The Everything Mafia Book (6 page)

The New Orleans Mafia family was never very large. At its height it had only a couple dozen made guys with a few hundred associates. But they were powerful, controlling vast swaths of the Gulf Coast with strategic alliances in Tampa and Dallas.

Blood on the Docks

From their earliest efforts Italian gangsters had a penchant for the waterfront. In 1890 the earliest Mafiosi in America quickly muscled in on the docks. New Orleans has been an active port city since its inception. Ships from all over the world docked on its waterfront.

In addition to having a climate similar to their homeland, one of the reasons Sicilians found New Orleans appealing was the fact that it had a Catholic culture. In the North and elsewhere, Catholics were in the minority and often subject to discrimination.

Two enterprising brothers, Tony and Charles Matranga (born Antonio and Carlo Matranga), formerly of Palermo, Sicily, were making a nice living shaking down and intimidating skippers and ship owners, who were obliged to pay extortion money or else end up shot, stabbed, or beaten to a pulp and tossed into one of the many canals. It was a reign of terror that the chief of police was determined to stop.

Common Killings

A rival group of brothers was vying for control of the New Orleans waterfronts. The underworld was well aware of such delineations and distinctions, while to the untrained eye they were all just thugs. Savage hits were commonplace. One gangster’s head was stuck into a burning stove, many were shot, some hits were near misses that only succeeded in grisly mutilation and the amputation of various body parts. The escalating violence was played out against the reality of postwar Reconstruction, making life even tougher for the immigrant communities of the South.

Joseph Macheca—The First American Don

The name Joseph Macheca is not well-known to the general public. Even in Mafia historian circles, he is an enigmatic figure. But this unknown may have been the first Mafia don in America. He led an enterprising crew of gangland figures in the years following the Civil War, decades before organized crime is generally thought to have originated. By absorbing hoodlums into his group, Macheca avoided much violence. But as always, violence came to the mob.

New Orleans served as a port of entry for many Sicilians, and many of the early mobsters got their start there before moving on to cities like Chicago and New York. New Orleans–born mobsters also moved to Rockford, Illinois, and Tampa, Florida, cementing ties between the respective Mafia organizations.

Macheca welcomed an exiled Sicilian Mafia leader into his “family” after Macheca led his team to victory in a war against rival gangsters in 1869. When this exiled leader was deported back to Italy by New Orleans authorities, the Macheca hold on the local mob started to splinter. Two distinct factions emerged. And as is the case with every mob family where factions emerge, the blood began to run. The two factions were the Macheca-Matranga group, briefly mentioned in the previous section, and another, led by the Provenzanos. War erupted between the factions around 1888.

Crusading Cop

New Orleans Police Chief David C. Hennessy was determined to put an end to the ongoing violence of the Macheca-Matranga/Provenzano war. He spoke to some of the Sicilian immigrants and learned that even the non-gangsters were inclined to be insular and clannish. They had the Old-World innate distrust of authority. Most would not talk to him, but those who did whispered an alien phrase not uttered before on American soil—La Mafia. That was when Hennessy discovered the existence of a secret organized collective of criminals. He was dealing with something deeper and more menacing than mere street hoodlums.

Police chief David Hennessy had a hard time getting anyone on his staff to work with him in his crusade against the Mafia. They had all received threats, and they didn’t doubt that the Mafia would follow through on those threats.

Dead Man Walking

Desperate to break the cycle of violence, Hennessy took sides. He supported the Provenzano brothers over the Macheca-Matranga factions. Hen-nessy had members of his police force vouch for the Provenzano gang after a vicious attack on the Matranga clan. Hennessy was planning on testifying on behalf of the Provenzanos. Although he had a previously friendly relationship with Joseph Macheca, that friendship had spoiled. Hennessy was now a marked man. The Mafia was following him and his routine was being noted. A hit was in the works, though Hennessy probably felt safe and in no danger.

