The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  On Friday, four days after the attack on his brother, Peter Davi showed up at police headquarters and told the doorman he’d like to speak to a detective. Directed to Dan Mouney’s desk, he sat down across from the detective and pulled out a year-old letter.

  About a year ago, he told Detective Mouney, he and his brother Joe had run a grocery just outside of the Vieux Carré. One day Joe had received a letter warning him that unless he paid $200, he’d be killed. The letter included detailed instructions about where to deliver the money in Carrollton. His brother had ignored the letter, but a week later another arrived. When Joe still didn’t respond, he received a third communication. This was the letter Peter had found in a trunk after his brother’s death and now handed over to Mouney. Mouney turned the cheap notepaper over in his hand. The unsigned letter was written in Italian and dated May 24, 1910. The letter threatened Joe, Peter told Mouney. The writer warned that since Joe had ignored previous communications, he could expect retaliation.

  Why didn’t Joe take the letters to the police? Mouney asked. Peter said that he and his brother talked about it but put it off and never got around to it. Nothing ever came of the threat so, eventually, they forgot about it. It was only after Joe’s murder that Peter dug out the letter. And, Peter told the authorities, that wasn’t all.

  The combination of the blackmail letters and Sam Pitzo’s history had made Peter and Ben Gallin even more suspicious of the truck farmer. They had gone to Mary and asked her if she knew Pitzo. She said, yes, he had delivered figs to the store. Did he look like the man she had seen in her bedroom? Well, she admitted, he might resemble him. This was enough to convince both Peter Davi and Ben Gallin of Pitzo’s guilt.

  Mouney went straight to the chief of detectives’ office and told him Peter Davi’s story. They decided now was the time to bring Pitzo in. They snatched him from the steps of his Carrollton shanty, also pulling in Pitzo’s employee, Philip Daguanno, caught wearing a shirt with tiny bloodstains on it.

  Saturday afternoon Long, Mouney, and Dantonio interrogated the two men for hours. How well did you know Joseph Davi? Did you ever try to blackmail him? Where were you Monday night? Neither suspect was very helpful. Pitzo made no effort to cooperate, often merely shrugging his shoulders in answer to a question. Daguanno’s English wasn’t very good, and he had to be questioned by Detective Dantonio. Both men denied knowing anything about who had battered in Joe Davi’s skull.

  Long and his men were starting to get frustrated when a neighbor of Pitzo’s showed up at the police station. Sam Constanza, a grocer in Carrollton, accused the truck farmer of attempting to extort money from him. Pitzo, he told detectives, had come to his grocery and demanded ten dollars, promising to “beat his brains in” if he didn’t pay.

  Now the detectives had what they needed—a plausible motive for murder. They knew Davi refused to be blackmailed; they knew he had quarreled with Pitzo; now they knew Pitzo was a blackmailer. Perhaps he’d tried to victimize Davi, and when he refused to pay, Pitzo made good on his threat. The self-congratulation must have been palpable. The pieces fit.

  Late Saturday afternoon George Long, Dan Mouney, and John Dantonio marched both suspects down the whitewashed halls of Charity, past the starched nurses in white uniforms, down to the women’s ward. They pulled white screens around Mary’s bed to block the stares of other patients on the ward and planted the shabbily dressed workmen in front of her.

  Mary looked warily at the suspects. Pitzo was about forty years old, short, sturdily built, with black hair and a thick, bushy black mustache. Yes, she said, she’d seen him before; he delivered figs to the store. She had also seen him when he’d come asking Joe for money. Pitzo resembled the assailant because he had a similar build. But, she added, I am almost certain the man who hit me had no mustache.

  Next Long pointed to Daguanno. Had she seen him before? He was short like Pitzo but thin and nervous, a ferret-faced man, clean-shaven with brown hair. She shook her head without hesitation: No, I don’t recognize him.

