Punching $1. Both eyes blacked. $3. Nose and jaw broke. $7. Ear chewed off. $15. Shot in the leg. $20. Stabbing. $22. And at the bottom of the list, written in the same steady hand as the rest, doing the big job, $100 and up. That was murder. $100. That is what a human life cost on the streets of Lower Manhattan in 1884.
This was not some rumor passed down through the years. This was not folklore. This was a handwritten document, a physical price list, found in the pocket of a man named [ __ ] Ryan when the New York City police arrested him on the streets of the Five Points. Ryan was a member of the Whyos, and the Whyos did not just commit violence, they sold it.
They packaged it. They ran it like a business, with prices, services, and delivery. Decades before anyone used the phrase organized crime. Decades before the Italian Mafia families carved up New York. Decades before Murder Incorporated turned contract killing into a corporate enterprise. The Whyos were already there, already doing it, already charging by the service.
This is the story of the most dangerous gang 19th century New York City ever produced. A gang that rose from the ashes of the Civil War, took control of Manhattan’s most infamous slum, and turned violence into commerce. A gang whose leaders were so reckless, so savage, and so feared that the city had to hang three of them in the span of five years just to break their power.
This is the story of Danny Driscoll, a man the newspapers called the most venomous, worthless, sneaking, drunken, quarrelsome, and murderous reprobate in the city. And Danny Lyons, a 26-year-old pimp and killer who ran prostitutes, fought rivals, and died on the gallows over a love triangle gone wrong. Both men were hanged in 1888, months apart, in the same prison yard, from the same scaffold.
But here is what most people never learn about the Whyos. They were not just thugs. They were innovators. They invented the protection racket as New York knew it. They pioneered murder for hire. They provided political muscle for corrupt politicians and got away with shootings, stabbings, and beatings for years because the system protected them.
Until it didn’t. Until the bodies piled too high. Until even their political allies could not save them anymore. To understand how the Whyos became what they became, you have to understand where they came from. And where they came from was the worst place in America, the Five Points, Lower Manhattan. If you have seen the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York, you have some idea.
But the real Five Points was worse than anything Hollywood ever put on screen. Named for the intersection where five streets met near what is now the corner of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets in Lower Manhattan, the Five Points by the 1870s was the most densely packed, most disease-ridden, most violent neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere.
Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and was horrified. He wrote about lanes and alleys paved with mud knee-deep, where all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here. That was 40 years before the Whyos reached their peak. By the 1870s and ’80s, it had only gotten worse. Irish immigrants, many of them refugees from the Great Famine, had been crammed into collapsing tenement buildings where families of eight shared single rooms.
The area around Mulberry Bend, where the streets twisted and narrowed into dark passages, was considered the deadliest stretch of real estate in the world. It was said that Five Points had the highest murder rate of any slum on Earth. And in that slum, among those dark alleys and rotting buildings and open sewers, the Whyos were born.
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They did not appear out of nowhere. After the Civil War, the old Five Points gangs, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Forty Thieves, they had all been broken up or scattered by aggressive police campaigns between 1866 and 1868. The New York City Police Department, for once, had actually done its job.
The old gangs were finished, but the criminals who made up those gangs were still there, still hungry, still violent, and they needed a new flag to fly under. The Whyos gave them one. The gang formed in the late 1860s from remnants of a crew called the Chichester’s. They absorbed former rivals. They recruited from the tenements.
And within a few years, by the early 1870s, they had become the dominant criminal force in Manhattan’s Fourth Ward, the Irish slum that wrapped around the Five Points. Their name came from their war cry, a strange, high-pitched call that echoed through the narrow streets at night. Why oh.
It sounded like a bird, like an owl in the darkness. Residents of the Five Points knew what that sound meant. It meant the Whyos were out. And when the Whyos were out, you stayed inside. You locked your door. You kept quiet. You have to understand how this gang operated. The YOs were not just street brawlers fighting over territory.
They were the first true organized gang in Manhattan. They ran criminal operations across the entire borough. Pickpocketing, burglary, bank robbery, counterfeiting, prostitution, extortion, and violence for hire. They had a headquarters. Multiple, actually. Their original base was a notorious Bowery dive called The Morgue. The name was not ironic.
It was descriptive. The Morgue was the scene of at least 100 recorded violent murders in its early years. Hour-long gunfights between drunken gang members were a regular occurrence. The owner of the bar reportedly boasted that his liquor was so strong that the gangs were foolish to think they could hit anything after drinking it.
