Dangerous Rhythms, page 5
In New Orleans, corruption and the plundering of municipal funds had been a feature of the underworld going back to French and Spanish governments that had previously ruled the city. The Louisiana Purchase, it is said, was itself a bit of a swindle. Rich people and people who were connected could get away with crime. Sometimes they could get away with murder.
The template that most historians cite as the system that made organized crime possible was Tammany Hall, in New York. Tammany, nicknamed “the Tiger,” was a business association that sponsored candidates for public office and delivered votes on election day. It often did so through the use of fraud and violence. Tammany derived its power through proceeds generated in the underworld, primarily gambling money and, in later years, profits from the sale of illegal booze during Prohibition.
The common perception is that Tammany Hall was created by Irish immigrants. It wasn’t. It was created in Philadelphia by WASP businessmen in the years immediately following the American Revolution as a social, fraternal, and benevolent organization. The idea was that men with money and influence would use that influence to control a city’s political, business, and economic fortunes. It would determine who would advance and who would not. (Hint: WASP businessmen would advance, all others would not—unless they were selected by the organization to do so.) Tammany Hall was a system of power and influence that—once generations of hungry and ambitious Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants had risen through its ranks and seized control (primarily in New York)—would, by example, fundamentally reshape the nature of urban America.
The phenomenon of Tammany Hall was replicated in other U.S. cities. In New Orleans, it was called “the Ring,” a consortium of business and political interests based on connections of which Tom Anderson from the Fourth Ward and Storyville was a shining example.
As the American underworld took shape in the late nineteenth century, the mafia was certainly a factor, but it was not the progenitor. The idea of money as the elixir that would grease the wheel of urban advancement was baked into the system long before the first wave of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants came ashore. Municipal corruption, graft, boodling, illegal gambling and prostitution proceeds, street-level extortion, and gangsterism were a consequence of men and women maneuvering for power, clawing and scratching to gain a foothold and advance in society.
The social universe was the arena in which this narrative would find its arc. A place for businessmen, politicians, and gangsters to come together and hatch their schemes had become a requirement of urban life. Sometimes these places were part and parcel of those schemes. Honky-tonks, saloons, and dancehalls (in the early twentieth century the term “nightclub” was not yet in fashion) were sometimes financed with money from illegal gambling, extortion, and other criminal activities. That money was also used to pay the musicians who were, through the emerging phenomenon of jazz, an increasingly vital aspect of city life.
In New Orleans, this development had a distinct flavor. The musicians were primarily a mix of Blacks of all hues and Creoles like Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and others. The impresarios of this world—the men who owned the clubs and paid for the entertainment—were a mixed bunch, but by the early decades of the new century they came to be dominated by a particular ethnic group with a penchant for exquisite cuisine; finery in style and presentation; a high standard of craftmanship; an artistic aesthetic that ranged from the bourgeois appeal of opera to the earthiness of brothel culture; and a criminal tradition going back to the Old Country that sometimes involved extortion, intimidation, kidnapping, dismemberment, and murder.
Sicilians had been coming to the state of Louisiana in significant numbers since at least the 1870s. Political turmoil in Sicily had created a permanent migration class, mostly peasants fleeing domestic persecution for a better life on the American continent. With New Orleans serving as the third largest seaport in the United States, Louisiana was a natural destination. The climate, which had been so onerous for an earlier generation of Irish immigrants, was familiar to immigrants from Sicily. It was hot and languid, with long stretches of sweltering sunshine, but this was not new for the Italians who came by ship from across the sea. Many new immigrants found agricultural work in rural Louisiana, especially in the cane fields, and in New Orleans, with a thriving merchant culture of cobblers, tailors, and haberdashers. Newly arrived Italians distinguished themselves as players in the local economy.
Almost immediately, there was the issue of the Sicilian Black Hand, a tradition of extortion that came from the Old Country and found particular notoriety in the local press. Newspapers like the New Orleans Mascot, the Daily Picayune, and others couldn’t get enough of this secret society. Coverage of the Black Hand, which was a real phenomenon in the city’s Italian immigrant community, veered toward the sensational. There were Black Hand murders, with notes left on dead bodies and threats that were occasionally pinned on storefronts and sent through the mail to merchants and shopkeepers demanding a payment, or “tribute,” to do business in the area. Coverage in the press openly referred to Italians as “dagos,” and the operative signifier was “swarthy” and “secretive,” terms designed to identify Italians as outsiders, no matter how far they might have advanced in the commercial realm.
As long as the Black Hand remained a fringe culture representative of Italians preying on other Italians, the city’s white, post-European citizenry viewed it as a kind of blood sport, or entertainment for the masses. By the 1880s, as Sicilians in the city’s enclave of Little Palermo branched out into New Orleans at large, a slightly different phenomenon began to take shape. The Black Hand became old news, and a more insidious kind of criminal subculture rooted in intimidation and violence made inroads into the city’s mainstream corridors of power. This fraternity of crime would have a profound effect on the way Sicilian immigrants saw themselves in relation to the rest of American society, especially those who were, in many ways, closest to them in the cultural and economic pecking order—recently freed African American slaves and their offspring.
