How bullies shaped 19th-century America

Introducing Louis Beryl

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1:45In 19th century America, it paid to be a bully. At least that's what the subject of today's episode of the History Extra podcast shows us. Historian and author Andrew Wender-Cohen argues. Speaking to Eleanor Evans, he explains how, long before organized crime took its modern form, violence shaped politics, business, and everyday life across the United States. And he reveals the astonishing true story of Louis Beryl, whose life crossed paths with slavery, the US Civil War, political corruption, and the rise of modern America.

2:26To kick us off, this man is really not someone you would like to meet down a dark alley, is he? No, you would not want to meet him in a dark alley. He was quite intimidating in his own time and probably would be even today. He was not a large man. He illustrates the maxim that it's about the size of the fight and the dog, not the size of the dog and the fight. He was only about 5'6", about 150 pounds. So nowadays, we would not be necessarily intimidated by him as a physical figure.

2:57But in his own time, of course, people were much smaller. And he really knew how to fight. And moreover, he was a very courageous person. And I mean that in the both good sense and bad sense, meaning he was unafraid to die in a fight. And that makes someone very, very dangerous. So his life tells us a lot about the type of world we're talking about today. I loved your analogy of him being a sort of equivalent of a Forrest Gump character. His story sort of pops up in these moments that our listeners might recognise. And we're going to draw out some of these today. But if we start at the beginning, what are Louis' origins? Where do you first pick up his story?

Origins and naval service

3:36Well, we first pick up his story in revolutionary Chile, which at the time was not Chile at all, but part of the Spanish Empire. During the Napoleonic period, the French and Spanish lost control of their empires, in part because they were busy fighting on the continent. And so as a result, we see a series of revolutions in South America. And Louis comes out of that period. He's cut loose by the revolutions of that period. And somehow he ends up on a whaler to the United States. Again, he claims he was kidnapped.

4:10It's also possible that he simply sought adventure or wanted to get away from Chile for some reason. Chile was quite dangerous at the time. Perhaps his family was in a fight and he was worried that he would be kidnapped or killed. So he ends up in a whaler and he ends up becoming a servant in New York of the 1830s. Now, the 1830s in the United States is a period in which our politics is changing radically because we have universal white manhood suffrage. That means every white man without property can participate in politics.

4:45Now, Louis can't. He's not a citizen yet. But nonetheless, this is a period of economic expansion and a period in which working men, white working men, and even racially indeterminate men like Louis find that they can be part of fire companies. They can be part of boxing matches. They can even involve themselves in American politics. Even if they can't vote, they can be involved on Election Day, rallying the troops for, in his case, the Democratic side.

5:17And so he becomes part of this world, this white working man's world, even though, again, we don't know really exactly what his ethnic origins were. People at the time saw him. Some saw him as black. Some saw him as white. The category of Latino or Hispanic was not really well formed in the period. So people might refer to you as Spanish, but that didn't necessarily indicate that they saw that as a distinct racial category. They really went on, what do you look like? And as I said, people saw different things in him.

5:50So he becomes this sort of violent character in New York City of the 1830s. Then suddenly, in 1837, the United States is in the midst of a terrible depression. He joins the United States Navy. The Navy is going on a cruise around the world, in part to try and raise American business prospects in the Far East. Always the dream of all the businessmen is to somehow capture the Chinese market. And the United States wants to get in on that game.

6:23So we send the Navy to the Far East and he finds himself fighting pirates in Sumatra. And we know he was there because we have the records of the ship. At the time, he went by the name Louis Clark or Louis Clark. And so he sails to the Pacific. He visits his old hometown of Alparaiso, Chile. He ends up seeing Hawaii. He gets his first tattoos. Eventually, he would be covered head to foot in tattoos with an enormous picture of Jesus on his back, his hands even tattooed.

6:54And he becomes even rougher and tougher, if that's somehow possible. And he's also exposed to the discipline of the United States Navy. As perhaps everyone knows, probably everyone in England knows this, the Navy in this period disciplines Ben physically with whipping or flogging, with a cat-o'-nine tails. And so Louis begins imbibing a idea of patriarchal authority and discipline.