That was the kind of place The Morgue was. A slaughterhouse that served whiskey. The gang also used Dry Dollar Sullivan’s saloon on Christie Street. They gathered in a churchyard at the corner of Prince and Mott Streets. And on any given night, you could find YOs members haunting the graveyard of Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street.
[ __ ] Ryan, Baboon Connolly, Go Go Knox, Bull Hurley, Red Rocks Farrell, Googie Corcoran. These were not aliases chosen for fun. These were the names that struck terror into the people of Lower Manhattan. Now, here is where it gets interesting. The early YOs had some truly creative criminals. Take Dandy Johnny Dolan. Dolan was one of the original members.
Well-dressed, always groomed, he looked like a gentleman. But Dolan had modified his boots. He had embedded sections of ax blade into the soles of his fighting shoes. So, when he kicked a man who was down, the blades did the rest. And that was not even his signature weapon. Dolan wore a copper eye gouger on his thumb, a small metal device custom-made designed for one purpose.
In the summer of 1875, Dolan attempted to rob a jewelry store owned by a man named James H. Noe. When Noe tried to stop him, Dolan beat him with an iron crowbar. Then he used the eye gouger. He took Noe’s eyes with him. Dolan was later found by Detective Joseph M. Dorsey, and the eyes were discovered in his possession.
He had been showing them off to friends. Dandy Johnny Dolan was convicted of murder and hanged at the Tombs Prison on April 21st, 1876. He was 23 years old. But Dolan’s death did not slow the gang down. Not even close. By the late 1870s, a new leader had emerged. Mike McGloin. Young, ruthless, still a teenager when he took control. McGloin was the one who formalized the Whyos’ most notorious rule.
To be a full member of the gang, you had to have killed at least one person. McGloin put it simply. He said, “A guy ain’t tough until he has knocked his man out.” That was the entry requirement, murder. Not a beating, not a robbery. You had to take a life. McGloin also pushed the Whyos further into extortion and murder for hire.
One of his contemporaries, Big Josh Hines, was regularly seen walking into illegal gambling dens wearing a pair of pistols, demanding a percentage of the night’s profits. When a detective questioned Hines about the extortion, Hines was genuinely confused. He reportedly said, “Those guys must be nuts.
Don’t I always leave them something? All I want is me fair share.” That was the Whyos’ mentality. They were not stealing from these businesses, they were taxing them. This was protection money decades before the Mafia made it famous. But McGloin was too reckless to last. On the night of December 29th, 1881, four Whyos entered a Hell’s Kitchen tavern owned by a French saloon keeper named Louis Hounier.
One asked to change a $10 bill. Another pretended to be sick and tried to get behind the bar. Hounier asked them to leave. They did. But at around 2:00 in the morning, after Hounier had closed up and gone upstairs to bed, his wife heard noises from below. When Hounier went down to investigate, someone shot him dead. The police, led by NYPD Inspector Thomas F.
Byrnes, traced the murder weapon, a .38 caliber pistol, to a pawn shop on 9th Avenue. The gun had belonged to McGloin. But proving it in court was another matter. Byrnes even assigned an undercover woman to live with the 19-year-old gang leader, hoping she could get a confession. She could not. It was only after Byrnes raided the Whyos’ headquarters and arrested three gang members that McGloin broke.
Convinced his own men would testify against him, he confessed to the killing but claimed self-defense. The jury deliberated for 11 minutes. They found Mike McGloin guilty of first-degree murder. He was hanged at The Tombs Prison on March 9th, 1883. He was around 21 years old. Three Whyo leaders, Dolan, McGloin, all hanged.
And the gang was only getting started. After McGloin’s execution, power passed to two men who would become the most infamous Whyos of all, Danny Driscoll and Danny Lyons, two Dannys running the most dangerous gang in New York City. And both of them were heading straight for the gallows.
Danny Driscoll was born in 1855 in the heart of the Five Points. He never had a chance at a normal life. Raised in the tenements, surrounded by crime from birth, Driscoll had a criminal record before he was old enough to shave. First arrested for pickpocketing at age 15, he would go on to be arrested 27 times in his life. 12 of those arrests came in 1884 alone, 1 year, 12 arrests.
