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

by Gary Krist

  After a few minutes, another man—in his early forties, with sparse graying hair and a small mustache—approached Walter in the alley. Exactly what he said to the eight-year-old boy is unknown. But he produced two nickels from his pocket and offered to treat the boy to ice cream from a candy store down the street. Walter apparently saw nothing amiss in the offer. He got up from the pavement, took the man’s offered hand, and walked with him up St. Philip Street toward the store.

  When they reached Bourbon Street, they came upon a covered wagon stopped at the corner. A tall man stood beside the wagon, as if waiting for them. This man took Walter’s hand and then, before the boy could protest, lifted him up to the driver, who quickly pushed Walter into the covered space behind him. The tall man then climbed into the back of the wagon and pulled the tarp closed after him. The driver spurred the horse, and the wagon began moving noisily down the poorly paved street. The first man remained standing on the banquette, watching them go in the faltering light. Then he turned away and disappeared into the warren of tenements, outbuildings, taverns, and warehouses of the lower French Quarter.

  When Walter did not come back into the family’s living quarters after nightfall, his parents were at first unconcerned. The boy often liked to hide in various places around the courtyard, hayloft, and livery stables; sometimes he’d even fall asleep in his hiding place. But as the evening wore on, the Lamanas became worried. Peter Lamana, Walter’s father, searched the premises and the surrounding neighborhood, but the boy was nowhere to be found. Finally, it occurred to the father that Walter might have stowed away on the tallyho his older brother John had driven that evening to West End, the lakeside resort some six or seven miles from the city. Lamana had one of his horses saddled up and rode out to the resort in the moonlight. But when he returned, hours later, he had nothing to report. John had not seen his younger brother.

  For the rest of that night and throughout the day on Sunday, Peter Lamana searched the French Quarter for his son, enlisting friends, employees, and neighborhood children in the hunt. They talked to neighbors, shopkeepers, and anyone else they encountered, but no one seemed to have any idea what had happened to the boy. By Sunday evening, Lamana decided to go to the police. That he had waited even this long to report the disappearance was not unusual. Members of the city’s Italian community typically preferred to deal with their own problems. Besides, the police did not always respond energetically to cases involving Italians, since investigations of crimes in Italian neighborhoods were often met with a wall of mistrustful silence. But Peter Lamana’s case was an exception. As the owner of a prosperous undertaking business and the largest livery stable in the Vieux Carré—and as a member of the city’s powerful Progressive Union, a civic organization composed of the most prominent local businessmen—he was considered a very important man, worthy of the best efforts of the police. And so they responded to the report with a greater determination than they would have if the missing boy had been the son of a downtown grocer or banana handler. The search was expanded to the riverfront, the lakeside district, and throughout the “sewers, dark alleys, back yards, and hidden courtyards” of the Quarter.

  But then, on Monday morning, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Lamana residence. Written in Italian in a crude, barely legible hand, it read: “Your boy is comfortably housed, clothed, and fed. He is well and no harm will be done him, but we will not be responsible for the consequences should you fail to comply with our demands.” What followed was a demand for a ransom of $6,000—a huge sum in 1907 dollars—to be delivered by Lamana himself. According to the instructions in the note (which Lamana kept secret from everyone except the police), the undertaker was to raise the money in gold and then take it—alone, on horseback—out along the road toward Bogalusa, a small town about seventy miles north of the city. Somewhere on the way, he would be approached by a person who would accept the money from him and tell him where his boy could be found. Unless he wanted Walter sent back to him “cut up in pieces,” Lamana was to follow these instructions to the letter.

  The note was signed with a small skull and crossbones at the bottom—a sure indication, it was said, that it came from the organization known to all Italians as the Black Hand.

