by Gary Krist
ALSO BY GARY KRIST
City of Scoundrels
The White Cascade
Extravagance
Chaos Theory
Bad Chemistry
Bone by Bone
The Garden State
Copyright © 2014 by Gary Krist
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krist, Gary
Empire of sin : a story of sex, jazz, murder, and the battle for modern New Orleans / Gary Krist.
1. New Orleans (La.)—History—20th century. 2. Storyville (New Orleans, La.)—History—20th century. 3. New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Storyville (New Orleans, La.)—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Anderson, Thomas Charles, 1858–1931. 6. Crime—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 7. Murder—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 8. Corruption—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 9. Jazz—Social aspects—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. 10. Sex customs—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—20th century. I. Title.
F379.N557K75 2014
976.3′35061—dc23 2014003191
ISBN 978-0-7704-3706-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-7704-3707-7
Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi
Spine photographs: (top) Detail, Joseph “King” Oliver’s Band, Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum; (middle) Ewing, Inc., Baton Rouge, LA; (bottom) Attributed to E. J. Bellocq/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Author photograph: Bob Krist
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Prologue May 23, 1918
PART ONE: THE WAR BEGINS, 1890–1891
Chapter 1 Going Respectable
Chapter 2 The Sodom of the South
Chapter 3 The First Casualty
Chapter 4 Retribution
PART TWO: DRAWING BOUNDARIES, 1890S–1907
Chapter 5 A Sporting Man
Chapter 6 New Sounds
Chapter 7 Desperado
Chapter 8 Storyville Rising
Chapter 9 Jazzmen
Chapter 10 The Sin Factory
PART THREE: BATTLEGROUNDS OF SIN, 1907–1917
Chapter 11 The Black Hand
Chapter 12 A Reawakening
Chapter 13 An Incident on Franklin Street
Chapter 14 Hard Times
Chapter 15 The New Prohibitionists
PART FOUR: TWILIGHT OF THE DEMIMONDE, 1917–1920
Chapter 16 Exodus
Chapter 17 A Killer in the Night
Chapter 18 “Almost As If He Had Wings”
Chapter 19 The Axman’s Jazz
Chapter 20 The End of an Empire
Chapter 21 The Soiled Phoenix
Afterword Who Was the Axman?
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Empire of Sin is a work of nonfiction, adhering strictly to the historical record and incorporating no invented dialogue or other undocumented re-creations. Unless otherwise attributed, anything between quotation marks is either actual dialogue (as reported by a witness or in a newspaper) or else a citation from a memoir, book, letter, police report, court transcript, or other document, as cited in the endnotes. In some quotations I have, for clarity’s sake, corrected the original spelling, syntax, word order, or punctuation. Names and certain other nouns were often spelled in various ways in various sources (for example, “axeman/axman”); in these cases, I’ve chosen the spelling that seems best or most plausible and used it consistently throughout the book, even in direct quotes.
It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.
—REVEREND J. CHANDLER GREGG
“THE CRIME,” AS DETECTIVES WOULD LATER TELL THE newspapers, was “one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”
At five A.M. on the sultry morning of May 23, 1918, the bodies of Joseph and Catherine Maggio, Italian immigrants who ran a small grocery store in a remote section of the city, were found sprawled across the disordered bedroom of the living quarters behind their store. Both had been savagely attacked, apparently while they slept. Joseph Maggio lay face-up on the blood-sodden bed, his skull split by a deep, jagged gash several inches long; Catherine Maggio, her own skull nearly hewn in two, was stretched out on the floor beneath him. Each victim’s throat had been slashed with a sharp instrument.
A blood-smeared ax and shaving razor—obviously the murder weapons—had been found on the floor nearby.
Police Superintendent Frank T. Mooney stood among the dozen or so detectives and patrolmen working over the grocery for clues. Summoned from his bed before dawn, the superintendent had immediately rushed out to the crime scene, located at the corner of Magnolia and Upperline Streets. It was a godforsaken neighborhood on the outskirts of Uptown New Orleans, a place where a few single-story pineboard shacks stood amid a sea of weed-choked empty lots. Until recent years, this area had been little more than a fetid swamp, populated by alligators and slender-necked herons. But now people actually lived here—Italians, mostly, along with an assortment of other recent immigrants and a few blacks too poor to live anywhere else. Like much of the part of New Orleans set far back from the river and its natural levee, it was an inadequate place for human habitation, a breeding ground for all kinds of disease and squalor. And now it had become a breeding ground for crime as well: street lighting was still unheard-of out here, and even the slightest rain could transform the low-lying, unpaved streets into stagnant rivers of muck, impossible for even the sturdiest of police vehicles to navigate.
