Mile High Read Free

Liverpool and had lost three sons to the bastards. On that crossing Paddy had promised himself, writ in vomit, never to go to sea again or set his feet on anything that floated. The man and the woman had been talking about the South End and Lime Street in Liverpool, but he was here now and he could see what was happening, and he knew if he answered any greeting from a warm and friendly stranger he’d find himself on the floor of a foc’sle bound for China.
    He moved warily and got his first job as a fish-market porter on the very day he landed. He became a citizen of the United States on the second day. They paid him twenty-five cents to take the oath along with sixteen other men, all of them crouched and huddled sideways to be able to lay but one fingertip on the Bible to swear allegiance. There just weren’t enough Bibles to go around. The witnesses who that day swore they had known every one of the applicants for eight years or longer, all those years spent in the City of New York, had good, steady work out of it, but the Tammany judges in the State Supreme Court were often hoarse swearing them all in. All the new citizens had to promise to vote the straight Tammany ticket of course. It was a thrill to be a new American, and he was never to forget that. Still and all, he spoke to none of his fellow indoctrinates. Paddy West wouldn’t talk to anyone except his employer because any man on the street might be a crimp.
    The two flourishing crimping organizations were those of Fernando Wood, a U.S. congressman, and Ma “the Casker” Steinet. She was called the Casker because if something slipped and a shanghaied man died on her hands she’d stuff him into a cask and send him off to sea that way, collecting her fee nevertheless. Fernando Wood owned a tobacco shop in Pearl Street, then he acquired seven sailing vessels while trading with a pack of cards, and so entered the shipping trade. When his crews began to desert in order to make their way west to California he immediately began his eventually extensive crimping business as a sideline. Meanwhile, forging ahead in city politics, he rose to be chairman of the Tammany Young Men’s Committee, then won the Democratic Congressional nomination in 1840. In Congress, Wood crusaded for Navy drydocks and for full pay for overseas consuls. And despite complete indifference on all sides, he encouraged a nut professor to string wires from the Wood Congressional committee rooms to corresponding rooms on the other side of Capitol Hill, and thus Professor Morse’s amazing telegraph was demonstrated publicly for the first time.
    Congressman Wood was skillful with guns, knives, clubs, fists and pokers—widely admired. In 1848, when 212,000 immigrants arrived in New York, including 117,000 Irishmen, Wood, who was always dreaming and planning for Tammany Hall, organized the Instant Citizenship Committee that had so flattered Paddy. While Wood went well on his way to becoming mayor he was also establishing himself as one of the two top crimps. He did indeed become mayor in 1854, and moved instantly to attack municipal problems by banning the driving of cattle through downtown streets, by putting the police into uniforms against their will, and before settling down with his and Tammany’s ideas of the real business of being mayor, established the seven hundred and seventy-six-acre Central Park in Manhattan at a projected cost of three million dollars.
    Fearing Wood’s crimps—because he truly admired Fernando Wood—Paddy moved out of his waterfront boardinghouse and walked north almost three miles every night to a farmhouse where he could lock himself in. He avoided the Irish shantytown along the old Bloomingdale Road just farther north because the crimps were drawn to it like flies to a jam pot. At the fish market, if any jolly smiler spoke to him and invited him off for a drink Paddy would ignore the man. Because of the crimps, he refused