  FOR more than a decade following the Orleans Parish Prison lynching of 1891, New Orleans’ Italian underworld had been relatively quiet. “Some twelve years ago we discovered our mistake in tolerating the vendetta here,” the Times-Democrat observed in 1902. “[But] we were aroused from our mistake … by a shock of thunder that shook the whole city and, indeed, the whole Union.” That shock—the assassination of David Hennessy—had of course been met with “corrective” violent action by many of the city’s leading citizens. “The lesson then given was salutary,” the paper continued, “and for twelve years New Orleans was almost free from the vendetta. The general peace and order of the community were better because of it, and the Sicilians themselves secured the best results from the improvement.”

  Whether “the Sicilians themselves” would have agreed with this assessment is perhaps doubtful. But the fact remains that the city had been more or less free of assassination-style murders for the rest of the 1890s. That changed in 1902, however, with the arrival in New Orleans of a man calling himself Francesco Genova. Under his real name, Francesco Matesi, he had allegedly fled his native Sicily after being indicted for the slaughter of an entire family named Seina. Coming to Louisiana by way of London and New York (where he apparently became associated with legendary mafioso Giuseppe Morello), he quickly established himself as a leader in New Orleans’ Italian community, which reportedly knew all about his activities in Sicily and was appropriately cowed. Genova and his supposed accomplice in the Seina murders, Paolo Di Christina (real name: Paolo Marchese), attempted to take control of the local pasta-making business. But they met with some resistance. Two brothers who owned a macaroni factory in nearby Donaldsville—Antonio and Salvatore Luciano—refused to stand for Genova’s attempts to force them out of business. One day in early May 1902, Salvatore Luciano caught sight of Genova and Di Christina in a buggy near the Lucianos’ boardinghouse on Poydras Street in New Orleans. Thinking that the two men had come to make good on their various threats to harm the brothers, Salvatore ran inside to grab his shotgun, rushed up to the buggy, and fired at Genova.

  The shot missed, and although Genova and Di Christina both suffered painful powder burns, police arrived before anything more serious could occur. But the incident set in motion a brutal interfamily mob war that ended up appalling a city that had hoped its Italian crime problems were over. One night, about a month after the original incident, Antonio Luciano was hosting a poker game at the Poydras Street boardinghouse while Salvatore sat in an adjacent room, writing a letter to their mother in Italy. Four men walked in off the street and, without much preamble, fell upon Salvatore Luciano with knives and clubs. Antonio, hearing the disturbance, grabbed his shotgun and started firing. The ensuing melee left Salvatore and one of the poker players dead and two more men seriously wounded.

  The next day, after being released from jail under a plea of self-defense, Antonio Luciano was overseeing his brother’s wake at the boardinghouse. Friends of the family were milling around Salvatore’s body, which had been laid out on a table in one of the larger rooms. Antonio looked on in amazement as a man named Ferrara, whom he recognized as one of his brother’s murderers, stepped up to the corpse, pushed aside the gauzy shroud, and planted a kiss on the dead man’s lips. Enraged and incredulous, Antonio beckoned to Ferrara to follow him into the courtyard of the boardinghouse. Ferrara, apparently unaware that he’d been recognized, complied—and was met with both barrels of a loaded shotgun. Antonio discharged the weapon into Ferrara’s chest and then, while the horrified guests looked on, proceeded to beat the man’s head to a pulp with the broken stock of the shotgun. “I am satisfied,” Antonio crowed as he was arrested. “I have killed the man who slew my brother!”

  Francesco Genova, on the
other hand, was emphatically not satisfied. But he was patient. When Antonio Luciano was again released from jail after a quick acquittal for the killing of Ferrara, Genova sent for a gunman from New York—one Espare, a stranger to New Orleans who befriended Luciano and, over the next few weeks, slowly earned his trust. One day in August 1902, the genial Espare accompanied his new friend to a photographer’s shop on Canal Street to fetch some newly developed photos. After they had retrieved the prints—as they were descending the outdoor stairwell back to Canal Street—Espare calmly took a revolver from his belt and fired six shots into Antonio Luciano’s back. Luciano attempted to shoot back, but lost his footing and tumbled down the stairway into the street. Espare raced up to the roof, jumped to the roof of the adjoining building (which happened to be Tom Anderson’s Arlington Restaurant on Rampart Street), and disappeared into the open skylight.

