In 1869, in lower Manhattan, amid blocks of seedy slums, pawnshops, rescue missions, and gambling dens, there lived a young woman known as Sadie the Goat. New York was the largest and wealthiest city in the country, but Sadie's was not a wealthy part of town. Tuberculosis and diarrhea were the leading causes of death. Ragpickers went door-to-door trading anything from old food to broken furniture. Horses dropped thousands of pounds of manure on the cobblestone streets every day, and nobody was responsible for cleaning it up. Lines of drying laundry hung out the windows. Garbage piled in mounds in the gutter, sometimes several feet high. Sadie's neighborhood, the Fourth Ward—the "Bloody Fourth," known for its frequent violence—was the site of the densest population crush anywhere in the world.

She spent much of her time with a street gang. Mugging people on the streets of the Fourth Ward, Sadie would headbutt her victims in the stomach [hence the nickname] and then let her gang fleece the unfortunates of cash and goods. It was small change, but it was something to do.

Sadie was a regular on Water Street, the Fourth Ward's main drag and a favorite of sailors and those looking for underworld fun. A travel guide of the day called it the most violent street on the continent; another warned readers absolutely to steer clear after dark. The Fourth Ward Hotel kept a trapdoor to dump corpses into the East River. The street had no shortage of saloons and their unlicensed cousins, called "blind tigers," which served the locals, slumming gentry, and the criminals who preyed on all alike. On the corner of Water and Dover Streets was one of the roughest taverns of all, the Hole-in the-Wall, the favorite basement hangout of Sadie the Goat.

By far the scariest bouncer at the Hole-in-the-Wall was Gallus Mag—a six-foot-plus Englishwoman with a truncheon tied to her wrist and a revolver tucked in her belt. Mag had a unique way of dealing with rowdy drunks: smacking the lout with her truncheon, dragging him to the door with his ear held firmly in her teeth and, if she was in the mood, biting off the ear before tossing its owner into the street. The ears were added to her collection, which she kept in a pickling jar behind the bar. One spring night Sadie ran afoul of Mag, and the next ear in the pickling jar was Sadie's.

After this, Sadie decided it was time to take a sabbatical from the Hole-in-the-Wall. Tired of making chump change with her old gang, Sadie shifted her attention over to the docks on the West Side, looking to throw in with a more successful band of hoodlums. There were plenty to choose from: the Daybreak Boys, the Buckoos, the Hookers, the Swamp Angels, the Slaughter Housers, the Border Gang, the Patsy Conroys, the Short Tails. She joined the Charlton Street Gang, young men with names like "Flabby Brown," "Big Mike," and "Big Brew," who spent their days in an abandoned gin mill and their nights stealing goods from ships on the North River, raiding them from rowboats. Sadie helped row for miles, hidden under piers, with oars muffled by rags. Climbing onto their targeted ship by its anchor chains, the gang grabbed whatever they could from the ship's deck or hold and rowed back to fence their loot in New York's pawnshops.
River and harbor piracy offered a great opportunity in Sadie's time. Pirates made off with more valuables than any other thieves in the city, but the competition was fierce. In 1850 the New York City chief of police estimated that there were fifty gangs and between four and five hundred river pirates in the Fourth Ward, with additional pirates dropping by from New Jersey and Brooklyn. By 1858 the city had only begun to address the situation by organizing the first harbor police patrol: a handful of men in rowboats. The police had a coup two years later when they captured river pirate and murderer Albert W. Hicks. More than ten thousand people turned out to see Hicks hanged on Bedloe's Island, swarming the island in steamboats, oyster sloops, barges, yachts, and rowboats—a spectacular demonstration of what the city thought of pirates, but not the sort of thing to give Sadie pause.

Sadie took her piracy seriously, and by force of personality became the leader of the gang. She read up on pirate traditions and incorporated hallmarks of pirate lore into her crew's methods. They held prisoners for ransom after she heard that pirates had once kidnapped Julius Caesar, and she made her victims—and any crew members who angered her—walk the plank, a trait of fictional, and not historical, pirates.

The old Charlton Street Gang had worked an area unusual for river pirates: Manhattan's west side, dismissed as fruitless by their pirate brethren. The vessels docked here were mostly ocean-bound steamers and sailing ships whose owners protected their investments with especially vigilant watchmen and extra lighting on the piers. Soon after Sadie joined the gang, she realized that they needed to cast their efforts farther afield to make any real money. Under her leadership the gang stole a high-quality sloop, raised a Jolly Roger, and rampaged north, raiding farms and riverside mansions along the banks of the Hudson River as far upstate as Albany. Their loot was likely still smalltime—food, a few valuables, and some cash.

But Sadie's exciting life of piracy soon came to an end. Farmers in the Hudson Valley united against the gang; Sadie found her raids met with gunfire, and notoriety forced the crew to abandon their distinctive sloop. Police patrolling New York's harbor prevented them from returning to their old hunting grounds on the North River. Defeated, Sadie and her crew slunk back to their gin mill.

After hosting seven murders in two months, the Hole-in-theWall was closed down by the police. Marking the end of an era, Gallus Mag reached into her pickle jar before the bar's last call to fish out Sadie's ear and return it to her former enemy. Sadie wore her car in a locket hanging around her neck for the rest of her days in the Fourth Ward.