Leader of the pack
How Danny Driscoll, NYC’s ‘most murderous reprobate,’ finally met his end
AS leader of the notorious Whyos gang, Danny Driscoll was fearless and unflappable. After he was sentenced to death in 1886 for shooting his friend, the prostitute Bridget “Beezy” Garrity, Driscoll barely blinked. “I guess luck wasn’t on my side” is all he said as he left the courtroom.
But if Danny Driscoll was famous for keeping his cool in police custody, he frequently ended up there because he lost it on the streets. As one of his peers said, “Driscoll was one of the cleverest [criminals] that ever came from the Sixth Ward . . . but he had one great fault. He had a very quick temper. He was sensitive and lacking in self-control. He would shoot at a moment’s notice,” John Oller writes in “Rogues’ Gallery: The Birth of Modern Policing and Organized Crime in Gilded Age New York” (Dutton), out Tuesday.
Born in 1855 and raised in the Five Points slum, Driscoll became a criminal because he had no other choice. As one street urchin said at the time, crime is “the one profession that as a ragamuffin I’ve got a fighting chance to win out in,” Oller writes.
First pinched for pickpocketing at age 15, Driscoll was frequently arrested — 27 times in his life, 12 in 1884 alone — but he mostly avoided serious jail time with the help of corrupt politicians. Starting in the 1880s, the Whyos gang was the first to make crime a “full time occupation,” Oller writes, employing “pickpocketing, petty thievery and pimping” but also expanding into “counterfeiting, extortion, and control of gambling houses.”
When night fell in New York City, the Whyos worked, whether stealing from a “lush” (a drunk asleep in the street) or targeting a “slummer” (an uptown visitor searching for vice). When bars dared not offer them free drinks, the Whyos hurled chairs into their shelves of liquor. When the police tried to accost them, the Whyos fought back, frequently pelting the officers with bricks that had fallen from the roofs of tenements.
Photographer Jacob Riis considered the Whyos “the worst cutthroats in the city,” but they did have panache, the newspapers said, wearing “low-crowned derbies” over “closecropped hair,” with “toothpick-pointed shoes” on their feet. One reporter called Danny Driscoll “the most venomous, worthless, murderous reprobate,” but the media also waxed poetic about the “bravado” on his face, the “swagger” in his step, and the hat he wore “rakishly cocked over one eye and ear ‘at the approved Bowery angle.’ ”
After their previous leader was executed for murder, Driscoll became chief of the Whyos in 1883. But, roaming the streets of downtown Manhattan, he became easily offended. In 1876, Driscoll ended up in a “threecornered pistol fight,” gunning down two strangers in a saloon over some perceived slight while also managing to get himself “shot through the body.” That bullet became the first of seven that would remain inside him.
In 1883, Driscoll shot, for no known reason, a fat German sauerkraut vendor on Chrystie Street, before then shooting the man’s also innocent wife. A local alderman named “Fatty” Walsh helped that unpleasantness go away for Driscoll. In return, the Whyos threatened voters with violence if they didn’t cast a ballot for Walsh on election day.
But in 1886, Driscoll’s luck ran out, when he tried to help Beezy murder their fellow rival, John McCarty. After Beezy entered McCarty’s lodging house with the aim of sneaking Driscoll in, Driscoll became impatient, stuck his pistol through the front door and fired. McCarty fled unscathed but Beezy fell over, crying out, “I’m shot.”
As Beezy slowly died over the next 24 hours, she confessed to her mother that it was Driscoll who had accidentally shot her. Later, when Beezy’s weeping, frail mother made that claim in court, The Sun newspaper reported, “There was not a dry eye visible.”
Even Danny Driscoll couldn’t get away with that. Found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, he was finally led over the “Bridge of Sighs” to the Tombs’ gallows on Jan. 23, 1888. As he faced the end, he displayed his stoic side. “He greeted his executioner warmly,” Oller writes, then asked him “to please make quick work of his task.”