by Gary Krist
Back at the parish prison, some of Parkerson’s associates had arranged a gruesome tableau, so that all New Orleanians could bear witness to what had been done for their welfare. The two hanged men were left swinging outside for all to see, while several other bodies were lined up in a large room inside the prison for more convenient viewing. For five hours, thousands of men, women, and children filed past to see them. Some of the women allegedly dipped lace handkerchiefs into pools of blood to keep as mementos of the day, while others took away bits of the victims’ clothing and shoelaces. One enterprising man even began peeling strips of bark from the tree on which Bagnetto had been strung up, to bring home as a souvenir.
ELEVEN men in all were killed at the Orleans Parish Prison that day. Three of the slain had been tried and acquitted; a jury had failed to agree on three others; five more belonged to the second group of defendants that had not even been tried yet. Asked later whether he regretted what had happened in the prison, Parkerson was adamant. “Of course, it is not a courageous thing to attack a man who is not armed,” he admitted. “But we looked upon these [men] as so many reptiles.… This was a great emergency, greater than has ever happened in New York, Cincinnati, or Chicago … Hennessy’s killing struck at the very root of American institutions. The intimidation of the Mafia and the corruption of our juries are to be met only with strong measures. I recognize no power above the people.”
Parkerson was not alone in this judgment. Many in New Orleans were soon hailing the lawyer and his followers as heroes. The city’s business community was virtually unanimous in its approval; the Board of Trade and the Cotton, Sugar, Produce, Lumberman’s, and Stock Exchanges all passed resolutions praising the vigilante action. The local newspapers also came to the mob’s defense: “Government powers are delegated by the people,” the Daily Picayune opined, “and [the people] can reclaim them if they feel that the power is not being executed properly.” The Item agreed: “When the ordinary means of justice fail, extraordinary means are resorted to. This is a characteristic of the American people, and has today been illustrated once more in a most impressive fashion.”
Emboldened by this definitive blow for order and self-defense, Parkerson and his Vigilance Committee promised further extralegal means to ensure the submission of the so-called Mafia threat. Vowing to burn down the Italian quarter if revenge were taken on the lynchers, Parkerson proceeded to investigate claims of jury bribery (even as an official grand jury was doing likewise). Evidence was eventually found that certain members of the jury pool had indeed been promised money, but apparently no actual jurors were bribed. That didn’t help the twelve men who had delivered the unpopular verdict. Many were forced to leave town, including jury foreman Jacob M. Seligman, who was summarily expelled from the Stock Exchange and the Young Men’s Gymnastics Club. Eventually, finding life in New Orleans untenable, he moved to Cincinnati.
As for the lynchers themselves, the grand jury, citing its inability to fix guilt on “the entire people of the parish and city of New Orleans,” indicted precisely no one, calling the incident “a spontaneous uprising of the people.” Those people themselves, however, were in no doubt as to who their leaders were. Parkerson, universally identified as the head of the lynch mob, became something of a national celebrity, and was soon being invited to give speeches in places as distant as Boston and Bloomington, Indiana. Over the next few years, he would receive threatening letters, many of them in Italian, and his home in New Orleans would twice suffer minor damage by arsonists’ fires. But neither he nor any of the others would ever suffer serious consequences—legal or otherwise—for their actions.
For “respectable” New Orleans, then, the lynching was a triumph. Though opinion throughout the rest of the country was deeply divided, many prominent figures came out in favor of the action. Even a young Theodore Roosevelt, then a Civil Service commissioner in Washington, DC, approved of it; the future president called the lynching “a rather good thing,” and said so at a party attended by what he described as “various Dago diplomats.” Those diplomats, of course—as well as their fellow Italians both here and in Europe—had a very different perspective. In fact, the incident—regarded as the largest mass lynching in American history—caused something of a political crisis between Italy and the United States, at one point bringing the two countries dangerously close to a declaration of war. But eventually, with the payment of a $25,000 indemnity divided among the victims’ families, the crisis passed. In the minds of many “law-abiding citizens,” both in New Orleans and in the rest of the country, Parkerson and his band had accomplished an important and worthy goal: they had taught the Crescent City’s lawless Italians the harsh lesson that the city council had called for back in October.