Frank Mooney, forty-eight years old and still new to his job, understood that he had to oversee the investigation of this case very closely. It would be the first high-profile homicide of his tenure as police superintendent, and a crime so strange and sensational was bound to attract all kinds of unwanted publicity. In some ways, the case seemed straightforward enough. The intruder had clearly taken the Maggios’ own ax from the backyard shed and used it to chisel out a panel of the kitchen door and pry off the lock. He had then entered the kitchen, carried the ax down the short hallway to the bedroom, and used it, and perhaps the shaving razor, to butcher the sleeping Maggios. He’d apparently made no attempt to hide the murder weapons or otherwise obscure any evidence of the brutal crime that had occurred in that tiny, airless bedroom.
The question of motive, though, was more problematic. Robbery seemed the most obvious explanation, but there was little proof that anything had actually been taken from the house. True, the grocer’s bedside safe had been found open and empty. But there were no signs that the safe had been forced, and right beneath it sat a tin box, wrapped in a woman’s stocking, containing several hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry. Mooney’s officers also found $100 in cash secreted under Joseph Maggio’s pillow. No professional thief could have overlooked such easy booty.
Chief of Detectives George Long, the experienced investigator whom Mooney
had put in charge of the case, had a different theory—one that implicated Andrew Maggio, Joseph’s younger brother, who lived in the other half of the grocery building on Magnolia Street. Andrew had been the first person to discover the bodies, after allegedly hearing a scuffle in his brother’s apartment and going next door to investigate. He was a barber by profession, and several days earlier had been seen taking a straight razor from his shop “to have a nick honed from the blade.” Based on this evidence alone, Andrew Maggio—along with another younger Maggio brother—had been detained for questioning.
But there was one incongruous piece of evidence that seemed to exonerate the brothers—and to point to another kind of perpetrator entirely: Shortly before noon, two detectives canvassing the neighborhood had stumbled across a clue just a block away from the murder scene. Right at the corner of Robertson and Upperline, scrawled across the planks of a wooden banquette (as sidewalks are called in New Orleans), they’d found a chalk message written in a crude, childish hand:
MRS JOSEPH MAGGIO IS GOING TO SIT UP TONIGHT JUST LIKE MRS TONEY
It was baffling: Why would Andrew Maggio—or anyone else in his right mind—leave behind such a gratuitous clue to the murders?
A couple of Mooney’s more senior detectives raised an unsettling possibility. They told the superintendent about a series of unsolved attacks on Italian grocers that had occurred in the city some years ago; at least three of those attacks had been committed with a hatchet. One victim, who like Maggio had been slain in bed with his wife, was named Tony Schiambra. Could Mrs. Schiambra be the “Mrs. Toney” in the chalk scrawl? And if so, what did it mean? At the time of the earlier attacks, police had attributed the crimes to the local Black Hand, a loosely knit organization of Italian extortionists that New Orleanians commonly (though not accurately) called “the Mafia.” But the Black Hand had supposedly been eliminated in the city some time ago. The New Orleans police had waged a long and bitter fight against the shadowy organization to root out its members and end what had been a virtual epidemic of blackmail and murder in the city’s Italian community. By 1918, it was widely believed that the battle had been won.
But now Frank Mooney had his own pair of murdered Italian grocers to deal with, and it was certain that everyone in New Orleans would be watching to see how their rookie superintendent handled the case. Ten months earlier, when he was first named to the position, the Times-Picayune had questioned the wisdom of Mooney’s selection. Was it a good idea, the paper had asked, to trust command of the entire police department to a former railroad executive whose law enforcement experience amounted to little more than a short stint as a rail-yard cop many years ago? The new superintendent was clearly a police outsider, appointed by a mayor well known for bestowing city jobs on his political allies. Mooney didn’t even look like a cop—with his gold-rimmed spectacles, brushy mustache, and stout, well-banqueted physique, he looked more like an insurance executive on his way to an industry convention in Omaha. And even though the Times-Picayune had praised Mooney’s sterling qualities as a manager, the paper pointed out that these credentials did not guarantee success as commander of the New Orleans police: “As police superintendent, he will be judged not by his [past] record, however creditable … but by the record he has yet to make.”
For Mooney, then, there was strong incentive to see Andrew Maggio as the perpetrator of these two murders, and to write them off as isolated revenge killings or a domestic crime of passion—the kind of easily explicable incident that was all too common in New Orleans’ poorer neighborhoods. Far better this explanation than attributing the attack to a return of Black Hand terrorism, long after the police had supposedly eliminated that threat. The campaign against the Italian underworld—part of a larger effort by the so-called respectable white establishment to wrest control of their city from the forces of vice, crime, and corruption—had roiled New Orleans for the better part of three decades, eventually degenerating into something like all-out class warfare. A generation-long ordeal of lynchings, riots, and large-scale police raids had taken a harsh toll on the entire city. So for an untested police superintendent trying to convince his constituents that New Orleans’ bad old days were indeed over, a resurrection of the “Dago Evil,” as it was called, would be an ominous development indeed.
