Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  This outcome caused the spectators in the courtroom “to turn and look at one another in mute amazement.” But then the shouting began—both inside and outside the courthouse. Reporters rushed the dismissed jurors as they gathered up their belongings to leave. Besieged with questions, they refused to reveal anything about their decision. Sheriff Villere, knowing the reception they were likely to get outside, advised them to exit the building by the side door. But after some discussion, the jurors decided to brave the judgment of their fellow citizens. They left by the main courthouse door. And although the mob outside was unruly and belligerent, the jurors were able to push through the milling throngs unmolested. A boy in the crowd, apparently convinced that the bribery rumors were true, shouted to one juror: “Say, how much did you get?”

  The nine defendants, on the other hand, were met with more overt hostility. Though six of them had been acquitted of the murder charges, all had to be returned to prison until certain lesser charges against them could be formally withdrawn. They were thus again returned to the Black Marias waiting outside. A detail of police tried to hold back the jeering mob to clear a path. Despite some scuffling as spectators pushed against police lines, the prisoners were loaded into the vans without incident. Even so, a howl of frustrated rage rose up in their wake as they departed.

  The afternoon newspaper editorials about the outcome were blistering: “Red-handed murder … struck at the Law itself,” the Daily Item proclaimed, “and the agencies of the law were found impotent to punish the foul deed.” The writer for the Daily States was utterly apoplectic: “Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted civilization.” And yet the spillers of that blood were now to be set free. Such a verdict, according to the paper, was an affront to justice, a grievous injury that admitted only one possible solution: “Rise, people of New Orleans!”

  It was a suggestion that some “people of New Orleans” were already seriously contemplating.

  WHEN William S. Parkerson stepped into his second-floor law office at 7 Commercial Place that evening, he found several dozen agitated men waiting for him, with more arriving at the office door every minute. Parkerson had been in another courtroom all afternoon, but by now he had heard about the outcome of the Hennessy trial. So he knew why these men were here: incensed by the verdicts, they were looking to him for guidance on how to right what they all regarded as a blatant miscarriage of justice.

  That the men in his office—some of them much older and more prominent than he—should now turn to Parkerson for leadership was not surprising. Balding, bespectacled, and somewhat portly, the thirty-five-year-old lawyer may not have looked the part of the dynamic leader of men, but his intensity in the courtroom was legendary. A powerful natural orator, he had been a political force in the Young Men’s Democratic Association for some time already. But it was his position as alleged leader of the YMDA’s unofficial militia that explained why these men were at his office. Described by one historian as a “Southern ‘special gentlemen’s police,’ ” Parkerson’s so-called Regulators included many of the city’s most prominent citizens. These were the men who had brought Mayor Shakspeare and his reform government into office, and who now felt it their job to correct the “mistake” the jurors had made that day.

  After fifteen minutes, Parkerson broke up the meeting, instructing the men in his office to assemble again later that night. They would meet at the home of Franklin Brevard Hayne, a young cotton merchant who was also a leader of the Regulators militia. And when they reconvened in the parlor of Hayne’s home—at the corner of Royal and Bienville Streets in the Vieux Carré—their ire was, if anything, stoked even higher than before. Many had heard stories of raucous demonstrations in the Italian colony that day; one report even had some Italians spitting on an American flag in joyous defiance. To the 150 men present, the meaning of this was obvious. The Mafia society was flaunting its power, celebrating its victory over the forces of law and order in New Orleans.

  Many at the meeting wanted to march to the parish prison at that very moment to exact their revenge. But Parkerson dissuaded them. Convinced that any such vigilante action needed a popular mandate behind it, he argued instead for a mass meeting to be held the next morning—a gathering that would attract a large number of participants. And so together they composed an announcement to be printed in all of the morning papers. Signed by sixty-one men, it read:

  MASS MEETING!