Mayor Shakspeare could not have been more pleased at the outcome. After receiving laudatory letters from all over the country (one of them praising “the able manner in which ‘you stayed at home and attended to your own private business’ ” while the prison was under siege), he was inclined to thank his friend and former campaign manager for a much-needed cleansing of the Italian community. Asked by a newspaper reporter about the position of the Mafia in New Orleans after the lynching, the mayor was upbeat. “They are quiet, quieter than they have been for years,” he said. “The lesson taught them at the parish prison has had a most excellent effect and I do not anticipate we will have any more trouble with them. You may announce that the reign of the Mafia in New Orleans is over.”
That utterance, of course, would eventually prove to be far too optimistic. But for the time being, the city’s Italian underworld—“Mafia” or not—was subdued. The Italian colony would in fact remain relatively quiet through the rest of the 1890s.
But the reformers’ efforts to clean up the city would not end with the killings at the Orleans Parish Prison. There were still other lessons to be taught, other threats to be neutralized. The war for control of New Orleans had actually just begun.
TOM ANDERSON WAS A MAN ON THE RISE. IN MID-1890S New Orleans, this was already a well-known fact. Now in his thirties—dapper and always well groomed with his pomaded reddish-brown hair and carefully waxed mustache—the young Scots-Irishman had already established himself as a shrewd businessman with a hand in many different ventures around town. In the few short years since his friend David Hennessy’s unfortunate death, Tom had come far—making a name in sporting circles as a boxing manager, a horseracing entrepreneur, and a saloon- and restaurant-owner with an unstinting sense of hospitality. He’d also had success in more “legitimate” endeavors, as proprietor of a small but growing oil business—the Record Oil Company (the “Only Independent Oil Company Not Controlled by Trusts or Monopolies”), dispensing everything from axle grease to salad oils from a warehouse in the Central Business District. Some said Tom Anderson was extraordinarily lucky. But luck, as he well knew, was something that had to be made; luck was hard work and handshakes; it was cultivating influential friends from all walks of life, both high and low, and making sure they were happy. And now, flush with this early success, he was even contemplating that inevitable next step—into politics, the game that in New Orleans was so often the key to greater prosperity.
Tom Anderson, in short, was a man who so far had made very few mistakes in his life. Except one: namely, Mrs. Tom Anderson, the former Catherine Turnbull, Tom’s second wife. On January 24, 1894—in what must have been a weak moment—he’d married the pretty but combative young prostitute, and had regretted it almost immediately. Their marriage had been a disaster from the beginning—a nonstop melodrama of bickering, histrionics, and recriminations. Less than a year after the wedding, Anderson was already desperate to call it quits. He sued his wife for a separation of bed and board, hoping eventually to divorce (without alimony or division of joint property) and just move on as if the whole thing had never happened. But Kate was not about to let him off so easily. She was Mrs. Anderson now; there was no way she was just going to disappear with nothing to show for their associ
ation. So she was willing to fight him in court to prevent it.
That their brief marriage had come to this impasse was somewhat out of character for the genial young businessman. Tom Anderson, after all, was well known for being accommodating to everyone, willing to go along to get along, forever the man eager to do a favor that would, in the natural course of things, eventually be repaid. It was the law of the streets he grew up on—reciprocity, mutual protection. As the product of a bloody-fisted childhood in the neighborhood known as the Irish Channel, Tom had learned early in life that those who escaped the rough Channel streets were those who hustled, made friends, avoided trouble, and kept an eye out for the main chance. When, as a young boy peddling the Daily Picayune on street corners, he happened to witness a petty theft on Basin Street, he did not, as so many other boys would have done, clam up when a patrolman asked him about it. Instead, he pointed out the thief’s hiding place, and even agreed to testify in court about everything he’d seen. For this service he received a small monetary reward; more important, the deed also earned him a reputation among the local constabulary as a boy who could be relied upon. Most likely, it had been a calculation on Tom’s part: a sneak thief could do nothing for him, but a beat cop … well, you never knew.…
But Tom liked to make himself useful to others in the neighborhood as well. He wasn’t overly fussy about his associates, and he was soon helping out at the local brothels, running to the corner pharmacy to fetch the ladies their regular doses of opium and cocaine. When someone told the boy that those drugs, while easy to obtain in New Orleans, were actually illegal, he obligingly agreed to forgo the deliveries—at least while his police friends were watching.
