The question of when the “Mafia” arrived in New Orleans is a messy one. Historians of crime can’t seem to agree, and more than one criminal has been credited with establishing the organization in the city. John S. Kendall, a historian writing in the 1930s, gave the honor to Giuseppe Esposito, a notorious black-haired, black-bearded Sicilian outlaw. According to Kendall, in the 1860s and 1870s Esposito belonged to a criminal gang that terrorized western Sicily, robbing and kidnapping at will. Eventually he fled Sicily and made his way to New Orleans. But the law caught up with him. In 1881 Esposito was nabbed in Jackson Square by New Orleans police officers—one of whom was the good-looking, twenty-three-year-old David Hennessy. Esposito was extradited back to Sicily, and Dave Hennessy became famous.
Kendall argued that while he was in New Orleans, Esposito led a handful of desperadoes who set up an extortion business, preying on local Italian merchants. This racket continued to flourish after Esposito himself was back in prison in Italy. And that, pronounced Kendall, “was in essence the Mafia.”
Except that it wasn’t. Esposito as Mafia boss was a later invention. At the time, no one described him as anything other than a bandit or brigand. Such fantasy is typical of the myths surrounding the Mafia in New Orleans, most a mixture of exaggeration and outright fabrication.
The citizens of New Orleans, however, didn’t realize that. For many—perhaps most—people in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, the Mafia was a deadly reality. The gunning down of David Hennessy that rainy night cemented for many New Orleanians—and much of America—a firm belief in the Mafia, a secret criminal organization that could reach out of the shadows and strike down anyone who dared stand up to it, even one of the country’s most famous policemen.
Dave Hennessy had had an eventful career after becoming the great hero of Esposito’s capture. Shortly after that episode, he and his cousin Mike (also a policeman) stood trial for the murder of another police officer in a shootout and won controversial acquittals. Leaving the police force, Hennessy then became successful as a private detective and what would now be called security consultant, but his police career effected a remarkable comeback when Joseph Shakespeare ran for mayor as the Reform Democratic candidate against the regular Democratic—the Ring—candidate in 1888. Mayor Shakespeare was serious about rehabilitating the city’s corrupt and incompetent police force. After his election to office, he appointed David Hennessy superintendent of police and instructed him to turn the demoralized, corrupt police department into a professional police force.
The capture of Esposito had made him famous, and his charisma made him many friends. At thirty-two, Hennessy was a handsome fellow, with a luxuriant black handlebar mustache, his hair fashionably oiled and parted in the middle. The premature gray in his black hair only added distinction to the young chief; his steely gray eyes gave a hint of the toughness and cool nerve for which he was known. He was curiously abstemious for a tough crime fighter: He didn’t drink, didn’t gamble, and at thirty-two still lived with his mother. A supremely confident man, the chief got his way by reputation and force of personality. If that wasn’t enough, well, he had his fists and the revolver tucked into his waistband.
Hennessy had a reputation as a crackerjack detective, but great detectives don’t necessarily make good administrators; Hennessy proved gifted in both roles. In only two and a half years, he shaped the New Orleans Police Department into a better disciplined and more efficient police department.
An affable and sociable man, Hennessy belonged to the Red Light Social Club, a social organization in the Vieux Carré that welcomed the middle-class Irish and Italians kept out of the city’s more exclusive clubs. There he became friendly with successful Italian businessmen like Joseph Macheca (suspected by some later writers as the real founder of the Mafia in New Orleans), a wealthy steamship owner and fruit importer, and Joseph and Peter Provenzano, owners of a stevedore firm.
If Dave Hennessy was a man of many friends, many years in police work had given him equally many enemies. Ironically, it may have been one of his friendships that killed him.
Along the waterfront, Irish and African American longshoremen monopolized the loading and unloading of rice, cotton, and sugar. Italians, however, had seized control of the fruit business. By the 1880s, the Provenzano brothers—Joseph, George, Vincent, and Peter—ran a successful stevedore firm of longshoremen who wrestled crates of coconuts, bananas, limes, pineapples, and mangoes off ships from Latin America. But their business began to suffer when brothers Charles and Tony Matranga elbowed their way onto the waterfront in 1886 and began taking contracts away from the Provenzanos.