  ALL GOOD CITIZENS ARE INVITED TO ATTEND A MASS MEETING ON SATURDAY, MARCH 14, AT 10 O’CLOCK A.M., AT CLAY STATUE, TO TAKE STEPS TO REMEDY THE FAILURE OF JUSTICE IN THE HENNESSY CASE.

  COME PREPARED FOR ACTION.

  The announcement did not specify what action was meant, but Parkerson’s intentions were clearly telegraphed by what he did next: After adjourning the meeting at Hayne’s house, he and a select group of trusted friends rode a horse-drawn wagon to a hardware store across town. There they loaded it up with an ample supply of rope, plenty of ammunition, and 150 Winchester rifles and shotguns. Then they carried this arsenal back to Hayne’s, where they loaded it into several large trunks, to be easily available the next day.

  WHEN Sheriff Gabriel Villere read the newspapers the next morning, he was under no illusions about the probable result of the announced mass meeting, and he wanted to be ready for it. Whatever his own sympathies, he was responsible for the safety of the nineteen prisoners in his charge. So at eight thirty A.M. he left his office at the parish prison and headed toward City Hall to find Mayor Shakspeare. If the crowds at the mass meeting turned into an unruly mob, he wanted the mayor to give him more men, or maybe even help from the state militia.

  At roughly the same time of the morning, Pasquale Corte, Italy’s consul to New Orleans, was heading through the streets in the same direction. The announcement in the papers had distressed the consul considerably. At least two of the defendants in the trial were Italian nationals, and Corte saw it as his responsibility to make certain of their safety. So he, too, was going to see the mayor, hoping to persuade him to protect the acquitted men.

  Sheriff Villere was already at City Hall when Corte arrived, but both were to be disappointed. Neither Mayor Shakspeare nor his secretary were in their offices, and no one seemed to know where they were. Chief of Police Dexter Gaster, Hennessy’s successor, was present, but the neophyte chief seemed reluctant to do more than send a few extra patrolmen over to the parish prison. If Corte and Villere wanted any greater precaution than that, they would have to speak to the mayor, who—conveniently, some would later say—wasn’t due in City Hall before noon.

  Frustrated, and in a state of rising alarm, Corte and Villere hurried over to consult with Louisiana governor Francis T. Nicholls, who was known to be in town at his lawyer’s office. But here they got no help either. Nicholls, a white-haired former Confederate general, seemed sympathetic to their concerns, but he claimed that there was nothing he could do to aid them. To deploy the militia in any city, he would have to receive an official written request from its mayor. Without such a document, he said, he was powerless. But Nicholls at least knew where Shakspeare could be found: the mayor was breakfasting at the Pickwick Club. If the gentlemen would simply have a seat, he would send a message over to the club and ask Mayor Shakspeare to come to the office.

  By this time, crowds were already gathering at the foot of the Henry Clay statue, which in 1891 still stood on the neutral ground (the median) of Canal Street at the intersection of Royal. At ten o’clock, when Parkerson and his self-styled “Vigilance Committee” arrived on the scene, approximately six to eight thousand citizens already thronged the avenue. Intersections were blocked to traffic and the Canal Street trolleys were so swamped that they could barely move.

  Amid shouts and cheering, Parkerson and the other leaders of the committee got the meeting started. They marched three times around the monument to give the other leaders a chance to fall in behind them. Then Parkerson climbed the steps to the foot of the sta
tue. He took off his hat as another cheer rose up from the crowd.

  “People of New Orleans, once before I stood before you for public duty,” he began, referring to his role in the 1888 elections. “I now appear before you again, actuated by no desire for fame or prominence. Affairs have reached such a crisis that men living in an organized and civilized community, finding their laws fruitless and ineffective, are forced to protect themselves. When courts fail, the people must act!”

  Again the crowd roared its approval. By now, spectators had climbed to the roofs of the paralyzed streetcars to get a better view. Others looked on with opera glasses from nearby windows and balconies.

