The portion of Bleecker Street, New York, in the vicinity of Broadway, is rapidly rivaling Greene and Mercer streets, in the number and quality of the female harpies who make it their cruising ground. Not a night passes without the arrest of one or more drunken prostitutes in this locality. They are of the lowest grade, and almost always noisy and disorderly. If Sodom surpassed New York in wickedness, no wonder it was destroyed.

Illustrated Police News, December 7, 1871.

Mollie Hoey, the well-known New York sneak thief and shoplifter, makes a break for liberty at Cleveland, Ohio.[more]

Crawled Out.

Mollie Hoey, one of the shrewdest and most daring of shoplifters, went to Cleveland a few days ago and made a systematic round of the principal stores in one of which she took a $400 shawl. She confines her operations to silks and costly fabrics. She is jailed and her husband, who was arrested, but is out on bail, prowled about the jail. Mollie kept apart from her fellow prisoners. The night of Oct. 12 she escaped from the jail. It was a daring exploit. She enlisted a boy named Regenaur, who recently escaped from jail and has just been recaptured, to aid her by watching the turnkey. She removed the bricks from the wall near a window and made a hole 3 feet square. She carried the removed bricks to the fourth floor, and when not at work covered the hole with an oil cloth the color of the wall. She must have had to remove some of her clothing to crawl through the hole, but she did it at night, and although she was compelled to crawl out in view of a busy street she was not detected. A buggy in waiting drove rapidly away with her and the boy Regenaur. Officers are now scouring the country to recapture her.

Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, October 31, 1886.