A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

George Appo lived a fascinating and revealing life - one that touched on Chinese immigration and the California Gold Rush (his father), Irish immigration (his mother), criminal activity in New York's notorious Five Points neighborhood, the very beginning of the opium culture in the U.S., political corruption and reform, the Broadway stage, as well as major upheavals in how America thought about medicine, psychiatry, and prisons... Read Full Review

A Pickpocket's Tale is a close, intimate look inside of New York's underworld in the nineteenth century. Ostensibly about one criminal, the half Chinese, half Irish George Appo, the book is more a sociological work about the institutions of crime and punishment as they existed then. Born in poverty in 1856 (or -8), Appo began as a newspaper boy, then graduated to the career of pickpocket. He served time in all kinds of detention... Read Full Review

George Appo's own previously unpublished biography is interwoven into Gilfoyle's outstanding book and tells readers first hand what life was like in the "new" Sing Sing prison, the infamous Tombs - NYC's massive city jail, and of course the newly created institutions for the criminally insane in the late 1800's. Appo survived on the streets like thousands of boys from Five Points and eventually learned to read and write in... Read Full Review

I first saw this book featured in the book section of THE WEEK magazine. So I picked it up to know more about the scams of the day and the criminal underworld protocals as well. But my ulterior motive was to examine how the coming gilded age of corporate power was reflected in the underground economy and how justice and prisons were being affected. It is a window of the past that looks into todays corporate influence in... Read Full Review

You probably never heard of George Appo, although he wrote an autobiography. He was a reformed and washed-out criminal by the time he told his story in the early twentieth century, and although he got through 99 typewritten pages, it must have been tough for him. He had never gone to school, and his limited reading and writing skills were whatever he could pick up from fellow convicts in prison. When Timothy J. Gilfoyle,... Read Full Review