The Bowery Boys cornered me in the middle of Five Points and screamed, “You’re nothing but a dead rabbit!” I didn’t know it then, but that insult would follow my gang for over a century. They…

The Bowery Boys were coming, and everyone in Five Points knew what that meant. For years, the gang had traded bloody blows with their rivals, the so-called Dead Rabbits, in the filthy, overcrowded streets of lower Manhattan. On the morning of July 4th, 1857, while the rest of the city celebrated the nation’s birthday, the Bowery Boys marched straight for their enemy’s headquarters, fueled by hatred and, almost certainly, a great deal of alcohol. The fighting started outside the Bowery clubhouse and didn’t stop.

For hours, the two gangs beat each other senseless while the local police stayed away. By the next morning, the violence had spread, and both sides called in reinforcements from allied gangs. By ten o’clock, nearly a thousand gangsters were tearing through the streets of Five Points, killing each other with clubs, bricks, and gunfire. One brave police officer stepped into the chaos and tried to order an end to the fighting.

He was knocked down, stripped of his uniform, and beaten with his own nightstick. Miraculously, he crawled out of the melee, made it back to the precinct, and collapsed after requesting backup. A small squad was sent out, but they were quickly overwhelmed. The New York Times described the scene the next morning: bricks, stones, and clubs flying from windows in every direction, wounded men lying on the sidewalks and being trampled, and the two sides surging back and forth through the streets like waves.

For forty-eight hours, the riot raged until the 8th and 71st regiments of the New York State militia finally put an end to it. Several buildings had been burned. Over a hundred people were injured. Eight people were dead.

When the smoke cleared, most historians and newspapers blamed the Dead Rabbits. But the Rabbits themselves denied everything. In a strange move for a street gang, they took out a notice in the New York Times insisting that the Dead Rabbit club members were not thieves and had not participated in the riot. According to them, the fight on Mulberry Street had been between the Roach Guards of Mulberry Street and the Atlantic Guards of the Bowery.

The notice went on to say that the Dead Rabbits were sensitive on points of honor and wouldn’t allow a thief to live on their beat, much less be a member of their club. It was a strange thing to see a gang defending its reputation in the newspaper, but it was a different time. The story of the Dead Rabbits has become legendary, thanks in no small part to Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film, *Gangs of New York*. In the movie, the Dead Rabbits are Irish Catholic gangsters led by Priest Vallon, who is murdered by his rival, Bill the Butcher, leader of the Protestant, anti-immigrant Natives.

The film follows Vallon’s son, Amsterdam, on a decades-long quest for revenge, complete with a scene where he hangs a literal dead rabbit in the center of Five Points to announce the gang’s return. But the truth behind the Dead Rabbits is far more complicated than the movies would have you believe. Historians agree that a gang did operate in Five Points during the 1830s through the 1850s, but the police at the time called them the Mulberry Boys, since they claimed Mulberry Street as their turf. According to the book *The Gangs of New York* by Herbert Asbury, which inspired the film, the gang began as the Roach Guards, named not after the insect but after its founder, Ted Roach.

They were originally hired to protect liquor merchants in lower Manhattan, but it didn’t take long for them to graduate to robbery and murder. The story goes that during a tense meeting between different factions of the Roach Guards, someone threw a dead rabbit into the center of the room. Some of the more superstitious members took it as an ill omen, withdrew from the gang, and formed their own group, the Dead Rabbits, who would carry dead rabbits on pikes as symbols and weapons. It makes for a great story, but according to professor and historian Tyler Anbinder, the Dead Rabbits never actually existed.

Anbinder argues that the entire legend is based on a misunderstanding. In the aftermath of the 1857 riot, reporters relied heavily on firsthand accounts from members of the Bowery Boys, the racist, anti-immigrant gang that was the Dead Rabbits’ chief rival. When referring to the Roach Guards, the Bowery Boys disparagingly called them dead rabbits, and the name stuck in the press. The word rabbit was common slang at the time, used to refer to a rowdy person, often with associations of thievery.

The word dead was another way of saying very. So dead rabbits meant something like very rowdy thieves. It wasn’t a name the gang chose for itself. It was an insult hurled at them by their enemies, designed to paint the Roach Guards as the aggressors while casting the Bowery Boys as innocent victims defending Protestant America.

There was another layer to the insult. The Irish word *rabbade*, pronounced something like rabbit, means a big hulking person in Gaelic. Mixed with street slang, a dead rabbit would seem to refer to a very big, hulking ruffian. For the anti-Irish Bowery Boys, it was the perfect slur to use against their immigrant enemies.

Anbinder points out that Five Points locals at the time balked at the name, knowing full well that the press had bought into the Bowery Boys’ slander. As he writes in his book *Five Points*, there seems to be no justification for referring to the Bowery Boys’ adversaries by the name Dead Rabbits. As for the famous story of the dead rabbit being thrown into the middle of a gang meeting, Anbinder is dismissive. He says he always thought the story was phony.

If someone had thrown a dead rabbit into a room full of Five Points Irish immigrants in 1850, they would have skinned it, cooked it, and fed it to their family in a stew. And the New York Times notice that seemingly proved the Dead Rabbits’ existence? Anbinder says it does the opposite. The notice explicitly states there was no such thing as the Dead Rabbits.

It clarifies that the people from Mulberry Street involved in the riot were members of the Roach Guards and that they were not criminals, but regular folks who were gainfully employed. Whether or not the Roach Guards were actually criminals is beside the point. They almost certainly were. But the evidence is convincing that for the last 170 years, the New York Times, Martin Scorsese, and countless others have all mistakenly referred to the Roach Guards by the name given to them by their sworn enemies.

Scorsese almost took another crack at the story in 2013 when it was announced he would executive produce and partially direct a television series based on the same source material. He said the era of American history was rich with characters and stories that couldn’t be fully explored in a two-hour film, and that a television series would give him the time and creative freedom to bring that world to life. Whether he would have corrected the film’s take on the Dead Rabbits is unknown. The series was never made.

Now, the question remains: do you still believe the Dead Rabbits existed?