The Rhodes Gang was an American street gang based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

at the turn of the 20th century. The group was one of several smaller

Hell's Kitchen Hell's Kitchen, also known as Clinton, is a neighborhood on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is considered to be bordered by 34th Street (or 41st Street) to the south, 59th Street to the north, Eighth Avenue to the ea ...

gangs affiliated with the

Gopher Gang The Gopher Gang was an early 20th-century New York street gang who counted among its members Goo Goo Knox, James "Biff" Ellison, and Owney Madden, born in England of Irish ancestry. Based in the Irish neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, the Gopher Gan ...

, all of whom were almost constantly fighting among each other, among these including The Gorillas and the Parlor Mob. They were known, at times, to briefly put aside their differences when police attempted to interfere in gang fights and authorities found the area impossible to control. The membership of the Rhodes Gang, like many other rival gangs, quickly dropped following the breakup of the Gophers by railroad detectives of the

New York Central Railroad The New York Central Railroad was a railroad primarily operating in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St. Louis in the Mid ...

in 1910. The New York Police Department soon began efforts to rid the city of the remaining street gangs and, by 1916, the Rhodes Gang and the other

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

-based gangs had disbanded permanently. Federal Writers' Project. ''New York City: Vol 1, New York City Guide''. Vol. I. American Guide Series. New York: Random House, 1939. (pg. 156) The gang was referenced in the historical novels ''A Long Line of Dead Men: A Matthew Scudder Mystery'' (1999) by

Lawrence Block Lawrence Block (born June 24, 1938) is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York-set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Ma ...

and Michael Walsh's ''And All the Saints: A Novel'' (2003).

References

{{Organized crime groups in New York City Former gangs in New York City Irish-American gangs Irish-American culture in New York City