The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  As they had done after the Crutti incident, the newspapers debated a range of possible motives: robbery, revenge, drug-induced mania, even “domestic strife.” To some, the previous assault on the Cruttis did not rule out a vendetta as a motive. Both couples were, as more than one paper deliberately noted, “of Italian descent.” The implication that the families had run afoul of some Italian criminal gang was clear.

  Reynolds’s own view is hard to discern in the pages of the newspapers. Three days after the attack, the New Orleans Item quoted him as insisting, “I am certain that burglars did the work.” The Times-Democrat, on the other hand, was convinced Reynolds believed the attacker was no ordinary criminal, with no ordinary motive, but someone who simply delighted in the sight of blood. But rumors also circulated that the chief leaned toward the “revenge theory.” Reynolds may well have found it prudent to keep his views to himself, leaving reporters to infer them as best they could. But the Times-Democrat was likely nearer the mark. Both the Crutti and Rissetto crimes were too unlike the handiwork of any ordinary burglar. That much was clear to almost everyone. The “meat axe fiend” theory seems to have been the most popular: that the assailant was motivated by “a fiendish thirst for blood”—a desire to draw blood, perhaps to actually see the blood. Newspaper headlines spoke of “Jack the Axeman” and speculated about New Orleans’s own Jack the Ripper, all of which contributed to what the Daily News called the “dime store novel flavor” of the affair.

  The main benefactor of all this speculation was John Flannery. His trial was scheduled to begin at the end of the month, and it was becoming increasingly clear that, drug addict or not, he hadn’t assaulted August Crutti. It was also increasingly a matter of concern that the attacker would strike again if he wasn’t stopped. And no one knew how to stop him.

  At the end of the week, Chief Reynolds again assured the public that “the trail is very warm and we expect to capture this man shortly.” But the investigation had petered out, although Reynolds was loath to admit it publicly.

  The episode did have a happy ending, of sorts. From the beginning the doctors at Charity Hospital had thought Joseph Rissetto, while badly scarred and blind in one eye, would live but that his wife probably would not. Yet Conchetta held on, day after day, despite constant pronouncements in the papers that she couldn’t last much longer. If she did survive, the surgeons said, she would probably be permanently paralyzed on one side of her face. Her husband, injured and in the men’s ward, waited anxiously for news about his wife’s condition and asked frequently how she was and when he could see her. She lay in the women’s ward pleading to see him. After a week, he was finally permitted to leave his own hospital bed and go to his wife’s bedside. As badly scarred as both were, they were each delighted to see the other. Their affectionate but brief reunion over, he returned to their home, alone. How long he had to wait for her to join him is not known, but join him she undoubtedly did, for she lived to a good age, dying only in 1940. Joseph, however, died only two years later, in 1912. While the newspapers said that his death wasn’t a direct result of the injuries he’d sustained, he was never the same after that September night, and it’s hard not to suspect that his wounds contributed to his long decline. Perhaps Joseph Rissetto was another, unacknowledged fatality of the Axeman.

  According to the Daily Picayune, Mrs. Crutti had described her husband’s attacker as having “murder stamped on his countenance.” She was right. For if “the Cleaver,” as he would soon be known, hadn’t yet actually managed to kill anyone, that would change in the summer of 1911.

  ≡ 3 ≡

  Dagoes, Sugarcane, and Muffulettas

  THE AXEMAN’S VICTIMS—JOSEPH AND Conchetta Rissetto, August and Harriet Crutti, the Cortimiglias, Frank Jordano and his entire family—represented a particular niche in early twentieth-century New Orleans: the Italian grocer. Italians, especially refugees from the rocky soil of western Sicily, came to Louisiana as laborers, but many quickly became businessmen. How? And why would anyone want to kill them?

  The dusty little Sicilian town of Campofiorito didn’t have much to offer Iorlando Guagliardo, and he knew it. Slight but handsome, with a full, dashing mustache, he was also illiterate and unskilled; all that lay ahead of him was a lifetime of poverty, confiscatory taxation, rapacious bandits, endless vendettas, and constant labor in someone else’s fields. Still, at age twenty-one, Iorlando had another option. In 1873 he packed everything he could carry into a canvas bag, kissed his mother good-bye and hopped on a cart that jostled him twenty-five miles north to the port of Palermo. There he boarded a ship and sailed to America, joining the vanguard of what would become a flood of Sicilians into Louisiana.

