Five Points gangs
The term Five Points gangs refers collectively to the many street gangs that operated in and around Five Points, Manhattan, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It should not be read as the name of one continuously governed Irish organization that later became Italian.
Nineteenth-century gangs
Five Points was initially associated with gangs drawn largely from Irish immigrant and Irish-American neighborhoods. They included the Forty Thieves, Kerryonians, Chichesters, Roach Guards, Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies and Whyos. These were separate organizations that sometimes cooperated or fought under broader neighborhood labels.
In a 1909 investigation, George Kibbe Turner described the Five Points and Cherry Hill underworld of the 1880s as predominantly Irish but comparatively unorganized. He contrasted it with the more structured political gangs that emerged around the turn of the century.[1]
Ethnic and organizational transition
By the late nineteenth century, Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigration had changed Lower Manhattan's population and underworld. Sociologist James M. O'Kane writes that Jewish and Italian gangsters eventually took over or transformed older Irish gangs. He identifies Paul Kelly—born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli—as the Italian leader who assumed control of the old Five Points gang, while noting that the major gangs continued to contain members from different ethnic groups.[2]
The name itself was reused. In July 1903, the New-York Tribune called the Paradise Social Club the “new Five Points Gang” and said its riot occurred on the battleground of the “old Five Points Gang.”[3] This contemporary distinction is one reason later sources cannot safely be reduced to a single uninterrupted organization.
Paul Kelly period
The later singular Five Points Gang was associated with Paul Kelly and an Italian-led but multiethnic network of social clubs and neighborhood crews. Contemporary and later sources disagree over whether the name covered Kelly's entire association or a faction that separated from him in 1905. Its history is therefore treated in a dedicated article rather than projected backward onto every earlier gang in the neighborhood.[1]
See also
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 George Kibbe Turner, “Tammany's Control of New York by Professional Criminals”, McClure's Magazine, vol. 33, no. 2, June 1909, pp. 117–126.
- ↑ James M. O'Kane, The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity and the American Dream (Routledge, 2017), pp. 64–66.
- ↑ “Reserves Beaten Off: Five Points Gang Ends Celebration by Rioting and Assaulting”, New-York Tribune, July 6, 1903, p. 4.