But not, perhaps, the worst possible development. That would come a few months later. For, by the end of that summer of 1918—with three more similar ax murders terrorizing the city and the Times-Picayune openly speculating about a crazed serial killer on the loose—it would be clear that a very different kind of evil was at large in the squalid backstreets of New Orleans.
SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK ON A BRIGHT November morning, a handsome middle-aged man dashed up to the front door of the brothel at 172 Customhouse Street in the French Quarter and let himself in with a key. It was still early for any kind of business at a New Orleans house of prostitution, so no one except the servants was up and about. But the man—Phillip Lobrano—didn’t have to be formally shown in. He was well known in the house; the front ground-floor bedroom was where he regularly consorted with the madam of the place, a woman who called herself Josie Lobrano. The two had been lovers and business partners for almost a decade—ever since Josie was sixteen and the much-older Lobrano had offered her his protection. And while she was technically and legally still Miss Mary Deubler, she used Phillip’s surname for professional purposes—though few people were apparently deceived.
This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890—the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren’t always the best guide to telling who was who. Dressed in knee-length frock coats, pinstriped trousers, and suavely cocked felt derbies, men who may or may not have been gentlemen strolled the gaslit avenues with fashionable young women who may or may not have been their wives. Clerks in the department stores on busy Canal Street were careful to ask their female customers that all-important question—“And where do we send the bill, madam?”—in a hushed, confidential, knowing tone of voice. Newsboys of uncertain parentage hawked papers on street corners, and one could only wonder who was bankrolling the rakish ne’er-do-wells dropping hundreds at the Fair Grounds Racetrack or in one of the backroom gambling dens in saloons all around town.
And so Phillip Lobrano—aging but dapper, well dressed but not conspicuously employed—entered the brothel of the woman known by some as his wife. He found Josie still in bed, sleeping late after the strain of a busy Friday night. Clearly in a state of some agitation, Lobrano told her to get up immediately and get dressed. He said that he had just seen one of her brothers—Peter Deubler, who worked sporadically as a streetcar motorman—in a bar on Royal Street, supremely drunk and apparently hungry for trouble. Peter was on his way over to the brothel, and when he arrived, Josie was to send the maid to the door to say they weren’t home. If she let Peter in, Lobrano warned, she would have to take responsibility for the consequences.
As Josie dressed, Lobrano recounted what had happened on Royal Street. He had been sitting in Louis George’s saloon, quietly reading the newspaper, when an obviously intoxicated Peter Deubler wandered in. Seeing Lobrano, the young man ordered a bottle from the bartender and carried it over to his table. Phillip wasn’t particularly welcoming. He’d always disliked Josie’s family, whom he considered little more than a “flock of vultures,” forever borrowing money and monopolizing too much of her time and attention. Even so, he tried at first to be civil. But Peter was still reeling from an all-night spree and was in a foul, abusive mood. In sarcastic tones, he invited Lobrano to have a drink with him, and when Lobrano declined, Peter became angry.
“You bastard, come take a drink,” he insisted, filling a glass and shoving it across the table.
The bartender tried to intervene. “It looks as if you want to raise hell,” he observed warily. Peter, a
large, muscular man who had once singlehandedly knocked down six men in a street fight, agreed that this was indeed his intention. Then, for reasons that would remain obscure, he began to deride Lobrano in a loud, menacing voice. Intimidated, Lobrano quickly finished his drink and got up to leave.
“I know where to find you,” Peter said ominously as Lobrano turned away.
A few minutes later, as Lobrano was hurrying over to Josie’s, a friend who had been in the bar caught up with him on Canal Street. Peter, the friend warned, had begun to make threats against Lobrano just after the two had parted. “I am going to kill that bastard Lobrano,” Peter had said explicitly—in front of several witnesses—before stumbling out of the saloon.
Lobrano had barely finished telling this story to Josie when the brothel’s front doorbell rang. That was Peter now, Lobrano warned, and he urged her again not to let him in. But Josie seemed unconcerned. Twenty-six years old, sturdily built like her brother, with attractive, somewhat hardened features accentuated by striking black eyebrows, she was hardly the timid, fearful type. Driven into prostitution as an eleven-year-old orphan, Josie had been forced to fend for herself and her two younger brothers from the beginning. Years of struggling to survive on the streets of New Orleans had turned her into a tough and often combative woman. She had in fact been arrested for disorderly conduct several times, once for horsewhipping a young man on Palmyra Street, and again for brawling with a fellow prostitute named Beulah Ripley (who allegedly “staggered from the scene of combat missing part of her lower lip and half an ear”). So Josie was not one to shy away from a confrontation, especially not with a member of her own family. Calling the maid, Josie instructed her to answer the door and see her brother in. She would talk to him alone in the parlor and see what was the matter.