Gangs of New York Got ‘Priest Vallon’ Completely Wrong – ht
February 25th, 1855. Stanwix Hall, a saloon on Broadway near Prince Street, Manhattan. >> [snorts] >> A man named Louis Baker walked through the door with a pistol tucked in his coat. Inside, William Poole, the most feared nativist brawler in New York City, was drinking. Baker raised the gun and fired.
One bullet tore through Poole’s leg. Another buried itself in his chest, just above the heart. Poole collapsed. He didn’t die that night. He held on for 11 days, bleeding internally, refusing to quit. And on March 8th, 1855, in his home on Christopher Street, William “Bill the Butcher” Poole finally died. He was 33 years old.
A local reporter claimed his last words were, “Goodbye, boys. I die a true American.” The New York Evening Post told a different story. They said Poole spent his last breath naming the man who ordered the hit, John Morrissey. This wasn’t just another barroom killing. Poole was the leader of the Bowery Boys, a nativist street army that terrorized Irish immigrants across Lower Manhattan.
He was the enforcer for the Know-Nothing political movement, a bare-knuckled brawler who believed America belonged to white Protestants and nobody else. His funeral procession was the largest New York City had ever seen. Thousands marched. Banners read, “I die a true American.” Politicians wept, and across the city, in the muddy, stinking alleyways of the Five Points, the Irish celebrated.
Their tormentor was finally dead. This is the story Hollywood doesn’t tell you. When Martin Scorsese made Gangs of New York in 2002, he gave us Priest Vallon, a noble, dignified Irish gang leader played by Liam Neeson, who died in a massive street battle against Bill the Butcher, clutching a crucifix, defending his people. It was epic cinema.
It was also completely fictional. There was no Priest Vallon, not in the historical record, not in the police files, not in a single newspaper from the era. But the question of who Priest Vallon was really based on leads you somewhere far more interesting than any movie. It leads you to the real men who led the Irish gangs of Five Points, men who were more complicated, more brutal, and more fascinating than anything Hollywood could invent.
But here’s what makes this story truly wild. The gang Vallon supposedly led, the Dead Rabbits, might not have existed at all, at least not the way you’ve been told. And the real power behind the Irish gangs of Five Points wasn’t a priest or a holy man. It was a network of bare-knuckled boxers, corrupt politicians, saloon keepers, and a riverboat gambler who controlled everything from the shadows.
To understand who the real Priest Vallon was, you have to go back to the beginning. You have to go down into the mud. In the 1790s, Lower Manhattan had a body of fresh water called the Collect Pond. It covered roughly 50 acres. It was up to 60 ft deep in places. For a while, it was the city’s primary drinking water source.
But by the early 1800s, tanneries and slaughterhouses had dumped so much waste into the pond that the water turned black. The stench was unbearable, so the city decided to fill it in. They drained the pond starting around 1803 and finished by 1811, packing the basin with dirt, garbage, and rubble. Then they built a neighborhood on top of it.
They called it Five Points, named for the intersection where five streets met. Orange Street, Cross Street, Anthony Street, Little Water Street, and Mulberry Street, all converging in a small triangular clearing called Paradise Square. You have to understand something. The ground beneath Five Points was never stable. The old pond bed kept settling.
Foundations cracked. Buildings leaned. Basements flooded with foul water that seeped up from below. And into this sinking, rotting landscape came the poorest of the poor. Free black Americans settled there first. Then came the Irish. Between 1845 and 1855, roughly 2 million Irish men, women, and children fled the Great Famine, starvation, disease, eviction.
They packed into coffin ships and crossed the Atlantic. Those who survived the voyage landed in New York Harbor with nothing, no money, no connections, no skills that matched the industrial city. And in a New York already hostile to Catholics, they had exactly one place to go, Five Points.
The conditions were beyond anything most people can imagine today. The most infamous building in the neighborhood was the Old Brewery on Cross Street. Originally Coulthard’s Brewery, built in the 1790s, it was converted into a tenement in 1837 after the financial panic. By 1850, an official census counted 221 people living in 35 apartments, but the real number was almost certainly higher.
Some estimates put it at a thousand souls crammed into a single building. The legend said there was a murder inside the Old Brewery every single night for 15 years. That was probably an exaggeration, probably. The building was finally purchased by a Methodist charity and demolished in 1852. They found human bones in the walls during demolition.
Five Points had the highest murder rate of any slum in the Western world. Only parts of London’s East End came close for population density, infant mortality, disease, and violent crime. This was the world that created the gangs, not ambition, not greed, survival. The first major Irish gang wasn’t the Dead Rabbits. It was the Roach Guards.
Now, despite what you might think, the name wasn’t about cockroaches. They were named after a local liquor dealer named Ted Roche. Some sources spell it r o c h e. The Roach Guards operated along Mulberry Street in the heart of Five Points, running protection rackets, controlling gambling, and most importantly, serving as the muscle for local politicians.