7:26The idea that the way society should be run is through physical chastisement and comes back and becomes a bully. Someone people hire to physically intimidate those who they want to intimidate. And his entire life becomes the story of what you might call a celebrated bully. Not just as a gangster, although he is a gangster, as a boxer and a gambler, but also as simply a person who is esteemed for his ability to beat the snot out of every person that offends him.

8:03So by the time Louis is in his 30s, he has lived quite an improbable life already, as you said, from Valparaiso to Brooklyn to joining the Navy and then back again.

Private violence in America

8:13To zoom out of his story, you've already touched on it, but I want to just look at this broader society in America. You mentioned they tolerate to the point of even celebrating violence. What does that picture look like? Take us into the world that Louis is finding himself in. Well, the point I want to make is that this is a society in which there is an assumed pecking order with white men at the top of that pecking order and people of color, especially black slaves or enslaved blacks and indigenous people are at the bottom.

8:44And in such a society, there is an enormous amount of private violence holding it together. So one thing people have to understand about slavery in the American South is that the discipline is private. It's about what the law allows, not what the law does. So what holds the plantation economy together is fear of the patriarch, of the person who runs the plantation, the person who technically owns those human beings.

9:16Well, you might say, well, that's just the South. But in point of fact, servitude still exists in the American North. Servitude is people working in other people's houses. And those servants can be disciplined with force and violence. So if you are working in someone's house as a serving maid, you can be disciplined by the employer. That means physical chastisement. If you're a student in school, you can be disciplined by the teacher, physical discipline.

9:47Parents have wide latitude to discipline their children. And husbands have some latitude to physically be violent with their wives without having any punishment from the criminal law. Now, people sometimes exaggerate that to suggest that spousal violence was tolerated. It was not looked upon as a good thing. However, the law did not sanction people for violence in the way that they do today. And so part of my story is that you have a society in the 19th century which is held together as much by private violence as it is by law.

10:27And that private violence enforces the authority of the people at the top, the people who are the patriarchs. So in that context, Louis is viewed as a remarkable figure. He isn't necessarily hated. He isn't necessarily viewed as some sort of wicked man. Quite the opposite. So Louis Bayral is clearly a figure who seeks out a bit of an underbelly in this era. And an underbelly he finds, I think it's fair to say.

10:59What sort of underworld does he find himself in in Boston and New York? Take us into these neighborhoods and what it means for him.

The 19th century underworld

11:05Well, to understand the underworld of the 19th century, you have to understand that it's not as organized as we imagine from movies and television. There is no boss who runs the society. In fact, it's very, very chaotic and often ruled by people with political connections. So the idea is this. You run for public office or you contribute to the party and that gets you protection for your bar or your casino. Now, these houses of prostitution and bars and casinos still needed tough guys to protect them from other tough guys and gangsters.

11:47So they're using their political connections to try and make certain that they're never busted by the police. But at the same time, they need tough guys who can make certain that they aren't robbed by other criminals. Louis finds his talents extremely useful and valuable in this kind of society. First of all, he's able to be what's known as a fancy man. That means basically he is the bouncer for a house of prostitution.

12:17He also owns it in part. And so his job is to make certain none of the johns, that means the clients of the house of prostitution, get out of hand, that they pay the money they owe, to make certain that no other people, gangsters, end up attempting to infiltrate the house or steal any of his inmates. He also finds himself working for the political parties. And again, this is what gives him the juice to be able to protect his pimping operation.

12:48He rents out his muscles to various affluent men who use him as basically a bodyguard or, in some cases, to assault people they want assaulted. He becomes heavily involved in boxing, both as a boxer but also as a boxing promoter. And that leads us to gambling. And to understand crime in American history, gambling has a much bigger place than I think most people imagine. Gambling is the mob's main source of income in the 1950s, and it's true in the 1850s as well.

