A Pickpocket's Tale

Meet George Appo, pickpocket, con man, mayor of underworld New York in the late nineteenth century. In Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the streets, addicts drifted in opium dens and swindlers worked the lucrative "green-goods" game. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo rose as an exemplar of the "good fellow", a criminal who relied on wile, following a code of loyalty in his world of deception. Here is the New York that gave us Edith Wharton, Gangs of New York and the Brooklyn Bridge.