The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation

An Amazon Best Book of June 2019: In The Last Pirate of New York, author Rich Cohen takes readers on a narrative nonfiction adventure back to the New York underworld of the mid-1800s. Drawing on archival materials and including newspaper accounts of the day, Cohen introduces us to the last man hanged as a pirate in this fair city on Friday the 13th, 1860: a handsome, charismatic thief and killer called Albert Hicks. Hicks roamed the ports and dives of the day, working for a time with a sidekick named Tom Stone, “Sundance to Hicks’s Butch,” but by 1860 Hicks was once again working alone. Hicks’s final crime was the brutal murder of three men aboard an oyster sloop; he killed them, stole their money and valuables, then attempted to sink the ship. The ghost ship was discovered with frightening evidence of the bloody crime, and the search for the killer began. Cohen recounts not only this heinous crime, but the life of a man who in a strange way embodied the soul of America at the time, “courageous yet grotesque.” Hicks gave a confession in order to supply his soon-to-be widow with funds after his death, and thousands flocked to his hanging. Cohen’s remarkable tale is a fascinating window on an early underworld legend in a city that made a star out of a killer. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review