Here’s where the Dead Rabbits origin story gets complicated. The traditional account, the one Herbert Asbury told in his 1928 book, The Gangs of New York, goes like this. During a heated meeting of the Roach Guards, a faction disagreed with the leadership. Tempers flared, and at some point, someone threw a dead rabbit into the middle of the room.
A group of dissenters saw this as an omen or a rallying symbol, and broke away to form their own gang. They called themselves the Dead Rabbits. They carried a dead rabbit impaled on a pike as their battle flag. It’s a great story. There’s just one problem. It might not be true. Tyler Anbinder, a respected historian at George Washington University, spent years researching his book Five Points.
His conclusion was startling. Anbinder argued that the Dead Rabbits gang, as a formal organization, never existed. He found that the main gang in Five Points was the Roach Guards, and the term Dead Rabbits was either a nickname applied by hostile newspapers or a misidentification by reporters covering the riots of 1857. As [clears throat] one example, Anbinder pointed to the Morning Express newspaper, which initially reported that mourners at a rioter’s funeral wore badges reading “Dead Rabbit Club.
” The next day, the paper issued a correction. The badges actually read, “Roach Guard, we mourn our loss.” You have to remember the context. In the 1840s and 50s, anti-Irish hatred in New York was at a fever pitch. Newspapers owned by nativist sympathizers had every reason to paint the Irish as savage, animalistic, and organized into terrifying gangs.
The name Dead Rabbits fit that narrative perfectly. Whether the gang actually called themselves that or whether the media branded them remains one of the great unresolved questions of New York history. But whether the name was real or invented, the violence was absolutely real. And the men behind it were very real.
The closest thing to a Priest Vallon in actual history wasn’t a priest at all. He was a riverboat gambler, a political fixer, and the most powerful man in Five Points that nobody outside the neighborhood knew about. His name was Isaiah Rynders. Born in 1804, Rynders had a past wrapped in rumor.
Some said he’d killed a man on a Mississippi riverboat in a knife fight. What’s documented is that by the 1840s, he had established himself in the Sixth Ward of Manhattan, which included Five Points, as the top political organizer for Tammany Hall. He founded a political club called the Empire Club and set up shop near Paradise Square.
He owned at least half a dozen green groceries in the area. In the language of Five Points, a green grocery wasn’t just a vegetable shop. It was a front, a place that sold cheap liquor in the back, ran gambling tables, and served as a meeting spot for gang members. Rinder’s genius was organization. He took the scattered, brawling Irish gangs of Five Points and turned them into a political weapon.
Under his direction, the Dead Rabbits, the Roach Guards, and other affiliated crews became the enforcement arm of Tammany Hall. During elections, Rinder’s men would surround polling stations, threaten voters, stuff ballot boxes, and physically attack anyone who supported the opposition. His lieutenants included some of the most dangerous men in Lower Manhattan: Paudeen McLaughlin, Country McClister, Jim Turner, Lou Baker, and a young bare-knuckle boxer named John Morrissey.
By the end of the 1840s, Rinder’s was considered the de facto leader of all the Five Points street gangs. When riots broke out that the police couldn’t control, city authorities didn’t call for more officers. They called for Isaiah Rynders. He was the only man who could calm the streets. That kind of power is exactly what Martin Scorsese was trying to capture with Priest Vallon, an elder figure, a patriarch, a man whose authority over the Irish gangs was absolute and unquestioned.
Rinders was that man. The difference is, Rinders wasn’t noble. He wasn’t fighting for his people’s freedom. He was fighting for Tammany Hall’s vote count. He was a political boss who used immigrant desperation as fuel for a machine that enriched everyone except the immigrants themselves. But if Rinders was the shadow king, then John Morrissey was the warrior.
And if you’re looking for the physical inspiration behind Priest Vallon, the man who actually stood in the streets and fought Bill the Butcher, Morrissey is your answer. John Morrissey was born February 12th, 1831, in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. His family emigrated to the United States around 1833 and settled near Troy, New York.
His father, Timothy, worked as a laborer, supporting seven daughters and one son. Young John received almost no formal education. By age 12, he was working in a wallpaper factory, then an ironworks, then a stove foundry. By 1848, Morrissey was 17 years old and already the most feared street fighter in Troy.
He’d become the king of the downtown faction in the city’s territorial gang wars. He earned his legendary nickname, Old Smoke, in a barroom brawl when his opponent shoved him backward onto a coal stove. Morrissey’s coat caught fire. His back was burning, and he kept fighting. He won the fight with his flesh literally smoking.
From that day on, he was Old Smoke. Morrissey came to New York City looking for a boxing match with Tom Hyer, the heavyweight champion and a known nativist. Hyer dodged him and fled to California during the Gold Rush. Morrissey followed. Out west, he won his first official boxing match against George Thompson, the veteran who had trained Hyer himself.
