Preface
Hey there! You’re listening to The Gargoyle podcast. I’m your host, Rian.
I’m so excited for this week’s episode, since I’m launching a new storytelling series called “Untold New York.” Today is the first episode in that series, in which I’ll be sharing the untold story of Night-Spike – a man considered to be New York’s first masked crime-fighter.
This story takes a lot of twists and turns, so I’ve invited a couple of friends who will help me keep the narrative on track. If you like true crime, detective stories, or New York City history – I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this story too.
Just a housekeeping note – you can read along to this story by visiting my Substack at thegargoyle.substack.com. The entire story transcript is posted [here].
Oh, and one other small disclaimer – this story is a work of fiction.
Alright, without further ado, let’s dive in to the story of Night Spike.
Introduction
[BUSTLING NEW YORK STREET]
If you ever find yourself near the old Mulligan Matchstick factory in Brooklyn, check out the strange mural on the alley-facing side of the building. Although decades of industrial fumes have damaged the original paint, you can still see the image in good daylight: the twenty-foot-tall, black-and-white profile of a masked man with seven spikes around the crown of his head.
Below the painting, faded lettering simply reads: “Night-Spike, New York Hero.” Otherwise, the mural is undated and unsigned. There is no brass plaque or historic marker to orient visitors. Oddly, though, you can often find small bouquets placed at the base of the wall.
Someone cares about this painting – but who?
After all, the character looking down at you is probably just an old mascot for a gin brand – or perhaps a grocery chain, back when bread cost five cents. Right? The more you look at him, you can almost see him on a vintage poster print, selling syrup, or aperitifs, cigarettes, or whatever else.
But what if there were more to the story? What if this “Night-Spike” was not only a real person – but a legendary figure in New York City crime-fighting lore? Would it pique your interest if in fact, there were more to this story than chipped paint on a factory wall?
If your answer to that question is “yes,” then pour yourself a nice drink, and get comfortable. We’re about to take a deep dive into a strange, untold chapter of New York City legend.
Part One
In the year 1939, New York was just starting to rebuild from the devastating Great Depression. The subway system was rapidly expanding and modernizing, uniting the far reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx (sorry, Staten Island). And above ground, a residential and commercial construction boom was beginning to transform New York into the “city that never sleeps.”
[BOOMING CONSTRUCTION]
Yet there were still a handful of sleepy corners left in town.
Our story begins at exactly one such sleepy corner, at West 91st Street and Watercourse Way on the Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson River. There, at precisely midnight on April 30, 1939, three masked men in trench coats stepped out of a green Packard 120 sedan and onto the sidewalk outside #808 Watercourse Way – the home of one Marie Soldano.
A fourth man stayed in the car – hands gripped to the steering wheel, eyes darting to the Rolex on his left wrist. Like any good getaway man, The Driver kept the engine running.
[CAR ENGINE PURRING]
The Lockpick (the smallest man in the group) approached the house first. He climbed the front steps and bent over the doorknob. One twist, a few clicks, and the door swung open.
[CREAKING WOOD]
The Fixer and The Muscle followed The Lockpick inside. They split up and searched the house; as they had expected, Miss Soldano was not home. Relaxed now, the men descended upon the darkened first-floor office. There, behind a screen in the fireplace, was their target – Miss Soldano’s cast-iron safe, holding $25,000 in its belly.
If that sounds like a small prize, just remember – that amount in 1939 would be more than half a million dollars today. Not bad, for a night’s work.
However, our smooth operators were about to swing-and-miss on consecutive curveballs. The first curveball was the safe itself.
The men had expected to find a Gibson safe – the popular American brand which, although dependable, could be cracked by seasoned thieves. But instead of the Gibson, the men found a Hugerrot – the 245-lb. European model with a vastly more intricate mechanism.
The Lockpick was good, but not that good. After ten futile minutes, the men held a whispered vote. Option #1 – blow the safe open, and wake up the whole neighborhood. Option #2 – transport the safe to a different location and blow it there. They chose option two, and laboriously wrestled the bulky safe out of the house and down the front steps.
Then came the second curveball. The Packard sedan was still there, engine running. But their Driver was gone. They dropped the safe.
[HEAVY OBJECT DROPPING]
Then, they heard it – a muffled shout, coming from the alley three houses up. The men sprinted and turned the alley corner. Twenty yards down, The Driver was on his stomach – hogtied with a gag stuffed between his teeth. The Driver thrashed, desperately trying to speak.
By the time the others understood his warning, it was too late. Two “pops” sounded from above. The Fixer and The Muscle groaned and collapsed next to The Driver. Then a dark figure dropped down from the fire escape, landing gracefully on the pavement.
