Saturday, November 26, 2022

Howe and Hummel.

Museum of the City of New York

William Howe and Abraham Hummel were the most successful criminal lawyers in Gilded Age New York. With a combination of skill, showmanship, and unethical practices, they defended most of the city’s significant criminals and many of its murderers. Whether they won or lost, Howe and Hummel made every trial sensational.

Here are a few of the many accused murderers defended by Howe and Hummel:

Defendant Victim Year Story
James Logan Charles M Rogers 1869
The Rogers Murder.
Jacob Rosenzweig Alicd Bowlsby 1871
The Great Trunk Mystery.
Billy Forester Benjamin Nathan 1871
Who Killed Benjamin Nathan?
Edward Reinhardt Mary Reinhardt 1879
The Silver Lake Mystery.
Thomas McCabe Catherine McCabe 1882
A Boy Murderer.
Dan Driscoll Breezy Garrity 1886
Murder Among the Whyos - Part 1.
Daniel Murphy Dan Lyons 1887
Murder Among the Whyos - Part 2.
Hannah Southworth Stephen Pettus 1889
Avenging Her Honor.
Mickey Sliney Robert Lyons 1891
The Confessions of Mickey Sliney.

1 comments :

Howard Brown says:
October 31, 2026 at 6:44 AM

Bob...according to a newspaper report in the New York Herald, December 29, 1894, Abe Hummel, not Inspector Alexander Williams, came up with the phrase, Tenderloin, to describe the 29th Precinct in New York City....here's the article: ORIGIN OF “TENDERLOIN.”The Term Invented by Lawyer Hummel and First Published in the Herald.At the Lexow investigation yesterday Inspector Williams incidentally remarked, when on the witness stand, that a certain morning newspaper originated the word “Tenderloin” for the old Twenty-ninth precinct, now the Nineteenth. Augustine E. Costello, who had fallen foul of the Inspector over the “Tenderloin,” asked Lawyer A. H. Hummel if he would state the facts in the case, as the name first appeared in the Herald, and Mr. Hummel, in reply, wrote the following interesting letter to Mr. Costello:— “The creation of the word ‘Tenderloin,’ as applied to the uptown precinct, occurred in the Coroners’ Office before Richard Flanagan, then Coroner, when the Coroners’ court was held in the residential building on the northeast corner of Houston and Mulberry streets during a lull in the proceedings incidental to an inquest, my senior partner, Mr. Howe, the then Captain Williams, you and I being present. “We were pleasantly chaffing one another when Captain Williams jokingly remarked that if I did not behave myself he would take me out of Delmonico’s some evening, where he often saw me eating a juicy tenderloin steak. I quickly retorted that the Captain had a juicy tenderloin in his own precinct. The sally evoked laughter from Williams with the others, and you, who represented the Herald at Police Headquarters at the time, felicitously hit on the incident, and in your report of the proceedings depicted what had occurred. “This was the christening by the newspapers from that day of the old Twenty-ninth precinct as the ‘Tenderloin’ precinct. “Yours very sincerely, A. H. HUMMEL.”

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