The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Finally prepared to confront him with evidence, Mooney had Andrew Maggio transferred from the Seventh Precinct to police headquarters on Saturday afternoon, where he was ushered into the superintendent’s office. The young man was seated in front of Mooney’s desk; Superintendent Mooney stationed himself on one side of Andrew; Assistant District Attorney Daly came at him from the other direction. For four hours Mooney and Daly grilled Andrew, pelting him with question after question and flinging his brother’s bloodstained clothes in his face. Hour after hour Andrew repeated his story, insisting again and again that he did not kill his brother and sister-in-law. The bloodstained razor wasn’t his; he’d never seen it before. He didn’t know who it belonged to. The bloody clothes in the room belonged to Joseph. He’d slept through the noise of the murders because he’d been drinking the night before and was soundly asleep. The stains on his white shirt were from wine, not blood. He’d spilled a glass of wine over himself at a wedding. Over and over again Andrew protested his innocence.

  Finally, he could stand it no longer: “How could you think I could kill my own brother?” he demanded, his voice choking on tears. “He sent us the money to come to America. He supported us after our father died in Sicily. Joe was like a father to me since I was eleven years old. I know a man isn’t supposed to cry but . . .” and slumped over, his face in his hands, sobbing.

  Mooney sat back in his chair and looked on thoughtfully as the distraught young man finally got control of himself and wiped his eyes. He had planned to charge Andrew, but now the case against him didn’t seem strong enough. Mooney couldn’t claim to have a policeman’s long-honed skill in interrogation. But his career so far had taught him to be a judge of character, and his instinct told him he should look elsewhere for the murderer.

  When Andrew was released Saturday night, Superintendent Mooney made a statement to the press: “Up to the time we conducted a rigid cross-examination of Andrew Maggio, I suspected strongly that either he committed the crime or had knowledge of the identity of the person or persons who did so. Andrew, however, explained so readily and clearly some of the puzzling threads of evidence that we gathered, and which we thought might be binding on him, that Mr. Daly and I concluded that the doubt as to Andrew’s guilt was so strong that we were compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  Mooney promised that the investigation would go on, declaring, “Our hope for a solution is still bright.”

  Privately, however, he may have felt much less optimistic. But it was important to bolster public confidence in the police force. Having the public frightened of a razor-wielding maniac who killed with impunity could only complicate the police superintendent’s job.

  One step Mooney took to inspire confidence at the beginning of the investigation was to announce that he had assigned Chief of Detectives George Long to take charge of the case. The New Orleans public had faith in Long; he had a reputation as a clever detective who could solve difficult cases. The Reidel murder, a few years earlier, had been one such case.

  In the fall of 1910, the bloated, decomposing remains of a middle-aged man sown into coffee sacks bobbed up in the Old Basin Canal. While the body was quickly identified as that of Franz Reidel, a German immigrant and watchmaker who’d gone missing with his life savings, investigators didn’t have much to go on, except that the victim had died of blunt force trauma. Jim Reynolds, chief of detectives at the time, had little else in the way of clues or suspects. “We don’t know where to start,” he conceded to a newspaper reporter. “There is absolutely nothing to give us any idea of what to do.” The Daily States was calling it “one of the criminal mysteries of the year.”

  Captain George Long unearthed the clue that broke the case. At the time, Long wasn’t even in the Detectives’ Office. But he had a flair for investigative work and kept his eyes and ears open, as Reynolds advised his officers to do. Long’s patience was rewarded by a tip that Reidel had been seen entering a door at 630 North Rampart Street, on the edge of the French Quarter. More nosing around revealed that this was the address of an unsavory character named Eugene Bescanon, a tall, fish-eyed French immigrant with a criminal past, who had been an acquaintance of Reidel’s. Further probing led to a squalid apartment in a dilapidated building on North Rampart Street (only two blocks from the Old Basin Canal) where investigators found bloodstained floors and rags.