  Fortunately for the cause of New Orleans justice, the fatal shooting had been witnessed by several members of the city’s exclusive Pickwick Club, which stood just across Canal Street from the photographer’s shop. When Espare was brought up on murder charges, these worthies—unlike the Italian witnesses to so many other vendetta murders—actually testified to what they had seen. Espare was quickly convicted of the crime. And when he was hanged for it in 1905, it allegedly marked the first time in the city’s history that an Italian was executed for the murder of another Italian. But the conclusion to be drawn from this six-month back-and-forth killing spree was inescapable: as the newspapers put it, the city’s Italian underworld was reawakening from its decade long slumber.

  And the Luciano affair did indeed herald a marked increase in so-called Mafia activity in New Orleans. In particular, the extortion gangs known collectively as the Black Hand began again to make their presence felt in the city. Crime historians today generally make a clear distinction between the Black Hand (essentially a blackmail technique that all but disappeared after the 1920s) and the Mafia (a much longer-lived syndicate of organized crime families), whose members often engaged in Black Hand activity. But to the general public of the early 1900s, they were essentially the same threat, perpetrated by the same population of immigrants. And when merchants in the Italian community began to receive anonymous extortion letters in the aftermath of the Luciano incident, the police and the newspapers had their suspicions about who was responsible. For many, the uptick in Mafia activity followed too closely upon the arrival of Francesco Genova to be coincidence. A new capo had apparently come to New Orleans, and the lesson of the Orleans Parish Prison lynching was one he’d never learned.

  Even so, the ire of the city’s “better element” was not fully raised again until, as in the Hennessy case, one of its own was affected. This is what happened on that June evening of 1907. Peter Lamana, a “prosperous and worthy” stalwart of the Progressive Union, had had his beloved son stolen from the threshold of his own home. The lesson of 1891, it seemed, would have to be taught again.

  A CROWD of four to five thousand people packed the main auditorium of the Union Française Hall on the evening of Wednesday, June 12. Four days had passed since the disappearance of Walter Lamana, and no trace of the boy had yet been found. The night before, following the instructions of the Black Hand letter, Peter Lamana had ridden out on the road to Bogalusa with a sack containing $6,000 in gold; contrary to those instructions, he’d been followed by a contingent of New Orleans police. But either the police had been detected or something else had gone wrong, because no kidnapper met the father to take his offered ransom. Now the police were left with few concrete leads to work with.

  Wednesday night’s mass meeting—called by the city’s Progressive Union and several Italian leaders—was intended to produce some clues by urging members of the Italian community to abandon their customary silence on Mafia matters. The Lamana kidnapping was the type of outrage that could not be allowed to stand. “The people of New Orleans are easygoing and overlook many things,” the Daily Picayune observed, “but now and then malefactors, emboldened by immunity for years, strike a blow which threatens the very foundation of society or the home. Then they are given an exhibition of the power of a people aroused in their wrath.”

  But that wrath had to be properly channeled, and so this meeting had been called. Speaker after speaker pleaded with the residents of the Italian quarter to come forward with information about the Lamana case or about any other Mafia-like activity they might know about. Judge Philip Patorno, one of the leaders of the community, announced the formation of an Italian Vigilance Committee to handle the problem of crime in the neighborhood. “From now on, the Italians will be resolved to act,” he vowed. “Any Italian who henceforth receives a threatening letter will be compelled to lay it before the committee.”

  Patorno’s speech was met with enthusiastic cheering and applause, as were the similar declamations of many other speakers that night. But the greatest ovation—at least if the Daily Picayune is to be believed—was reserved for Col. John C. Wickliffe, one of the leaders, with W. S. Parkerson, of the 1891 lynching. (“There were also loud calls for Parkerson,” the paper noted, “but Mr. Parkerson was not present.”) Wickliffe urged the crowd to cooperate with Judge Patorno. “There has been too much of a disposition on the part of Italian people to fight their own battles alone, and to fear asking aid,” he said. “But they ought to be made to know that they are living in a land of liberty and that they can get the support of every citizen.… Is it possible that a handful of criminals can defy a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants? Is it possible that these men can remain undetected? On behalf of your own little ones, strive [in] every way possible to stop such an infamous business!”

