The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (12 page)

That was in the summer. Now, in October 1890, Hennessy’s investigation was complete and he was expected to give evidence at the Provenzanos’ trial for the docks ambush. According to two men who knew the police chief well, he had marshaled fresh information against the Matranga brothers in the form of a packet of incriminating transcripts from Italy and “a great deal of dark evidence about Joe Macheca, whom he considered to be a troublemaker.” George Vandervoort, Hennessy’s secretary, heard that the chief had confronted Macheca with some of this information and threatened him with the state prison. According to Vandervoort, Macheca and the Matrangas were terrified by Hennessy’s investigation and likely to respond violently. “He dug deeper into the order than any outsider had ever dared,” the secretary said, “and when he was up to see me he said he had evidence to uproot the Mafia in this country. He had ascertained facts that would have uncloaked their band of assassins and would have sent a great crowd to the penitentiary for perjurers.” There was sufficient fear for the police chief’s safety for a private detective agency to be assigned to watch his home.

Hennessy himself appeared as unperturbed as ever. With the Provenzano trial a mere two days away, he had attended the New Orleans Police Board as usual, then sprawled in his office talking with a policeman friend named Billy O’Connor. At eleven, the two men went for their late supper, sharing a plate of oysters.

Hennessy said good night to O’Connor at the door, then turned uphill and trudged through the mist on Girod Street toward the small frame house that he shared with his mother. It was almost midnight on October 15. Hunched behind his open umbrella, the police chief did not see a group of five roughly dressed men skulking beneath the awning of a cobbler’s shop on the far side of the road. The men watched as Hennessy approached, pressing themselves into the shadows as he strode by. When he had passed, they stepped onto the sidewalk, leveled their guns, and opened fire.

The boom of two heavily charged shotguns and the sharper crack of several pistols rumbled through the mist. Even the police chief, famous for his quick reactions, had no prospect of avoiding the attack. A large-caliber revolver bullet tore into his chest, passed through a lung, and came to rest against the membrane of his heart. A second round struck an elbow; a third broke a bone in his right leg. The whole of his right side was raked with buckshot.

Knocked backward by the force of the impact, Hennessy slumped to the sidewalk for a second, gasping with shock and pain. Then, as if to prove his legendary toughness, he hauled himself to his feet, drew his own gun from his waistcoat, and began to limp after his fleeing assailants. Terribly injured though he was, he discharged two futile shots into the gun smoke before tripping over a doorstep and collapsing for a second time.

Billy O’Connor had walked no more than a few hundred yards toward his own home when the sound of shooting rang along the street. He turned and sprinted through the mud until he came upon his wounded friend propped against a step. Even in the semidarkness, O’Connor could see the ragged holes torn by the shotgun pellets and feel the sticky warmth of blood on his companion’s clothing. Hennessy’s lips were forming almost silent words. O’Connor, kneeling in a pool of liquid mud and gore, pressed an ear close to his face.

“They gave it to me,” hissed the dying man. “And I gave it them back as best I could.”

“Who gave it to you, Dave?” O’Connor asked, and the answer came so quietly that he barely caught it above the rasp of labored breath.

“Dagoes,” Hennessy mumbled to his friend. “The dagoes did it.”

WHEN THE CHIEF’S WORDS
reached the ears of New Orleans’s police and press, they unleashed a sensation.

Hennessy’s men had passed a miserable night dredging the muddy gutters along Girod Street in search of the murder weapons; by dawn they were all for picking up some suspects first and worrying about their stories later. Their views were shared by Joseph Shakspeare, New Orleans’s mayor. Shakspeare, like most members of the ruling class, had no love for the city’s “dagoes,” with their different customs, strange food and religion, and incomprehensible language. He shared the casual racism that prevailed in the United States during its Gilded Age. “We find them,” he once remarked when pressed for an opinion of Italians, “the most idle, vicious and worthless people among us. … They are filthy in their persons and homes and our epidemics nearly always break out in their quarter. They are without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion or any quality that goes to make the good citizen.” Certainly Shakspeare saw no reason to protect such people simply because there were no witnesses to the Hennessy shooting and no one who could identify the murderers. The mayor’s orders, when they came, were unequivocal: “Scour the whole neighborhood! Arrest every Italian you come across, if necessary, and scour it again tomorrow morning.”

