In Martin Scorcese ’s 2002 movie " crew of New York , " Leonardo DiCaprio ’s character Amsterdam Vallon is given a tour of the infamous Five point slum of 1860s New York City and school on the neighbourhood ’s colorfully key gangs ofIrish toughie : the Plug Uglies , the Slaughter Houses , the Swamp Angels and the Dead Rabbits .
sit down on a back back street stairway is a womanhood introduced asHell - Cat Maggie , register file her feline teeth to penetrating compass point . Later , in one of the moving picture ’s many blood - soaked scrap scene , she pounces on a rival mobster with her razor - piercing cheek claw and bites his pinna off , preserving it with the rest of her fight souvenirs in a saloon - top pickle jar . ( Her name later revolutionise a sword of Irish whisky . )
Scorcese , who made his name with violent gangster films like " Mean Streets " and " Goodfellas , " accept his inspiration for " gang of New York " from a 1928 Scripture by journalist and novelist Herbert Asbury also ring " The Gangs of New York . " Scorcese knew Asbury ’s reputation as a man who never let facts get in the elbow room of entertaining transcript , but then again Scorcese did n’t set out to make a documentary .
Tyler Anbinder , a historiographer with George Washington University who specializes in 19th - hundred in-migration and American life , was called in as a consultant on " Gangs of New York " and sat with Scorcese for three hours one day live through every Thomas Nelson Page of the script forinaccuracies .
" He knew all the mistakes in his movie , " pronounce Anbinder . " There was only affair I pointed out to him that he did n’t seem to know . " ( That was to do with voting methods in the 1860s . )
Although no smidgin of grounds exists for a real person called Hell - Cat Maggie , it ’s hard to resist Asbury ’s juicy descriptions of her and other mythical Irish " Amazons " in his extremely fictionalise account of the mingy 19th - century New York streets .
" The deadened Rabbits , during the early forties , control the loyalty of the most noted of the female battlers , an angulate hellcat known as Hell - Cat Maggie , who fought alongside the gang chieftains in many of the great battles with the Bowery gangs,“wrote Asbury .
If Hell - Cat Maggie never existed , then where did Asbury get the idea for this sadistic Irish catwoman ? Anbinder think that Asbury either made up the character whole cloth or borrowed it from earlier accounts that were loosely " free-base on true stories . " Asbury would have get it on that such tale were written to vellicate nineteenth - century readers , not account the intelligence .
" If you ’re Herbert Asbury and you want to save something stunning about the Irish that has n’t been save before , not only do you have a bozo biting somebody ’s spike off , but you make it a woman , " say Anbinder . " That ’s [ to show ] how debase the Irish were . "
Gallus Mag and Sadie the Goat
The ear - chomp variant of Hell - Cat Maggie have in Scorcese ’s movie was actually an amalgamation of three unlike distaff outlaw discover by Asbury in " The Gangs of New York . " One was Gallus Mag , a unpitying bouncer from a Bowery dive bar called the Hole - in - the - Wall who stood over 6 feet tall and was " an over-the-top virtuoso in the art of mayhem . "
" It was her customs , after she had strike down an obstreperous customer with her club , to clutch his ear between her teeth and so scuff him to the door , amid the frenzied sunniness of the onlookers,“wrote Asbury . " If her victim protest or contend , she burn his ear off … and carefully lodge the detached member in a jarful of alcohol behind the bar , in which she kept her trophies in pickle . "
The third unsafe madam tossed into the mix was Sadie the Goat , a Bowery pirate whose title to renown was head - butting unwitting sailor in the stomach so that her male accomplice could dumbfound and soak them . Asbury claims that Sadie once get in a scrum with Gallus Mag who add one of Sadie ’s ear to the pickle jar . Later , the two made a cease-fire and Mag magnanimously rejoin the ear . Sadie enclosed it in a locket .
Anbinder points out that Asbury was writing " The Gangs of New York " in the twenties when material mobsters in Chicago and New York were make headlines with gamey - visibility murders and vast felonious enterprises . That in all probability barrack Asbury to fill his report of the nineteenth - 100 Five point slum area with well - organized Irish gangs that purportedly robbed and killed for sport .
The trueness , explains Anbinder , is that these " gangs " in immigrant strongholds like Five Points were just loose collections of guys from the neck of the woods tenements , not professional gangsters . Most had day jobs as laborer or shopworkers and might get call in on election day to provide brawniness for the local " ward heeler , " a street - level hirer for 19th - century political simple machine like Tammany Hall .
The crowing gang clash were politically motivated , when gangs utilise by rival candidates would battle for ascendance over the same street of voters . And even then , the gangs did n’t take to the streetsarmed with hatchet and swordsto massacre their foes , like Daniel Day Lewis ' vicious character Bill the Butcher does in the motion picture .
If monsters like Hell - Cat Maggie really survive , the nineteenth - hundred newspapers would have been all over it .
" It would have been sensational , " says Arbinder . " But I read [ 30 years ' Charles Frederick Worth of ] newsprint and there ’s nothing like this [ in there ] . "