  Disappointed, the detectives returned to the police station. Without eyewitness testimony, they couldn’t make a case against Pitzo. Their other witnesses that day were equally disappointing. August and Harriet Crutti and Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto all came in that afternoon. None of them had ever seen Pitzo before. Harriet Crutti, the only one who’d gotten a good look at the attacker, shook her head. “The man who attacked my husband was about the same height, but he was a little broader,” she said.

  Sunday night, morale in the Detectives’ Office must have been low when, to everyone’s surprise, Jim Reynolds walked in unannounced. He hadn’t been expected back for almost a week, but when he heard about Davi’s murder, he hastily caught a train from Baltimore. Now the inspector sequestered himself with Chief Long to be brought up to speed on the investigation.

  Before he left for the night, Reynolds walked across the hall and into the pressroom. Reporters would have been there well into the night, anxious to get the latest word on the investigation, and they weren’t willing to leave as long as a detective’s light was on. Most of the writers on the crime beat spent so much time at police headquarters that the inspector knew them almost as well as he knew his own officers. Some crime reporters, young men like Andy Ojeda of the Daily States, never seemed to go home. They spent their days—and frequently their nights—hunched over their typewriters in the Press Office, tapping out stories of theft, blackmail, accident, and murder. When the telegraph operator or Reynolds’s secretary posted an emergency bulletin, they’d heave themselves into their jackets, tighten their ties, grab their hats, and be out the door after the story.

  The press and the police had a clubby relationship. Reynolds tried to make reporters’ jobs easier, personally updating them on developments in major stories, giving them whatever information he felt he could, even occasionally offering them a lift in the patrol car on the way to a crime scene. The reporters identified with the police, some even going so far, as one admitted, to think of themselves as “closely allied to the [police] department, and likewise working for its advancement in [our] own way.”

  Now Reynolds needed to use the press to reassure the people of New Orleans:

  “I came back early because I am deeply concerned about the Davi affair. This murderer must be captured. Neither men nor money will be spared in bringing the fiend to justice. Not only will public funds be available, but I mean to go into my private purse if necessary. He must be captured and we are going to do it.”

  Whether or not Reynolds actually felt such confidence, with his arrival the investigation took off in new directions.

  The first thing he did Monday morning was to interview Pitzo and Daguanno. Reynolds came away convinced neither had anything to do with Joe Davi’s murder, but he and St. Clair Adams decided to hold both men for a few more days. Who knew what evidence might turn up in the meantime?

  Monday afternoon Reynolds went to see the Davi residence for himself. He arrived to find a gang of prisoners from the parish prison cutting the tall grass growing in the vacant lots behind and next to the grocery. It was the latest effort to find the murder weapon. Dripping with sweat in the humidity, the prisoners were searching the lots on the chance that the murderer might have tossed his weapon there as he fled. So far, they’d found nothing but snakes and weeds.

  Reynolds spent several hours going over the crime scene with Long and the others. This would have been a good opportunity for the detectives to outline their respective theories of the crime; with more than one theory floating around, there must have been some lively discussion as first one and then another tried to persuade the inspector of the viability of his view.

  John Norris, the Bertillon operator, was also there. He had presumably been summoned to the grocery as soon as the injured couple had been discovered. But the crime scene hadn’t been searched thoroughly, as Assistant District Attorney Doyle had just discovered what he thought was an additional print that needed to be photographed. Th
e handprint of Mary Davi had been noted immediately, but Doyle had spotted what appeared to be another bloody print near the window of the bedroom. This print, investigators surmised, was that of the murderer, since it was too high to have been made by Mary.

  Norris disappointed the detectives by telling them that the “print” was nothing more than a smear and would be useless in identifying any suspect. But the bloody smudge should have been noted earlier. This wasn’t the only evidence that had been overlooked. Ben Gallin had found a bloody print on an outside door that the police had missed. This, and the search for the weapon on adjoining lots almost a week after the attack, suggests that New Orleans detectives relied too much on their gut and not enough on evidence catalogued at the scene. And, of course, no one had even thought about preserving the crime scene. The police at least were now keeping away the morbidly curious wandering by in hopes of getting a glimpse inside the now-famous grocery.

