An interesting period piece that gives the reader a sense of the life and times of pre-modern New York City long since past. I enjoyed the discussion of early detective work, as well as well as the spectacle surrounding the public hanging.

Unfortunately, the author's writing style can be campy and sometimes sounds more like a dime store gangster novel. Also, while the main protagonist is somewhat interesting, he is definitely unlikeable and very likely has wildly exaggerated his life of crime.

An enjoyable but hardly first rate work. ( )

Rich Cohen is now one of my favorite authors, and I have added his others books to my TBR list. The story of criminal Albert Hicks is a story not only of crime in New York and how the laws were applied to best suit the crime, but is also a wonderful history of New York and its reputation for as a gangster hangout. ( )

There is a really good story here, and I like Cohen's writing. But I think .... its just not the way he went about writing it. You can see his love for New York and his writing reflects kind of a Scorsese like view of New York City and his love for all that the city is, how its evolved, transformed, and what it is today.

And that basically underlines this whole book. The story of Albert Hicks and his mutiny/murder spree on the E.A. Johnson is kind of a background to what New York City was like for Cohen. So in contrast, when Cohen gets to the Confession chapter and details the life and story and history of Albert Hicks, I was vastly more intrigued by his whole life, than just the little bit that we actually get in this book in the way of narrative.

The book primarily focuses on the night Albert Hicks slew Capturn Burr, the Watts brothers, and ran the E.A. Johnson ashore and then went on the lam from the law. There really isn't much of a manhunt like I had thought going in, and given how Cohen even discusses "without a body, murder is near impossible to prove" its kind of anti-climatic how easily they are able to get Albert Hicks. The police, understandably, know he did it, but also, at the same time use underhanded tactics then saying things like counterfeiting bills and stuff like this to get him arrested and then to charge him with a different crime (piracy) once in cuffs.

So for me, the actual story of the murders and then his subsequent 'manhunt' and arrest, seems anticlimatic, uninteresting, and stilted comparatively later on to what we find out his life actually was. The beginning of the book makes it seem like he was a New York City pirate-cum-gangster style person, but in fact, he had a massively sprawling and marauding like life. Including running a hotel in Buenos Ares, pirating in Hawaii, Rio Di Janeiro, up and down the coast of America and South America, up the Mississippi from New Orleans, England and Ireland, and back 'home' to New York harbor. His life story sums up to be much more impressive, interesting, and sadly summarized compared to that of the 4-5 day crime and capture.

The book is very prose heavy and Cohen writes with a very over-handed flourish, in some ways making the book stretch a bit longer than it really has life to give, especially given how he summarizes the life of Hicks and gives that to us in a few pages but then drawls out and overreaches on the E.A. Johnson killings and the capture/execution.

Reading this is fascinating and interesting, and worth a look at. I think it could have been presented better, I think it would have been better served as more of a biography of Hicks rather than an attempt at connecting Hicks to the various generations of New York gangster/gangs of the Five Points to people like Lensky and Luciano and the five families of later years. Cohen tries to use Hicks as a bridge from one generation to the next, and it is an interesting idea, not sure how fully realized it is. But I think he does definitely draw into the Scorsese mythos of New York City. The whole time I was reading this I had this picture in the back of my head of how Scorsese would film, and show Hicks, and show the New York City just before the Civil War, and how he would incorporate Hicks whole life and various elements and stuff. I think in that aspect, as a Scorsese style movie, this would be fantastic. Let Cohen and someone like Pileggi work up a screen play and Martin Scorsese direct it, and this would be a damn good movie in the vein of his Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, Mean Streets, etc.
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A fascinating story told extremely well. ( )

The Last Pirate of New York is a short but well-done true-crime story about Albert Hicks who was active from about 1840 to 1860. Cohen has long been fascinated with legendary crime figures and he discovered that every generation told stories of a prior generation. He followed the chain backwards in time to find the first legendary gangster of New York and he came upon Hicks. He was indeed legendary, for the brutality of his crimes and the stories he told about himself - a real-life boogie man who made a deal with the devil. The Hicks case was widely covered in the press, he was cast in wax by PT Barnum and even appeared in a Twilight Zone episode in the 1950s. The enrichment of this book comes from the quality of Cohen's writing who brings to life another era as told through the macabre story of Albert Hicks. Cohen frames it as nested stories within stories and it feels like unpacking the cancerous innards of some great terrible monster long ago buried and forgotten but still haunting the present. My only concern is Cohen recounts Hicks' life story as told by Hicks himself without much critical filter. Nevertheless the core crime story is unquestionably accurate. ( )