Later, The Lockpick would describe the man as:
“Tall and athletic, like some kinda gymnast. He wore black. He had a mask over his whole head, with a buncha spikes on it.”
In the alley, this mystery man gestured at the trio on the ground, and then raised his compact weapon at TheLockpick.
“These are knock-out darts. You’ll live,” he said.
Then the third pop sounded, and The Lockpick’s world turned dark and dreamy.
***
[TYPEWRITER CLACKING]
The heist didn’t make the morning papers – but it was front page news in the evening editions. The New York Beacon ran the headline, “MASKED HERO BAGS BANDITS!”
Inside, Beacon crime reporter Doug Treadwell relayed the full story of the heist and the masked man who foiled it, including a police sketch based on The Lockpick’s description of the man. The article also quoted Police Chief Dana Marlowe, who said:
[FLASHBULBS, REPORTERS CLAMORING]
“Please, people! We are grateful that our four suspects are in custody, and that Miss Soldano’s home and possessions are now secure. However, I must remind EVERYONE that the City of New York does not condone vigilante justice. If any New Yorker feels unsafe, they need to use the callboxes and phone booths, and ring for police assistance.”
While the papers continued to stoke public curiosity, the PDNYC quietly hoped the masked man would disappear. Sure, he’d stopped a robbery-in-progress. But an amateur crime-fighter set a dangerous precedent. And besides, what if the man were a criminal himself? Perhaps some underworld intelligence had alerted him to the heist, and he’d wanted to interrupt it for his own gain.
The PDNYC waited anxiously. Then just as the story seemed to fade, the mystery man resurfaced.
Part Two
[MOTORBOAT, WHIRRING OVER WATER]
May 28, 1939. Another quiet city night, another vehicle creeping someplace it wasn’t supposed to be. Only this time, the vehicle wasn’t a sedan – it was a 25-foot steel boat with an outboard motor and a sunken cargo hold.
Two men stood at the fore – one stocky and bearded pilot, and one lanky kid (nineteen at most) with binoculars dangling from his wrist and a revolver on his waist. Behind them in the shallow cargo hold, burlap cloth covered up “the goods” – one ton of Mediterranean marble, looted from the Bayonne dockyards two months earlier.
The city had purchased thirty tons of the expensive stone to renovate the famed West Side Library. But the marble had never made it. Now, the same gang who’d lifted it was boating it into Manhattan, block by block, to unload to buyers who didn’t mind hot merchandise.
That was the plan, anyway. But when the boat pulled into the 58th Street slip, their usual pickup man wasn’t there. Instead, they saw a slim man in black, with strange spikes on his head.
[SUDDEN IMPACT AND LOUD THUDS]
In the blink of an eye, the two men were tied back-to-back and jammed up against the looted marble. The beefy pilot had been no match for the man’s athleticism, and the inexperienced kid had simply frozen. The man stood over them now. He reached for the kid’s waist, took the gun off him, and threw it in the water.
To the pilot, he said, “Tell Mickey I’m watching him.”
And to the kid he simply said, “Don’t ever let me see you out here again.”
Then the masked man leapt back onto the pier. But as he sprinted over the wood planks towards the alleys, a bright flash stunned him.
[SINGLE FLASHBULB]
***
The photo ran the following morning in The Beacon, under the headline, “HUDSON HERO BUSTS BLOCKHEADS.”
The Beacon’s Events Photographer, of all people, had wandered over to the pier after a museum gala, hoping for an artsy shot of the midnight river. By pure chance he caught the mystery man in full profile – including the seven spikes on his head – before the man pushed past him and disappeared into the night.
Upon seeing the man’s photo, The Beacon’s night editor suggested the nickname “Night-Spike,” which soon stuck in newsrooms around town. Meanwhile, the PDNYC held a press conference to denounce this latest outburst of vigilante heroism.
But the city was far too excited to listen.
Night and day, New Yorkers called the newspapers with tips and homespun theories on Night-Spike’s identity and motivations. The radio shows scrambled to work in the “Night-Spike angle” on their evening programs. And everywhere people went, they peeked around corners and down subway stairs, hoping they’d glimpse the anonymous crimefighter themselves.
Decades later, Matt de Maris, Chair of the Media Studies Department at Bronx University, has a theory about why “Night-Spike” fascinated New Yorkers at that time:
“People had never seen anything like this.
Sure, you had masked heroes in the popular imagination – like Zorro and The Lone Ranger. But those guys were riding horses and fighting train robbers in the desert – a long way from New York. Meanwhile, Night-Spike was mixing it up with safecrackers and smugglers right in the heart of the city.
