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

by Gary Krist

  “I’m full of blood,” Parkerson whispered. When Santa Cruz asked him what he had done to himself, the lawyer just repeated, “I’m full of blood.”

  Santa Cruz ran to the telephone and called the sheriff in nearby Slidell. Within an hour, the sheriff was at the camp with a local physician, Dr. Outlaw. As the doctor attempted to staunch the bleeding, Parkerson admitted that he had inflicted the wound himself. Several months earlier, apparently, his young daughter had died of asphyxiation when a bathroom gas fixture in their home had malfunctioned. Parkerson’s grief at her loss had been unbearable. For months afterward, he’d lost interest in his job and everything else, and now he just wanted to die.

  Dr. Outlaw and the sheriff rushed Parkerson to the North Shore station, where a train to the city had been delayed for his transport. They arrived in New Orleans at 4:45 P.M. and were met by an ambulance, which carried the patient to Touro Infirmary. There he was put under the care of his family physician, Dr. Parnham, who pronounced the wound “trivial,” though he admitted that the lawyer had lost a good deal of blood. “Unless aggravated by unforeseen complications,” the doctor announced, “I think the wound will have no bad effects.”

  But complications did set in. Over the next few days, Parkerson developed a lung infection, apparently as a result of the neck wound being left untreated for so long. He took a turn for the worse over the weekend, and at four A.M. on the morning of Sunday, February 14 (exactly one year after Josie Arlington’s demise), he died in his bed at Touro Infirmary. The cause of death, according to Dr. Parnham, was “an edema of the lungs, caused by septic broncho-pneumonia.”

  In one respect, the death of W. S. Parkerson at this point in New Orleans’ vice war was symbolic. By the mid-teens, Parkerson and the earlier generation of reformers had all but ceded the field of battle to what might be called the new prohibitionists—the clergymen, social puritans, and club women who had risen to prominence in the wake of Carrie Nation’s late-1907 visit. Unlike their predecessors of the 1890s, who were open to negotiation with the forces of the demimonde, this new crop of moral warriors were absolutely uncompromising. They demanded outright interdiction of all vices, including drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling, and even tobacco. As a sop to these more stubborn opponents, Mayor Behrman (now serving his third term and in full command of the Ring political machinery) had taken on a new commissioner for public safety in 1912. Harold Newman, an ex-lawyer and businessman from a prominent New Orleans family, came to the job with impeccable credentials as a reformer, so Behrman hoped that his installation as the city’s chief moral watchdog would deflect some of the mounting criticism of his administration. It was a shrewd move. Politically, Newman was something of a neophyte, and whenever his insistence on strict enforcement of vice laws became too cumbersome, Behrman had ways of circumventing his orders—as when, by special permit from the mayor’s office, Tom Anderson was allowed to employ a female singer when all other cabaret owners could not.

  Unfortunately for the mayor, however, the city’s reformers soon saw through the ruse, and their honeymoon with the new commissioner did not last long. They were soon attacking the ineffectual Newman with a vehemence—and a condescending sarcasm—usually reserved for members of the demimonde themselves. Two figures in particular proved to be consistent critics of the commissioner’s feeble attempts to clean up New Orleans. Kate and Jean Gordon, irrepressible daughters of a Scottish émigré schoolmaster, had come to reform as young women in the 1880s. Born to privilege, they had given up early on the idea of marriage and motherhood and turned their substantial energies to public service—mainly, to hear Kate tell it, “because we never cared what people thought.” Such defiant confidence was apparently a legacy from their mother, a teacher from a socially prominent New Orleans family. “[Our mother] believed it was all right for a lady to go up to City Hall or a newspaper office,” Kate once explained. “In fact, she believed that a lady might do anything, if it were for good.”

