No one knows as much about the city they live in like a high ranking police officer. When he or she first joins the force, the geography is the easiest thing to understand. Geography is stable. Any changes to it occur slowly: a new building here, a new park over there, a street is renamed, maybe a new bridge goes up and an old one comes down. But it takes time, lots of time, to fully understand the temperament of the local citizens as well as these officers do--for they are the baby sitters of the city; watching over the rich and the poor, young and old, the losers and the winners, and the givers and the takers. They have to separate the liars from the truth-tellers, and punish the wrong-doers. Sometimes, the truth of a human being lies at the end of a long and perilous investigative path with more wrong turns than right ones.Although they see the good and the bad, the bad they see is prolific and nefarious. In this treasured and forgotten book, the imaginative reader will travel back in time and place to New York City during the 1880s. Your guides will be 15 Police Captains, who reveal the least understood part of American history, social history All fifteen detective stories presented are the memorable and unmemorable crimes of everyday life as it was 132 years ago. This includes gas-pipe toting jewelry store robbers; a degenerate son who rose from river thief to pirate captain aboard a stolen yacht renamed Satan; the bloody aftermath of a Chinese sailor who returns home to his Irish wife, his prized parrots, and their younger tenant; the story of how three men were executed for the murder of an old peddler who shared his food with them. Saving the best for last is the extraordinary story of a young girl with an earnest heart, who was tossed around and discarded by her caretakers, but triumphs in the end.This is not just a true crime book, it is fifteen lessons on what life was like in a city known worldwide, during an era as mysterious to us as human nature.