In the gay ’90s, Crazy Butch was one of the youngest criminals on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Legend has it that Butch was abandoned by his parents when he was only eight years old, and as a result, Butch lived on the streets and became, what was known at the time, a “street kid”.

One day, Butch was scavenging the streets looking for food to eat, when he came across a dog, which was also abandoned. Butch took the dog under his wing and named him “Rabbi” because the dog was very smart.

Butch started teaching Rabbi “tricks”, but not the usual tricks that kids would teach their dogs. When Butch saw an old woman carrying a tote bag, he told the rabbi, “Go look.” And so the rabbi would do, lunging at her bag and ripping it from the startled woman’s arm. Then the rabbi, bag clenched in his mouth, would run to the corner of Willett Street and Stanton Street, where Butch would be waiting. Butch would get the contents of the bag and the rabbi would get a nice big bone, one of which Butch always kept in his pocket, in case a mark suddenly appeared.

Butch and Rabbi were so successful in their robberies that other street urchins began to follow them, so they too could learn the tricks of the trade. Soon Butch had his own gang of pre-teen and teen delinquents, which he called the “Crazy Butch Gang”.

When Butch had accumulated enough money, he bought himself a huge bike; not only for transportation, but to be used as an instrument for the next scheme of it. Butch was pedaling his bike through the busy streets of lower Manhattan, followed by his gang and the rabbi. When Butch thought the time was right, he would crash his bike into an unsuspecting pedestrian. Instead of apologizing to the fallen lady, Butch would jump off his bike and start berating his victim with comments like, “What are you blind or something? Old bag!”

Almost immediately, a curious crowd would form a circle around Butch and his victim. As unsuspecting onlookers pondered Crazy Butch’s situation, Butch’s gang, consisting of 10 to 15 incorrigible kids, slipped through the crowd, picking every pocket in sight. The rabbi would take the usual bag from him, usually from the same person Butch had dumped on the pavement. The gang members would then disperse in different directions. They would meet later at their headquarters, a small apartment on the third floor of Forsyth Street, to split the winnings.

As Butch and his gang began to get older and bolder, they attracted the attention of Paul Kelly’s Five Points Gang, who ruled the same neighborhood where Crazy Butch had been robbing. Apparently, Butch’s gang had victimized some relatives of the Five Points Gang, and one of the Five Pointers himself was rumored to have been robbed by the Crazy Butch Gang.

Butch soon heard that the Five Pointers were after him and his gang, so one summer day Butch decided to test how good his gang’s defenses were at his Forsyth Street apartment. Butch, not the brightest of fools, crept up the stairs and then, screaming like a banshee, stormed into his gang’s apartment and fired a revolver in each hand. His gang initiates, most of whom were napping, were taken completely by surprise. One of the gang members, Little Kishky, was sitting on the windowsill with the window open. Little Kishky fell backwards out of the window onto the pavement three stories below. It’s unclear if Crazy Butch paid Little Kishky’s hospital bills.

As the Crazy Butch Gang grew older, in order to neutralize the Five Pointers that were constantly pursuing them, Butch’s gang joined forces with the Monk Eastman Gang of 2000, which was constantly at war with Paul Kelly’s Five Pointers.

This worked fine for a while until Butch made the mistake of falling for a thief named The Darby Kid. Butch loved The Darby Kid, and apparently The Darby Kid loved Butch. However, The Darby Kid had a jealous boyfriend named Harry the Soldier, who was always packing. Harry the Soldier caught up with Butch and shot him dead, sending The Darby Kid straight into Harry the Soldier’s arms.

With the loss of their leader, the Crazy Butch Gang broke up for good. Some left on their own, and some were absorbed by other Lower East Side gangs. One of the Crazy Butch Gang that rose to the top was Big Jack Zelig, known to the police as “The Toughest Man in New York City.” Big Jack took over the Eastman gang after Monk Eastman was sent to prison for robbery, and Monk’s successor, Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, was shot and killed on Coney Island. But unfortunately, on October 15, 1912, Zelig was shot to death at the age of 24, while riding the 2nd Avenue streetcar.

There is no record of what happened to Rabbi the bag snatching dog.