Whipped up by the mayor and the press—which reported sightings of suspicious-looking Sicilians in the most inflammatory terms—the police descended on the Italian quarter of the city. They were joined in their endeavors by the Committee of 50, a group of vigilantes led by a prominent lawyer named William Parkerson. In the absence of firm evidence against any of their suspects, the authorities followed the mayor’s edict to the letter, rounding up suspects on a whim. Almost 250 Italians found themselves in custody.

The least suspicion was enough to get a man charged. A pushcart peddler who had failed to turn up at his usual pitch was summarily arraigned. A boy only twelve years old, thought to have been a lookout for the ambush gang, was also hauled before the courts. But so were five members of the Matranga family and the man widely regarded as the most powerful Italian in the city: Macheca.

The case against all the prisoners was inconclusive. The authorities did contrive to place two undercover Italian-speaking detectives in the jails where the suspects were being held, and one of them, a young Pinkerton operative named Frank Dimeo, spent three months in a stinking cell, courting dysentery or worse in his efforts to build a case against the defendants. But no actual confessions were obtained, and when the Hennessy murder trial opened at the end of February 1891, all but nineteen of the arrested men had been released, among them Tony Matranga. The case against the remaining prisoners was far from conclusive and rested chiefly on a series of disputed identifications. The principal defendants, Macheca and Charles Matranga, were both rich enough to lavish substantial sums on high-class lawyers, and neither man expected to take chances in the trial. Down on the waterfront it was said that they had plans in place to bribe the jury.

To keep proceedings as simple as possible, the defendants were to be tried in two groups, beginning with Macheca, Matranga, and seven others. Their trial proved sensational—not least because one of the accused, an unstable laborer named Emanuele Polizzi, broke down in the dock and openly charged Macheca and Matranga with being joint leaders of the New Orleans Mafia. Fortunately for the two defendants, the value of this evidence was diminished by the fact that Polizzi was clearly mad. Having delivered his evidence, the prisoner spent the remainder of the proceedings slumped glassily in a chair, rousing himself intermittently to attempt to bite passing court officials; Macheca and Matranga, meanwhile, produced a dozen witnesses to show that they had been at the opera at the time of the shooting—an alibi the prosecution averred was so convenient that it had probably been carefully arranged.

Most of New Orleans’s citizens, certainly, considered the defendants to be guilty, and the verdicts, when they came, stunned the city. The jury pronounced itself split over the guilt or innocence of three of the Sicilians, each of whom had been placed by at least one witness on the street where Hennessy was shot; the presiding judge ordered that this trio be tried again. The remainder of the defendants, Matranga and Macheca among them, were found not guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Crucially, though, none of the men were immediately released. There were additional charges, of “lying await with intent to commit murder,” still to be faced.

Had the defendants in the Hennessy case been found guilty, it seems safe to say, vastly less would have been heard about the case. As it was, the acquittals led directly to an outbreak of violence so savage and uncontrollable that it would be remembered vividly for years, and not only in New Orleans. The whole town pulsed with anger at the notion that a group of murderous Sicilians was escaping justice, and next morning, March 14, 1891, the local
Times-Herald
carried an advertisement so laden with menace that it frightened the entire Italian community:

MASS MEETING

ALL GOOD CITIZENS ARE INVITED TO ATTEND A MASS MEETING AT 10 O’CLOCK A.M., TO TAKE STEPS TO REMEDY THE FAILURE OF JUSTICE IN THE HENNESSY CASE. COME PREPARED FOR ACTION.

Among the fifty-one signatures appended to the appeal were those of William Parkerson and several local politicians.