  Monday night Inspector Reynolds was up until midnight discussing the case with his detectives. Everyone agreed that the Cruttis, Rissettos, and Davis had been attacked by the same person. The attacks were too similar to think otherwise. But there was disagreement about motive. Despite the lack of actual theft, some detectives believed that all of the attacks were burglaries gone wrong. Chief Long was the leader of this faction. He argued that nothing was taken from the Rissetto and Davi groceries because the thief was frightened away. He could point out that the intruder who attacked their husbands took eight dollars from Mrs. Crutti and demanded money from Mary Davi. Look, he could say, this fellow is nothing more than a burglar who got interrupted.

  None of this convinced John Dantonio, who led the second camp. He insisted that they weren’t dealing with an ordinary burglar. No attempt had been made to rob either the Rissetto or Davi groceries. The “thief” was interested in something very different. Dantonio was outspoken, telling a reporter, “I do not believe any of these jobs were the work of a burglar. I believe the guilty man took the $8 Mrs. Crutti gave him to throw the police off the scent. A fiend committed these crimes.”

  During the week after Reynolds’s return, perhaps at his urging, Dantonio took several other detectives to consult with a medical expert to learn as much about sadism as they could. Perhaps if they learned what motivated the fiend, they could catch him. Reynolds was careful to remain open-minded and publicly noncommittal. He kept his men working all aspects of the case. But he, too, seems to have inclined toward the sadistic “fiend” theory. As first one and then another line of investigation played out, nothing else made sense.

  Without any evidence to connect Pitzo to the Davi murder, Inspector Reynolds and DA Adams decided to charge him with what they had. Pitzo faced a count of attempted blackmail, and Daguanno was charged with being a “dangerous and suspicious character.” Pitzo found someone to sign for his bond; Daguanno could not. Pitzo walked out, leaving Daguanno, arrested only because he worked for the other man, in the parish prison.

  In the excitement of the investigation, two people had almost been forgotten, two other innocent people whose lives had been changed by the Cleaver.

  Mary Davi left the hospital on Wednesday, July 5, just over a week after having been admitted. Finally, she learned that her Joe was dead, and the blow was worse than any cuts inflicted on her by the Cleaver. She had almost collapsed and was still in a very emotional state when her parents came to take her home. In the months ahead the young widow would dream of her dead husband, dream that he visited her, but the most constant reminder of Joe was the son she gave birth to early the next year, named Joseph P. Davi for his father.

  John Flannery still sat in the parish prison, waiting to be shipped off to East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane as a drug addict, even though the DA had dropped charges for the assault on August Crutti. He wrote to St. Clair Adams from his cell, insisting again that he was innocent of any violence. The murder of Joe Davi was more proof of this, he argued. Flannery pleaded for Adams to send him to the Louisiana Retreat, a private Catholic hospital in New Orleans, rather than to the state insane asylum in Jackson, Louisiana, over a hundred miles away. That was where the state sent the criminally insane. Perhaps he wanted to remain closer to his family in New Orleans. Perhaps he was terrified of the conditions in a state asylum. But he desperately wanted to be free from the stigma of criminal insanity. Whether the DA ever responded to his plea is unknown, but five years later Flannery was shot dead during an attack on a teenaged boy.

  Despite continued assurances from Reynolds that Joe Davi’s killer would be caught, two weeks after the attack the public began to realize that the police weren’t going to find the murderer. The case was rapidly getting cold. The Italian community was particularly unnerved by the police failure. This was the third attack on an Italian grocer in a year, and the police seemed powerless to put a stop to them. And on the morning of July 7, nine days after the Davi murder, an attempt had been made to break into another Italian saloon “in very much the same manner in which the store of Crutti, Davi and Rosetti [sic] were broken into,” reported the Daily Picayune. Fortunately, something had scared off the intruder. Nervous grocers securely fastened their doors and windows each night, praying to Saint Joseph that they wouldn’t be the Cleaver’s next victim.

