A Pickpocket's Tale

the long version

A Pickpocket's Tale is a fascinating true-crime story. Gilfoyle uses George Appo's unpublished memoirs to re-create the world of the nineteenth-century criminal in astonishing detail. George Appo was half Irish, half Chinese who became a pickpocket at the tender age of twelve. he was first arrested at age fourteen and sentenced to a year on a prison ship for juvenile offenders served . In and out of prisons, he became an expert pickpocket, making hundreds of dollars a night--the annual wage of a skilled laborer. By his early twenties he was a regular patron of New York's opium and prostitution dens. But despite many years in prison and being wounded several times he managed to die of old age at age seven-four.