Remember, Batman hadn’t even debuted yet - he would do so later in 1939. So yeah – a real-life, costumed crime-fighter who could fistfight? He became a cult hero.”
The PDNYC only amplified his cult hero status by releasing a WANTED poster offering $500 (over $10,000 in today’s money) for “information leading to the identification of one ‘Night-Spike.’” And if the rumors were to be believed, New York’s underworld was also offering rewards for information about the man who’d now ruined TWO potentially lucrative heists.
New York’s cops, robbers, and everyone in between waited eagerly for the next Night-Spike sighting. They wouldn’t have to wait long. Night-Spike surfaced again on the night of July 4, 1939. Only this time, he wasn’t interrupting a heist – he was saving a life.
Part Three
Details about this third public appearance come from Johnny O’Hare - the same nineteen-year-old kid Night-Spike had busted at the 58th Street Pier. The following is an excerpt from O’Hare’s statement to detectives on July 5, 1939:
“After my arrest on May 28, Mickey…”
That’s Mickey Owens, the notorious bootlegger and criminal gang leader.
“…Mickey sent word to lay low, which I did. Then on July 3, Mickey phones me. Says to meet him the next night. Tells me he’s gonna let me make up for getting busted.”
“Him and a driver pick me up. Then Mickey says we’re gonna talk where no one is watching – the Manhattan Bridge. The driver takes us there and lets us out halfway. We get on the pedestrian path, and start talking. Then, BAM! Mickey punches me in the gut. He starts screaming, asking if I sold out the gang to this Night-Spike guy!”
Johnny O’Hare’s testimony is pages long – so here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: Crime czar Mickey Owens was behind not only the failed marble smuggling, but also the failed safe heist weeks earlier. Paranoid that Night-Spike had infiltrated his gang, Mickey was now roughly interrogating all his men, including Johnny – the most junior member of his crew.
What Johnny didn’t know was that Mickey was also using him as bait to lure Night-Spike out of the shadows. Mickey knew he was being watched, and figured if he made it look like the kid’s life was in danger, then the masked goody two-shoes would come out of the shadows and try to be a hero.
Spoiler alert: Mickey was right.
Mickey Owens had Johnny O’Hare up against the Manhattan bridge guardrail when Night-Spike sprang out from behind a support column. “YOU!” Mickey roared. The crime boss dropped Johnny and lunged at Night-Spike. The two men grappled mightily for several minutes. Then, Johnny said in his police testimony, they disappeared.
Both men gone – having busted through a thin sheet of plywood covering a gap in the guardrail’s vertical bars. Johnny jumped to his feet up and looked over the railing just in time to see two bodies hit the water. In the distance, the city’s firework show threw red, white, and blue starbursts against the night sky.
[DAMPENED, DISTANT FIREWORKS]
***
The following day, Mickey Owens’ body washed up in a shallow inlet off of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The influential crime czar, dead at just 38 years old. But finding Mickey’s body was only half the solution to a two-piece jigsaw puzzle. The papers and radio shows dared to ask the question on everyone’s minds – could Night-Spike have survived the fall?
[PHONES RINGING]
Once more, the phone lines and mailboxes were jammed with reader theories and hypotheses. Some said they’d seen a man in all black, limping through Red Hook, Brooklyn, just hours after the incident. Others said they’d seen a motorboat heading downstream immediately after the fall. Still others swore that Night-Spike hadn’t fallen at all – he’d caught hold of a steel ledge and pulled himself to safety underneath the bridge girders.
As notorious and larger-than-life as Mickey Owens had been, people could nevertheless accept his death. But Night-Spike was just too cool to die, says Matt De Maris:
“Basically, it was the 1930s version of ‘Elvis isn’t dead.’”
“It’s all about the frame of reference at the time. What did people know? They knew The Lone Ranger and Zorro – and those guys NEVER died on their radio shows and dime novels. They might look dead, for a minute. But they always found a way to survive the train explosion, or leap away from the stagecoach before it tumbled into the gulch.
“So, for New Yorkers at the time, they really thought this character would come back. Heck, even Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock back from the dead.”
This unique “hero anxiety” as de Maris calls it, drove many of the Letters to the Editor which continued to flood the news over the following weeks. Some were optimistic and naively hopeful. A few were real and pragmatic. A minority are cruel. But one letter in particular stands out – a missive from Miss X of Brooklyn.
