always appeared to be smiling, but it was because he
suffered from I should not laugh from a partial paralysis
of his facial muscle, and he hated people making remarks
(31:55):
about it. He was a total sociopath and so like
he would put the herd on anyone who made a
comment like what you laughing about?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Killer clown?
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah? Exactly. There's this guy Onie Madden. He was born
in Leeds, England, and he was like a big boss.
His identity in his story those are solid. He shows
up a lot in the papers like good looking dude.
His nickname was Onie the Killer, So we'll just leave
that beat where Jesus playing it. He was like the
(32:24):
most famous alum of the Gopher Gang. He graduated from
the Hell's Kitchen Street Crime and moved into bootlegging. He
went to sing, sing for a.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
While, we don't need to know why, graduated.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Became a bootlegger and then co owner of the Cotton Club,
what Harlem's celebrated venue of the nineteen twenties. Wow. And
then we have my favorite part. The Lady Gophers.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
This was a group that was headed up by a
woman named Annie Walsh aka Battle Annie. And so like
her story is kind of like, let's call it obscured
by the fog of legend. Two principal sources for her
story are Herbert Asbury's nineteen twenty seven book The Gangs
(33:11):
in New York and the earlier reporting of New York
Herald Knight editor William Davenport, whose account of the Hell's
Kitchen Underworld Asbury drew upon really heavily for his book.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
He was like a crime police night court reporter. Correct.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
And so there are those that think that he Davenport
just like made a bunch of stuff up. But like
I said earlier, yeah, but it's not that he's making
up what happened. It's like he's filling in outbollishing. Yeah.
And so was there a leader of the Lady Gophers.
Of course, Yes, was she a big boss? Yes? Was
her name actually Annie Walsh. Maybe his accounts came from
(33:54):
these really extensive interviews that he did with cops who
patrolled Hell's Kitchen. So like they may have exaggerate, I
read it a bit, but the truth is there. The
truth isn't there somewhere.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
He's the legend.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah. So Annie built up a gang of like minded women,
and they were domestic workers by day, serious bruisers by night. Yes,
they'd gather in the back room of a saloon near
Tenth Avenue. They'd drink and carouse and drink and joke
and drink, and then Annie would be, like, when she's
(34:25):
really in her cups, she would remember some beef that
she had with like a housewife on thirty eighth Street,
like she insulted me, or maybe she said something about
my kid. And then that's when Annie Walsh became battle Annie.
So she'd get all her followers behind her and she
would just like descend on the offender with her. Yeah,
(34:46):
but it wasn't like hair pulling and face scratch like
these ladies showed up with weapons like rolling pins, scalding
water bricks. Yeah, they didn't play. So she had this
crew of Amazon like absolute valkyries, just reaking havoc on
the streets, or at least that's how the papers told it.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
Well, I believe started the French Revolution.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Once closer to the truth is that these were women
of a working class Irish neighborhood who organized other women
for collective action. Yes, was it often violent, probably, but
it wasn't born of like petty bickering like the papers one.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
No, I wouldn't imagine that. I was imagining like just
like the men, they were like gonna beef basically right right.
The come from a hearts gravel culture. They've been you know,
battling for centuries exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
So she she gets described in the press as the
Queen of Hell's Kitchen and quote the most feared brick
hurler of her time. And that tells us something important
just about how she's perceived. She wasn't just known as
like a street fighter. She was this territorial sovereign. You know,
she ran the joint. The organization that she built is
(35:58):
really one of the most remarkable ones in the history
of American organized crime because it mirrored the Gopher Gang
and it practiced a sort of violence not seen from women,
but it also had like a social function and a
means of protection and agency for women in this urban underworld.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
Yeah, they could turn to their fellow women and be like,
we need to go beat up this guy who's beating
up his wife.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah. So the Lady Gophers were also known as the
Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club. Social and Athletic
Club was like this standard euphemism of the era for
organizations that were in practice, you know, gang affiliates or
political machines. So Tammany hall patronage networks were just like
riddled with these things. And so by giving her organization
(36:42):
this really respectable sounding title, Annie was kind of mimicking
or mocking civilized society, and she was wrapping a fighting
force in the language of like civic associations. And the
irony was not lost on the women themselves, I bet not,
or the police who had to deal with them. So
(37:03):
let's stop here and take a break. Apologies to those
listening on Spotify. We recently learned that they stick extra
ads between our ad breaks, which are carefully engineered.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Well, that ain't right.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, sometimes they get cut right in the middle of
a sentence. That's not something that we can control, and
we feel really badly about it. Anyway, have some ads, Zaren,
(37:44):
Elisabeth Zaron. We're talking Hell Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yeah, we are, sister.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
We're talking gangs, and we're talking lady gangs now specifically
the Lady Gophers aka the Battle Row Ladies Social and
Athletic Club. I love that name.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yes, Weedies.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
It's a great trivia team name if you ask me. Yeah,
out there for grabs. I mean I like our trivia
team name Steve Harvey Oswald, never letting that go. But
this one's out there every anyone wants it. And the
gang led by Annie wall shka Battle Annie. She put
the structure to this group of wild women, and she
(38:23):
welcomed new members into the fold. She didn't actually just
welcome them, she trained them. Zaren, close wandering. I want
you to picture it. It's nineteen oh one. You are
a young mother who lives in Hell's Kitchen in New
(38:46):
York City. Your parents came here from Ireland looking for
a better life. What they found was only slightly better
than what they left. Your mom was a devout churchgoer.
