- During the Gilded Age, New York City was a real-life Gotham.

While the ultra-wealthy lived comfortably in their Fifth Avenue mansions, thousands of children relied on petty crime to survive and slept on the street just blocks away.

One of those children was George Appo.

The first time he was thrown into a jail cell, he was only three years old.

He would return to prison many times as a youth picking pockets, an adult running one of the biggest cons in the United States, and finally as a destitute outcast whose allies had turned against him.

But his testimony exposing police corruption helped transform New York City policing forever.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History."

(bright lively music) This season of "Rogue History" is brought to you by "Crime and Punishment in America," a new four-part documentary from PBS.

More on that later.

George Appo didn't have an easy childhood.

He was born in 1856 to an Irish mother and a Chinese father.

At the time, Irish and Chinese people faced discrimination and poverty, often living side by side on the same streets in the same distressed neighborhoods.

By 1859, George's family was regarded as an assimilation success story, but behind the scenes, his parents fought violently.

One day, their fight spilled over into a neighboring apartment where his father, Quimbo, stabbed their landlady to death.

The landlady's husband accosted George's mother, Catherine, who fought back, landing Catherine and young George in jail.

Quimbo claimed self-defense, but ultimately became the first Asian person convicted of a capital crime in New York City.

Catherine sent George to live with a family on Donovan's Lane, one of the most impoverished streets in Five Points, Lower Manhattan.

It was 19th-century New York at its darkest: tenements, disease, and pickpockets around every corner.

Charles Dickens himself was shocked by the conditions there, exclaiming, "All that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here."

This was the New York that earned the real-life nickname, Gotham.

Even if George had stayed on the straight and narrow, the racism and inequality of the era likely would've consigned him to a life of backbreaking manual labor at best.

But as it was, George never attended a single day of school.

Childhood was not yet a protected category, and Gotham was every kid for himself.

It wasn't long before he made his true home in the streets.

Joining the up to 15,000 New York City street children, often called urchins or guttersnipes, who begged, scavenged, and stole to survive.

George started selling newspapers at nine and learned to pickpocket from other kids by 11.

By 15, he was caught red-handed picking a businessman's pocket.

As punishment, he was sentenced to join the crew of the school ship, Mercury.

The Mercury was an experiment in juvenile incarceration, where child convicts would learn valuable nautical skills on their voyage to the West Indies, Brazil, and the coast of Africa, rather than sitting in prison.

This was a progressive reform long before the so-called Progressive Era, but the ship was overcrowded and poorly managed, and the conditions only reinforced the type of life that children already knew.

When the ship docked back in New York, a group including Appo escaped.

Just days later, Appo was back pickpocketing on Donovan's Lane.

This was his world, and he spoke its language.

A touch was a victim.

A stall was an accomplice who distracted the touch.

A beat was a pick's claimed territory.

This wasn't random theft, but a trade with its own codes, techniques, and hierarchies.

While a pickpocket risked arrest if he strayed outside his beat, his relationship with the police was more, shall we say, complex.

Some officers were known as percentage coppers, meaning they looked the other way as long as they got a cut of the pick's proceeds.

Police would confront a pickpocket, but rather than arrest him, demand money in exchange for protection, a practice known as registering pickpockets.

Cops also collected similar fees from gambling houses, opium dens, and brothels.

Higher-ups in the police department knew all about it.

In fact, corruption was a quietly sanctioned part of the city's policing strategy.

The relatively new NYPD viewed getting dirty as the price of controlling Gotham's underworld.

Registered pickpockets, for example, could be kept out of the wealthier parts of the city, above the so-called deadline of Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, by the percentage coppers who knew them.

They were also expected to return stolen goods on command and inform on their collaborators when asked.

As George Appo rose through this economy, he encountered police constantly, sometimes as accomplices and other times as enemies.

Then Appo landed on the wrong side of that coin and was sentenced to the first of many stints in adult prison, Sing Sing, the infamous stone fortress 30 miles up the Hudson River.

It was this prison that inspired the phrase "sent up the river" and the same state penitentiary that held his father.

Sing Sing was bad, and George's years there were some of the worst in its history.

More than 1,600 men were crammed into a prison with 1,200 cells and forced to perform hard labor without pay.

Eventually, George was sent upstate to a prison called Clinton, but some things never changed.

Corruption was endemic behind bars too, with some inmates receiving special privileges.

George wasn't so lucky.

He was caught reading a newspaper, which was contraband, and tossed into solitary confinement by a violent guard named Haggerty, who was known for hanging inmates by their arms from an overhead pipe and beating them.

The inmates called it "Haggerty's Christmas Tree."

When George was released from Clinton, he went to the press and told them about the brutality of the guards.

It was the first time George opened his mouth to expose bad behavior of authorities, but it wouldn't be his last.

Trying to turn a new leaf, Appo went looking for legitimate work, but was turned away as soon as employers learned where he'd been.

He eventually wandered back into the opium dens he visited as a teenager.