13:22That is where they get most of their money from. And so he's heavily involved in the early forms of sports that are emerging in American society. But those early forms of sports are always tied to gambling. You cannot have a boxing match or a horse race or a pedestrian contest without there being betting. And with that, there also comes the fixing of matches, of fights and races and other forms of contests.

13:54And so that's kind of part of the game. So Louis finds himself at the center of all of this. And in the end, again, his ability to fight is what enables him to gain political protection for his operation, to defend himself against other gangsters, and also to be able to engage in all sorts of, you know, behaviors that might be challenged. So he finds himself becoming more and more powerful, and by the 1850s, he's become a leading figure in organized crime in Boston.

14:29He ends up moving to New York for various reasons, and he becomes heavily involved in gambling in New York City. He retains his house of prostitution in Boston, which is run by his wife, but he becomes mostly a character in New York after that. And again, mostly involved in gambling, but also as a bodyguard. He becomes the bodyguard for Boss Tweed, the most significant political figure in mid-19th century New York City. He becomes a bodyguard for William Henry Seward, the former Secretary of State of the United States.

15:03And he later becomes a bodyguard for Jubilee Jim Fisk, the financier.

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15:44Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. I'm not giving up.

16:14I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No! Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other.

16:35FX is the Bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. These are clear indications of the world in which Behral is living, the way in which he's able to leverage this authority, this pugnacity, this penchant for violence. Another reality of the society he's living in is that it's a slave society, enslavement exists. Where does Behral sit on this issue? And what about his actions regarding certain abolitionists in the story?

Slavery and the Civil War

17:04Well, one of the most fascinating aspects of Louis' life is the fact that he comes to the United States and he immediately becomes attached to the Democratic Party. Now, in the 19th century, before the Civil War, the Democratic Party is the party of slavery. It's the party of Thomas Jefferson, of Andrew Jackson. These are both enslavers. It is the party of the American South. It's also the most popular party in New York City. It's where Tammany Hall, the infamous political ring, controls Democratic politics.

17:36And Louis becomes very much part of this world. First in New York, then he moves to Boston and he becomes a potent representative of the political party. And I say that in a slightly sarcastic way. He's a bully boy. He beats people up at the polls to try and get them to vote for the Democratic Party or conversely to keep them from voting at all. So Louis B. Rall is very much on the side of enslavers. This is ironic because, again, he may have had some African ancestry.

18:07His relatives may have themselves been enslaved in Chile. We don't know. We know that some people saw him and immediately thought that he was a man of color and perhaps African-American. So you might ask, how is it possible that he would support slavery? Well, the answer is there were Latinos in the United States and a surprising number of them were on the Democratic side and supported slavery. The reality is that simply because you have darker skin or you come from a society that is itself in revolution

18:41does not mean that you're necessarily going to oppose slavery. You may have chosen the Democratic Party for other reasons. And as part of being in that coalition, you find yourself being forced to support it. So Louis becomes actually a fairly strong supporter of slavery and white supremacy. When he's living in Boston, he becomes the leader of the Marshal's Guard that brings Anthony Burns back to slavery. Anthony Burns was an escapee from slavery in the South. He goes to Boston.

19:11And under the new odious Fugitive Slave Act, he is grabbed by what are known as slave catchers and then they take him to the federal jail to be held, to be brought back to slavery in the South. Louis is hired to lead the deputies who take Anthony Burns back to slavery. Now, you must understand for a U.S. historian, this is one of the most infamous episodes in the lead up to the American Civil War, the rendition of Anthony Burns. There are multiple books written about this.

19:42And Bayral just happens to be the leader of the people bringing him back to slavery. So you'd say he's a fairly staunch advocate of slavery, right? Okay, but then when the South secedes, the Confederacy is formed, Bayral becomes a staunch Unionist, a staunch advocate of the United States. He helps organize a regiment in the United States Army. In that regiment, he's a captain. And he finds himself the hero

20:13of one of the first major battles of the Civil War. Now, it happens that that battle didn't really have a hero. It was a debacle for the United States. Bayral distinguished himself by retrieving the body of his commanding officer, who was a United States senator and close friend of Abraham Lincoln, named Edward Dickinson Baker. Bayral becomes a celebrated hero. And again, this represents the extent to which 19th century Americans celebrated the ability to inflict violence,

20:45the toughness, the ability to survive. So he comes out of that. He's still a member of the Democratic Party for a while, but he had fought against slavery. But he begins shifting his views on race. We don't know this from his writings. We know this from his actions. First, he joins the Republican Party. He's recruited to become a bully boy for the Republican side. The Republican Party decides we're going to win elections the old-fashioned way. We're going to beat up our opposition. So they hire Bayral, get him to switch parties.

