Empire of Sin

ALSO BY GARY KRIST

City of Scoundrels

The White Cascade

Extravagance

Chaos Theory

Bad Chemistry

Bone by Bone

The Garden State

Copyright © 2014 by Gary Krist

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krist, Gary

Empire of sin : a story of sex, jazz, murder, and the battle for modern New Orleans / Gary Krist.

1. New Orleans (La.)—History—20th century. 2. Storyville (New Orleans, La.)—History—20th century. 3. New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Storyville (New Orleans, La.)—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Anderson, Thomas Charles, 1858–1931. 6. Crime—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 7. Murder—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 8. Corruption—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 9. Jazz—Social aspects—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 10. Sex customs—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. I. Title.
F379.N557K75    2014
976.3′35061—dc23            2014003191

ISBN 978-0-7704-3706-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-7704-3707-7

Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi
Spine photographs:
(top)
Detail,
Joseph “King” Oliver’s Band
, Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum;
(middle)
Ewing, Inc., Baton Rouge, LA;
(bottom)
Attributed to E. J. Bellocq/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Author photograph: Bob Krist

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Prologue May 23, 1918

PART ONE: T
HE
W
AR
B
EGINS
, 1890–1891

Chapter   1    Going Respectable

Chapter   2    The Sodom of the South

Chapter   3    The First Casualty

Chapter   4    Retribution

PART TWO: D
RAWING
B
OUNDARIES
, 1890
S
–1907

Chapter   5    A Sporting Man

Chapter   6    New Sounds

Chapter   7    Desperado

Chapter   8    Storyville Rising

Chapter   9    Jazzmen

Chapter 10    The Sin Factory

PART THREE: B
ATTLEGROUNDS OF
S
IN
, 1907–1917

Chapter 11    The Black Hand

Chapter 12    A Reawakening

Chapter 13    An Incident on Franklin Street

Chapter 14    Hard Times

Chapter 15    The New Prohibitionists

PART FOUR: T
WILIGHT OF THE
D
EMIMONDE
, 1917–1920

Chapter 16    Exodus

Chapter 17    A Killer in the Night

Chapter 18    “Almost As If He Had Wings”

Chapter 19    The Axman’s Jazz

Chapter 20    The End of an Empire

Chapter 21    The Soiled Phoenix

Afterword    Who Was the Axman?

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

Empire of Sin
is a work of nonfiction, adhering strictly to the historical record and incorporating no invented dialogue or other undocumented re-creations. Unless otherwise attributed, anything between quotation marks is either actual dialogue (as reported by a witness or in a newspaper) or else a citation from a memoir, book, letter, police report, court transcript, or other document, as cited in the endnotes. In some quotations I have, for clarity’s sake, corrected the original spelling, syntax, word order, or punctuation. Names and certain other nouns were often spelled in various ways in various sources (for example, “axeman/axman”); in these cases, I’ve chosen the spelling that seems best or most plausible and used it consistently throughout the book, even in direct quotes.

It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans
.

—R
EVEREND
J. C
HANDLER
G
REGG

“THE CRIME,” AS DETECTIVES WOULD LATER TELL THE newspapers, was “
one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”

At five
A.M.
on the sultry morning of May 23, 1918, the bodies of Joseph and Catherine Maggio, Italian immigrants who ran a small grocery store in a remote section of the city, were found sprawled across the disordered bedroom of the living quarters behind their store. Both had been savagely attacked, apparently while they slept. Joseph Maggio lay face-up on the blood-sodden bed, his skull split by a deep, jagged gash several inches long; Catherine Maggio, her own skull nearly hewn in two, was stretched out on the floor beneath him. Each victim’s throat had been slashed with a sharp instrument.

A blood-smeared ax and shaving razor—obviously the murder weapons—had been found on the floor nearby.

