Anonymous ID: bdf570 July 15, 2019, 3:35 p.m. No.9612   🗄️.is đź”—kun

The Dead Rabbits

 

This crew of Irish immigrants was one of the most feared gangs to emerge from Five Points, so named for its location at the intersection of five crooked, narrow, downtown streets. For more than 60 years, Five Points (near modern-day Chinatown) was one of the city’s most notorious—and dangerous–neighborhoods. Throughout the 1850s, the Dead Rabbits excelled at robbery, pick-pocketing and brawling—particularly with their sworn enemies, the Bowery Boys. The group was made up mostly of young men, but it wasn’t unheard of for women to join in on the violence. According to legend, one of the most feared Dead Rabbits was “Hell-Cat Maggie,” a woman who reportedly filed her teeth to points and wore brass fingernails into battle. While the Rabbits mostly dabbled in petty crime, they were also famous for the events of July 4, 1857, when one of their street fights with the Bowery Boys turned into a bloody riot that killed a dozen people.

 

The Dead Rabbits supposedly began as an offshoot of another gang called the Roach Guards, but some historians have suggested the two were actually one and the same. In fact, one popular theory argues that the term “dead rabbit” was simply a pejorative used by the Bowery Boys and the New York press in reference to members of the Roach Guards and other Five Points gangs.

 

https://www.history.com/news/7-infamous-gangs-of-new-york