  As with many self-styled moral champions of the day, however, their idea of “good” was often distorted by class and racial prejudice. So while the two sisters fought for such laudable aims as female suffrage, public-health improvements, and child-labor regulation, they also lent their support to the cause of racial purity as embodied in Jim Crow legislation and the disenfranchisement of Louisiana’s black population. Worse, they held some astounding beliefs about eugenics. As heads of the Milne Asylum for Destitute Girls, they advocated for the forced sterilization of children who showed signs of a future in crime, prostitution, or alcoholism: “Took Lucille Decoux to the Women’s Dispensary July 17 [for an appendectomy follow-up],” Jean once wrote in her diary. “This was an excellent opportunity to have her sterilized … and thus end any feeble-minded progeny coming from Lucille.”

  But while it would not be unfair to dwell on the sisters’ monstrously callous sense of class and racial superiority (Kate once refused an invitation to the White House because Booker T. Washington was also invited—“and I declined … to attend any function where I would be placed on equal terms with Negroes”), they did believe they were doing God’s work, and were determined to “stamp out of His world the unfit.” In their minds, prostitutes, criminals, and paupers were inherently unfit, and therefore justifiably a target for social engineering of any type, no matter how high-handed.

  In the battle against Storyville, “Miss Jean,” as the younger sister was typically known, took a particularly prominent role. She had worked with the ERA Club in its 1908 campaign to move the Basin Street brothels away from the new railroad station. After the failure of that effort, she began to see total prohibition as the better path. And she believed that the way to accomplish this end was to give women the vote. “If you don’t want the ballot for yourselves,” she once told one of her women’s clubs, “you should want it for the good you can do. You need it, for your ‘woman’s influence’ is a miserable failure as long as it does not prevent white slavery, gambling among young boys, violations of the Gay-Shattuck Law, and other evils which destroy the sons and daughters of our community.”

  In 1914, she supported an effort in the state legislature to close all prostitution districts in Louisiana—not just the legal one in New Orleans but also the unofficial tenderloins in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and other major cities in the state. A bill was drafted, but thanks to the influence of Representative Tom Anderson and the other Storyville landlords—who were still enjoying comfortable profits, despite the overall decline of the District—the measure was indefinitely tabled. But the woman sometimes called “the Joan of Arc of New Orleans” was nothing if not persistent. The efforts of 1908 and 1914 may both have failed, but the clamor for reform was growing in New Orleans, especially after the start of the world war. The third and most serious effort to take on the city’s vice lords—and their enablers in City Hall—would have far wider support.

  REFORMERS weren’t the only group in New Orleans undergoing a change in leadership during the second decade of the twentieth century. The ranks of the city’s Italian underworld were also turning over—and usually with far more violent consequences. After the rash of killings that had roiled the city around 1910—when (alleged) capo Vincenzo Moreci answered the unsuccessful attempt on his life by having his two assailants summarily executed—the city’s (alleged) Mafia had experienced a few years of relative peace. Occasional Black Hand slayings continued to occur, but Moreci—representing the Morello element in the city, which stood opposed to the more loosely organized Black Handers—seemed to have matters under control. But then, at two A.M. on the morning of November 19, 1915, another wave of homicidal chaos began. Moreci was walking home alone on Rampart Street when gunfire erupted from an abandoned storefront on the corner of St. Anthony. “They finally got Moreci,” the Times-Picayune reported: “[And] when they did, they got him all the way. They shot him from the right; they shot him from the left; they went up to him and hit him with a shotgun so hard that they broke the gun. They blasted ha
lf his jaw off; they put 11 buckshot in his right arm; they put two balls into his back and two into his chest; they broke his right arm with the butt of their gun and knocked the .38 revolver that he waved desperately 15 feet up the street.” It was, in other words, an all-out massacre. This time, their target did not survive.