  “What protection is there left us,” Parkerson went on, “when the very head of our police department—our Chief of Police—is assassinated in our very midst by the Mafia Society, and his assassins [are] again turned loose on the community? The time has come for the people of New Orleans to say whether they are going to stand [for] these outrages.… I ask you to consider this fairly: Are you going to let it continue? Will every man here follow me, and see the murder of D.C. Hennessy vindicated? Are there men enough here to set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel?”

  The roar of the spectators left no doubt about their answer. And after a few other men had made speeches from the foot of the Great Pacificator, the crowd, excited to a frenzied pitch, heeded Parkerson’s final words: “Men and citizens of New Orleans, follow me! I will be your leader!”

  The crowd parted as Parkerson and the other leaders made their way down Royal Street. At Hayne’s house on the corner of Bienville, a previously selected group of men armed themselves with the shotguns, Winchester rifles, and rope that they had cached there the night before. Then they returned to Canal Street and began their march toward the parish prison. “The crowd accordingly fell in line, three and four abreast,” the Daily Item would later report. “The vanguard was composed of the most wealthy and respected citizens of New Orleans. They were followed by honest, hard-working mechanics, tradesmen, and laborers … Here was a body of men on their way to do what the law had failed to do.”

  The mob moved “like a mighty roaring stream” along Canal and then turned right up Rampart toward Congo Square. Along the way, crying women waved handkerchiefs from galleries; shouting men climbed on beer and grocery wagons, on awnings and rooftops, encouraging the marchers forward. Some began chanting, “Who killa de Chief? Who killa de Chief?”—a hateful ethnic taunt that would be flung at the Italians of New Orleans for decades to come. The few policemen in the crowd were driven out of the path under a salvo of stones and clumps of mud.

  The armed men at the head of the procession marched on with almost military discipline. “It was the most terrible thing I ever saw,” Parkerson would later boast to the newspapers, “the quiet determination of the crowd. There was no disorder.” With a Winchester rifle in one hand and a revolver tucked into his pocket, Parkerson led his followers to Congo Square, just one block from the prison. Here he stopped and addressed them again about the grave duty they were about to perform.

  Two municipal detectives left the park and ran ahead to the parish prison to alert Warden Lemuel Davis of the approaching mob. The warden realized that it was too late to move the inmates to another location; he and his men would just have to hold off the mob as best they could. Moving quickly, he ordered that the doors to the prison be barred from the inside. After calling the Central Station with an urgent request for reinforcements, he went to see the prisoners in their cell on the second floor—a large, low-security area called the Star Chamber—where they were waiting for their release. When told of the approaching mob, Joseph Macheca, the most prominent of the prisoners, asked the warden that they all be given arms to defend themselves. Davis refused, but did agree to release them from the cell for their own safety. He sent a guard over to the women’s section of the prison, ordering that the female inmates be moved to allow the Italians to hide there. Then he turned a set of keys over to the prisoners and allowed them to scatter throughout the cavernous building.

  By this time, the mob had reached the front gate of the prison. Officers from the Fourth Precinct station, which shared the same building as the prison, made futile attempts to keep the banquette clear in front of the entrance. One deputy sheriff pushed a man away from the gate, only to have the man silently raise a pistol to his head. “I’ve done all I can,” the officer declared, backing away from the gate with his hands raised.

  Eventually, Parkerson himself stepped up to the iron gate and called out to Warden Davis. He asked that the keys to the gate be turned over, on the authority of the people of New Orleans. Davis refused, and refused again after Parkerson threatened to break down the gate. Frustrated, the lawyer ordered that gunpowder and some stout pieces of wood be found to batter through the gate. He also sent a contingent around to the side of the massive prison, where a far less imposing wooden doorway led from the street to the warden’s private office.

  It was the side door that eventually gave way. Though prison guards had nailed wooden boards across the inside of the door, Parkerson’s men were able to batter it in with cobblestones and railroad ties taken from a nearby construction site. Parkerson stationed several guards at the splintered door while his handpicked squad of executioners entered, leaving everyone else outside. A locked gate still stood between the armed men and their prey inside the prison, but this proved to be just a temporary hindrance. The men quickly broke the padlock and threw the gate back on its hinges.