By the time he was an adult, he had served a combined 16 years in the New York State Penitentiary and New York State Prison. He also trained young boys to pickpocket, acting as what the press called a Fagin, after the character in Oliver Twist. You have to understand something about Driscoll. He was not just brutal.
He was unpredictable. A peer described him this way, “Driscoll was one of the cleverest criminals that ever came from the Sixth Ward, but he had one great fault. He had a very quick temper. He was sensitive and lacking in self-control. He would shoot at a moment’s notice. That was the man running the Whyos, smart enough to lead, too volatile to survive, and the newspapers loved him for it.
One reporter called him the most venomous, worthless, murderous reprobate in the city. But they also wrote about the bravado on his face, the swagger in his step, and the hat he wore rickishly cocked over one eye and ear at the approved Bowery angle. Driscoll and the Whyos had a look. Low-crowned derby hats over close-cropped hair, toothpick-pointed shoes.
They dressed like they owned the streets because they did. In 1876, years before he became leader, Driscoll got into what the press called a three-cornered pistol fight. He shot two strangers in a saloon over some perceived insult while managing to get himself shot through the body. That bullet was the first of seven that would remain inside him for the rest of his life.
Seven bullets lodged in his flesh carried around like souvenirs. In 1883, Driscoll shot a German sauerkraut vendor on Christie Street for no known reason. Then he shot the vendor’s wife. A local alderman named Fatty Walsh made the charges go away. In return, the Whyos threatened voters with violence if they did not cast a ballot for Walsh on election day.
That was the deal. Political protection in exchange for political muscle. It was a system that would define New York corruption for the next century. But here is where everything changed. In 1886, Danny Driscoll met 18-year-old Bridget Garrity. Everyone called her Beazy. She was a Five Points girl.
A prostitute working the rough territory the Whyos controlled. Beazy claimed she had been cheated by the owner of a panel house, a kind of rigged brothel where customers were robbed through hidden panels in the walls that was operating in Whyos territory. The man running the house was a tough named John McCarty. And McCarty and Driscoll already had bad blood between them.
On June 26th, 1886 at 4:00 in the morning, Driscoll decided to settle it. He took his revolver and rode by coach to a three-story brick building on the north side of Hester Street where McCarty ran his operation. Beazy came with him. This was the decision that would end his life. What happened next is one of those moments where history turns on something small, something stupid.
Driscoll arrived at the building. The hallway was dark. He could not see. He stuck the muzzle of his revolver through the crack in the door and fired. He thought he was shooting at McCarthy. He was not. McCarthy saw the gun and managed to stay clear. The bullet hit Beazy Garrity in the abdomen. Beazy was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Surgeons tried to save her. They could not. She was dying. And here is the part that tells you everything about the world these people lived in. As Beazy lay dying, the police questioned her. They asked her who shot her. She knew it was Driskoll. She had been standing right there. But she did not say his name. She remained loyal.
She told the police, the priest, and her own mother that it was McCarthy who shot her. She murmured it with her dying breath. McCarthy shot her. She lied for Driskoll to the very end. It did not matter. Driskoll was charged with first-degree murder. His trial became a sensation. The defense was handled by William F.
Howe, one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in New York at the time. The prosecution argued that even though Driskoll had not intended to shoot Beazy, the murder occurred during the commission of a violent felony. The law did not care about his intentions. What mattered was the result. The most devastating moment came when Beazy Garrity’s mother took the stand.
Old, frail, weeping. She told the court that her dying daughter had finally confessed in her last moments that it was Driskoll who fired the shot. The Sun newspaper reported that there was not a dry eye visible in the courtroom. Danny Driskoll was found guilty of first-degree murder. When the verdict came down, he barely reacted.
“I guess luck wasn’t on my side.” is all he said as they led him out. “I’ve got a bad name with the police.” he told the court earlier. “And they say give a dog a bad name and we’ll hang him. He was not wrong. On the morning of January 23rd, 1888, Danny Driscoll was brought to the yard of the Tombs prison.
150 police officers formed a cordon around the building. Small groups of young men with, as one newspaper described, hard, wicked-looking visages gathered outside. The police identified them as remnants of the Whyo gang. Among them were what the press called brazen-faced young women of the class to which Beazy Garrity belonged.
They had come to watch their leader die. Driscoll walked to the scaffold. He greeted his executioner warmly. He asked the man to please make quick work of his task. A noose of white Italian hemp was placed around his neck. At 7:24 in the morning, the trapdoor opened. His neck snapped. Danny Driscoll was dead.