After this business rivalry turned violent, Hennessy got the two sides together and tried to broker a truce, but on the night of May 5, 1890, gunmen fired on a wagonload of Matranga workmen as it jolted down Esplanade Avenue. After the gunsmoke cleared, Tony Matranga was left writhing in agony, his leg so badly mangled by buckshot that it had to be amputated. Two others were also wounded.
When the ambush victims identified Joe Provenzano, his brother Peter, and four of their men as the shooters, Hennessy duly arrested his friends, and in July, the six men went on trial for the shooting. The trial was noteworthy for the numerous policemen who provided alibis for the defense and for the defense’s accusation that the Matrangas were members of the Stoppagliera, an offshoot of the Mafia. The jury ignored the policemen’s testimony and the Mafia accusation and promptly convicted the defendants. The trial judge just as promptly vacated the verdict as contrary to “the law and the evidence.”
Many suspected that Hennessy had extended his friends a lifeline. After the trial, rumors about the chief’s chumminess with the Provenzanos were rampant, and his officers were widely suspected of perjury. Hennessy’s friend Joe Macheca was also very unhappy with him. Macheca, who’d testified against the Provenzanos, feared them. When he’d confided his anxiety to Hennessy several months before, the chief had reassured him that he would protect him. But now Hennessy appeared to be siding with the Provenzanos. Macheca was afraid, and he was angry, and he said so.
Hennessy had three months until the retrial. He’d developed suspicions about Italian criminals in New Orleans, suspicions that some of them were connected to Giuseppe Esposito, the bandit he’d captured and extradited nine years earlier. The Provenzanos later claimed that he hoped to impeach several of the witnesses against them and prove that the Matrangas were indeed involved with the Mafia. Hennessy wrote to a police official in Rome, Louis Berti, and requested information about men in New Orleans who had been friends with Esposito. What specific names he inquired about isn’t known, but he asked for photographs and facts about their criminal past. In September, Berti responded politely, promising to send photographs and criminal histories in the near future.
The Provenzanos’ second trial was scheduled for October 22, 1891; rumors swirled about that this time Hennessy would appear for the defense. When he was shot dead that rainy night, a week before the trial was slated to begin, it was easy to conclude that the chief had been killed to prevent him from testifying and that the Matrangas were behind it.
The police were after Italians from the start—not without reason. Hennessy had identified his murderers as “Dagoes,” and a block and a half from the scene of the shooting a private watchman had spotted five Italians, two of whom were trying to hide sawed-off shotguns under their coats. But the authorities showed little discrimination about which “Dagoes” they arrested. Before the chief was even dead, Mayor Joseph Shakespeare gave the order: “Scour the whole neighborhood. Arrest every Italian you come across, if necessary, and scour it again tomorrow morning as soon as there is daylight enough.” On the day after Hennessy’s funeral, Shakespeare made it clear what he planned to do about the Italians: “We must teach these people a lesson that they will not forget for all time.”
And indeed he did.
Nineteen Italians were eventually charged with the assassination of David Hennessy, including
Joseph Macheca and Charlie Matranga. The first lot of nine went on trial in mid-February 1891 at Saint Patrick’s Hall on Lafayette Square. The evidence against them consisted of a theory of the crime—that Macheca had masterminded a plot to get rid of the chief before he could testify at the Provenzanos’ retrial—and a series of problematic eyewitness identifications. The case against the accused was so weak that at the end of the two-week trial, the judge ordered a directed verdict of “not guilty” for two of the defendants, including Charlie Matranga. And after deliberating for less than a day on the fates of the remaining seven, the jury deadlocked on three and outright acquitted four more.
With the pronouncement of “not guilty,” a collective gasp of dismay rippled through the courtroom. How could the killers of Hennessy walk free? In the hysteria that had washed over the city, few doubted their guilt. The crowd gathered outside of Saint Patrick’s Hall was stunned by the verdict. Then they became angry. “Who killa de chief?” chanted the outraged mob. “Who killa de chief?” Accusations of jury tampering flew around the city.
