The Whacky Hijinks of the Molasses Gang

In 1870 or 1871, when New York’s Five Points district was by most accounts home to one endlessly rolling gang riot (or hundreds of concurrent gang riots as the case may be), three small-timers—Blind Mahoney, Billy Morgan, and  Jimmy Dunnigan,—struck an alliance  to form their own gang of sneak-thieves and pickpockets.

When I first read Herbert Asbury’s informal 1928 history of the era, Gangs of New York, even more than the exploits of the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, or the Plug Uglies, I was taken by his brief account of Mahoney, Morgan, and Dunnigan’s madcap criminal adventures as The Molasses Gang. Although mentioned in only a single paragraph, it was clear the Molasses Gang not only had style—they had a sense of humor. According to Asbury, the gang acquired that particular moniker as a result of one of its more inventive modus operandi. The members would casually enter a store and spread out, browsing about the shelves as if examining the merchandise. One of them would approach the shopkeep behind the counter, remove his hat, and innocently ask the shopkeep if he would be so kind as to fill it with molasses. He and his friends there had a bet, see, concerning exactly how much molasses the hat would hold. Perhaps accustomed to such wagers, the clerk would dutifully take the hat and fill it to the brim with molasses from a nearby barrel before handing it back. That’s when the gang member would slam the hat down over the clerk’s head, blinding him with molasses while the other members looted the store. It was a simple yet classic bit of slapstick.

As Asbury tells it, they were not terribly well-respected among other gangs, in part for this sense of whimsy and in part because the members had the annoying tendency to simply walk away in the middle of a robbery if they got bored with the proceedings. Crime was merely a game to them, and they didn’t take it seriously enough. By 1877 all the members of The Molasses Gang had apparently been jailed or killed, and they were never heard from again.

I was content to leave it at that for years, telling that story at any appropriate opportunity. But as the decades passed and I never quite forgot about the Molasses Gang, I grew more curious and decided to find out more. Who were these men, and how did they come together? Asbury mentioned their wilder and wackier antics made them darlings of the New York papers, which loved to print lively accounts of the gang’s latest shenanigans. So what else did they do, and what did the papers have to say about them?

I began doing a little research, and it wasn’t long before something curious began making itself apparent. Every account I could find of The Molasses Gang seemed to be little more than a reprint of that Asbury paragraph. Not only could I not track down any newspaper accounts from the era, I couldn’t find any references dated any earlier than the 1928 publication of Asbury’s book. I asked historians, and couldn’t find one who’d ever heard of The Molasses Gang. What’s more, I could find no individual record of Mahoney, Morgan, or Jimmy Dunnigan.

Then a wise old friend who knows the book as well as anyone reminded me that by its very nature the book was the result (to a certain degree) of fallible interviews, hearsay, rumor, and simple imaginative storytelling. Not to say The Molasses Gang never existed, or that it never existed as Asbury reports it but… well, it’s entirely possible that what I was pursuing was nothing but  another of those countless small but colorful lies of history, dropped there in the book to act as a bit of lighthearted comic relief to counter the well-known outright savagery of the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits. Without something like The Molasses Gang, you might well come away from the book under the impression everyone living below 14th Street between 1860 and 1900 was a semi-human bloodthirsty jackal. And what would that say about human nature?

Instead of a simple coarse lie (if a fairly minor one in comparison with the massive lies which constitute so much of our accepted history) I prefer to think of The Molasses Gang as what Werner Herzog called an ecstatic truth—an image or a detail or a story which if not exactly truthful in the accountant’s sense (or even an out and out fabrication) still plunges deeper into the heart of the matter and tells us something more profound about the era than any strictly accurate history ever could. We need The Molasses Gang as much as we need the Kennedy conspiracy or the noble motives behind World War II, so I will continue to believe and tell the story.

Jim Knipfel