Hennessy was brave but foolish. He could not be bribed and he was not alarmed by the many death threats he received. He meticulously built a case against the Matranga brothers. He was ready to present his airtight case to a grand jury when four men surrounded him on a darkened street. All four men brandished shotguns and fired at close range.

Even though he was badly injured, Hennessy fired in vain at his murderers and then dragged himself back to the police station. His friend Captain Billy O’Connor and another policeman discovered him. He was asked if he knew who shot him and he uttered a sentence that unleashed a wave of violence and retribution that achieved national attention: “The Dagos did it.” The next day complications from his wounds set in and Hennessy took a turn for the worse and died.

National Scandal

New Orleans was outraged at the police captain’s murder at the hands of these foreign hoodlums. As a result of Hennessy’s murder, anti-Italian sentiment swept through New Orleans and the nation. Demonstrations were held in all the major cities that had large Italian populations. Mayor Shakespeare ordered a crackdown on the Mafia. More than 100 men were arrested, many simply because they were Italian. The media made things worse with sensational and racist editorials. The word
Mafia
became nationally known, and it automatically became associated with poor Italian immigrants.

Dividing the City

Among the men rounded up in the dragnet were the actual culprits in addition to innocent parties. An informant in the jail got cozy with one of the accused, who spilled the beans about the conspiracy against Hennessy. The loose-lipped prisoner implicated high-level members of the Matranga clan, including Charles Matranga, Joe Macheca, and numerous others. The trial divided the country along racial lines. The Mafia exploited ethnic pride to collect money for a defense fund for the accused.

Nineteen Sicilian men were brought to trial for the murder of Police Chief Hennessy, but using an old Mafia trick, the local gangsters bribed and intimidated the witnesses and the jury. The frightened jurors found sixteen of the accused not guilty, and couldn’t come to a verdict on the other three, including the two kingpins, Matranga and Macheca, who would have to stand trial again.

Although it is highly likely that the Mafia murdered Police Chief Hennessy, the fiasco of the trial and subsequent chaos and carnage overshadowed the quest for justice. The case is still officially listed as unsolved.

Lynch Mob

The jury verdicts created an uproar in the city of New Orleans. The aftermath of the verdict coincided with an Italian holiday. The leader of Italy, King Umberto the First, was a hero who had unified the country. The Italians in New Orleans flew flags and were engaged in a festive celebration. Whether the non-Italians in the city thought the party atmosphere was a celebration of the verdict or they simply did not like the pomp and parades immediately after their police chief’s killers did not meet the justice they felt was their due, they were incensed, and protests broke out.

Did the New Orleans family run Dallas?

Yes, they did. Though considered a separate family, Dallas crime boss Joe Civello was a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a close ally of Carlos Marcello, as was his successor Joe Campisi. The New Orleans family also held sway over Galveston through the Maceo brothers.

Thousands of people assembled at City Hall. They listened to a lot of inflammatory rhetoric from several notable citizens, one of whom flat out exhorted the throng to take the law into their own hands. The crowd raided the city armory and proceeded to the prison where the Mafiosi were being held. The prison warden let the Italians out of their cells so the rioters could get to them.

Bastille Day Redux

The angry mob barreled into the prison looking for the Mafiosi. Top man Joseph Macheca was shot dead. Six other men were also rounded up and shot. Manuel Polizzi was dragged from the prison and lynched. Several members of the lynch mob shot him as he writhed at the end of the rope. A total of sixteen men were killed that day. Two of them had no mob connections at all. They were executed simply for being Sicilian. In a stroke of luck for the Mafia, its leader, Charles Matranga, the man who had orchestrated the murder of the police chief, survived the mob’s bloodlust. He had been able to successfully hide during the carnage.

We will never be sure whether it was a less-than-airtight case by the prosecution or Mafia intimidation that resulted in the charges against the accused being dismissed or mistrials declared and defendants found not guilty. No matter which side you take in these tragic events, justice was not served.