  While Chief Long looked for a murderous burglar and Inspector Reynolds looked for a crazed maniac, there was a third possibility. All the attacks had been on Italian grocers. What was the significance of this? Why not German or French or American grocers? When Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto were attacked, the New Orleans Item suggested they were the victims of “vengeance”—i.e., the Italian vendetta. “Both families,” the paper deliberately noted (referring to the Cruttis and Rissettos), “are of Italian descent.” After Joe Davi’s death, the Daily Picayune opined that the “fact that all the victims were Italians of the small tradesmen class should point the direction in which the clews [sic] are to be sought.” Everyone in New Orleans knew what this meant. As the case was dissected over dining tables or in saloons, the same question was asked all over the city: Did the Mafia kill Joe Davi?

  ≡ 5 ≡

  The Black Hand

  Around midnight, October 15, 1890

  THE STREET WAS QUIET, except for the soft brush of light rain. New Orleans police superintendent David Hennessy and Captain William O’Connor of the Boylan Protective Police paused at the corner of Rampart and Girod.

  Hennessy turned to his companion. “It’s not necessary for you to go any further. You go on and look after your business.”

  Superintendent Hennessy usually worked late into the night, and since the threats had started, one of his friends usually insisted on accompanying him home. The chief (as most people called him) didn’t give much thought to his own safety and didn’t like making his friend go any farther out of his way on this dreary night. Besides, he was only a block and a half from home and the Boylan officer who’d been hired to watch his house. The two men said good night, and Hennessy turned down Girod Street toward the cottage he shared with his mother. O’Connor took off in the opposite direction.

  O’Connor had only gone two blocks when he heard the bang of a shotgun from the direction he’d just come. He spun around to see a bright flash and hear the loud crack of another shot. Almost immediately, three pistol shots rang out. Instinctively, O’Connor took off at a dead run in the direction of the gunfire. Firing continued as he ran.

  O’Connor raced past the spot where he’d left Hennessy. As he neared the corner of Girod and Basin Streets he heard someone call his name. Glancing down Basin Street, he could make out the chief’s form, slumped on the steps of a house fronting the street. O’Connor rushed over and knelt beside his friend. Even in the dim light he could see Hennessy was covered with blood.

  “They’ve given it to me,” Hennessy grimaced. “I gave them back the best I could.”

  “Who gave it to you, Dave?”

  The dying Hennessy motioned his friend closer. O’Connor leaned toward him. T
he chief whispered one word: “Dagoes.”

  The Mafia had struck again. Or so everyone said.

  Francisco Domingo was the Mafia’s first victim in New Orleans. In 1855, the story goes, the Sicilian truck farmer received a note threatening to kill him if he didn’t come up with $500. The note was signed with the ominous imprint of a black hand. Unimpressed, Domingo laughed at the threat as nothing to worry about. A few days later, the luckless immigrant’s throat was slit and his body dumped on the bank of the Mississippi River. The next several years saw six more murders—each complete with a black hand note. In 1861 the New Orleans Daily True Delta reported on bands of Sicilian thieves and counterfeiters, some of whom, the paper claimed, were probably the “black hand” murderers. The legend of the New Orleans Mafia was born.

  Unfortunately for Mafia aficionados, large parts of this legend are completely bogus. A Francisco Domingo was killed in New Orleans in 1855. But he was from Manila, his throat was not cut, and there was no great mystery about the identity of his killer. An argument at the dinner table escalated into a fistfight, and Guillermo Ballerio grabbed a knife off the table and plunged it into Domingo’s chest. Later writers spun the mundane murder into the more dramatic tale.

  In the 1860s, New Orleans newspapers did warn against gangs of Sicilian robbers and counterfeiters active in the city. Sicily was a violent, poverty-stricken backwater in the nineteenth century, with the highest murder rate in Europe. There, the vendetta survived well into the twentieth century. Since New Orleans itself was a turbulent, vice-ridden, and often lawless town, it isn’t exactly surprising that some immigrants were drawn to crime, and that some Sicilians were among them.