Word spread fast throughout the city, and a crowd guessed to be eight thousand strong gathered next morning at the appointed time. Many had armed themselves with guns, knives, clubs, or staves. The vigilante leader, Parkerson—his eyes “snapping fire”—delivered an inflammatory speech, denouncing the acquittal of the “Mafia Society” and ending with a rousing call for his audience to “follow me, and see the murder of Hennessy vindicated.” The mob, a watching newspaperman reported, “went mad, shouting, ‘Yes, yes, hang the dagoes!’” and began marching on the parish jail. Arriving at the prison, the vigilantes were still more incensed to find that, in an attempt to save lives, the warden had released all nineteen Italians in his custody from their cells and had urged them to find hiding places in their cell blocks.

The mob would not be denied. A rear gate was promptly broken down, and members of the crowd stationed themselves as guards at all the exits while a well-armed execution squad—sixty men strong and handpicked by Parkerson—combed purposefully through the prison buildings in search of anyone Sicilian. Six prisoners, betrayed by other convicts who pointed out their hiding places, were herded against a wall and killed with shotguns; at least a hundred blasts were fired, tearing their bodies into pieces. Macheca, cornered with his back against the bars of his cell, picked up an Indian club in a vain attempt to defend himself but suffered the same fate, and Polizzi, the madman, was seized alive and handed over to the thousands milling about outside; they wasted little time in stringing the boy up from a nearby streetlamp, half hanging him, then sending more than thirty bullets into his body. When Parkerson emerged to announce that the killing was over, he was carried off in triumph on the shoulders of his men. “Mob violence,” the lawyer piously remarked as the crowd dispersed, “is the most terrible thing on the face of the earth. You have performed your duty. Now go to your homes, and if I need you, I will call you.”

Eleven men were killed in Orleans Parish Prison, the single largest lynching in the history of the United States, and most Americans believed that justice had been done. In truth, though, there was strong reason to doubt this. Five of the dead were members of the group of prisoners still awaiting trial; they had never even been brought before a court for Hennessy’s death. On the other hand, several of the most notorious of those arraigned for the Hennessy murder escaped, and among the eight survivors was Charles Matranga, who had found a secure hiding place under the floorboards of a rubbish closet in the women’s section of the jail. Passions in the city cooled so quickly after the lynchings that he was able to go back to his old job as boss stevedore without apparent hindrance and to continue working, seemingly peaceably, until his retirement in 1918.

Whether Matranga retained any active involvement with crime on the waterfront remains obscure; certainly he was never convicted of any offense. Nor was much more heard for several decades of the New Orleans Mafia, although dark rumors still swirled out of the bayous from time to time: word of an Italian plot to murder all the officials in New Orleans in 1890, concern over a spate of eleven unsolved murders of Italians five years later. It may be that the lynchings disrupted the Stoppaglieri’s operations, or at least made the gang more cautious. Whatever the truth, though, the United States had received its first glimpse of the Honored Society at work.

THE HENNESSY MURDER
sparked the biggest Mafia scare of the century and by far the most influential. It cemented belief in the society’s existence among thousands of Americans. It also greatly increased hatred and fear of Sicilians throughout the country. In the coming decade, a large proportion of all the violent crimes committed by Italians in the United States would be routinely attributed to the Mafia, and as a result there was more violence and discrimination against Italians. Eight Sicilians were lynched in Louisiana in the 1890s, another three in 1896, and five more three years later. There were minor scares in Denver in 1892, in Milwaukee in 1897, and in San Francisco in 1898.

In Boston, two Italian policemen received threats from a “Mafia” that claimed to have forty-five members in the city. Lieutenant John Wheeler of the Chicago police said he was certain, from personal experience, that “a branch of the Mafia society” existed in his city—an opinion that was echoed by A. L. Drummond, the storied former head of the Secret Service. There were still plenty of policemen, judges, and reporters who took a different view, and evidence that proved the existence of a “Mafia society,” rather than merely suggesting it, was difficult to find. In Chicago, Lieutenant Wheeler’s boss, Inspector Michael Lewis, insisted that he had not “the slightest reason to suspect the existence of the Mafia in Chicago,” and Oscar Durante, who edited the local Italian American daily, went further. “This is all sheer nonsense, stupidity, imbecility,” the newspaperman exploded. “Every time a drunken row among Italians occurs, the people and the press cry ‘Mafia.’ There is no such organization and never was.”