  Louisiana plantations had always run on the sweat and blood of black labor. But after the Civil War many former slaves were anxious to get as far out of Dixie as they could, and they migrated in large numbers up north and out west. Many who did stay in Louisiana preferred day labor in New Orleans or Baton Rouge to hoeing weeds in a cane field, for them an echo of times best forgotten. For their part, white planters heartily disliked dealing with freedmen and looked around for another, more amenable source of cheap labor for Louisiana’s rapidly growing sugarcane industry. It was this need that led to the great influx of Sicilians into the state and the city in the later nineteenth century and explained the journey of many young men like Iorlando Guagliardo.

  The Sicilians turned out to be just what the sugar planters of Louisiana needed, for they were industrious, dependable laborers—a “hard-working, money-saving race, and content with . . . few of the comforts of life.” The trickle of Sicilians in the 1860s and 1870s became a torrent by the 1880s and 1890s. They dominated Italian immigration into Louisiana.

  For the city’s inhabitants, the new arrivals presented a strange and exotic sight—swarthy men in their fur caps, close-fitting black velveteen jackets and trousers, booted to the knee, and sporting earrings; stout women with their heads tied up in brightly colored kerchiefs, earrings dangling to their shoulders. Newspaper reporters covering the arrivals smiled condescendingly at the strange sight of bearded men rushing into each other’s arms and kissing each other. The men were “like school girls,” reporters wrote of the un-American emotion with which relatives and friends welcomed the newcomers: “The meeting between the immigrants [and] their friends, who had preceded them to this country, was in accordance with the manners and customs of the passionate, warm-hearted people of the Southern climes. . . . All talked and chattered as only Italians and Spaniards can.”

  Sicilian traditions only added to their alien air, traditions that had developed to make bleak lives bearable. Saint Joseph was a favorite in some Sicilian towns. He was the patron saint of workers. Tradition held that once during a famine farmers became so desperate that they ate the fava beans they’d been feeding their cattle. With the help of Saint Joseph, they survived. In gratitude, every year on his feast day the devout created an altar loaded with breads and pastries that they shared with the poor.

  By the time immigration was shut down in the 1920s, over 100,000—and perhaps as many as 290,000—Italians, over 80 percent of them Sicilians, had passed through New Orleans into Louisiana. Most of these arrivals came with families, but many were single men like Iorlando. Most of these were temporary “birds of passage” making the journey to work and return home with their savings. Others, like Iorlando, stayed. By 1900, at least 8,000 Italians—and possibly as many as 15,000 to 25,000 if children of immigrants are counted—made New Orleans their home, making it the largest such colony in the South.

  How Iorlando actually got to Louisiana isn’t known. He might have sailed into New York Harbor and made his way from there. Or he may have boarded a ship loaded with lemons and figs and sailed from Palermo to New Orleans. He might have been recruited by padroni—labor agents—who were sent to Europe to sign up workers for Louisiana plantations. Possibly, having heard about jobs in Louisiana, he traveled to New Orleans on his own, hoping to find work when h
e arrived. If he arrived in New Orleans alone, speaking little English, wondering what he should do next, he would have been relieved to have a padrone welcome him in Italian and offer to arrange work.

  The New Orleans that greeted Iorlando was dirty and smelly, with few paved streets and no proper sewage; it was also a cultured and sophisticated city, more indulgently Latin than American, although the Americans west of Canal Street had come to dominate the city, to the chagrin of the Creoles of the Vieux Carré. The elegant white and orange stucco Creole townhouses with their pitched roofs and lacy wrought-iron balconies lined the narrow streets of the Vieux Carré and the Faubourg Marigny. In the American sector, along broad Saint Charles Avenue, Italianate and Greek Revival mansions on expansive grounds proclaimed the presence of American banking and merchant wealth. Fashionable cafés and fine French restaurants catered to a sophisticated crowd. The French Opera House hosted international theatrical stars. Visiting Europeans preferred New Orleans to the “foggy cities of the North,” because of its “sunlight, its festal air, its all-pervading cheeriness and gaiety.”