  Only one man was arrested in the shooting—a notorious and much-feared Black Hander by the name of Joseph Monfre (or, variously, Manfre, Mumfre, and Mumphrey). Sometimes known as “Doc” because he dispensed patent medicines as a sideline, he was well known to New Orleans police, having been implicated in Black Hand activities as far back as the Lamana kidnapping in 1907. During that episode, Monfre (who was apparently a relative—perhaps even a brother—of conspirator Stefano Monfre) had been so aggressive in trying to “thrust himself forward” into Lamana’s confidence that he was suspected of being a spy for the kidnappers. Several months later, he was arrested for bombing the grocery-saloon of an Italian named Carmello Graffagnini, who had refused to comply with a Black Hand letter demanding $1,000. While out on bail awaiting trial, Monfre was again arrested—for an identical extortion bombing, this time of a grocery owned by a man named Joseph Serio. Convicted in July 1908 for the Graffagnini bombing, Monfre was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. But even when in jail, Doc Monfre was feared in the Italian community. At the time of the Schiambra murder in May of 1912, for instance, relatives of Monfre were said to be living in the Schiambras’ neighborhood—a fact that the murdered man had worried aloud about shortly before his death.

  And now, in November of 1915, Monfre had again been arrested, this time for the murder of Vincenzo Moreci. Monfre had apparently been released on parole from the state pen several weeks earlier, after serving just six and a half years of his twenty-year sentence. And it hadn’t taken the Black Hand leader very long to settle his score against the Mafia capo, though of course he denied it. “Vincent Moreci was the best friend I had,” Monfre insisted to police, claiming that the murdered man had been instrumental in securing his recent release on parole. And although police gave this claim very little credence, they had no concrete evidence against Monfre, and the charges against him were eventually dropped. Despite their strong suspicions that Doc Monfre was one of the most dangerous men in New Orleans, police were forced to set him free.

  Meanwhile, the power vacuum left by Moreci’s murder soon plunged the city’s underworld into another frenzy of tit-for-tat killings on the street. The first half of 1916 saw a virtual orgy of bloodshed in the Italian neighborhoods of New Orleans. On March 20, a stevedore named Joseph Russo was shot and killed by Francesco Paolo Dragna, an in-law of a known family of Black Handers. Four days later, another dockworker—Joseph Matranga, of the Matranga family implicated in the Hennessy assassination—was murdered by one Giuseppe Bonforte. On May 12, three men working for the Matrangas took out Joe Segretta (the saloon owner who had earlier tried to have Henry Ponce killed, and nearly shot Louis Armstrong in the process). Then, a mere twelve hours after Segretta’s demise, Vito DiGiorgio and Jake Gileardo were shot in DiGiorgio’s grocery-saloon. And finally, on May 15, Pietro Giocona was shot and wounded by two men who turned out to be sons of Joseph Segretta.

  Just keeping all of these names straight was no small task for the police department. Superintendent Reynolds was overwhelmed. “Black Hand shootings and murders are going to stop. They are going to end right now!” he told reporters on May 16, pounding his desk to emphasize the point. “I am going to hunt out every criminally inclined Italian in the city, if it takes every moment of time of every man on my force.”

  Speaking later to an assembly of his officers, Reynolds announced a new campaign to scour the Italian colony and bring the perpetrators to justice. “You men are going to find and bring in the heads of these vendetta organizations,” he said. “You are going to find the sources of this Italian crime wave. There is no ‘probably’ about this order. I am going to give this situation every ounce of my own energy and I expect every man on my force to do his duty and do it to the limit.”

  Sounding much like Mayor Shakspeare twenty-six years earlier, after the Hennessy shooting, he exhorted his men to make mass arrests of Italians, without much bother over anything like modern probable cause. “I believe you will find that, out of every ten you arrest, nine will have a loaded revolver concealed on his person.”

  Draconian as these measures were, Reynolds was adamant. “When we get through with our work,” he concluded, “New Orleans will be a city in which no agent of the Black Hand will have any desire to operate.” It was, of course, a vow that New Orleanians had heard many times.