But by this time, he was an adult and soon met criminals operating at a much higher level than the street pickpockets.

They made more money with less risk of arrest, so George set out to learn their trade.

George became involved in the granddaddy of confidence games, the green goods scam.

Here's how it worked.

Scammers sent letters claiming they'd gotten hold of the U.S.

Treasury's currency printing plates, which enabled the con men to sell perfect counterfeit money at a steep discount.

This get-rich-quick scheme not only attracted criminals, but also anyone in need of a quick infusion of cash.

The victim was brought into a hotel room where $1,000 in real cash was displayed.

After paying 300, they were handed the satchel.

But while they were distracted, the satchel was swapped for another one full of sawdust.

George's job was to escort the mark to and from the hotel, warning them not to open the satchel before returning home, and that getting caught with counterfeit currency meant 15 years in federal prison.

The beauty of it was that the target, being engaged in a criminal enterprise, could never go to the police for help.

That made it the most lucrative swindle in the game, as the famous detective Allan Pinkerton put it, "The boss racket of the whole confidence business."

As the enterprise grew, the gangs running it developed a closer relationship with New York's crooked cops who protected the route for them.

Naturally, in exchange for a cut, sometimes as high as 50%.

The scam also needed financiers to front the cash, and it found them among crooked Gilded Age elites looking for an easy payout.

Green goods, in other words, revealed the whole extent of corruption in New York.

For eight years, George Appo was right at the center of it.

Of course, green goods was not entirely without risk.

In February of 1893, one of Appo's deals went bad, real bad.

A pair of victims caught onto the scheme, and as one reached out to shake George's hand, the other fired a bullet into George's temple.

Shooting out his right eye, he wore a glass eye from then on.

In the hospital, his own gang boss sent someone to rough him up, which soured Appo on the enterprise.

Then he was hauled back to prison.

The shooting drew press attention and piqued the interest of the criminal justice and political reformers who were fed up with police corruption.

In 1894, those reformers succeeded in launching a state senate inquest into police corruption.

It was chaired by a senator named Clarence Lexow, and it went after the NYPD.

The Lexow committee heard testimony from nearly 700 witnesses and produced more than 10,000 pages of testimony.

But what it needed was someone who could explain in plain terms how the criminal economy actually worked and which cops were getting paid.

George Appo was that someone.

In 1894, fresh out of prison for at least the seventh time, George was approached on the street by two government agents who told him they'd been sent to take him dead or alive.

Appo refused to name names, but he didn't hesitate to describe how the green goods scam worked, including the role of cops.

His testimony shocked the public and helped the committee's efforts to reform the police.

The Lexow committee resulted in the firing of the police chief and a total rewriting of department rules.

The days in which each captain ran his precinct as he pleased and the law was whatever he worked out with the criminals on his beat were over.

For Appo, the results were more mixed.

On one hand, he was famous.

The Boston Globe called him the king of confidence men, and the New York World named him among the people who made the history of 1894.

On the other hand, the underworld now suspected George was working with the authorities.

He was barred from the opium dens.

His old partners cut him off, career criminals and crooked cops alike.

By historian Timothy Gilfoyle's account, he was attacked at least six times during the ensuing years, including a severe knife attack.

The day after that assault, Appo experienced a turn of events that could only have happened in the 1890s.

A Broadway theater producer recruited Appo to star in a new melodrama called "In the Tenderloin."

He would play himself, a green goods steerer working the con on stage for a paying audience.

You see, the play took off because America was in the middle of its first true crime boom.

This was the age of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show with authentic soldiers and even Native Americans who participated in Custer's Last Stand.

Theaters now placed real cowboys, real boxers, and now real crooks on stage.

Audiences wanted to see the underworld, and George, with his glass eye and his scars, was the genuine article.

The play toured the country, but not surprisingly, the producers stiffed George on his pay.

When the run ended, George had nothing to fall back on.

Over the next two years, he was repeatedly set up, provoked into fights, and then charged with assault.

And the reformers who had been so eager for his testimony did nothing to help.

On Christmas Eve of 1896, alone and unraveling, George was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and he ran into someone unexpected: his father.

Having spent most of the previous 40 years in state custody, by the time George found Quimbo on the ward, he was delusional and broken.

He would die there and be buried in an unmarked grave.

But George found a peace at Matteawan that the prisons had never offered, declared sane and released in 1899.

He decided to go straight for real this time.

Eventually, he found a job with a crime prevention organization, making a few dollars a month investigating the same opium dens he'd once frequented.

A true child of Gotham, George Appo's revelations helped transform policing in the city, but when his 15 minutes of fame were up, he died as anonymous as the immigrant poor he'd grown up among, most of whom left no record at all, except George left 99 unpublished pages of a memoir, and they're the only reason we can tell his story today.

If you want to learn more about George Appo, don't forget to check out "Crime and Punishment in America," a new four-part documentary series that tells the sweeping story of our criminal justice system from the colonial era to today.

(soft contemplative music)