  This discovery quickly led to Bescanon’s arrest, confession, and implication of his accomplice, a fellow Frenchman named François Rodin. The unsuspecting Reidel had been lured to Bescanon’s apartment, where he was battered to death and robbed. The recovery of Reidel’s watch chain, a distinctive one with a horse head locket, confirmed the men’s guilt. The investigation had solved the mystery of Franz Reidel’s murder and produced two culprits to hang—all because of a tip that might have escaped a less vigilant officer than George Long.

  And Chief Reynolds wasn’t stingy about sharing the credit. Captain Long’s part in unraveling the mystery was publicly celebrated, with one newspaper editorial “award[ing him] the first honors in the quest.” The case was a triumph for the New Orleans Police Department, showing that with thoroughness, perseverance—and a little luck—apparently hopeless cases could be solved.

  Mooney only hoped Detective Long could accomplish a similar turnaround with the Maggio murders.

  By May 1918, the United States had been in the First World War for just over a year. For months the New Orleans papers had carried stories about Red Cross fund drives, violations of the Espionage Act, and the first military conscription in America since the Civil War. But for the people of New Orleans the war was far away compared to the immediacy of the Maggio murders. The city was no stranger to violent death, but not since Joe Davi’s death had it seen this kind of butchery. Newspaper accounts of the investigation into the murders of Joe and Catherine Maggio inspired far greater interest than stories of Zeppelin attacks or U-boat warfare.

  As they drank their chicory coffee and contemplated the grisly murders, New Orleanians couldn’t help but wonder whether all the attacks on Italian grocers were related. The Crutti and Rissetto attacks, the Davi murder, the Andollina case, and now the Maggio murders. Were they all connected? And who was targeting these people? And why?

  Another name cropped up again and again in discussions as alert readers of the New Orleans papers thought back to another murder of another Italian grocer six years before.

  Less than a year after Joe Davi’s murder, another Italian grocer died in the middle of the night. Superficially, the crime was similar to the attack on Davi—a young grocer brutally murdered as he slept next to his wife. Yet the two murders were dissimilar in one crucial way, a way that indicated a different kind of criminal and a different type of motive.

  At twenty-seven, Tony Sciambra was already a success. He’d learned the business as a boy in his father’s Carrollton grocery and now ran his own grocery and bar at the opposite end of town, on France and Villere Streets in the Bywater District. The hard work and frugality that came as naturally to first-generation Americans as it had to their immigrant parents had allowed him to pay cash for the property. A personable young man, Tony was married to “Mrs. Tony” as the locals called her—pretty twenty-three-year-old Johanna. They were well on their way to producing the hoped-for houseful of children: married not quite two years, they had one son—eleven-month-old Jake—and another baby on the way. So, as Tony slept in his bed on the morning of May 16, 1912, he had reason to be pleased with himself, and with life.

  Tony, Jake, and Johanna Sciambra.

  But not everyone, apparently, was pleased with Tony Sciambra.

  About 2 AM on that morning, an intruder stacked a couple of soapboxes on top of each other and climbed up to reach a kitchen window at the back of Tony and Johanna’s house. Opening the shutters, then raising the unlatched window, he crawled into the kitchen. Once inside, he paused and listened; no one in the house stirred. One door off the kitchen led into the grocery. He chose the o
ther door, the one leading through the small dining room to the room where the young couple and their son were fast asleep. Entering the bedroom, the intruder attacked Tony, killing him almost instantly and inadvertently wounding Johanna; the baby sleeping next to them was unharmed.

  How was this crime so different from the murders of Joe Davi or Joe and Catherine Maggio?

  Tony Sciambra was shot to death.

  In the bedroom the assailant walked up to the bed, pulled the mosquito netting out of the way, pointed his .38 caliber pistol at the sleeping grocer, and pulled the trigger. Again and again he fired. He unloaded five shots into Tony before turning around and slipping out through the kitchen door, giving no thought to the jewelry in the wardrobe or the cash in the till.

  The Sciambra grocery and home, where Tony Sciambra was shot to death.