[HAUNTING PIANO MUSIC]
“Dear Beacon readers: I am the daughter of the hero called Night-Spike. Thank you for the many kind tributes in this paper – they have comforted me greatly. However, there have also been false rumors hinting that my father is a criminal, a mental patient, an undercover agent, or a violent sadist. He is none of these things.
This is the truth: In his youth my father was an acrobat who performed under the name Le Dague [“The Dagger”] in circuses on five continents before the age of 30. At age 31, he came to America, where he joined a new circus run by Michael Owens - before he took the name Mickey. The circus was poorly run, and Mickey mistreated the performers in his employ. Shoddy equipment led to many injuries – including my father’s near-fatal fall during a trapeze act.
When confronted, Mickey swore to pay my father’s medical bills and improve circus conditions. But true to his nature, Mickey then double-crossed my father and abandoned him on a Midwest tour. Desperate, penniless, and dependent on pain medicine, my father turned to cat burglary – which he became skilled at. While he stole to survive, Mickey leveraged his circus earnings into a smuggling empire.
Then, on the eve of my father’s 40th birthday, he received a vision imploring him to abandon his path and dedicate his life to God. The vision promised that if he could save 40 sinners like himself, that Mickey Owen’s empire would fall. It is this exact work my father has been doing in our city ever since.
He never meant to cause harm or fear. He only meant to help others who had strayed from the path. That is my testimony. Thank you again for the kind words.”
Wow - the letter from Miss X is compelling, and convincing. But then again, so are hundreds of the letters which the newspaper published from citizens claiming to know what happened to Night-Spike. How can anyone know which letters are true – and which are fiction?
In preparing for this episode, I followed up with the PDNYC Archival Office, to ask if any tips from the public had ever turned up promising leads. But my call was never returned.
In the end, I have to admit that I’m a realist – and the most probable explanation is that the man known as Night-Spike perished, along with the criminal leader he was fighting, in their tandem fall from the Manhattan Bridge into the East River.
Still, there’s one more piece to the puzzle, which leaves a very interesting door open. I’ll call upon Professor Matt de Maris one final time to explain:
“So, yeah - Night-Spike is mentioned in a couple of books and the occasional journalistic piece. But for the most part, New York City forgets about him.”
“Then, on April 7, 1947 – almost eight years to the day after his first known public appearance – there’s an explosion at the Mulligan Matchstick factory in Brooklyn.”
[EXPLOSION, FIRE CRACKLING]
“One hour into the fire-fighting and rescue operation, Lieutenant Jimmy Boswick notices a figure in all black run into the rear of the burning building.”
“The figure comes back out several minutes later with two people wrapped in a blanket. Lieutenant Boswick rushes to them, just as the figure in black flees the scene.”
“And Lieutenant Boswick swears the person has these weird spikes on their head…”
Even after looking into this story, I’m still a pragmatist. I think the real Night-Spike perished in 1939 – and this “volunteer fire-fighter” was simply a well-intentioned copycat. You know, wearing the costume to kind of keep the spirit of Night-Spike alive. But that’s just me.
You are perfectly free to believe anything else you want. Maybe that hero in the explosion was the real Night-Spike, healed from his 150-foot fall after years of rest and recuperation. Or maybe – the masked figure was Night-Spike’s daughter, the same one who wrote that mysterious Letter to the Editor eight years prior.
One thing’s for sure – less than a year after the Mulligan Matchstick explosion, the factory is rebuilt. And then, while everyone is home over the weekend, a mural appears on the back wall of the alley: Twenty feet tall, black-and-white, a masked figure with seven spikes around the crown of their head. The mural is unsigned, and un-dated. All it says underneath is this: “Night-Spike, New York Hero.”
It’s well worth checking out, if you should ever find yourself over in that part of Brooklyn. And who knows, maybe you’ll even meet another fan there, perhaps an admirer of Night-Spike’s legacy, stopping by to place a bunch of flowers at the base of his fading portrait.
Thank You & Acknowledgements
Hey guys, thanks so much for listening. That was the first story in my new series called “Untold New York.” Please let me know what you think. If you liked it, it would mean so much to me if you shared it with your friends.
To catch more from this series – and all my other creative work – just visit thegargoyle.substack.com. My site is always free to subscribe.
Special thanks this episode to my friend M.M.A., who helped with story development and voice talent. Special thanks also to Mrs. Rian Casey Cork, who lent voice talents and helped with story visuals. Lastly, thanks to Seamus McCoastie, for advising on the maritime aspects of this story.
Until next time, I am your host, Rian Casey Cork. Can’t wait to see you again soon for more “Untold New York” at The Gargoyle podcast.
Untold New York: The Story of Night-Spike, NYC's First Masked Hero