Your father had a backbreaking job at the docks with
a side gig as a fence for the Gopher Gang.
When you reached young womanhood, you hooked up with a
fella also on the periphery of the gang. He is
(39:07):
not the best provider, and he's always getting into scraps.
You work as a scullery maid for some fat cats
during the day. You clean up after those pigs, wash
their dishes, grub their floors. Your little sister and your
mom watch after your baby during the day, and you're
fed up. You want more in life. You're walking home
from work when a woman stops you in the street.
(39:30):
Drunks pass by you on the sidewalk. A tinker's cart
rolls by, all manner of pots and pans, rattling in
the back. She asks if you know battle Annie. You've
heard of her, you say. The lady asks if you
want to join the Lady Gophers become a member of
the battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club. You're stunned.
(39:51):
This would be a whole different life for you. You'd
be more than a mom and a wife and a maid.
You'd be a gangster. How do I sign up?
Speaker 3 (39:59):
You ask.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
The next night, you find yourself in a back room
at the battle Row Saloon, A feisty Gal stands before
a crowd of other women. She commands the room. Everyone
else in there is like you, new to the Lady Gophers.
Some of you look nervous, some of you look blaise,
All of you are transfixed. As piano music floats in
(40:23):
from the front room, punctuated by the occasional whoop or
clatter of glass battle. Annie tells you that you're all
there for training. You'd heard about this, that the first
order of business was to train you all in the
martial arts. Fighting without weapons. Anyone could wield a pipe
or a broken bottleneck. Annie wanted the ladies to be
(40:46):
able to brawl bare handed. Two other veteran gang members
join Annie at the front of the room. Now, ladies,
Annie says, you have to do more then slap and grab.
You have to use more strenuous activity. Yeah, with your
teeth than with your nails. You look down at your
(41:06):
coal stained fingernails, at the chemical burn marks from the
harsh cleaners you use all day. Yeah, these will do
just fine, you tell yourself. You run your tongue over
your jagged teeth into the pit where one of your
molars used to be. Oh, yeah, these will do just
fine too. The women flanking Annie now demonstrate fighting techniques
(41:27):
thumbs to eye sockets, elbows to the bridge of noses,
pulling at ears, fighting down between the thumb and forefingers,
knees to the groin. A woman at the front makes
a wise crack. Sounds like me and my old man
on a Saturday night, She hollers. The crowd around your laughs,
you chuckle, Annie tells the group that may be the case,
(41:50):
but you'll be the one standing when it's over. From
now on, she and the gang of compatriots demonstrate more
moves and encourage the crowd to practice on each other.
But not for real. Ill just pretend real gentlely. After
a while of this, more women enter the room and
pass around bottles of beer and whiskey. Welcome to the
Battle Row, Ladies, Social and Athletic Club, Annie shouts. You
(42:13):
are all now lady gophers. The crowds hears you take
a long pull from a bottle of booze, stare at
the ceiling, and revel in your new identity. Yes, welcome
to the gang's Errand so, when called upon battle, Annie
could assemble a fighting force of between fifty and one
(42:35):
hundred women within hours. Yeah, they'd show up. They'd be
strapped clubs, bricks, knives, like.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
He was very celtic.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
We're gonna go, like I'm wondering if they had like
the body of drums, like it's just get me all
worked up. And so the women were like reserve backup
in fights over territorial disputes with other gangs. And the
speed of mobilization was what was really incredible with them.
It's not like they weren't just like this casual collection
(43:06):
of allies.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
They try and go like phone each other. They got
to put like candles in the window or something, and
I think they just read I.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Guess would be they'd probably have younger girls running building
to building and popping in and grabbing people, and you know,
once word gets out, then they're all like telling everybody
people sells and yeah yeah. And so we've got this
organized reserve force with a command structure, a common purpose.
So in military terms, war fighter terms, if.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
I may thank you, Fred, you're putting it in my
understanding the language.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Annie Walsh was something like a quartermaster and a field
commander simultaneous. And so there were other notable Gopher affiliated
women who operated alongside Annie.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Their real sergeants.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Ida Burger a ka I to the Goose.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
The goose.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
She was a dance hall guy and a lady of
the night. There was there was this guy, chick Tricker.
