ROGUES' GALLERY

A popular historical study of the rise of metropolitan policing in late-19th-century New York City.

One of the great benefits of living in America is that people can reinvent themselves pretty much at will. Take William Devery (1854-1919), a former police official who was “as shameless a political hack as could be found within the police force.” Finally ousted from his job after a career that embarrassed even the excessively corrupt denizens of Tammany Hall, Devery took his graft-gotten gains and bought the baseball team that would become the New York Yankees. Just so, an Italian gangland leader gave up one branch of racketeering for another, changing his name and becoming a strong-arm union boss. So it is with many of the whirling cast of characters in Oller’s book, which begins with an account of reform-minded cops during and after the Civil War who took on a stellar cast of murderers and miscreants, from the Five Points Irish gangs to a Staten Island dentist of homicidal bent. The author’s account is careful and circumstantial, though it could have used some streamlining to wrestle it down to a more manageable length. But there are plenty of memorable episodes and players. One of the best of them is a former chief named Thomas Byrnes, a good man at the right time who was relieved of his duties by a police commissioner even more bent on reform: future president Theodore Roosevelt. For crime buffs, Oller delivers ample murder and mayhem as well as organizational notes for students of criminology, with commentary on such things as interrogation techniques and the reasons why homicide units are distributed among the boroughs rather than centralized. The author is also good on the evolution of organized crime in various ethnic enclaves, including the loose Black Hand and the more hierarchical Mafia in Little Italy and the Jewish and Irish gangs of the Lower East Side.

Overlong but with some fine moments of cops-and-robbers and cops-and-politicos action throughout.