Rogues Gallery: The Birth of Modern Policing and Organized Crime in Gilded Age New York, Oller - C+

             Between 1870 and 1910, the city's population grew from 1.5 million to 5 million. Fully 40% of the residents were foreign born, and almost as many were first generation Americans. Crime grew exponentially, and the NYPD had to learn to police the increasingly complex and immigrant-filled city. The man who ushered the police department into the modern era was Thomas F. Byrnes, who joined the department in 1863, the year of the draft riots.  As a captain fifteen years later, he became famous for cracking the Manhattan Savings Institution heist, still the biggest in NY history. It was the first time ever in the city that bank robbers were arrested and convicted. Soon thereafter, Byrnes was promoted to Inspector and put in charge of the Detective Bureau. He initiated the 'rogues gallery' by publishing the daily mug shots of everyone arrested in the city. "Under Byrnes, the NYPD's detective bureau came to rival the great detective departments of Paris and Vienna, Austria." In 1888, the state legislature made him a chief inspector, number two in the police department. Four years later, he was superintendent. His eventual denouement began in the early 90's when crusading moralist, Reverend Charles Parkhurst, began to point out that there still was a great deal of sin and crime that the police let slide. Byrnes countered that they couldn't stop all crime and Parkhurst hammered away on departmental corruption. Byrnes' live and let live approach to minor crime was soon to be over. In 1894, the legislature created the Lexow Commission to investigate corruption in the department. When summing up, the committee's counsel said, "that despite using a microscope, the Lexow Committee had yet to find a business in the city that wasn't being extorted by the NYPD." The committee tried, but couldn't lay a glove on Byrnes. However, he soon met his match in the person of the new police commissioner,  Theodore Roosevelt. TR wanted to clean house, and he did, starting with Byrnes. TR was a high-minded progressive who wanted a professional, depoliticized, and above all, an honest department. He upgraded procedures, enhanced the use of telephones and introduced mobility to the NYPD with his adoption of a bicycle squad. In a short period of time, he transformed the department. Following the letter of the law, Roosevelt closed every saloon in the city over the summer of 1895, leading to his achieving unprecedented heights of unpopularity. He resigned two years later. The reform efforts of the TR and the Lexow Committee affirmed that the department should be clean and honest. However, within a few years, it was back to business as usual with saloonkeepers, prostitutes, and small-timers kicking back to the police. The gangs and violence that once was the exclusive purview of the Irish were replaced by newcomers, the Jews and Italians, who now predominated on the lower east side. The newcomers were rougher and tougher. When the city sent its first Italian-American detective to Palermo to research the criminal records of various gang members, he was gunned down in the Sicilian capital. Thomas Petrosino was the only on duty city policeman ever to die on foreign soil. By the end of the Gilded Age, both the NYPD and the Mafia were established, powerful organizations.