Police Superintendent Frank T. Mooney stood among the dozen or so detectives and patrolmen working over the grocery for clues. Summoned from his bed before dawn, the superintendent had immediately rushed out to the crime scene, located at the corner of Magnolia and Upperline Streets.
It was a godforsaken neighborhood on the outskirts of Uptown New Orleans, a place where a few single-story pineboard shacks stood amid a sea of weed-choked empty lots. Until recent years, this area had been little more than a fetid swamp, populated by alligators and slender-necked herons. But now people actually lived here—Italians, mostly, along with an assortment of other recent immigrants and a few blacks too poor to live anywhere else. Like much of the part of New Orleans set far back from the river and its natural levee, it was an inadequate place for human habitation, a breeding ground for all kinds of disease and squalor. And now it had become a breeding ground for crime as well: street lighting was still unheard-of out here, and even the slightest rain could transform the low-lying, unpaved streets into stagnant rivers of muck, impossible for even the sturdiest of police vehicles to navigate.

Frank Mooney, forty-eight years old and still new to his job, understood that he had to oversee the investigation of this case very closely. It would be the first high-profile homicide of his tenure as police superintendent, and a crime so strange and sensational was bound to attract all kinds of unwanted publicity. In some ways, the case seemed straightforward enough.
The intruder had clearly taken the Maggios’ own ax from the backyard shed and used it to chisel out a panel of the kitchen door and pry off the lock. He had then entered the kitchen, carried the ax down the short hallway to the bedroom, and used it, and perhaps the shaving razor, to butcher the sleeping Maggios. He’d apparently made no attempt to hide the murder weapons or otherwise obscure any evidence of the brutal crime that had occurred in that tiny, airless bedroom.

The question of motive, though, was more problematic. Robbery seemed the most obvious explanation, but there was little proof that anything had actually been taken from the house. True, the grocer’s bedside safe had been found open and empty. But there were no signs that the safe had been forced, and right beneath it sat a tin box, wrapped in a woman’s stocking, containing several hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry. Mooney’s officers also found $100 in cash secreted under Joseph Maggio’s pillow. No professional thief could have overlooked such easy booty.

Chief of Detectives George Long, the experienced investigator whom Mooney had put in charge of the case, had a different theory—one that implicated Andrew Maggio, Joseph’s younger brother, who lived in the other half of the grocery building on Magnolia Street. Andrew had been the first person to discover the bodies, after allegedly hearing a scuffle in his brother’s apartment and going next door to investigate. He was a barber by profession, and several days earlier had been seen taking a straight razor from his shop “
to have a nick honed from the blade.” Based on this evidence alone, Andrew Maggio—along with another younger Maggio brother—had been detained for questioning.

But there was one incongruous piece of evidence that seemed to exonerate the brothers—and to point to another kind of perpetrator entirely: Shortly before noon, two detectives canvassing the neighborhood had stumbled across a clue just a block away from the murder scene. Right at the corner of Robertson and Upperline, scrawled across the planks of a wooden banquette (as sidewalks are called in New Orleans), they’d found a chalk message written in a crude, childish hand:

MRS JOSEPH MAGGIO IS GOING TO SIT UP TONIGHT JUST LIKE MRS TONEY

It was baffling: Why would Andrew Maggio—or anyone else in his right mind—leave behind such a gratuitous clue to the murders?

A couple of Mooney’s more senior detectives raised an unsettling possibility. They told the superintendent about
a series of unsolved attacks on Italian grocers that had occurred in the city some years ago; at least three of those attacks had been committed with a hatchet. One victim, who like Maggio had been slain in bed with his wife, was named Tony Schiambra. Could Mrs. Schiambra be the “Mrs. Toney” in the chalk scrawl? And if so, what did it mean? At the time of the earlier attacks, police had attributed the crimes to the local Black Hand, a loosely knit organization of Italian extortionists that New Orleanians commonly (though not accurately) called “the Mafia.” But the Black Hand had supposedly been eliminated in the city some time ago. The New Orleans police had waged a long and bitter fight against the shadowy organization to root out its members and end what had been a virtual epidemic of blackmail and murder in the city’s Italian community. By 1918, it was widely believed that the battle had been won.