Queen of the Underworld
Name: Sophie Lyons
Also Known As: Queen of the Burglars, Queen of the Underworld, Madame DeVarney; many, many, many more.
Years Active: 1860s-1900s.
Claim to Infamy: Every type of theft imaginable, daring prison escape, a string of gangster husbands
In 1913, Sophie Lyons of 23rd Street, Detroit, crowned herself Queen. She'd been in a reflective mood lately, working on her memoirs, forcing her crimes, her travels, and her husbands into neat paragraphs. Over her (more or less) sixty-three years of life, she'd never asked anyone for the things she wanted. She was in the business of taking them herself. So when she decided on a byline for her memoir Why Crime Does Not Pay, she opted for Sophie Lyons, Queen of the Underworld.
“I was not quite six years old when I stole my first pocketbook,” Sophie reflected in the book. “I was very happy because I was petted and rewarded; my wretched stepmother patted my curly head, gave me a bag of candy, and said I was a “good girl.”” The Van Elkans household ran by a different set of rules than most other households in the 1850s. Not long after immigrating from Bavaria to New York, Sophie’s stepmother taught her how to steal. When she failed, she faced physical abuse. By age 12,
Sophie had been convicted of burglary and sent to the House of Refuge, a juvenile prison institution. Less than a year after her release, she was once again convicted of pickpocketing. An 1861 article from when she was arrested at age 13 observed that "She was a pretty and adroit little thing, and had often escaped punishment before by the irresistible air of innocence, or prettiness which she carried about her."
In the 1860s, Sophie came across a gentler and infinitely more cunning teacher: Fredericka Mandelbaum. 1860s New York knew "Marm" Mandelbaum as one of its most successful and powerful fences. In addition to receiving and selling contraband, Mandelbaum also developed a coterie of thieves, many of them women like Sophie. "Alas!" Sophie later lamented, "I knew her well--too well. A hundred, yes, perhaps near five hundred transactions I have had with her, little and big."
For all her lamenting, Sophie learned valuable lessons from Mandelbaum (whom she called "Mother”). Offloading stolen goods was easy at her place; she generally gave a fair price. Mandelbaum shelled out lots of money on quality attorneys to get her people out of trouble, and Sophie took note of the importance of good legal rep. At Marm’s luxe parties, Sophie mingled with her network of criminals (like Adam Worth, the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s James Moriarty). Thanks to the tutelage and support of Fredericka Mandelbaum, by her late teens Sophie had earned a reputation as a master pickpocket, shoplifter, and overall thief.
As she pilfered her way through the Five Boroughs, Sophie snagged her first husband. With good looks (she was thin, with dark brown tresses and sharp gray eyes) and confidence, she never found men that difficult to snag. Her first husband, Maurice Harris, was an accomplished pickpocket himself (Sophie never bothered with a man unless he had street cred). Within two years the romance had burned out, paving the way for the strapping, fearless bank robber Ned Lyons.
Ned, according to Sophie, was a "a desperate scoundrel," who "could not let drink alone." But she admired his criminal instincts, which she considered "quicker than the quickest intellect." The bank robber and the pickpocket quickly fell head over heels for each other, and were married in 1865. Sophie had six children with Ned over the years, and claimed in her memoirs that she yearned to embrace life as a stay-at-home mom. More mouths to feed meant more food to buy, however, and she was forced to keep thieving. Other sources claimed Ned begged Sophie to give up crime and stay home, to no avail. Either way, the couple found themselves in and out of trouble with the law as their family grew. By 1871, Sophie and Ned were both jailed at Sing Sing Prison--Sophie for shoplifting, Ned for robbing a bank.
"It is not easy to get out of Sing Sing Prison." Sophie reflected somberly in Why Crime Does Not Pay. Like much that she wrote in the book, this was not, strictly speaking, true. At times throughout its history, the prison seemed more like a sieve than the secure fortress it was supposed to be. In 1904, an ex-prisoner wrote that "Sing Sing is perhaps the most insecure prison, structurally, that was ever built." He cited the distracted guards, the New York Central running along one side and the Hudson River along the other as "standing invitations for the prisoner to take a walk in Westchester County or a long swim over to Rockland in the Hudson." In 1871, the year Sophie began her sentence, twelve inmates escaped by leaping from their work near the prison dock to an approaching tugboat. Escaping Sing Sing wasn't easy, maybe, but that hadn't stopped prisoners from doing it over and over and over again.
Like any power couple, Sophie and Ned got to work scheming as soon as they could. Sophie's good behavior earned her privileges, like unsupervised visits with Ned and a cushy job in the matron's house. Over their weekly meetings, Ned and Sophie brainstormed different ways to escape. The idea was to use Sophie's freedoms to help Ned escape and then, he swore, he would be back for her in a matter of weeks.
Sophie and friends on the outside managed to smuggle in a forged visitor's pass and a gentleman's disguise. After that, they waited. They needed an opportunity to lure the warden away from the jail. That November, their patience paid off when Horace Greeley, renowned New York Tribune editor, passed away. A public figure for decades, Greeley's passing became a grand affair, with a funeral procession through the streets. Many New Yorkers wanted prime viewing seats, and when the warden received a telegram offering him exactly that, he jumped at the chance. As soon as he'd left, the plan sprang into motion, with one of Ned's friends posing as a gentleman and requesting a tour of the storied prison. Ned, gentleman's disguise ready and forged visitor's pass in hand, joined his friend on the way out of the prison. By the time the warden realized that the telegram had been a fake, Ned was long gone.
