On this week’s episode we discuss Andrew Wender Cohen’s Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America, a rollicking biography of a man who went by many names including Louis Bieral or Louis Clark or sometimes Spanish Louis. He was born in Chile when it was a part of the Spanish empire, and his life spanned the hemisphere. He was a gangster, a horseman, a gambler, a boxer, a politician, an assassin, a bodyguard, a sailor in the navy who fought pirates in the South China Sea who later fought in the Union Army and became a Civil War hero. And those are just some of the things he did in his fascinating and full life. Cohen has carefully reconstructed his biography and illuminated the world of nineteenth century America where vice and politics were intertwined and where identities were malleable!
Here’s a link to today’s book, Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century Americahttps://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gangster-of-new-york/D8410C6334B17087CFE6018497E136AA
And a link to Cohen’s earlier book, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, where he first encountered Birel: https://wwnorton.com/books/Contraband/
Cohen also mentioned Tim Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York: https://wwnorton.com/books/A-Pickpockets-Tale/
","author_name":"Michael Patrick Cullinane"}