Five Points Gang

The Five Points Gang was a criminal street gang of primarily Irish-American origins, based in the Five Points of Lower Manhattan, New York City, during the late 19th and early 20th century. Paul Kelly, born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, was an Italian American who founded the Five Points Gang. It included some who later became prominent criminals in their own right, including Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, and Lucky Luciano. Five Points The area of Manhattan where four streets – Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Mosco), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water (now nonexistent) – converged was known as the "Five Points". Mulberry, notorious for slum tenements, was one street down from the Five Points. This area, now the present-day location of Chinatown, lay between Broadway and the Bowery. By the 1820s, this district had been a center of settlement for poor immigrants and was considered a slum area of run-down wood frame and brick dwellings, warehouses and commercial enterprises dating from the late 18th century and early 19th century, populated by mostly poor English and Scots-Irish with increasing waves of German, Welsh and Irish refugees by the 1840s.