Morrissey returned to New York with a fat purse and a growing reputation. In 1853, Morrissey won the bare-knuckle heavyweight championship of America by beating James Ambrose, known as Yankee Sullivan. He defended that title in 1858 against John “the Benicia Boy” Heenan in what became the most widely reported sporting event in American history up to that point.
Morrissey was the most famous athlete in the world, but Morrissey’s most dangerous fight wasn’t in a ring. It was in the streets of Five Points. His rivalry with William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was personal, political, and savage. Poole led the Bowery Boys, the muscle for the Know-Nothing Party, dedicated to keeping Irish Catholics out of American political life.
Morrissey represented everything the Know-Nothings despised. He was Irish. He was Catholic. He was powerful, and he refused to be intimidated. On August 8th, 1854, the two men finally fought, not in a formal bout, in the street. The corner of West and Amos Street, Lower Manhattan. After some sparring, Poole threw Morrissey to the ground and climbed on top of him.
A newspaper account described it: Poole was pounding, gouging, bucking, and biting. Morrissey was forced to concede. It was the worst defeat of his life. Morrissey wanted revenge. Six months later, on that February night in 1855 at Stanwix Hall, Louis Baker and Jim Turner walked in and shot Bill the Butcher dead.
Were they acting on Morrissey’s orders? That’s what the prosecution argued. Morrissey and Baker were both indicted for murder, but after three separate trials, all ending in hung juries, the charges were dropped. Baker argued self-defense and was never convicted. Here’s the thing. Modern historians have actually challenged the idea that Morrissey ordered the hit at all.
The New York Almanac published a detailed investigation arguing that Morrissey had gone home drunk hours before the shooting. He told a reporter later that he feared for his life because nativist politicians were trying to frame him for the murder. The truth about who really ordered the killing of Bill the Butcher is still debated. Now, remember this.
In Gangs of New York, Priest Vallon dies at the hands of Bill the Butcher. In real history, it was the other way around. The Irish gang leader’s associates killed the nativist brawler. Scorsese flipped the script for dramatic purposes, creating a revenge narrative for Amsterdam Vallon. But the real story was that the Irish won the first round.
And the consequences were explosive. Two years after Poole’s death, on July 4th, 1857, the entire Five Points erupted. It started as a raid. Members of the Dead Rabbits, or the Roach Guards, or whatever you want to call them, led a coalition of Five Points gangs into the Bowery to attack a clubhouse occupied by the Bowery Boys and the Atlantic Guards.
They were met with ferocious resistance and driven back to Paradise Square after vicious street fighting. The next morning, July 5th, they came back, this time with reinforcements. They attacked the Green Dragon, a popular Broom Street resort controlled by their rivals. The fighting spread across multiple blocks.
Between 800 and 1,000 gang members took to the streets. Rioters built barricades. They hurled bricks, wielded clubs, swung iron bars. Bystanders were caught in the crossfire. Homes were looted. The police were helpless. And the reason the police were helpless is perhaps the craziest detail of all. At that exact moment, New York City had two competing police departments.
The state legislature had created a new Metropolitan Police Force to replace Mayor Fernando Wood’s municipal police. Wood refused to disband his department. So, both forces existed simultaneously, each claiming authority, neither willing to cooperate. While the two police departments were literally fighting each other in the streets, the gangs ran wild.
It took the New York State Militia to end it. On the evening of July 5th, the 8th and 71st regiments marched down White and Worth streets with fixed bayonets. Two detachments of 75 officers each led the advance, clubbing anyone in their path. The show of force worked. The gangs scattered back to their hideouts. When the smoke cleared, eight men were dead.
Between 30 and 100 more were injured. Roughly half of the injured required hospitalization. Now, here’s where the story connects back to our question. Where was Priest Vallon in all of this? The answer is, there was no single leader who rallied the Irish the way the movie shows. The reality was messier. Isaiah Rynders, who by this time was already working as a U.S.
Marshal, was actually called upon by city authorities to use his influence to stop the rioting. That’s right. The man who had organized these gangs was asked to shut them down. John Morrissey wasn’t even in New York City during the Dead Rabbits riot. He was in Troy, running a saloon called the Ivy Green on Fourth Street.
He had deliberately left Manhattan after the Poole killing to avoid further trouble. The founder of the Dead Rabbits, a man known as Shang Allen, is barely documented in the historical record. And Matthew Brennan, who some writers have tried to link to the Dead Rabbits, was actually a captain of police and later a police justice at the time of the riot.
He owned Monroe Hall, home of the Monroe Guard, which nativist newspapers later called a Dead Rabbits headquarters just to smear Democrats. You see what I’m getting at. The Priest Vallon figure, the noble chieftain who united the Irish and led them into a climactic battle, is a romantic fiction.
