The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation

Documents the story of underworld legend Albert Hicks, chronicling his mid-nineteenth-century crime spree and the plot gone wrong that culminated in an onboard massacre and manhunt in 1860 Coney Island. "The story of Albert Hicks, the most notorious criminal on the New York waterfront, unfolded in the course of three bloody months in the summer before the Civil War. There was a massacre, a flight, a manhunt, and a trial, all of which kept the nation riveted and remade Hicks, the last pirate of New York, into a celebrated antihero. Handsome and charismatic, Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. His criminal career reached its peak in 1860, when he was hired, under an alias, as a hand on an oyster sloop. His plan was to rob the ship and flee, disappearing into the teeming streets of lower Manhattan, as he'd done numerous times before, eventually finding his way back