21:17But we also know it because he gets married for the second time. And his second wife, Cecilia, is Black. And she says so on documents, so we know that this is a fact. So we see Louis embracing his mixed racial identity. Marries a woman of color. He names his first child by her, Jose. Greater recognition of his Hispanic, his Chilean background. And he becomes a staunch Republican.

21:48And this is a period in which the Republican Party is the party of racial equality. This is the Reconstruction period, the 1870s. So we see Bayral shifting from being an advocate of slavery, an advocate of white supremacy, a staunch defender of the Fugitive Slave Act who escorts a famous fugitive back to bondage. But we also see him shifting, becoming a hero of the anti-slavery cause

22:19and marrying a woman of color and becoming someone who identified himself as Chilean, as Hispanic. How do you characterize his sort of moves towards following power and the people who pay his wages, I suppose? Is he opportunistic? Is he being sort of pragmatic in his moves? Or is it more of a sense that he's just rolling the dice and see where he lands? Well, it's very tough to tell because we don't have personal papers from Bayral. We only have a few examples of his writing.

22:50What we have is a remarkable newspaper legacy. So in the United States, we have digitized many of our newspapers, maybe most of our newspapers. And as a result, you're able to find people in history, ordinary people, people who are modestly successful. And Bayral, remarkably, appears in the newspaper thousands of times. He is absolutely constantly in the newspaper. So mostly I only know him by his actions.

23:24And so the question is, what did he really think? What was really driving him? I don't think he joined the Union Army, the United States Army, merely for adventure. I mean, I think he genuinely was ticked off. I think a lot of Democrats felt betrayed by secession of the South. They had been committed to the Democratic Party and they had, in many cases, sacrificed a great deal to preserve slavery, something they may have opposed,

23:55may have thought little of. And so when secession comes, they are angry. And so I think he is a committed opponent of slavery and secession during the Civil War proper. But after the Civil War, how does he do things? I think he follows the main chance. You know, I think he's someone who is doing what's good for him on a day-to-day basis. He has a family to support. He's constantly involved in gambling of every conceivable variety.

24:26He owns many horses over his life. He is prominent at racetracks. He is a boxing promoter and boxes himself a great deal, at least when he's young. When he's older, he continues to do some exhibitions, but he's always involved in gambling. He's involved in pedestrianism. Pedestrianism is an early form of track and field where people would see how far they could walk in three days, right? And whoever walked the farthest wins the prize. So he's involved in all of these early versions of sports,

24:58but where gambling is always involved. Now, what that means is he needs money because if you're a professional gambler, you're going to lose money a lot. So he's always looking to find advantage. And by the later part of his life, he's living on the financial edge. He does not have a lot of money. He has a number of children and he cannot afford to lose his job. And so when he eventually, in desperation, shoots the Surveyor of Customs

25:30for the Port of New York, it's a reflection of economic desperation. So to some extent, we can explain his behavior by, you know, greed, lust for adventure, the will to power, the desire to dominate. But a lot of it is, again, reactive. We should not pretend that he's thinking that far ahead. Yes, I think it becomes clear in a lot of these episodes that he is sort of living a bit by the seat of his pants, as they say. I should just say for long-term listeners who might have picked up on the mention of pedestrianism,

26:01if you are interested in finding out more on that, we've got a excellent podcast series called The Tiger Tamer Who Went to Sea. So do check that out if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you'll love that. It talks about the transatlantic craze for pedestrianism. But back to our main character,