Chick Tricker, Yeah, chick Tricker was the leader of the
Eastman Gang, and he convinced Ida the Goose to bail
on the Gopher gang. This sounds like mad lips and
then come dance for his boys at the Cafe Maryland
(44:19):
on West twenty eighth Street. The Gophers did not care
for this, and Annie's included in that. So one night
some of the Gophers went to the cafe to retrieve Ida,
and they came in guns of blazing. Her boyfriend, who
was a member of the Eastman Gang, hid behind the bar,
and Ida looked over and was like, are you efane
(44:39):
kidding me? She was so disgusted by his cowardly move
she pulled him up from behind the bar and was
let and she shouted out, hey yous, come out and
take it. And the boyfriend didn't make it out of
the bar, but Ida did and she headed home with
the Gophers. Uh I was wondering, yes, And then we
(45:00):
have Sadie Ferrell aka Sadie the Goat. Yeah, so her
story is to be taken with a grain of salt,
maybe like a larger green.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Than everyone else's, but a salt.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, But I'm gonna tell it anyway. So she went
around mugging men in the hell's kitchen, and like when
she would happen upon a man walking alone, she'd head
butt him the glassy kiss she'd had like a goat.
And that's how she got her nickname. So she'd work
with this male accomplice who had then been the guy again,
(45:31):
this time with a sling shot, and then Sadie would
rob the guy. And Sadie had beef with a woman
named Gallis mag And Mag was six feet tall. She
worked as a bouncer at a bar called The Hole
in the Wall at two seventy nine Water Street in Manhattan,
(45:51):
over kind of south of the Lower east Side, in
the Seaport neighborhood. And so in the Asbury book The
Gangs of New York, this is how mag Is described quote.
It was her custom, after she'd felled an upsteperous customer
with her club, to clutch his ear between her teeth
and so drag him to the door amid the frenzied
(46:12):
cheer of the onlookers. If her victim protested, she bit
his ear off, and having cast the fellow into the street,
she carefully deposited the detached member in a jar of
alcohol behind the bar. She was one of the most
feared denizens on the waterfront, and the police of the
period shudderingly described her as the most savage female they'd
(46:33):
ever encountered.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
She got an ear collection, of course, she had an
air collection of trophy.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
She didn't just bite the ears off of fellas. She
bit Sadie the Goat's ear off too.
Speaker 6 (46:44):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So, one night Sadie was walking in Hell's Kitchen and
she saw some guys trying to come aboard a freight
ship like pirates would do. But they couldn't pull it off,
like they didn't have sea legs, and the crew was
just like laughing at and pushing him back like the
crew was yeah. So Sadie watched him try and try again,
and she was appalled, and so she called the guys
(47:05):
over like hey, hey, get over here, and she's like,
look for a cut, I'll get you on that boat.
And she did. Yeah, somehow she overtook like all the
crew on the boat. And then from that moment on
she became the boss of all this pirates. She becomes
a river pirate, and so they went for bigger and
(47:27):
bigger boats, and then they even raised the Jolly Roger
flag on one that they claimed for themselves. So they
would cruise up and down the Hudson River looking for victims,
and they stole goods. Sometimes they held people for ransom,
you know whatever. She was a menace and then people
started fighting back a little too much, and so Sadie
(47:48):
was like, you know what I'm done. This is too
much of a bother. So she goes back to Hell's
kitchen and becomes known as Queen of the Waterfront. And
she pulled all manner of crimes, and she was in
the orbit of the Lady Gopher. And then she and
Gallis Mag they made up. Mag fished Sadie's ear out
of the pickle jar behind the bar where she kept
(48:09):
it and gave it back to Yeah, it was probably
smaller than the others oh hair. So Sadie takes her
own ear where is it in a locket on a
chain around her neck. From then on out, BFFs oh.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
I thought she was gonna have it like, you know,
dipped in metal or a.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Pickled up of course. So one of the most historically
significant aspects of the pack is it. Yeah, take a
look of battle Annie's career and that of the Lady Gophers.
Was their participation in violent labor disputes in the late
(48:48):
nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
Please tell me they weren't like hired out like the Pinkertons.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Well, the Lady Gophers often worked as paid strike breakers
for businesses or they worked for labor unions. There you
go through a number of violent disputes, so there were
very few strikes that went down in which Battle Annie
didn't provide female muscle for quote biting and scratching, either
picketers or strike breakers.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
So she was an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah, So she and the Gophers, they had no allegiance
to either side workers or owners. It didn't matter to
Annie and the Gophers who they attacked as long as
they got paid paid. Yeah, They're like, let me get paid.
And so she wasn't like an ideologist of labor or capital.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
She had a job to do.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
She was an entrepreneur of violence.
