John “Shanghai Chicken” Devine

            On May 14, 1873, a large crowd assembled in front of the County Jail on Broadway Street near Kearny as 100 privileged ticket holders entered the facility to witness the hanging of John “Shanghai Chicken” Devine. Two years earlier, almost to the day, Devine had robbed and murdered  August Kamp in Visitacion Valley. When he went to his death, he was the twenty-first man to ascend the gallows in San Francisco up to that time.

            Devine, a County Warterford, Ireland native, had first arrived in San Francisco in 1861  as a 21 year old deckhand aboard the American ship Young America.. The nature of his arrival portended what his life was to be in San Francisco. Devine spent his last few days aboard ship in irons because of his proclivity to fight with his mates. And he celebrated his arrival on shore by getting in one last fight on the wharf with a shipmate named McIntyre.

Devine soon exhausted his accumulated wages in waterfront dives and shipped out again on a deep water cruise. He returned to San Francisco in 1863 vowing never to go to sea again. Instead he became a boarding house runner for a crimp (shanghaier) named Johnny Walker. Here his fighting skills were put to good use silencing sailors who objected to being shanghaied.

It was then that he earned his nickname, “the Shanghai Chicken.” One day, several sporting men were discussing the prospects of an upcoming prizefight and Johnny Walker is said to have told the group “I have a little Shanghai chicken [pointing to Devine] that none you fellers know of who can clean Paddy (West) out in no time.”  The fight for a purse of $100 was arranged at a corral on Vallejo Street. Devine won the match and the nickname “Shanghai Chicken” would remain with him to his end and beyond. (The appellation “chicken” did not have its current meaning but rather referred to the reputed reckless fearlessness of Shanghai roosters.)

After three more professional fights which had mixed outcomes, Devine gave up the ring and concentrated on his sailor recruitment activities and any criminal opportunity that came his way. Most often, his enterprises were fueled by any liquor at hand.  His record of his encounters with the law is truly amazing. In March 1865 after a rash of strong arm robberies committed with the use of brass knuckles, a plainclothes officer was assigned to stake out the area near the waterfront.

One night the officer saw a man walking along Jackson Street as another man stepped out of a doorway and hit him in the back of the head. As the assailant, who turned out to be Devine, stooped over his victim the officer confronted him. Devine ran but was run down and captured. He was found to have brass knuckles in his possession. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon instead of robbery because the officer had moved in before all of the elements of a robbery had been completed. At trial it was ruled there was no proof Devine had actually used the brass knuckles so the charge was reduced simple assault and battery.

Shortly thereafter, Devine had a difficulty with a prize fighter named Tommy Chandler who he assaulted with an iron bar in “Shanghai” Kelly’s Boarding House on Pacific Street near Drumm. Chandler was too quick for Devine and escaped without injury. In a later street encounter Chandler slapped Devine’s face whereupon Devine pulled an Allen pepperbox revolver and shot his adversary twice. Devine was arrested on a charge of attempted murder but at trial the jury could not agree on a verdict, so he was allowed to plea to a charge of  assault and battery for which he received a six month sentence in the county jail.

A month after his release, Devine was again arrested on a charge of armed robbery and was again allowed to plea to a charge of assault and battery, receiving a sentence of eight months in the County Jail, with a month tacked on because he had been armed with a weapon. In one of his stints in jail Devine became acquainted with a prostitute named Mary Hogan with whom he set up housekeeping and had a son. He is also supposed to have managed a small stable of other prostitutes. 

In June 1867 Devine was arrested for the street robbery of an elderly lady named Mary Martin at Merchant and Battery streets. Friends went his bail and when the case came to trial, Mary Martin was nowhere to be found. The thinking was that she had left town under threats of violence. While out on bond on this case, Devine was arrested for kidnapping and robbing a ship’s employee who was in a pay dispute with the vessel’s captain. For some reason Devine was convicted not of kidnapping but of assault and battery, and sentenced to jail for ninety days.

Pending this trial, he was again charged with robbery in another case, but again the witness could not be found when the case came up. (Witness intimidation is not a modern invention). In August Devine was again arrested, this time for assaulting a man who complained of being robbed in Mary Hogan’s house. For this offense Devine received a 50 day sentence and a $100 fine.

Two months later, Devine was again arrested,  this time with two other men, for abducting a woman named Martha McDonald in the Mission near 16^th Street where the bridge crossed Mission Creek. Devine was able to secure his release on the grounds that the records showed he was incarcerated in jail at the time. It was later revealed that he had been a jail trusty at the time with in-and-out privileges.. In all Devine was arrested 79 times between 1865 and 1871. Most of the charges were for drunk and fighting but there were also serious charges lodged against him. He was arrested three times for robbery, and once each for attempted murder, kidnapping, burglary, mayhem, grand larceny and attempted robbery, for which he spent but a few months in the county jail.

In summing up Devine’s criminal career in an1872 account, the Daily Morning Call commented that   “how he [Devine] managed to escape the State Penitentiary has always been a mystery to those who devote their attention to the acts of criminals.”  One suspects his connection with the crimping trade may have had something to do with it.

