ANOTHER TAMMANY RING MAN COME TO GRIEF.

Evening Star, Issue 3463, 28 March 1874, Page 3

ANOTHER TAMMANY RING MAN COME TO GRIEF.

: Political scoundrels and • m unicipal thieves are having such bad times of it in the United States, that public life will very soon cease to be attractive in the eyes of clever rascals. With Tweed,' Ipgersoll, and Farrington expiating their offences, like common felons' in the Tombs, the risks of robbing civic treasuries or the national exchequer are becoming altogether too serious. But sometimes these crimes are enlivened by the perpetration of a little manslaughter, as iq the case of John Sharkey, who has been committed to take his trial for shooting Robert Dunn, but who has since made his escape. Sharkey was a power in the City and State of New Fork. He was able to, bring 1,200. votes to the poll in the Eighth Ward, which he lived ; and his career is worth relating, as an illustration of the qualities by men may vise to ia times of great

political corruption. He was originally a pickpocket, and he combined with this occupation that of a receiver of stolen goods. When the war broke out, his genius sought and found a wider sphere of personal usefulness. He became an energetic “county-jumper,” and in this pursuit, he amassed a modest fortune- £24,000. But Sharkey had a taste for gambling, and he dissipated his money as rapidly as he had procured it. Then he opened a billiard saloon, and took vO putting certain gold certificates into circulation, which, unfortunately for himself, proved to have been stolen. This brought him into difficulties, and led to his brief seclusion from public life, as also from the arena of municipal politics. When he emerged from compulsory retirement, he fell back upon his former profession as a pickpocket; still retaining his influence as a wirepuller and as a controller of 1,200 votes. But Sharkey was liable to fits of anger, and occasionally suffered from cerebral excitement. At such times, says a New York paper, “he would draw a small Derringer, which he always kept in his hip pocket, and move it nervously to and fro in his left hand* while he fingered the trigger with his right. '.Sometimes'he,would c&dr it, and’ then ;let the' hammer down with the muzzle pointed'* directly at : his companion’s head. It'was in the practice of this agreeable .manoeuvre that the ‘ accident’ occurred by which Robert Dunn met his death at the hands of his former friend and confriere” Once upon a time, when the roughs were in the ascendant in New York, a coroner’s jury would have returned a verdict of accidental death” in such a case, and Sharkey would have been escorted to the bar of the nearest hotel by a multi- - ' tude of applauding friends; but the i eputable classes in that city are so weary of the reign of rascaldom that there is every probability that Sharkey, when he is recaptured, will be sent to keep company with Tweed and other magnificent scoundrels in. the Tombs.