Annie Reilly
American thief and con woman
"Little" Annie Reilly (c. 1844–unknown), also known under the aliases Kate Cooley, Connelly and Manning, was a 19th-century American thief and con artist widely regarded as "the cleverest woman in her line in America". A well-known member of New York's underworld, she was part of an elite "inner circle" of female career criminals under Marm Mandelbaum during the 1860s and 1870s. These included some of the most notorious thieves, blackmailers and confidence women in the country such as Lena Kleinschmidt, Sophie Lyons, Kid Glove Rosey, Queen Liz, Big Mary and Old Mother Hubbard
Biography
Annie Reilly was born in Ireland in about 1844. She later emigrated to the United States and settled down in New York City where Reilly found employment as a servant and child's nurse. She was said to look much younger than her age and was both charming and intelligent. She spoke at least two or three languages. Once gaining the confidence of the lady of the house, most often by making "a great fuss over the children", she would rob the house of its valuables, usually jewelry, sometimes valued as much as four to five thousand dollars. She rarely stayed in one place for long, waiting only one or two days before robbing her employers, and eventually became known up and down the Eastern seaboard. She became especially infamous in New York, Brooklyn and Philadelphia and was considered "the cleverest women of her line in America".
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This entry incorporates text from “Annie Reilly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.