The next morning the fury erupted. A lynch mob of some eight thousand vigilantes stormed the parish prison where the Italians were still being held on another charge. Shouting “Hang the Dago murderers!” they battered down a side gate, surged into the prison, and murdered eleven of the accused Italians, including five who had not yet been tried. Charlie Matranga survived, but Joseph Macheca was among those murdered.
To this day nobody knows for certain who killed Dave Hennessy. But in the minds of most New Orleanians, there was little doubt that he’d been brought down by the “Mafia.”
This was the beginning of New Orleans’s—and America’s—obsession with the Mafia. Previously, few Americans had been familiar with the term. But Dave Hennessy’s murder and the lynching of the Italians splashed the misdeeds of the “Mafia” on the front pages of newspapers all over the country. Before 1890, most violence involving Italians was attributed to the “vendetta.” After 1890, New Orleans papers that had rarely referred to the Mafia now blamed the mysterious organization for almost any crime committed by an Italian.
So did a Sicilian Mafia terrorize the city?
The question of whether the many crimes attributed to it were committed by the Mafia revolves around the question of what is meant by Mafia. While the origins of the Sicilian Mafia are shrouded in mystery, the phenomenon appears to have originated in response to specific social and economic conditions in western Sicily and the south of Italy. The government wasn’t much interested in the welfare of those working the land, who were often at the mercy of brigands or rapacious landowners. So peasants turned to local patrons for protection. In nineteenth-century Sicily, such a protector had to be a brave, swaggering sort of man who didn’t hesitate to do what was necessary to get what he wanted—burn a neighbor’s field, kill his cows, threaten his family, slit his throat. A man who had the guts and nerve and brains—and luck—to do this successfully could become a mafioso, a “respected man,” who became the patron of a large number of locals. He provided protection; he did favors; he mediated disputes; he “found” stolen goods. And each time he managed to extract a share of the rewards, a sort of unofficial tribute for his services. The natural consequence of this is obvious. Offering protection evolved into insisting on it. Turning to mafiosi for help evolved into mafiosi collecting payments simply for not causing harm. It was blackmail by another name.
A successful mafioso not only built a network of clients grateful for his patronage, but also created for himself a cosca, literally “artichoke”—“family” in American Mafia jargon. This small group of henchmen generally came to do the dirty work, allowing the most successful mafioso—the capo mafioso—the luxury of pretending not to be a thug. The more established his reputation, the more deference a “man of respect” could command and the less effort he had to put into the exhausting business of coercing compliance. People fell into line because they dared not risk otherwise.
Originally, then, Mafia referred not to an organization but to “a form of behavior and a kind of power.” It’s more accurate to say that there wasn’t any Mafia as such—that is, there was no organization at all; there were only capo mafiosi and their cosca. Another way of putting it is that there were numerous mafias, independent organizations, based on client-patron relationships, scattered throughout western Sicily. By 1900 these extralegal client-patron relationships—“part armed criminal gang, part commercial enterprise, and part political clique”—were functioning as a parallel form of government, involved in both legal and illegal activities. It was confused outsiders, baffled by the situation in Sicily, who wrongly surmised that the term Mafia referred to a single organization.
Some of these extralegal entities stretched their tentacles as far as the New World. Most Sicilian criminal gangs in the United States were simply that—garden variety hoodlums. But some crime syndicates had Mafia connections. A capo mafioso would have been too well-protected to ever need to flee Sicily, but without a doubt a scattering of low-level Mafia henchmen crowded the decks of ships bound for America.
To survive in a strange new country, they naturally turned to what they knew best. Giuseppe Morello, born in Corleone, Sicily, boarded a ship to America in the 1890s to avoid a murder charge. Born into a Mafia family, he established a successful extortion and counterfeiting ring in New York City and became the most powerful Mafia boss of his day. Gangs like Morello’s could retain ties to Mafia cosca in Sicily, but they always operated independently; no Mafia boss in Corleone ever called the shots in New York or New Orleans.
