The Gophers street gang was formed in the 1890s from a conglomeration of other Irish street gangs that patrolled the west side of Manhattan. They gave them their name, because after committing one misdeed or another, they hid in the cavernous basements of the neighborhood to avoid arrest. The Gophers first ruled the area from Seventh to Eleventh Avenue, Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street, but later moved north to Fifty-seventh Street. Their numbers increased and eventually reached over five hundred thugs, all murderous hooligans of the worst kind.
Their first base of operations was a notorious saloon called Battle Row, also the name of the area on 39th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, where the gophers committed most of their mayhem. Battle Row was owned by a thug named Mallet Murphy, who was given that nickname because he corrected drunks and other scoundrels with a wooden mallet, rather than a blackjack, which was the weapon of choice of the day.
By death, or imprisonment of their chiefs, the gophers passed through various leaders. The most famous Gopher boss was Owney “The Killer” Madden, whose reign ended in 1913, when he was sent to jail for ten years for killing Little Patsy Doyle, his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, and an ambitious man trying to replace Gopher. Madden. as the leader of the Gophers.
Another such boss was One Lung Curran, who originated a practice that set the trend for his gang. One day, Curran, dismayed that his girlfriend did not have a proper winter coat, sneaked up on a passing policeman, punched him over the head, and stole his police winter coat. He gave the coat to his girlfriend, and after some alterations, she produced a puffy model, with a military cut. Other Gophers followed this trend, and soon there was an epidemic of police officers staggering back to their West Forty Seventh Street police station, blood dripping from their heads and clad only in their shirts, shoes, and pants. This prompted the police captain of that station to send groups of four and five police officers into the Gopher domain, to beat up enough Gophers that the fashion for the clothing would soon end.
Another gopher leader was Happy Jack Mulraney, so named because his face seemed to have a permanent smile on it. This smile was not intended, but was in fact caused by a peculiar paralysis of the muscles in Mulraney’s face. His henchmen enjoyed inciting the ire of psychopathic killer Mulraney by telling him that someone had mocked his unintentional smile. One day, Paddy the Priest, a bar owner on Tenth Avenue and a close friend of Mulraney’s, made the horrible mistake of asking Mulraney why he didn’t smile with the other side of his face. Mulraney shot Paddy the Priest in the head, killing him instantly, then stole the cash register from him. For his time lapse at trial, Mulraney was sentenced to life in prison.
One day in August 1908, several Gophers left their West Side domain and crashed in the middle of a shootout on the Lower East Side between Monk Eastman’s gang and Paul Kelly’s Five Pointers. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, the Gophers opened fire, shooting members of both warring gangs. One Gopher later said, “Lots of guys were beating each other up, so why shouldn’t we do a little popping ourselves?”
For years, Gopher’s main source of income was looting the freight cars and train depot of the New York Central Railroad, which ran along Eleventh Avenue. The New York City police could not, and sometimes would not, stop these rackets. So the railroad organized its own “police force”, which was made up mostly of ex-policemen who had been brutalized by the Gophers in the past and were out for revenge. The result was that “special police” entered Hell’s Kitchen, beating the Gophers from one end of the neighborhood to the other, or as one of the policemen put it, “From Hell to Breakfast.” Sometimes they used clubs and, if necessary, fired firearms. Being ex-cops and well trained in firearms, they were much better at gunplay than the Gophers.
In 1917, after the arrest of One Lung Curran, and with Madden still in jail and Mulraney in jail until his last breath, the Gophers gradually dissipated. In 1920, the Gophers street gang ceased to exist, only to be replaced in later years by another murderous group called “The Westies”.