  The city dwarfed Iorlando’s hometown of Campofiorito. And it was expanding. New arrivals were pouring in at a brisk pace and had done so throughout the nineteenth century. With a mere 8,000 souls in 1803, by 1810 the population had jumped to over 24,000. By 1840, 102,000 residents made New Orleans the third largest city in the nation. On the eve of the Civil War, the population stood at 174,491. When Iorlando arrived in 1873, the population was 191,418. By the end of the century the city would reach well over a quarter of a million people.

  Most of the new arrivals were, like Iorlando, European. Nothing is less original than observing that the United States is a nation of immigrants, but of few places is this truer than New Orleans, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded by the French, ceded to the Spanish, sold to the Americans, influenced by Creole, European, Caribbean, African, and South American elements, New Orleans was a genuinely multicultural stew of peoples, languages, and cultures. As he absorbed his new surroundings, Iorlando may well have had the reaction of the mid-nineteenth-century German visitor who marveled at the “Americans, Brazilians, West Indians, Spanish and French, Germans, creoles, quadroons, mulattoes, Chinese and Negroes . . . Mexicans, Spanish and Italians” who were to be found swirling together on the city streets.

  Despite the city’s glamour, Iorlando wouldn’t have remained in New Orleans. Like so many later Sicilians, he was bound for the “Sugar Bowl,” the sugarcane parishes surrounding the city, and eventually he found himself forty miles up the river in the flat, green, mosquito-infested fields of Saint James Parish. Here, in all likelihood, he went to work in the brutal cane fields.

  Life in the cane fields was a constant, hard slog. Sugarcane production was labor intensive, much more so than growing cotton. Iorlando would have worked long hours during the planting season in the spring and hoeing back weeds under the punishing Louisiana sun in the summer. The zuccherata—the grinding season—arrived in October when the gold-green stalks had deepened into a mature purple and the cane was ready for harvest. For three months, Iorlando and others like him worked to exhaustion, cutting and loading cane seven days a week as long as there was light to see, and probably putting in an evening shift in the sugarhouse, turning the stalk cane into sugar and molasses.

  For Iorlando, this arduous life was better than anything he could have hoped for in Sicily. Swinging a cane knife, chopping weeds—all this gave him what most Sicilian immigrants wanted: the chance to save money. Working as an ordinary laborer, he might have earned seventy-five cents a day; as an experienced cane cutter, perhaps as much as $1.25 or $1.50 a day. As little as it sounds, such wages were twice what he could have made in Sicily, and Sicilians often carefully hoarded their wages—some managed to save fully half of theirs.

  Despite the hardships, workers flocked to Louisiana during the zuccherata, when planters had to hire large numbers of temporary workers. In these months, the presence of Italians may have swollen by tens of thousands. For a time, Iorlando probably joined the circuit of migrant agricultural workers, harvesting sugarcane in southeastern Louisiana during the zuccherata from late fall to early winter, laboring in the cotton fields of central and northern Louisiana in the boiling summer months, and scattering to larger cities—New Orleans, Chicago, New York—to find work in the months in between. Much of the temporary help arrived in Louisiana for the harvest and went home to Italy with their cash afterward. Not Iorlando. He stayed in Saint James Parish.

  Like so many destitute, illiterate Sicilians, Iorlando wanted security and respect. He wanted to be his own boss, more possible here than at home. So, like many other Sicilian laborers, Iorlando, hacking at cane and weeds under the murderous Louisiana sun, made up his mind to become a businessman. By working hard and saving his money, Iorlando could squirrel away enough to leave the cane fields and go into business for himself. This was the one problem with Italian workers as far as their employers were concerned. Planters grumbled that they couldn’t keep Italians in the field because in only a few years they would save a little money. Then, as one sugar planter put it, they “are ready to start a fruit shop or grocery store at some cross-roads town. Those who do not establish themselves thus strap packs and peddle blue jeans, overalls and red handkerchiefs to the Negroes.” This was no exaggeration; by 1900, Italian-owned businesses had sprung up all over Louisiana.