  The armed vigilantes now fanned out through the enormous building as other inmates of the prison—among them Phillip Lobrano, still incarcerated while awaiting trial for the murder of Peter Deubler—looked on. According to some reports, Parkerson had beforehand made up a list of the prisoners to be executed and those to be spared. The boy Asperi Marchesi, for one, was to be left alone, presumably because of his age; so, too, were the two defendants given a directed not-guilty verdict by the judge. But the others were to be captured and marched outside, there to be judged and executed with great solemnity. “The intention had been not to shoot any of them,” Parkerson would later tell an interviewer. But that’s not how it happened. “When my men were inside—there were about fifty of them—they got very furious, and after the first taste of blood, it was impossible to keep them back.”

  Several of the executioners ran into the now-deserted prison yard. One of them saw a face at a window on the second floor. “There’s Scaffidi!” he yelled, identifying one of the defendants, and he raised his revolver and fired. This was all the encouragement the others needed. Breaking discipline, they also fired at the window, shredding its whitewashed frame and sending down a shower of white dust and shards of wood. Warden Davis rushed into the yard, urging calm and restraint, but the men merely pushed past him toward the stairway to the second floor.

  Now the killing began in earnest. Egged on by the crowds outside, which began cheering and screaming at the first sound of gunfire, the executioners set off after their quarry. Macheca was the first to be found. Spotted from below, he and two others were in a third-floor gallery, where they had run—against the warden’s advice—to find a route out of the prison. Macheca was trying key after key to open a locked door that would have led into the Fourth Precinct police station. As his pursuers rushed up the stairs, he gave up on the keys and began hammering the padlock with an Indian club. But the lock would not give. Macheca spun around as the gate from the stairs to the gallery burst open—and was immediately shot in the face. The two men with him were also killed, one shot long-range from the floor below. The other—the father of Asperi Marchesi—had been thrown back against a wall when the gate flew open. As he stood there, dazed by the blow to his head, two men with shotguns approached and triumphantly discharged them into his chest.

  Others were being routed elsewhere in the prison. Seven of the Italians had fled as instructed to the women’s section of the prison, but they
were soon found by one of the execution squads. Flushed from their hiding places, the prisoners huddled together at one corner of the women’s yard. They were begging for mercy, but the vigilantes had by this time lost all restraint. They lifted their weapons and fired indiscriminately into the gaggle of men. Five were killed instantly, and a sixth was shot again when he lifted a trembling arm from the pile of bodies.

  One of the prisoners in the pile, Antonio Bagnetto, was found still alive. He was unceremoniously dragged from the yard and carried out to the front of the prison. Emmanuele Polizzi, the supposed madman, had also been found alive and was likewise pulled outside. And there—amid cheers and shouts from the crowd—both men were strung up on ropes. Bagnetto was hanged from a tree just outside the prison, Polizzi from a lamppost at the corner of Tremé and St. Anne Streets. As the bodies of the two men dangled above, they were riddled with bullets before a crowd of thousands.

  When all was finished, Parkerson emerged from the parish prison to resounding cheers. He himself had not fired a single shot, but he took full responsibility for the results. “Bagnetto, Scaffidi, Polizzi, Joe Macheca, Monastero, and Marchesi are dead,” he announced to the crowd from atop an overturned streetcar. “I have performed the most painful duty of my life today.… If you have confidence in me and in the gentlemen associated with me, I ask you to disperse and go quietly to your homes. You have acted like men. Now, go home like men.”

  But some in the crowd were not ready to disperse. In triumph, they marched back to the Clay statue on Canal Street, carrying Parkerson on their shoulders. There the lawyer made another speech—“You have today wiped the stain from your city’s name!”—and then asked them again to disperse, promising that more would be done to address those accused of bribing the jury. For that day, at least, their mission was complete.