Though his career at school had been undistinguished and brief, Tom’s mathematical abilities had nonetheless been sharp enough to land him a job early on as a bookkeeper and shipping clerk for the Insurance Oil Company. Here he did everything right—working hard, ingratiating himself with his coworkers, and saving as much of his salary as possible. After just a few years of apprenticeship, he was ready for bigger things. One day in 1879, when he was just nineteen or twenty years old, he breezed into the office and made an announcement to his colleagues: “Well, boys, I am going to leave you. I got married to a young woman uptown, [and] I am going into business for myself.”
The young woman in question was his childhood sweetheart, Emma Schwartz, the daughter of Dutch immigrants living in his old neighborhood. The newlyweds set up house downtown on St. Louis Street. And within a year, Emma gave birth to a daughter, Irene. Young as he was, Tom was apparently very happy to be a family man. (“William,” he told one of his old coworkers from Insurance Oil, “I got a fine little baby girl up home.”) But it was not to last long. In November of 1881, Emma succumbed to typhoid fever. (“William,” Tom told the same colleague when next they met on the street, “my wife is dead.”) Clearly unprepared to raise an eighteen-month-old child alone, he turned Irene over to the St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum. There the child lived until she turned five, at which point he enrolled her in the St. Mary’s Convent School in nearby Carrollton. It was hardly an ideal arrangement, but Tom apparently felt he had no choice. His own mother was working full-time as a domestic and couldn’t care for the child, and Emma’s family was apparently in similar circumstances. This way, at least, the baby would be close enough for him to visit when he could.
The 1880s proved to be a profitable decade for the young widower. He did not, as he had told his friends, go into business for himself, at least not yet. Instead, he worked as a bookkeeper for a number of other enterprises, including the Louisiana State Lottery Company. For an ambitious young man seeking to find his way in New Orleans’ semi-legitimate economy, there could have been no better training ground. Long the nemesis of Louisiana’s good-government reformers (W. S. Parkerson was a major foe), the Lottery was a boondoggle of impressive proportions. Run as a private corporation, it was chartered by the state government to hold regular drawings and distribute cash prizes to the lucky winners. In exchange, the company donated the small sum of $40,000 annually to the Charity Hospital; the rest of the profits went to shareholders in the corporation. Of course, keeping such a government-sanctioned swindle in operation required copious incentives in high places, and the company’s attentive bookkeeper was sure to take note of exactly how these were provided. In this way, he learned the important lesson that you had to spend money to make money. And he was careful to do likewise in his own endeavors. Tom saved where he could, but also generously contributed to political campaigns, police department benefits, and charity drives sponsored by the men’s clubs he made sure to join. Soon the young lottery clerk was on intimate terms with some of the most prominent businessmen and political figures in town. These, of course, did not include the blue-blooded elites of the Boston and Pickwick Clubs; they never would have looked twice at an Irish Channel man. Instead, Tom’s new associates were the more down-to-earth sorts: the ward politicians and tavern owners, the newspaper reporters and fire department chiefs. These were the people a man could deal with, even if his forebears hadn’t had generations in which to wipe the soil of the potato fields from the family escutcheon. And although reformers were eventually successful in getting rid of the Lottery in 1893 (when the company’s charter expired and it was forced to move its operations to Honduras), Tom Anderson had by then gotten what he needed from the venture, having made connections in many of the significant places of power in the city.
