The Pirate

In 1860 a sloop drifted into New York Harbor with no one aboard and blood from cabin to deck. Looted coins led investigators to Albert Hicks, a Bowery thug who had taken an axe to his shipmates.

Hicks was convicted not of murder but of piracy — a prosecutorial choice that carried the death penalty — and hanged on Bedloe's Island, now Liberty Island. Nearly ten thousand spectators came to watch, refreshments were served, and the showman P. T. Barnum turned up, later buying Hicks's clothes for a wax exhibit. The unrepentant killer became one of America's first celebrity murderers.

Harold Schechter reconstructs the case from newspaper accounts and court records. The Pirate is a short work, part of the Bloodlands collection of historical true-crime narratives published by Amazon Original Stories.