Brutality and street fighting

26:16Bayral,

Brutality and street fighting

26:17I want to pick up on the brutality of this world that he's in and particular details in your book about the fighting, whether that's the boxing he took on, whether that's the sort of beating up of rival politicians or, you know, just bar brawls, really. Just how dangerous these incidences were. And you mentioned people sharpening their fingernails, sharpening their teeth, eye-gouging. Can you take us into the real peril and risks of this world that Louis was in? Well, the paradox of the 19th century for modern people

26:48around the world is that they have a very high tolerance for violence, but not for murder, not for killing. If you kill someone, there's a good chance you're going to be executed. It's a very serious crime. Rape as well. Rape and murder are very serious crimes in 19th century America. However, fighting is barely punished at all. So if I were to attack someone with an axe, and this is 1830s, 1840s, and I were to chop their ear off, but they survived,

27:19eh, $20 fine. Maybe a month in jail. I mean, it's very minimal crime. So things that would get us 20 years in American prison now, back then, no, they didn't care. It was as long as the person didn't die. And fighting is so commonplace, this whole society doesn't have the money to incarcerate everyone who gets into fights. People are getting into fights all the time. And these fights, they develop a certain set of customs. Now, the boxers

27:50are, of course, bare-knuckle in this period. And the bare-knuckle boxers, there's a great deal of liberty, of action in these fights before all of the rules are firmly established. And they do things like brining their hands to make them tough. But in non-official fights, street fights, they go much, much further. People grow their fingernails long to engage in what's known as eye-gouging. Eye-gouging means that you try to pluck

28:20the opponent's eye out with your thumb, which often would have a lengthened and sharpened fingernail. So it's, you're like, it's like in King Lear, out-vile jelly, right? This was actually something that was not uncommon. And weirdly enough, it was a mark of honor if you were missing an eye. Okay, that meant you lost the fight, but you managed to survive. You were tough. You engaged in combat. You're not someone who shirked away.

28:52The worst thing to be would be someone who didn't fight at all because that meant that you were a wimp. That meant you were a coward. So Louis engages in these fights and he has part of his nose bitten off in one fight. He eye-gouges another guy. They're grabbing people by the neck. And again, these guys sustain very serious injuries, but as long as they don't die, there's no punishment from the society. Now, this is hard for us to comprehend,

29:23but you have to think about something like professional wrestling. Okay? Professional wrestling has some of the same qualities, but it's theater, right? It's a theatrical version, hitting people over the head with a chair and they'll have the guys, the blood dripping down and the boasting, right? The bragging, all of that stuff is a stylized, theatrical version of types of fighting that were actually real in the United States in the antebellum period.

29:53Now, as I said, lots of people are appalled by this. I don't want to suggest that everybody found it entertaining, but the people who were opposed to this kind of violence, who wanted there to be punishments for violence, they are a social movement that is trying to transform the society, to make it a society bound together by contract, by love, by wages, you know, to construct the idea of wage labor as opposed to laboring for a master, you're laboring for wages. Instead of voting

30:24being a dangerous activity, it's an activity that's open to all, regardless of whether they can fight. it's even open to women. If you were to look at 19th century cartoonists, they routinely mocked women suffragists by showing women at the polls brawling, right? The idea was that this was an activity that was inherently violent and dangerous, and therefore not something that women could ever participate in. Now,

30:54we can look at that as absurd or ridiculous, but it also reflects a reality, which is that people expected the polls to be a violent space. And the people who committed acts of violence at the polls were mostly not punished. Virtually no punishment for ordinary acts of violence, as long as nobody died. I think what's striking me is a lot of the lawlessness, potential lawlessness you're describing, it feels like it invokes almost a picture of the Wild West

31:25and how we might regard, you know, popular interpretations of the frontier life. And what you're describing is, you know, the predominant cities of eastern U.S. in the north, as you say, which, again, goes against some of the perceptions we might have of northern sensibilities versus southern in this particular era. Yes. What I learned, because Louis does go to the Gold Rush, or we think he went to the Gold Rush, we don't have a lot of evidence. What we have is the evidence that people said he went and that there are other people who resemble him who were there. But what I learn

