Tag Archives: Martin Scorsese  The True Story of Bill the
Butcher  Picture by Simon Hsu aka Citizen5010 on DeviantArt  In
Martin Scorsese’s 2002 movie Gangs of New York,  Daniel Day-
Lewis played a character named Bill the Butcher. In the movie,
Bill the Butcher was  a Protestant political leader, as well as
the head of a gang called the “Nativists”.  Scorsese’s movie was
based off of a book written back in 1926, also entitled The
Gangs of New York, a non-fiction recounting of the seamier sides
of New York City during from around 1830 up until the early
1900′s. The book itself reads like yellow-journalism, with the
story being torrid enough to keep one interested, but so
fantastic at times that it makes it difficult to believe. I’m
not saying the book is untrue, per se, but merely that it’s a
product of its time, as it bases many of its accounts on various
magazines and newpapers of the era, and not all of them had the
journalistic ethics to which were so accustomed to today. There
are enough verifiable facts