He cultivated those connections with all the care of a St. Charles Avenue yardman. When he scraped together enough money to open his first restaurant—at No. 110–112 North Rampart Street, in collaboration with a friend named David Heller—he played the generous host to all of his police, politico, and demimonde friends. At Tom Anderson’s convivial establishment, such men could always find plenty of good food and fine liquor; perhaps most helpfully, they could also find private rooms where deals, payoffs, and rendezvous could be made, far from the prying eyes of strict constructionists of the law. In fact, Anderson’s soon became known as a kind of “neutral ground,” a place where representatives from different spheres could meet and hammer out their mutually beneficial understandings. And whenever such parties came together, Tom Anderson was always right there—to make introductions, arbitrate disputes, and keep everyone’s beer mugs full to the brim.
His hospitality (“My motto,” he always claimed in advertisements, “[is] ‘The Best of Everything’ ”) was soon the stuff of urban lore. When he branched out into the boxing game—as manager of Andy Bowen, the lightweight champion of the South—there were always free tickets to distribute to his friends and associates. When the horse owned by his oil company ran a race at the City Park or Fair Grounds Racetrack, choice grandstand seats were available to anyone who might look kindly on one of his future projects. Yes, the prickly reform types might be immune to such blandishments, and they were not above harassing him in small ways, seeing that he was fined or even briefly arrested on minor charges of illegal gambling or serving liquor on a Sunday. But these petty annoyances could always be made to go away, particularly for a man with so many friends who happened to be cops or judges.
Sometime in the early 1880s, while he was still in his twenties, Anderson and another friend, Frank Lamothe, had begun sponsoring an annual Mardi Gras fete, a so-called French ball to which ladies of a certain type were admitted free of charge. Advertised as “The Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen,” it soon became one of the most sought-after tickets of the season. To many, it was a welcome corrective to the stuffy, formal affairs sponsored by the more established Carnival krewes. Anderson’s fete was a kind of parody of those other celebrations, which had grown up in the decades after Reconstruction. Elite krewes like Comus, Momus, and the Twelfth Night Revelers had been created expressly to bring order and hierarchy to Mardi Gras; their elaborate programs of balls and processions were designed to be exclusive—in order to keep undesirables out, to push disrespectable riffraff off to
the sidelines.
The Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen, on the other hand, was the regular New Orleanian’s answer to this high-handed appropriation of Mardi Gras. Like the elite krewes’ balls, Tom Anderson’s affair featured a royal court and a series of costumed tableaux. But “the queen and her court were prostitutes, not virgins from prominent families. Women in tights, not men in costumes, performed the tableaux.” The result was an alternative Mardi Gras, a Carnival for the city’s other half. And for a man on the rise like Tom Anderson, being co-host of an event like this was priceless publicity, an excellent means of raising his profile and setting himself up as a mover and shaker in the city’s semi-legitimate economy.
It was at this point in his life, in the early 1890s, that he decided to give marriage a second chance. Little is known about Catherine Turnbull, the twenty-nine-year-old woman from St. Louis he married in early 1894. Apparently, she was a widow who had fallen into prostitution after the premature death of her first husband, a man named M. L. Roder. But her profession made little difference to Tom Anderson. Having grown up as a messenger boy for Irish Channel brothels, he held little truck with the hypocrisies of Victorian moral ideals, and seemed to truly enjoy the company of prostitutes. But Kate soon became an exception. Within months of his bringing her into the Prytania Street home that he shared with his widowed mother, Honora, the battle was on. The elder Mrs. Anderson developed a vehement dislike of her new daughter-in-law, and Tom, like the dutiful Irish son he was, always took his mother’s side. The three Andersons argued bitterly and frequently, sometimes even in public, until matters came to a head in August of 1894. Catherine demanded that Mrs. Anderson leave the premises. Tom obliged, moving his mother—and himself—to a new house on Canal Street. He instantly filed suit for a separation from his wife, prefatory to a divorce.