  The first three bullets entering Tony’s back caused him to jerk involuntarily so that the next two hit with less accuracy, wounding him in the side and the arm. But it didn’t take long for internal hemorrhaging to kill him. Tony was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

  Johanna was killed accidentally. One bullet shot right through her husband’s body, struck her in the hip, and penetrated her abdomen. At first everyone thought she would live, but the wound went septic, and she died of peritonitis ten days after her husband, leaving little Jake to be raised by his grandparents.

  New Orleans vibrated with speculation over the assault on Tony Sciambra, yet another Italian grocer. People whispered to one another that it must be connected to the Davi murder less than a year before, and the Crutti and Rissetto attacks before that. There was no shortage of theories: it was the vendetta or the Black Hand; newly arrived Sicilians were trying to take the grocery business away from “local Italians”; the attacks were revenge for mistreatment by Italian grocers; the killer was a fiend.

  The most popular notion was that the Black Hand was at it again. An indignant editorial in the New Orleans Item demanded that “the better class of Italians”—i.e., those not criminal—“take active measures . . . to induce their own people to tell what they knew regarding these crimes.” It was only in this way, the editorialist continued, that Tony Sciambra’s murder could be solved and “the authorities will be able to discover and punish the guilty.”

  The writer may well have been right. But he, like most commentators at the time, didn’t recognize the significance of the choice of murder weapons. A gun and a blade are both lethal, but they kill in very different ways.

  Many aspects of the Crutti, Rissetto, Davi, and Sciambra (and later the Andollina and Maggio) attacks were similar: targeting a successful grocery and bar in an unfashionable, isolated part of the city (the Sciambra grocery was less than a mile from the Crutti place) and breaking in during the dead of night. Robbery was never the motive. The assailant usually targeted the man first, if he attacked the woman at all. Harriet Crutti, Mary Davi, and Anna Andollina escaped relatively unscathed. Only Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto were attacked with equal ferocity. And perhaps Catherine Maggio wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t attempted to defend her husband.

  All of these attacks were made with a blade of some kind—a meat cleaver, hatchet, axe, or razor—something that would draw blood. That’s what the Axeman craved.

  If all the Axeman wanted was the death of Italian grocers, he could have used a gun. He had one when he entered the Andollina home. It would have been less trouble—cleaner, more efficient, deadlier. But he never fired it, using it only to terrorize the victim’s wife. The survival of several victims attests to the fact that an axe or cleaver wasn’t as sure a method of killing as a revolver.

  So, why choose such an insecure weapon as a blade? Because guns are impersonal. Killing a man by standing over him and bashing his head with a hatchet or cleaver is a much more intimate affair. A blade is an intensely personal weapon, requiring the killer to actually touch his victim and risk being splattered with blood and gore. A killer who chooses this kind of weapon wants more than his victim’s death; he wants the power that comes with holding a man’s life in his hands and then choosing to spill his blood and brains out on the bed.

  Amid all the speculation after the murders, the Times-Democrat was closest to the mark, recording that many people attributed the killer’s actions to a “lust for blood.” The Axeman was willing to take the chance that his victims might actually survive.

  Tony Sciambra’s killer wanted something else. He only needed Tony dead. He didn’t need to enjoy it. He didn’t need to derive psychological pleasure from it. He didn’t require the satisfaction derived from bringing an axe down on a helpless, sleeping man and spattering his blood and brains over the bed. Tony Sciambra was murdered with a weapon meant to be used at a distance, one that didn’t require physical contact between the killer and his victim.

  So, if Tony Sciambra and his wife weren’t victims of the Axeman, who was responsible for their deaths? A clue may be found in a business transaction involving Tony’s brother, Henry. After Tony’s death—it’s unclear how long—Henry Sciambra sold his own thriving grocery business at Marigny and Dauphine. The neighbors, the Times-Picayune said, shook their heads, puzzling over why the young man would sell a business that had been doing so well.

  The man Henry Sciambra sold out to was Vito Di Giorgio.

  Di Giorgio was reputed to be a major figure in the local “Mafia,” the New Orleans gangsters who thrived on blackmail and counterfeiting. He’d been arrested in 1908 as the ringleader of a gang of Black Hand extortionists who’d tried to blow up a dry goods store when the owner refused to pay, but the police couldn’t make the charges stick. He also had connections to a local counterfeiting ring and to New York crime boss Joseph Morello.

