The Ultimate Anti-Hero Was In Fact An Actual Historic Figure: Fingy Conners. But a forgotten and discredited actual hero, James "Big Ben" Parker, is deprived his due.
African American James "Big Ben" Parker stood in line to meet President William McKinley, unknowingly waiting directly behind McKinley's assassin Leon Czolgosz. Parker jumped on Czolgosz, driving him to the ground and helping disarm him before the President's secret service detail could react. Praised initially, within days his story has been re-written to remove him totally from his valorous interception.
Based on the lives and histories of the actual real-life characters, THE FIRST WARD saga continues in Volume 2 with the turn of the century story of infamous millionaire saloon-boss murderer Fingy Conners and the Sullivan Brothers. Their lives being hopelessly intermingled both genetically and socially, family allegiances stand in the way of justice.Deprived of the very enterprise that initiated his vast fortune after his loss to laborers in the infamous Scooper's Strike of 1899, Fingy Conners sets out on a path of retribution: scorched-earth revenge on the entire city of Buffalo by way of destroying its economy and upending its multi-million dollar investment in the construction of the 1901 Pan American Exposition. Fingy schemes to control the entirety of the grain shipping and milling trade by moving the entire business out of the country to Montreal, where he enjoys dual citizenship. However, Alderman John P. Sullivan has an ace up his sleeve: his wife's powerful Canadian cousin.
Based on actual events and the real people who drove them, The First Ward II: Fingy Conners and The New Century documents the rivalry between dock-walloper-turned-multi-millionaire politician Fingy Conners and two brothers who emerged from the Buffalo Orphan Asylum to claim political power: Alderman John P. Sullivan and Buffalo Police Detective-Sergeant James E. Sullivan. Their lives intersect with the giants of their day; world champion boxing hero cousin John L. Sullivan, humorist Mark Twain, Presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Interwoven amid the drama are details surrounding the challenging construction, and ultimate triumph, of Buffalo's 1901 Pan American Exposition, followed in 1907 by the most successful Old Home Week ever held in the US-which doubled the city's population-bringing the past vividly to life.