Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today, for a

slight change of pace for the summer, we're going back to 1860 to talk about the last pirate of New York.

My guest is Rich Cohen, author of this fascinating book, out earlier this month.

Rich has written over a dozen bestsellers, and this promises to join that lineup. He's also

contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. Rich, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Let's jump straight in. Who was Albert Hicks? And why are we talking about him 160 years later?

He's like the missing link between pirates and gangsters. He was either New York's last pirate or its first gangster.

And he became in the summer of 1860, which was the summer before the Civil War, the sort of most famous, notorious, hated person in New York.

He'd committed this horrible crime on a ship in New York Harbor with inside of the city.

He then fled the ship and left it as a ghost ship. It's almost like a ghost story, just knocking

around New York Harbor. And he's like a pirate out of a Robert Lewis-Stevenson book.

He's stopping in bars, spending his stolen money, making people drink with them. And then he sets off on the greatest manhunt in New York City. And to me, it was interesting because it was really the end of the old city and the beginning of the city that we know, which is there's no room for guys like Albert Hicks anymore. Let's start with the term gangster, and then I'll take you back to the ghost ship, because that is,

that's really how the book opens and it's fantastic.

But when you say he's the first gangster, that word hadn't been coined yet.

He was gangster so long ago, the word didn't exist.

They called him a pirate.

And in New York, there were these sort of street gangs,

but they were almost big ethnic tribal gangs

with names like the chicksters and the dead rabbits

and the 40 thieves.

And this was a guy that operated above and beyond all of that.

...