  Was Tony Sciambra’s death connected to the sale of his brother’s store? Was it meant to serve as a warning? Or had Tony offended someone, someone who resorted to the vendetta and took a merciless revenge?

  That wasn’t all. Notorious Black Hander Joseph Mumfre—the man convicted in 1908 of trying to bomb grocer Camillo Graffagnini’s home—may, possibly, have been mixed up somehow with Di Giorgio and the Sciambras.

  Mumfre knew Di Giorgio; that was certain. Police suspected Mumfre—out on bond before his trial for dynamiting the Graffagnini home in December 1907—of involvement in the Black Hand bombing of another grocery in June 1908, for which Vito Di Giorgio was also arrested.

  After Tony Sciambra’s death, as Chief Reynolds, Detective Dantonio, and the other investigators began probing into the couples’ background, trying to find a motive for the gunning down of the young grocer, neighbors whispered that Tony Sciambra had heard that relatives of Mumfre—who had begun serving his twenty-year prison term—lived in the neighborhood, and this had frightened the young grocer enough that he’d considered selling his store. He’d gone as far as lining up a prospective buyer when he changed his mind.

  The would-be buyer, however, wasn’t to be put off and had shown up at the store with a companion in tow, to persuade Tony to sell. One woman confided to detectives that a few months previously Johanna had been “considerably worried because of an Italian who looked dangerous . . . [and] had been to the store.”

  Reynolds and his men followed up on these leads, without any result. They questioned the two men who’d been in to see Tony. They also questioned Johanna Sciambra, who was well enough to be interviewed the morning after the murder. No, she hadn’t seen the shooter. No, she and her husband had known nothing about Mumfre relatives in the neighborhood. No, they’d never received any Black Hand letters. Yes, her husband had considered selling but only because he hadn’t gotten along with the landlord.

  To add to the mystery, George Musacchia, the same grocer whose store had burned down just before Joe Davi’s murder, came forward to claim that someone had also tried to break into his house the night of the Sciambra killing, using much the same method. He’d discovered a barrel sitting under one of his windows; someone had broken some of the slats in the blinds in a
n apparent attempt to get in. Reporters noted that Musacchia’s grocery sat next to a vacant lot, just like the Davi, Rissetto, and Sciambra businesses. Why had the intruder abandoned the break-in? What connection—if any—did it have to the Sciambra case?

  The different threads of the investigation never came together to form a coherent picture for the detectives. The murders of Tony and Johanna Sciambra were added to the list of the city’s unsolved crimes. But contrary to the belief of most in his city, Chief Reynolds had concluded that the killing of the Sciambras and the murder of Joe Davi (and so presumably the attacks on the Cruttis and Rissettos) were products of very different minds: the Sciambras were, he thought, yet more victims of the Sicilian vendetta, still an all too common occurrence in the city. But Reynolds was convinced that Joe Davi’s murder was not the work of a criminal gang but “bore all the earmarks of the acts of a degenerate.” He never heard the term serial killer, but Chief Reynolds had clearly grasped the concept.

  If he’d lived, Chief Reynolds presumably would have agreed that the Maggio case had more in common with the Davi than the Sciambra murders. But most people didn’t think that way. Most people only remembered that some Italian grocers had died mysteriously under similar circumstances. The person who chalked the mysterious message onto the sidewalk—“Mrs. Joseph Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney,” or something similar—was probably only doing what many in New Orleans were doing that warm May morning of 1918, as news of the slaughter of the couple swept through the city—linking the murder of one innocent Italian couple with the other.

  The police weren’t in a position to tell them anything different. Less than a week after the Maggio murders, the investigation was flailing. The most obvious suspect had been released and no obvious leads presented themselves to Superintendent Mooney and his detectives. The investigation suffered another blow when Detective Theodore Obitz, one of the officers investigating the case, was himself murdered. Obitz had spent the Saturday after the murders running down clues, but at 3 AM on Sunday morning he was cut down by a bandit he was chasing through the deserted streets of the city.