  After the meeting was adjourned, excited crowds poured out into the streets of the Vieux Carré. Too impatient to wait for voluntary offers of information, one vigilante mob gathered near the site of the old parish prison, threatening to “make more history for Congo Square”—a not-so-veiled reference to the Italian lynchings of 1891. Others flooded into the streets around the Lamana residence. Defying police, they stormed through the surrounding neighborhood, pounding on doors and demanding to be admitted to search the premises. The terrified residents could do little but comply. “True, [the vigilantes] were after blood,” the Daily Picayune admitted the next day, “but only the blood of the guilty.”

  These intimidation tactics produced results. In one overcrowded rooming house, the vigilantes found two schoolboys who admitted having seen Walter Lamana walking on Saturday with a man named Tony Costa. Reinvigorated by this breakthrough, the mob proceeded immediately to Costa’s home on the corner of St. Philip and Chartres. They entered the premises and ransacked the house from top to bottom. And although they found no one fitting Costa’s description, another resident of the house told them that Costa did indeed live there, that he was a notorious gambler and ex-con, and that he had been missing since Saturday.

  The police had in the meantime met with some investigative success of their own. Rumors that a strange Italian had recently purchased a covered wagon in the neighborhood proved to be accurate. Detectives following a lead out in Jefferson Parish, west of the city, turned up a witness who saw a covered wagon late on Saturday night, pulling into the yard of a St. Rose Plantation farm owned by one Ignazio Campisciano. This was another name, at least.

  Then, on Thursday morning, Peter Lamana received another unsigned letter: “With tears in my eyes, I send you these few lines for your comfort,” the letter began in flowery Italian. “Therefore, be a man and accept my confidence. I do so for the love of your son.” The letter writer went on to tell Lamana how to find the boy: “Go to Harvey Canal and call on a man named Macorio Morti. He knows all. When you get him, ask him about the barber who was living at Harvey Canal.… The barber is the chief of all. I have no doubt that he has your son.”

  Following up on these and several other leads, police had by Friday arrested ten suspects, most notably Tony Costa, who had been found holed up in a house on Clouet S
treet. Also in custody were the farmer Campisciano, the Harvey Canal informant mentioned in the anonymous letter, the owner of the ice-cream store near the Lamana home, and—at the special request of the Italian Vigilance Committee—Francesco Genova, the alleged capo who had been involved in the Luciano shootings five years earlier. Genova was by this time a wealthy businessman, allegedly feared by all Italians of New Orleans. What evidence, if any, the committee had of Genova’s involvement in the case is unclear. But since he was the leading figure in what passed for the local “Mafia Society,” police seemed certain that he was in some way implicated.

  At this point, Capt. Thomas Capo, the inconveniently named officer in charge of the investigation, had some justification for believing that he was making progress. But virtually all of the evidence on which these men were held was circumstantial. After the intervention of lawyers, police were forced to release all except Tony Costa, who nonetheless still protested his innocence in the most vehement terms possible. Even so, police were careful to keep the released suspects under constant surveillance, and to keep pursuing tips and other leads, which were being brought to the Vigilance Committee in increasing numbers.

  By now, more than a week had passed since Walter Lamana disappeared, and hopes that the boy would be found alive were fading. Acting on persistent rumors that the boy had been killed and concealed in the bayou behind the Campisciano farm, police on June 21 hired a special train and transported a twenty-five-man search party to the site. But the swamp in this area was one of the densest and most forbidding in Louisiana. Although the men searched with a team of bloodhounds for an entire day—often knee-deep in muck and tormented by mosquitoes—they found nothing. At dusk the exhausted searchers emerged empty-handed from the swamp, as the tight-lipped Campisciano, ostensibly working his land, looked on.