The real Irish power structure in Five Points was distributed, fragmented. Multiple men held pieces of the power. Rinders controlled the politics. Morrissey was the public face, the celebrity fighter. Shang Allen started the split that created a new faction. Kit Burns ran his notorious saloon on Water Street, where dog-fighting and rat-baiting drew crowds.
Tommy Hadden operated a crimp house where sailors were drugged, robbed, and shanghaied onto undermanned ships. The power wasn’t in one man’s hands. It was spread across a network of saloons, gambling dens, and political clubs. All loosely connected by Tammany Hall and the shared experience of being Irish in a city that hated them for it.
Six years after the Dead Rabbits riot, Five Points was consumed by something far worse. The New York City draft riots of July 1863, when the federal government began drafting men to fight in the Civil War with a provision allowing wealthy citizens to pay $300 to avoid service, the working class of New York exploded.
The Irish were hit hardest. They couldn’t afford the buyout. They were being sent to die in a war they didn’t choose for a country that wouldn’t accept them. The riots lasted four days. Property was destroyed across Manhattan. Black New Yorkers were targeted by mobs of rioters, beaten and killed. An orphanage for black children was burned to the ground.
The violence only stopped when federal troops, fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg, marched into the city. Over 100 people died. Some estimates say the toll was much higher. Ironically, Five Points itself was relatively quiet during the draft riots. The neighborhood that had been the epicenter of gang violence for decades sat this one out.
By then, the old gang structure was changing. The wave of immigration had shifted. Italian immigrants were beginning to arrive. The geography of power was evolving. Within a few decades, the Five Points gang, now led by Italian-American Paul Kelly, born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, would produce a new generation of criminals.
Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano. The future of American organized crime was being born on the same streets where the Dead Rabbits had once fought with bricks and clubs. As for the men who inspired Priest Vallon, their endings were scattered and unremarkable. Isaiah Rynders lived until 1885. He died at 80 years old, having outlived his usefulness to Tammany Hall, a relic of an older, rougher era.
John Morrissey went legitimate. He invested his boxing winnings in high-end gambling houses on Broadway where men like Cornelius Vanderbilt played. He brought horse racing to Saratoga Springs, organizing what would become the legendary Saratoga race course in 1863. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1866, serving two terms.
He turned against Tammany Hall and its corrupt boss, William Tweed, joining the reform movement that would eventually bring Tweed down. He won a New York State Senate seat as an anti-Tammany candidate twice. Morrissey died on May 1st, 1878 at the Adelphi Hotel in Saratoga Springs. He was 47 years old.
A throat ailment that had plagued him for decades finally took him. The state legislature recessed so legislators could attend his funeral. So, who was the real Priest Vallon? He was nobody and he was everybody. He was a composite built from the fragments of men who lived in mud and fought for inches. Isaiah Rynders, who turned street gangs into a political machine.
John Morrissey, who fought Bill the Butcher with his fists and survived. Shang Allen, who threw a dead rabbit on a table and accidentally created a legend. And thousands of unnamed Irish immigrants who stepped off coffin ships into the worst slum in America and refused to be erased. Scorsese needed a martyr, a symbol, a father figure whose murder could launch a revenge story.
So, he created Priest Vallon, gave him a cross and a top hat and a noble death in battle. It made for a beautiful movie. But the real story is more interesting precisely because it’s messier. There was no single great leader. There was no clean narrative. There were just desperate people in a desperate place, forming alliances that shifted with every election, every brawl, every new wave of immigrants stepping off the boat.
Five Points doesn’t exist anymore. The streets have been renamed. The buildings torn down. Where Paradise Square once stood, you’ll find Columbus Park and the edges of Chinatown. Since 2021, the intersection of Worth and Baxter Streets carries a code designation. A small sign reads, “Five Points.
” Most people walk past without noticing. They don’t know they’re standing on the ground where American organized crime was born, where men fought with bricks and pipes over a few square blocks of sinking earth, where the idea that immigrants could seize political power through sheer force of numbers was first tested and proven.
That’s the legacy of Priest Vallon, not a man, an idea. The idea that if the system won’t include you, you build your own system. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t clean. People died for it, but it worked. From the Dead Rabbits to Tammany Hall to the halls of Congress, the Irish of Five Points carved a path that every immigrant group after them would follow.
Some used ballots. Some used fists. Most used both. The next time you watch Gangs of New York, watch the opening battle. Watch Liam Neeson raise that cross and march into Paradise Square. And know that the real story behind that scene is bigger, darker, and more complicated than any movie could capture.
There was no Priest Vallon, but there were 100 men just like him. And they changed America forever. If this story got under your skin, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every single week. Leave a comment below. Tell us, who do you think was the closest real-life Priest Vallon? We read every single one.