 From its founding as a city, San Francisco had never had a large enough pool of recruits to man the sailing vessels upon which the commerce of the city depended. Unlike more densely populated regains in the east, it was difficult get replacements for sailors who left the sea upon arriving in port.  For the entire 19^th Century San Francisco was the only really big city on the Pacific Coast from which recruit seamen could be drawn. Crimping, or shanghaiing, had been a long-established trade in many port cities but in nineteenth century San Francisco it took on an aspect of near-respectability. (In a way, the situation was analogous to the current feature of illegal immigration in which business interests and the authorities wink at violations of the immigration law to keep the wheels of business turning.) Nobody much questioned where the sailors came from as long as the ships were manned.

Police officers now regularly enforce the laws against defrauding innkeepers and cab drivers to settle fare and restaurant disputes. Why are there no equivalent special laws to protect other service industries?  Few remember now that the laws against defrauding innkeepers and cab drivers were originally enacted to arrest shanghaied sailors who might have escaped from the toils of boarding house keepers or hack drivers who were transporting them against their will to the ships where they had been consigned.  Devine was very much a part of that world and probably benefited from the official/business relationship that supported the crimping industry. Little else explains his immunity from any real punishment considering the number of times he was arrested.

Devine’s decline began in1868. Devine and his bosom buddy, Johnny Nyland, were mourning (or celebrating) the news of the death of one of their compadres in Peru by getting drunk and going from sailor’s  boarding house to sailor’s boarding house, staging impromptu boxing matches with the inhabitants as their victims. Everything went fine until they went to Edwin Lewis’ house at 41 Vallejo Street where the seamen decided to fight back. Nylan armed himself with a carving knife from the kitchen and put his adversaries to route.

Next the duo went to Billy Maitland’s Boarding House, Nyland taking the knife with him, to continue with their sport. There they ran into a tiger. In the resulting fray,  Maitland was able to disarm Nylan, and when Devine came to the help of his friend, Maitland took a swipe at him with the knife and Devine’s left hand was severed at the wrist.

After that, it was all downhill for Devine. He recovered from his injury and friends raised a subscription of $750 to establish him in a news stand. But Devine drank up the money and was soon back to his old tricks to the extent that he was able with a missing left hand.

One day in May 1871, Devine ran across August Kamp, a recent arrival in the city with whom he struck up a conversation. Devine promised to get Kamp a berth on a ship and borrowed $20 from him. When Kamp demanded repayment, Devine put him off. Finally, on May 14, Kamp became more insistent and Devine agreed to pay him if Kamp accompanied him to his mother’s ranch in the South Eastern part of the city. (In his incarnation as a boxer, Devine had trained at a camp in Viscitation Valley near the southern limit of the city.)

The two boarded a Potrero and Bayview street Railway car at Post and Montgomery, and proceeded along the recently completed Long Bridge across Mission Bay and out Railroad Avenue (Third Street) to the line’s terminus at 34^th Avenue (Jamestown).  From there the pair proceeded on foot out San Bruno Road past the Five Mile House at Wilde. Once past the rest stop, Devine suggested a short cut through the fields that would cut a mile off their trip. Kamp, though complaining, agreed, and they made their way over the top of Candlestick (KYA) Hill.

At the summit, and out of sight of habitations, as Kamp ducked to go under a fence,  Devine shot him in the ear with a pistol he had brought along. After robbing his victim of $40 Devine made his way back to the Barbary Coast where he spent his ill-gotten gains, regaling his companions in drunken indiscretion with the fact that he had shot a “Dutchman.”

But Kamp was not dead. Not yet. Though severely wounded, he struggled to San Bruno Road and with the help of two good Samaritans who found him lying in the field made his way back to the Five Mile House from where he was transported to the hospital in the City Prison at Kearny and Washington streets.

The next day, realizing that the heat was on, Devine secreted himself aboard the outbound steamer William G. Hunt at Meigg’s Wharf in hopes of fleeing the jurisdiction. There he was discovered by Harbor District Police Officer John Colter . “You are a God damned son of a bitch,” Devine told Colter, “but I think you are a friend of mine; you will be the means of having me hung.”

Devine was tried and convicted after a lengthy trial. Two years of appeals followed while he sat in the County Jail. After several escape attempts, Devine was placed in a cell within view of the deputies’ office. In May 1873, his appeals exhausted, Devine prepared for his execution. As his time neared, he heeded the counsel of spiritual advisors and in the end re-embraced his childhood faith.

Sheriff James Adams located his son in the Asylum of the Ladies Protective and Relief Society and brought him to the jail on Tuesday night for a last visit with his father. According to a contemporary news account, Devine, who had never shown remorse for any of his victims, “wept over him and warned him by the example of his own life.”

At 1pm on May 14, 1873, as a crowd of more than a 1000 milled around outside the jail on Broadway, John Devine mounted the scaffold inside the facility from where the jeers and laughter of the crowd outside could be heard.  The trap was sprung and in a few minutes Devine was dead. His death was unlamented, but in the end there was a modicum of respect from at least from one quarter.  “Devine Dies Game,” read the headline of the Daily Alta California in its report of his demise.