Overview

This is the story of Louis Bieral, a nineteenth-century gangster, politician, sportsman, and Civil War hero. Kidnapped from his birthplace in revolutionary South America, he doused fires in Jacksonian New York, battled Sumatran pirates with the US Navy, and panned for California gold. As a crime boss, he raced horses, boxed champions, and ran brothels. Yet Bieral's adventurous life was also steeped in the brutality of his time. He befriended rowdies like 'Butcher' Bill Poole, returned fugitives like Anthony Burns to slavery, and assaulted abolitionists such as Richard Henry Dana. As a Union officer, Bieral won fame in battle. He was a Gilded-age bodyguard for 'Boss' Tweed, William Seward, and Jim Fisk, becoming a suspect in that tycoon's murder. From the docks of Valparaíso to the dining room of Delmonico's to the cells of Auburn Prison, Bieral's remarkable journey illustrates the violence that bound nineteenth-century America together.

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9781009710596

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Reviews

'Gangster of New York tells a tale that would challenge today's best mystery writers. Kidnapped from his native Chile by a whaling captain, Louis Bieral survived the mean streets of Manhattan, joined toughs in beating abolitionist Richard Henry Dana Jr., and later toured the globe with former Secretary of State William Henry Seward. In Andrew Wender Cohen's capable hands, Bieral's complicated and contradictory world and career are restored to life in this fascinating and elegantly crafted account.' Douglas R. Egerton, author of A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 'Andrew Wender Cohen offers a fast-paced account of the Chilean-born, racially ambiguous Louis Bieral – a sailor, bare-knuckle boxer, pimp, gambler, and violent political fixer. The embodiment of everything that northern reformers abhorred, Bieral was also widely admired for his rough masculinity and brute strength. By tracing his improbable life story, which later included Civil War heroism and employment as a customs inspector, Cohen touches on seemingly every major theme in nineteenth-century US history. At the same time, he asks critical questions about the relationship between violence, the law, cultural values, and state power. In our own norm-shattering times, we would do well to reflect on what Cohen reveals—just how hard it was, and how long it took, to curb the rampant, everyday violence of the nineteenth century.' Rebecca Plant, co-author of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era 'Andrew Wender Cohen's lively tale of fixer, fighter, and fancy man Louis Bieral takes the reader from dark alleys to the corridors of power and back again, on a tour of nineteenth-century US history that shows how Americans of all sorts expected violence to tinge their daily lives and used bad men to get what they wanted. A wonderfully original, cleverly assembled and wickedly fun book.' Eric Rauchway, author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America

Author Information

Andrew Wender Cohen is a professor of history at Syracuse University. He is the author of two books, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century (2015) and The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (2004). He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

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