31:56is that the reason we think of the West, the Gold Rush, as being more dangerous, wild, is because it really was so extreme and there were so many people dying that it really represented something that was a quantum level more violent than anything anyone had seen. And these were people who were living in a highly violent society. So they had seen, you know, people beaten, they had seen whippings, they had lived with commonplace violence. But what you have

32:26in San Francisco and California is widespread murder. And that shocked them. And yet people still went, right? It didn't stop people from going out there because the possibility of making the big score, getting extremely wealthy. The opportunity. Yes. Was great enough that they were willing to risk it in a way that nowadays we would be like, I'm not going there. You know, that's, that's the, everybody's getting murdered there. So, I mean, one of the myths I'm trying to dispel is the idea that 19th century violence

32:57has its sole origin in the American South and the institution of slavery. Or that it has its origins or is connected to the genocide of indigenous peoples. These are both two of the worst crimes that have ever occurred. Certainly the two worst crimes in American history. However, the reality is that there's a continuum of violence throughout all of American society. And one of the ways you can explain the North's continued tolerance for slavery in the South

33:28and the murder of indigenous people in the West is that they themselves were living in a very violent society. And so as a result, it did not shock them in the 1830s to have someone be whipped. A lot of the people, all the people in Boston, they're all sailors. They all know people who've been whipped. The people who are living in Philadelphia or New York City, they knew people who were servants and they had seen servants be whipped or have other punishments. So they, it's not to say that the North was as violent as the slave South.

34:00It wasn't. Or that the brutality didn't always have racial or other forms of hierarchy implicating it. You know, and as I say, violence is a form of power that's tolerated as long as it enforces hierarchy. hierarchy, right? That's where you would see interesting stories. But as I said, but then as I show in the book, even in cases where the perpetrators are in fact black, we still see that the punishments are quite light. So it's, it's complicated. It doesn't necessarily

34:30follow all of our expectations. One thing though, I can say is again, that violence in America is not strictly speaking a Southern or Western thing. It is an American thing. It is connected to a society that is open politically. And that's again, something people resist the idea. In many ways, democracy encourages violence because people want to win elections. And how do you win elections? Well, you beat up

35:01the opposition. So we have a tendency to think, well, democracy is the opposite of violence, but that's not so in the US, not in the 19th century. I have no problem demonizing Southern enslavers. That's justified. But I do think that it's just not correct to say that the North is some sort of paradise where everybody's civilized and they make all their money in nice ways and they pay wages. And no, it's a process that occurs over time. There are people

35:31who dream of a North ruled by ideas and by wages and by contracts, but those are, they're reformers. The real life of ordinary people is much more violent, much more difficult than that. This is the picture then that you've been able to illuminate through being on the trail of Louis Bay Ryle through these various digitized newspaper archives and the sources that you've been looking at. As we alluded to earlier, you call him a sort of proto-Forest Gump figure where he pops up

36:01in these very significant moments of history and you say, aha, there he is again.

Witnessing historic moments

36:06Before we bring this interview to a close, Andrew, are there any other significant moments you'd like to bring into this episode today? Oh, absolutely. I mean, as I say, he's a Forrest Gump or a Zelig or a Flashman if you've ever read those books, but those are fiction, right, where the author can place this remarkable character at all these important moments. But in Louis' case, he was really there. So I've already told you about him fighting pirates in the Pacific. I've already told you him about being at the rendition of escaped

36:37enslaved person Anthony Burns, but he's also physically assaults Burns' attorney, Richard Henry Dana Jr., who, again, is a very, very famous attorney. He assaults Dorman Eaton, the father of the American Civil Service system. And when I say assault, I don't mean like he like pushed him. I mean, he took what was known as a slingshot. A slingshot is not a slingshot. It's different. A slingshot is closer to what we would call nunchucks. It's two weights at the end of a piece of rope

37:08and you swing it as fast as you can until that weight at the end of the rope is going very, very fast and then you smack the person on the head with it. Brutal. It's a sailor's tool that you could carry around legally because it was a sailor's tool but in fact quite a dangerous weapon. So he incapacitates Dorman Eaton for years. This is the head of the American Civil Service system. But most significantly he's present at the murder and heavily involved in the murder of a man named Jubilee Jim Fisk.