The witnesses included Sheriff Grant, his deputy, two priests named Prendergast and Gillenus, 14 reporters, and a man named Commodore Elbridge T. Gerry, who attended specifically to confirm that the execution had been conducted in a humane and just manner. But the Whyos were not done dying. Not yet.
Remember Danny Lyons, the other Danny. The co-leader. Danny Lyons was born in 1862. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was one of the most feared men in the Five Points. Lyons was a pimp. He controlled three prostitutes: Lizzie the Dove, Bunty Kate, and Gentle Maggie. Those were not just colorful names. Those were real women working the streets under Lyons’ control, handing over their earnings so he could finance his position in the gang.
Here is the thing about Lyons. He was greedy. When his three women were not bringing in enough money, he went looking for more talent. He found it in a woman named Pretty Kitty McGowan. Kitty was already working for a rival pimp named Joseph Quinn. Lyons did not care. He recruited her anyway. He hired her away.
You know what comes next. Quinn wanted her back. Or at the very least, Quinn wanted payback. The two men had been circling each other for months. This was not about love. This was about money. About territory. About respect. A pimp does not lose one of his women to another pimp without consequence. Not in the Five Points.
Not with the Wios involved. On the evening of July 5th, 1887, the situation exploded. The accounts vary on the exact details. What is documented is this. Joseph Quinn ended up dead, shot by Danny Lyons. Some accounts say Quinn was sitting on his front steps when Lyons walked up and shot him. Others describe a gunfight. Either way, Quinn died and Lyons fled.
And Lyons ran hard. He went to Philadelphia first, then Pittsburgh, then Chicago. When he thought the police were closing in, he doubled back to Pittsburgh trying to throw them off. It did not work. He was arrested there on a burglary charge. When New York detectives Malarkey and Duncan found him sitting in a Pittsburgh jail cell, Lyons agreed to return without formal extradition.
He told the police, “I killed Quinn because if I hadn’t done so, he would have killed me.” The trial began on September 19th, 1887, and lasted 6 days. Lyons took the stand in his own defense. He claimed Quinn had been harassing him. He said he had been carrying a revolver just to scare Quinn.
He claimed the gun went off accidentally. He claimed he was as surprised as anyone. The jury did not believe him. Daniel Lyons was convicted of first-degree murder. And now here is the part of this story that nobody forgets. While Lyons sat in the Tombs awaiting execution, Danny Driscoll was in the cell right next to him. The two leaders of the Why Os, both convicted of murder, both sentenced to death, sharing a wall in the most notorious prison in New York City.
They reportedly befriended each other and participated together in at least one failed escape attempt. Imagine that. The two most dangerous men the Five Points had ever produced sitting in adjacent cells waiting to hang. Driscoll went first, January 23rd, 1888. Lyons watched the preparations from his cell. He knew he was next.
Seven months later, on August 21st, 1888, Daniel Lyons was brought to the same yard, the same scaffold, the same prison. He was 26 years old. As the noose was placed around his neck, Lyons spoke his last words. He looked at the hangman, a man named Joseph Budd Atkinson, and said simply, “Goodbye, Joe.” Then the trapdoor opened.
Two leaders, both named Danny, both hanged. Both dead before they turned 30. In the same prison, in the same year, from the same scaffold. But the story does not end with the gallows. Because the world the Why Os built was so violent, so twisted, that even grief became deadly. After Lyons was hanged, his women mourned in the way Five Points women mourned. They drank.
Lizzie the Dove and Gentle Maggie went to a Bowery Tavern to toast their dead pimp. They drank too much. They started arguing about who had loved Lyons more. The argument escalated. And Gentle Maggie pulled a knife and stabbed Lizzie the Dove in the throat. As Lizzie the Dove lay dying on the floor of that tavern, bleeding out, she looked up at Gentle Maggie and spoke her final words.
“I will meet you in hell and there scratch your eyes out.” Then she died. That is the Whyos. That is the world they lived in. Even the morning killed you. With Driscoll and Lyons gone, the Whyos never recovered. The police came down hard. Arrests multiplied. Members were sent to prison or killed in street fights.
The gang still existed in name through the early 1890s, but it was a shadow of what it had been. Their last great moment came when two members named Denver Hop and English Charlie got into a dispute over shares from a robbery. A gunfight broke out. At least 20 Whyos joined in, firing wildly in the morgue. Nobody was hit. They were all too drunk.