  The commercial success of Sicilian immigrants didn’t protect them from the racial prejudices of the American South. Italians never entirely replaced black labor in the Louisiana cane and cotton fields but worked alongside blacks and the occasional Spaniard or Filipino. While Italians found nothing shameful about working in the fields with black workers, for native whites their willingness to do so made them no better than “Negroes,” Chinese, or other “nonwhite” groups. Because of the work they did, the small, swarthy Sicilians were often considered not white at all, nothing but “black dagoes.” It wasn’t lost on an observer that even “Negroes made unabashed distinction between Dagoes and white folks and treated these alien fellow tenants with a sometimes contemptuous, sometimes friendly, first-name familiarity.”

  The notion that “dagoes” were no better than “Negroes” helps account for growing prejudice against Italian immigrants in the 1870s and 1880s. Iorlando arrived in the earliest stage of southern Italian and Sicilian immigration that began in the 1870s. The handful of Italian immigrants before 1870 hailing from northern Italy weren’t primarily laborers: they included skilled craftsmen, artists, musicians, importers, cotton brokers, accountants, and physicians, as well as merchants, shopkeepers, and fruit dealers. But most of those who arrived after 1870 were peasants from southern Italy, especially Sicily. As numbers of the uneducated and unskilled newcomers mounted in the 1880s, prejudice grew, and Sicilian immigrants in Louisiana faced suspicion and the occasional lynch mob. In 1924, a Tulane University thesis expressed a common view of the “filthy paupers” from Sicily, decrying their “viciousness, ignorance, debauchery, and crime.”

  Such attitudes didn’t prevent men like Iorlando Guagliardo from climbing the ladder from day laborer to merchant. We don’t know exactly what route he took, but in 1892 Iorlando paid $200 cash for a small store in Convent, the seat of Saint James Parish. In 1883 he’d married another immigrant, Rosalie Lillian “Lillie” Billa. Over the next fifteen years, they produced a succession of children: two girls, two boys, and two babies who died at birth, a sadly common occurrence at the time. Then Iorlando left Saint James Parish, moving his family for a few years to Saint John the Baptist Parish, before settling in Gretna, the growing settlement across the river from New Orleans, about 1910.

  Perhaps Iorlando left Convent for the New Orleans area because he wanted a larger city with more opportunities for his children. With its relaxed cosmopolitanism and Latin Catholic heritage, the city absorbed new arrivals relatively easily. The Italian community in New Orleans was less segregated than in
any other city in the United States. In New Orleans, ethnic ghettos simply didn’t exist, as Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, Jews, Greek, French, Russians, African Americans, and nonimmigrant whites frequently shared the same streets and neighborhoods. Still, ethnic clusters could be found. African Americans dominated the area near the marshy backswamp known as back-of-town. A small Chinatown developed around the 1100 block of Tulane Avenue. A strip by the river between Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets was known as the Irish Channel after its inhabitants. The Faubourg Marigny was home to “Little Saxony.”

  The oldest section of the city, the French Quarter, or Vieux Carré, had become the Italian neighborhood. By the early twentieth century, so many Sicilians congregated in the lower French Quarter near the river that the area from Jackson Square to Esplanade Avenue, between Decatur and Chartres, was known as “Little Palermo.”

  Despite sporting an elegant European atmosphere with narrow streets, vaulted passageways, and iron lacework balconies overlooking tropical courtyards, the Quarter didn’t have the cache it had had in the French and Spanish periods, or that it would regain by the end of the twentieth century. As the Creole gentry abandoned it in the late nineteenth century to move uptown to join their American rivals along Saint Charles Avenue and toward Lake Pontchartrain along Esplanade Avenue, the oldest section of the city became a squalid Sicilian slum. Multiple families of the city’s poorest immigrants were crammed into decrepit Creole townhouses. Whole families, including four or five children, shared a single room and a lone bed. Drying laundry hung from balconies, courtyards were full of rotting garbage; ventilation was bad; sanitation was worse. The disapproving author of the Tulane thesis probably wasn’t exaggerating much when she described the Italian sector’s pervasive “filth and . . . intolerable stench . . . [and] deafening clatter and chatter.”