Speaker 6 (49:35):
This is what she was.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
And she was operating in the open market. The Gopher
gangs collapse, like its rise, was a process rather than
a single events. So there were all these forces that
came together to erode the organization over the first two
decades of the twentieth century. One of the leaders became
(49:58):
involved in this like years long with another member. It
was a local bar tender named William Lennon that went
down over a card game. And that wasn't the only
internal fracture that was weakening them at this critical moment
in history. So the railroad remember they had their own
police force. Well, they just keep ramping it up and
(50:19):
throwing money at the police officers. So the special police
are going into Hell's kitchen and just beating Gophers from
one end of the neighborhood to the other, or, as
one of the cops said, from hell to breakfast. That's
where we get that color. The guy Ony Madden, he
went to jail and he was the gang's like dynamic leader.
(50:43):
He got yanked from the game when they needed the most.
One lung Current died in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
He finally went down, finally went down.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
And then everything just chipped away at the gang's power.
So by the end of nineteen nineteen, most of the
survive all pretty much all almost all the surviving gang
members were in jail.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
I think also just World War One itself would have
changed to the dynamic of the city totally, what people
are willing to tolerate, and how brutality looks, and so exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
By nineteen twenty, Gophers didn't exist anymore. It ceased to exist.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
They pretty much left with the war.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah, so what happened to Annie Walsh in those years
isn't recorded with any reliability. So like her documented activity
is like pretty much eighteen seventies to kind of like
eighteen nineties. Whether she lived to see the full decline
of the gang that she served, whether she died imprisoned,
(51:39):
or just like aged out kidney her kidneys could have
turned to dust, we don't know. She could have become
a zombie.
Speaker 3 (51:48):
She could have gone riding off to El Dorado looking
for that gold.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
Probably, I think that's most likely. But the silence is revealing, right, definitely,
because the lives of where king class women in Gilded
Age New York were not considered worth preserving in institutional memory.
So her story survived not just not because anyone thought
she deserved this commemoration, but because she was so extreme,
(52:15):
like she was violent enough, organized enough, feared enough to
be useful as local color in the journalism and popular
history of men who found her exotic.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
She sells papers as like a little adornment to.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
The a nice little audience. Right, So, Zaren, what's your
ridiculous takeaway?
Speaker 3 (52:35):
Well, now I want Scorsese doesn't have many films left
in his uber to make. I know, I'd like him
to make a Gang of New York too, The Lady
goes Lady Gophers.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
I would love to see that. That's my ridiculous takeaway.
I want more. I want more about the Social Club.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
Yes, definitely, even if they have to.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
I mean, the thing is is, it's like a lot
of it is men manufactured myths, but manufactured mys I mean,
really there is anything true. But I think you could
juice it up enough, Zaren, to make a screenplay out
of it. Saren, I'm talking to you, my screenwriting buddy.
(53:18):
And in that note, Dave, let's polish this off with
a talkback.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
Yeah, here's one.
Speaker 6 (53:28):
Oh my god, I went cheat, y'all when Zaren made
this sound during this latest episode about the ranch milk
Cheke mashup situation. I would stop the episode to coup
(53:49):
lead this talkback, and she just felt that so deeply
in my soul.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
You get what she does to me.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
It can't help bodily reaction, can't help it, baby, can't
help it. Well. See, I think that's the thing is.
I think rude dudes either feel like me where it's
devilish and we think it's disgusting, but it's so entertaining
to watch you smell this, yeah, totally, to watch you
get tortured. Yeah, and then there are the rude dudes
(54:19):
who are tortured like you see, and it works out.
Speaker 3 (54:22):
Yeah, both sides of that coin. Everybody win twisted twisted coin.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
And everybody wins on my twisted coin. That's it for today.
You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com.
We're also at Ridiculous Crime on both Blue Sky and
on Instagram. We're on YouTube at Ridiculous Crime Pod, and
you can email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Most importantly, as I always say, leave a talkback on
(54:47):
the iHeart app. They're amazing and we love, love love them.
Reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton. And
Zer and Burnette, produced and edited by Dirty Dave Cousten,
King of Atlanta, starring Annals Rutger as Judas. Research is
(55:09):
by Marissa Brown aka Marissa the Shark and Jabbari Davis
aka Fists Davis. The theme song is by Thomas Lee
aka Tommy two Bites and Travis Dunton aka The Hammer Post.
Wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred producer Dave Cousten's
wardrobe by Mister Guy of Beverly Hills. Guest hair and
(55:29):
makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive producers are retired
Cops Out for Blood Ben Bowen and Noel.
Speaker 5 (55:37):
Brown reds Quime Say It One More Times Crime.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more Podcasts.
My Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Elizabeth Dutton
Popular Podcasts
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com