A newspaper reported that the bar’s owner had felt the gangs were silly to think they would hit anything after drinking his liquor. That was the Whyos epitaph. A drunken shootout where nobody could aim straight. By the mid-1890s, a new power had risen. A man named Monk Eastman, leading the Eastman gang, swept the last of the Whyos off the streets.
And after Eastman came the Five Points Gang, which was no longer Irish, but predominantly Italian-American. The Five Points Gang would produce names you know. Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano. The Whyos had been the bridge, the link between the chaotic street gangs of the Civil War era and the sophisticated criminal organizations of the 20th century.
They were the ones who proved that crime could be a business, that violence could have a price tag, that a gang could offer services, collect fees, and operate like a company. Let me put this in perspective. Think about that price list one more time. [ __ ] Ryan was carrying it in 1884, a menu of services.
$1 for a punch, $3 for blacking both eyes, $7 for a broken nose and jaw, $15 for biting off an ear, $19 for breaking a limb, $20 for a gunshot wound to the leg, $22 for a stabbing, and $100 for murder. Adjusted for inflation, that $100 in 1884 would be roughly $3,000 today. $3,000 to end a human life. That was the going rate, and here is what makes it so disturbing.
The price list was not aspirational. It was operational. The Whyos were actually performing these services regularly. For paying customers, businessmen who wanted a competitor beaten, landlords who wanted a tenant removed, husbands who wanted a problem solved. The Whyos were the first murder-for-hire operation in American criminal history, predating Murder Incorporated by 50 years. Think about what that means.
The entire framework of organized violence that defined the American underworld in the 20th century, the hitmen, the contract killings, the idea that murder was not personal, but professional, the Whyos invented that. In the mud and filth of the Five Points, in a bar called the Morgue, where 100 people had already been killed, a gang of Irish immigrants wrote out a price list and created the template.
So, what does this story tell us? You have to understand that the Whyos were not aberrations. They were products. Products of a city that threw its poorest residents into slums and forgot about them. Products of a system that made crime the only viable career path for a kid growing up in the Five Points. Danny Driscoll was arrested for the first time at 15.
Mike McGloin was leading a murder gang as a teenager. Danny Lyons was dead at 26. These were not criminal masterminds who chose evil over good. These were people born into a place where the line between victim and perpetrator barely existed. Jacob Riis, the photographer and journalist who documented the Five Points in the 1880s, called the Whyos the worst cutthroats in the city.
He was right. But he also understood why they existed. The conditions created the criminals. The tenements. The poverty. The complete absence of opportunity. The Five Points was a factory. It produced one product, and the Whyos were its finest output. Danny Driscoll carried seven bullets in his body. He was arrested 27 times.
He killed a woman he did not mean to kill and went to the gallows with a shrug and a quip about bad luck. Danny Lyons ran prostitutes, fought over them, killed a man over one, fled across three states, and died on a rope at 26, his last word being goodbye to the man who pulled the lever. Dandy Johnny Dolan gouged out a man’s eyes and carried them around in his pocket.
Mike McGloin declared that murder was the entrance exam for his gang, and then failed to pass his own test of survival. Three leaders hanged in 12 years, 1876, 1883, 1888, and then a fourth in the same year. The Tombs prison processed them like a factory of its own. The Whyos built a criminal empire in the most dangerous neighborhood in the Western world.
And the state tore it down, one new set at a time. Here is the final thought. The Whyos controlled Manhattan for nearly 30 years. They pioneered extortion rackets. They created the murder-for-hire model. They provided political muscle for corrupt politicians. They turned a bar into a slaughterhouse and a graveyard into a hideout.
They terrorized an entire city. And when it was over, when the last of them had been imprisoned or killed or absorbed into the next generation of gangs, nobody built them a monument. Nobody made a movie about them. For 100 years, most people forgot they ever existed. But every crime family that came after them, every hitman who took a contract, every mob boss who ran a protection racket, they were all following a blueprint that the Whyos drew up in the mud of the Five Points.
In a dead woman’s pocket. In a dying pimp’s last words. In a handwritten price list that put a dollar value on human suffering. That is the legacy of the Whyos. Not glory. Not legend. Just a price list. And the knowledge that in the end, everybody paid. If you found this story fascinating,