37:39Now Jubilee Jim Fisk was kind of the Elon Musk of his era and that's not an exaggeration. He was the most prominent well-known financier of the 1870s. He was a character. He wore rings on every finger. He was dressed in the finest silks. He was sort of porcine in appearance but he was still like this splendid man and everyone knew him in New York and Boston and even in upper New England as this incredible figure.

38:09And he was heavily involved in all of these railroad speculations and a major scandal involving gold in the U.S. Treasury. And Fisk is eventually murdered by a competitor for the love of a woman named Josie Mansfield. He gets into a feud with another financier named Ned Stokes. Well, Bayral is there. He's present at this moment. Now you have to understand this was the murder of the century and Bayral is working as a bodyguard for Fisk.

38:40He's close to Stokes. Many people think that maybe he committed the crime or was somehow profoundly involved. When Stokes has one of his multiple trials for murder he calls Bayral to the stand to try and get Bayral to exonerate him unsuccessfully. So the key point is he's constantly popping up at these moments that for U.S. historians there are whole books written about the murder of Jim Fisk that don't mention Bayral. But if you look at the records it's very clear that he's there. He's there at every

39:10single point in the story. And in fact for years for decades Ned Stokes the man who committed the crime would say Bayral you know could have exonerated me but he wouldn't. And Bayral lives on Stokes goes to prison and Louis just keeps going. Is it fair to say then that he also achieves a certain amount of notoriety? His name is known for all of these activities. He's very well known. Again there is no godfather. There is no crime boss of all of Boston or all of New York City.

39:41That doesn't exist in the way that we imagine it. However there are gangs and he is prominently involved in a gang centered at the Empire Club which is one of the most potent democratic gangs in New York City and he becomes a familiar of many of the most significant criminals fighters in 19th century New York and these are people who many people in your audience will have heard of. He is very familiar with John Morrissey who's the heavyweight champion

40:12of the world. He is very familiar with Butcher Bill Poole in New York City datavist fighter. He's friends with all of these people who are notorious but unlike them he lived. He kept living on and on and on.

Later life and legacy

40:29So when he eventually shoots the Surveyor of Customs in 1886 a man writes in the Boston newspaper he's like I thought that Louis Bay Ra was as dead as Julius Caesar. He's like a gangster figure from like another era like how is this guy still alive? Like all the other gangsters from his era are dead. And here's what's crazy Louis then lived another 14 years. He just kept living and living and living and living so as a result while most of the gangsters of New York that we're familiar

41:00with the dead rabbits and the Bowery Boys they're all gone but Louis lived till 1900 and so he for 60 years beat people up scared the crap out of people for 60 years. So yes he was well known but interestingly when he died he was best known as a Civil War hero who then got in trouble for shooting the Surveyor of Customs. Now you may say wow you know so they didn't think he was a bad guy when he died and the answer is they didn't.

41:30They reported on him as this positive figure as a war hero who happened to kind of lose his mind and shoot the Surveyor of Customs. And again this reflects again the deference and respect for someone who's a badass someone who's a tough guy someone who is capable of defending himself his family his honour with physical violence.

41:54That was Andrew Wender-Cohen Professor of History of Syracuse University. His latest book is Gangster of New York A Violent Life in 19th Century America.

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42:38with agents at jira.dev That's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned but we have each other. FX is the bear.

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43:39and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify. Hi, this is Sam from the Good Food Podcast. If you love all things good food join us at the festive Good Food Show from the 26th to the 29th of November at Birmingham's NEC. With a line-up of James Martin, John Turow, Lisa Faulkner, Pinkoombs and more you'll be able to get plenty of cooking ideas for your Christmas entertaining. Find out more at goodfoodshow.com. See you there.