Sicilian gangs in America acted in a social context considerably different from that of Sicily. In Sicily, Mafia networks were embedded in society; they performed an important social function. In the United States Mafia bosses were just gangsters. Mafia might be convenient shorthand for referring to Italian criminal gangs in the United States. It’s more accurate, however, to see the American version merely as gangs of criminals who were, by the way, Italian, rather than true Sicilian Mafia. And in neither case did they form a large, overarching organization.
But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Orleans was plagued by a very real threat: Black Hand crime. A type of petty extortion, the Black Hand racket was straightforward: The victim usually received a note, often signed with a grim black handprint (or sometimes skull and crossbones) demanding payment of a specified sum. If the cash was not forthcoming, the target was warned, there would be consequences. Sometimes the victim and his family were threatened with death; sometimes the blackmailers threatened to burn the family business to the ground. These warnings were often taken seriously: insurance policies could be canceled if word got out that the owner of a business had received a Black Hand note. The specter of the Black Hand generated genuine fear. (The apocryphal story of Francisco Domingo probably reflected the early existence of this kind of crime.)
Sicilian immigrants offered natural targets for this kind of extortion. Their well-developed distrust of government made them reluctant to go to the police. By the 1880s, such blackmail was prevalent among southern Italian communities all over the United States. By the early twentieth century, Black Hand crime was rampant in New Orleans, where Mafia and Black Hand came to be used more or less interchangeably. Black Hand was used to designate an organization, as well as a particular method of crime, and a mysterious “Black Hand Society” was often blamed for extortion attempts. But no Black Hand Society ever existed in New Orleans or anywhere else. Instead, opportunistic individuals or gangs sent Black Hand notes to anyone they thought could be terrorized into paying them off.
This, then, was the “Mafia” that in some quarters was suspected of the Axeman’s work: the Crutti and Rissetto attacks and Joe Davi’s murder. For some, it was the obvious suspect. An editorial in the Daily Picayune immediately after the Davi killing accused the Black Hand, noting that the “fact that all the victims were Italians of the small tradesman class should point the direction
in which the clews [sic] are to be sought.”
Some New Orleans police officers clung to the theory that Joe Davi’s murder was a Black Hand crime. The letters Davi had received a year before his death were typical Black Hand missives, a strange mixture of graciousness and menace: “Dear Friend,” the first one politely began. “Pardon us that we are going to bother you, because we are in need and we ask you to favor us with $200.” But it concluded with a definite, if vague, threat: “Be careful and do what we ask you. Otherwise you will suffer the consequences.” Joe Davi had shrugged off the letter and those that followed as just a bluff.
Maybe that had been a mistake. This is why Pitzo made such an appealing suspect. He had a history of cadging money from Davi and others. He’d been accused of attempting to blackmail Sam Constanza. He’d been seen in the neighborhood of a grocery that had mysteriously burned. He’d argued with Davi over money. For some investigators, it wasn’t such a stretch to see Pitzo as a Black Hand operator who’d carried through on a threat.
John Dantonio, the Italian expert, wasn’t convinced. He reasoned that the Black Hand wouldn’t have left August Crutti and Joseph Rissetto alive; it was pretty efficient at killing people. There were other arguments against the Black Hand: The attacker, witnesses said, wasn’t an Italian. Who’d ever heard of a non-Sicilian mafioso? Plus, neither the Cruttis nor Rissettos hailed from southern Italy or Sicily. And they didn’t move in immigrant circles; their friends and associates were all Americans. Black Hand crime was an almost exclusively Sicilian and immigrant phenomenon. And the Black Hand stabbed, shot, and bombed; no one in New Orleans could recall another case in which it had resorted to an axe.
So while it might not be accurate to talk about a New Orleans Mafia in a strictly technical sense, there were certainly criminal gangs in New Orleans who engaged in blackmail, kidnapping, and extortion, preyed primarily on the immigrant Italian population, and were known to use violence, including murder. Given this context, when the Axeman attacks began in 1910, suspicion that the Black Hand or Mafia might be involved was not entirely unreasonable. People believed in an Italian criminal conspiracy that targeted even modest people such as owners of a grocery store and was known to threaten people reluctant to pay them off.
The Axeman of New Orleans Page 8