Sophie learned that Ned had escaped when she saw guards sprinting and shouting across the road separating the men’s prison from the women’s that evening. Ned had been gone for several hours before anyone even thought to look for him. "A great weight rolled from my heart--Ned was free!" she later wrote of the moment. She had to scrub the joy from her face, however, and wait her turn.
In the meantime, Sophie used a quiet moment working in the matron's house to make a wax impression of the key to a basement door that led outside of the prison walls. She slipped it to a visiting friend, who had a duplicate made and smuggled back.
The set date for Sophie's rescue dawned cold, with snow fluttering through the air. All day more snow spiraled downwards, heaping great white mounds on the ground. It was still snowing as night fell, and Sophie started serving dinner to the matron's family. Over the sounds of dishes clanking and the wind groaning, she heard a low whistle sing through the night. Setting down the dishes she'd been carrying, Sophie retrieved the duplicate key and walked out of the basement door into the flurrying snow.
Ned stood on the road outside, next to a sleigh. "Hurling the key into a snowdrift," Sophie later recounted, "I ran to the waiting sleigh." She had brought no coat but Ned had a thick fur and a "stylish hat" waiting for her. Together, they "made me look like anything but an escaped convict." The pair even felt confident enough to eat in Poughkeepsie before taking a late night train to New York.
"...for months, asleep or awake, I would jump at the slightest sound, thinking it was an officer come to take us back to Sing Sing," Sophie later wrote of the time after the breakout. The escape catapulted her into helter-skelter weeks of sadness and stress. During her term, she'd lost her baby daughter to illness. The remaining Lyonses bounced from town to town, scrambling to stay one step ahead of the law. Sometimes, they failed, and shuffled in and out of prison. Sophie often turned to running badger scams (in which a woman blackmails a man after a sexual encounter, real or faked) in various cities. She had three more children, and then a possible affair with a man named Hamilton Brock. Ned found out, and in his fury he tried to kill Brock. The encounter left him clinging to life, courtesy of Brock's bullets. For years, the marriage had been strained with fighting and life on the lam. This was the last straw; Ned survived the bullets, but his relationship with Sophie didn't.
Sometime in 1876, Sophie moved to Detroit. There were no new leaves to be turned over there, only more purses to cut and pockets to pick. In 1881, she went to Cleveland with a childhood friend to take advantage of the grieving crowds gathered for President Garfield's funeral. She also began the process of turning her illegal revenue stream into a legal one by buying properties and renting them out.
Sometime around 1888 or 1889, Robert Pinkerton (head of the world famous Pinkerton Detective Agency) mailed a letter to the policemen of Scotland Yard. His letter bore a warning: he had reason to believe that Sophie Lyons and "Big Jim" Brady were presently at work thieving in London. Pinkerton was not far wrong. After filing for divorce from Ned in 1887, Sophie and her newest boyfriend, thief Big Jim Brady, had headed to Europe together. The new couple worked covertly, infiltrating posh hotels, using charm and stealth to steal jewelry from high society travelers.
In France, disaster struck as Sophie was arrested for pickpocketing. But Sophie, always thinking two steps ahead, identified herself to her jailors not as Sophie Lyons, but as Madame DeVarney. And Madame DeVarney was furious. She happened to be a very important American, and very, very rich besides. How dare the French police treat her like a common thief?
Just the way she'd planned, the press got hold of the story of the American socialite who’d been arrested by boorish French police. Before long, the police let her go, believing they were bowing to the inevitable outrage of an entitled rich person. By the time they learned Madame DeVarney was actually the legendary Sophie Lyons, she was long gone.
Big Jim and Sophie lived it up in Europe, then Detroit, then back in Europe again until 1891, living unofficially as man and wife. In 1891, Sophie gave birth to daughter Sophia in London (most likely, Sophia was Big Jim's child). The relationship soured soon after, however. Both Sophie and Big Jim returned home alone.
Back in the states, Sophie picked up another beau--Billy "the Kid" Burke. Billy was a bank robber--Sohpie's favorite type of man. His nickname “the Kid” has special meaning with Sophie–he was 11 years younger than her. The age difference meant little, however. The pair were a perfect match in energy, ambition, and cold-blooded cunning. They committed crimes together, fought (once, in a courtroom after a failed bank robbery, he openly cursed her for a perceived betrayal). Billy cheated on Sophie. Billy found himself in and out of prison, while Sophie always managed to slip out of trouble. But the pair of them always came back to each other. In 1910, they married--she was 62, he was 51.
In the summer of 1899, Billy and Sophie went to England and started a strategic crime spree. For the next 18 months they pickpocketed, swindled, and shoplifted their way across Europe. When they returned to Detroit, they returned with bulging pockets. It was time, Sophie had decided, to go clean.
The month after she got back from Europe, she bought two houses (one a $10,000 brick mansion). By 1908, she calculated that she owned $80,000 worth of property (upwards of $2,000,000 today). After that, the Queen of the Underworld made her riches off of collecting rent. In 1909, she rented to Mary McCoy, Black philanthropist. Sophie even fought her racist neighbors in court in order to do so (more out of spite against her neighbors than true allyship).
Detroit bounded into the 1920s, propelled by its flourishing auto industry. Sophie became something of a public figure in the city. She lectured at prisons and workhouses. She was always ready to help out convicts seeking to reform. At the same time, she bragged to neighbors about her life of crime; even after Why Crime Does Not Pay came out, she could often be heard retelling her escapades, boasting “That’s what it is to be smart.”
When she died in 1924, she left an estate worth $241,766 (over $4,000,000 today). Sophie Lyons had performed the kind of alchemy most career criminals can only dream about: turning earnings from a life of crime into legitimate riches.