  THE final campaign in the war against Storyville began in January of 1917, just months before the United States entered the ongoing war in Europe. On the night of the fifteenth, the Citizens League of Louisiana held a mass meeting at the First Methodist Church on St. Charles Avenue to launch the effort. “We have in the City of New Orleans a Sodom,” announced the first speaker, Rev. S. H. Werlein (uncle of Storyville-hater Phillip Werlein). “Last year an expert reformer visited the red-light district and the revelations he made were so repulsive that no decent person could read them without a blush of shame. The cabaret, an institution that is utterly violative of the law, flourishes. We have in the city some fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred saloons—”

  “Nineteen hundred and twenty!” Jean Gordon corrected him from the audience.

  “Nineteen hundred and twenty,” Dr. Werlein repeated (“obviously pleased by the interruption,” the Daily States observed), “and I don’t suppose there is one of them that doesn’t violate the law.”

  At last, the city’s upright citizens were fed up enough to really do something about the situation. And for once they had the full support of the city’s newspapers, virtually all of which had now embraced the cause of total prohibition. “We have the American, the Times-Picayune, the Item, and even the States with us in this fight,” he thundered on. “I have more hope for the press of New Orleans today than I’ve ever had before.”

  With the fourth estate now united behind vigorous reform, according to Werlein, the city’s elected officials would finally have to take real steps to solve the vice problem. “The mayor and the commissioner of police have the opportunity to immortalize themselves,” the reverend said in closing. “They have the law—let them enforce it! They have the police—let them instruct it!”

  Then Miss Gordon herself stepped to the pulpit. Now approaching her fiftieth birthday, the city’s Joan of Arc was already a seasoned veteran of moral campaigns like this, and she was not one to mince words. “I stand here tonight,” she began, “and make the statement—in all solemnness and in full appreciation of what I am saying—that I have been keeping tabs on political and moral conditions in this city for the past 25 years, and never have I seen such open, flagrant violation of all moral laws as under the present commissioner of police and public safety.”

  Violations were numerous all across the city, she continued—ranging from the sanctioned gambling on horses at the Fair Grounds racetrack to the blatant disregard of the Sunday Closing Law at the “Dago shop” on her very own street corner. But far more insidious was the grave danger posed to the city’s young girls by the ubiquity of vice as practiced in the legal red-light district. “Never in the history of the world,” she proclaimed, “has society had to face the problem of making the city a safe place for the young girl to go to and fro in … But due to the changed economic conditions in which we find ourselves, girls of fourteen and upwards are leaving their homes every day at 6 or 6:30, not to return until 7 [in the evening]—if then.… Being able to earn a little money makes the child of fourteen or fifteen very independent and only too willing to listen to the temptations offered by the advocates of a gay life as against the advice of a mother. Where are the fathers of the girls from whose mothers I receive note after note telling me of the downfall of their daughters?”

  The root of the problem, however, was not
the girls’ mothers and fathers; it was a lack of vigilance among those men who had been entrusted with enforcement of the laws—including those men who posed as reformers. “For the commissioner of public safety [Harold Newman] to say that he does not know that the Gay-Shattuck Law is being violated is to convict him of one of three things—he is either so utterly lacking mentally that he has not a proper perception of his duties, or he is utterly negligent of the affairs of his office, or else he is acting in conjunction with other authorities not to see violations.” Miss Gordon did not mention those authorities by name, but another speaker obliged. “In the name of God,” Rev. William Huddlestone Allen shouted, jumping up from his chair in the audience, “who is the man higher up in this town? Is he Tom Anderson? If it’s Tom Anderson, let’s take his crown away from him; if it is Martin Behrman, let’s shift him!”

  The mass meeting stretched on into the night, with speaker after speaker reiterating the new unanimity among the city’s righteous citizens to finally demand action of their elected officials. At the end, a vote was taken on whether the Citizens League should submit a full report on vice conditions to District Attorney Luzenberg. It passed without a single negative vote. “Take it to the district attorney,” one speaker concluded, “and tell him if he don’t do his duty, you’ll kick him out!”

  Whether Tom Anderson’s crown would finally be taken from him remained to be seen. But as one reporter later put it, it was now clear “that the most serious and hopeful reform movement of this generation in New Orleans had actually begun.”