Il Stuppagghieri
The version of the mafia that developed in New Orleans, much like its predecessors in Sicily, was not simply a criminal organization. It was rather a workingman’s organization, albeit one whose leaders did not hesitate to commit crimes. As Italian immigrants in the city and state made inroads into areas of commerce such as produce import/export and, most important, along the waterfront as stevedores, longshoremen, and union activists, the mafia came looking for a taste. Often, mafia groups were a veiled continuation of traditions first begun “on the other side,” in Sicily, which was certainly the case with the Stuppagghieri (sometimes spelled Stoppaglieri), an influential mafia faction that made its presence felt in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The boss of the Stuppagghieri was Salvatore Matranga, scion of the Matranga family, who first immigrated to New Orleans in the 1850s. This was the same Matranga family that would, decades later, hire the young Louis Armstrong to play at their popular honky-tonk in Black Storyville, thus initiating the century-long relationship between jazz and the underworld.
Salvatore Matranga came from the town of Monreale, in the province of Palermo, where the Stuppagghieri had been created in the 1830s. Matranga’s many sons and cousins, all of whom followed Salvatore to New Orleans in dribs and drabs, formed the ruling council of a sophisticated and insidious secret society. By 1880, they were believed to have hundreds of members divided into small groups of at least ten members, or saldati, each with a leader, or capodecina, at its head. Activity of the capos was coordinated by a trio of group leaders (eventually known as underbosses) who answered to and advised il padrone, the boss.
There was, at the time, no national Five Family structure or anything like that. Mafia families in the United States, of which the Matrangas were one of the first and most influential, did have associates in other cities (primarily among Sicilian communities in New York and Chicago), but they functioned mostly within their own jurisdictions. The Stuppagghieri was based in the Vieux Carré (the French Quarter) and the adjoining neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny, otherwise known as Little Palermo.
The Matrangas and the Stuppagghieri were not alone. There were other mafia factions in the city vying for control. In fact, the primary reason non-Italian citizens in New Orleans knew that the mafia existed was because of interfactional killings that were reported in one of the city’s many newspapers.
From the mid- to late 1880s, the city had its first mafia war, between the Matranga family and another well-represented faction known as the Provenzanos. This war had its roots among the city’s dockworkers, which were a major source of employment for Italian immigrants and a source of plunder for the mafia.
The Provenzano clan was associated with the Giardinieri, another mafia faction from the town of Monreale, in Palermo. The rivalry between the Giardinieri and Stuppagghieri ran deep, with the former, in Sicily, representing the traditional, established mafia and the latter representing a more rebellious, antiestablishment movement within the mafia. Back in the Old Country, the differences were political, territorial, and lethal. In New Orleans, they tended to revolve around economic issues, with political undercurrents having to do with the Matranga family’s strong ties to “the Ring.” With economic interests in bars and restaurants in the Fourth Ward, Il Stuppagghieri, not Il Giardinieri, had their fingers in the city’s nightlife.
Charles and Antonio Matranga, the oldest sons of Salvatore, the padrone, were the primary point men in the family’s rivalry with the Provenzanos. The war frequently resulted in violence, such as on the night in October 1888 when Giuseppe Matranga, cousin to Charles and Antonio, was found dead of gunshot wounds. His corpse was fished out of the Mississippi River near the docks. Giuseppe, father of five children, earned a modest living as an oysterman and seemed to have little or no involvement with his cousins’ Stuppagghieri organization.
Charles Matranga was the family’s underboss on the docks. Known by his Sicilian longshoreman employees as “Millionaire Charlie,” Matranga saw his family’s ongoing rivalry with the Provenzanos as an existential threat. After the death of Giuseppe, the innocent oysterman, Charles Matranga sought to infiltrate the Provenzanos through the use of informants and snitches. It was an effective strategy, but it sowed the seeds of paranoia and mistrust within the New Orleans mafia that would lead, in two short years, to a crescendo of gangland violence in the city.
On the night of May 5, 1890, a Matranga family work crew unloaded cargo from an 847-ton steamer ship moored at the river docks on the uptown edge of the Vieux Carré. In the wee hours, after finishing their work, the stevedores climbed into a horse-drawn wagon illuminated by lanterns and headed back toward their homes in and around the district. There were half a dozen men, including the driver. Among them was Antonio Matranga, foreman of the work crew and an underboss in the Stuppagghieri. The men drank wine and sang songs as the wagon ambled along Decatur Street near the French Market. Men were dropped off at their homes, and eventually there were only three men left in the wagon—Matranga and two others. The wagon came upon the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Esplanade, a broad avenue. It was there, in the near darkness, that a crew of hitmen emerged and opened fire with rifles and a shotgun.
Antonio Matranga had his leg blown apart. The other two men in the wagon were also injured, though not as seriously as Matranga, who would lose his leg and spend the next month in the hospital.
Everyone in town knew what this ambush was all about. Only recently the Matrangas had successfully outbid the Provenzanos in a highly lucrative contract negotiation with the city’s major produce importers. The Provenzanos were letting it be known how they felt about this.
The Matrangas held a series of secret meetings to plot their revenge. Salvatore Matranga, the padrone, was especially incensed because he believed that the city’s popular chief of police, an Irishman named David Hennessy, had sided with the Provenzanos in their waterfront rivalry with the Matrangas. Hennessy had recently launched a highly touted investigation of the mafia in New Orleans, suggesting publicly that his investigation could lead to the deportation of certain notorious Sicilians in the city, including Salvatore Matranga. In their war with the Provenzanos, the Matrangas may have been swayed by the old Sicilian bromide attributed decades later to New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello. Discussing his problems with the Kennedy brothers, JFK and RFK, Marcello is alleged to have said words to this effect: “If you cut the tail off a dog, it continues to bark. You want to silence the dog, you need to cut off its head.” This was Marcello suggesting to cohorts that the mafia not bother with their nemesis, RFK, the attorney general, but instead kill JFK, the top dog.
To redress their grievances with the Provenzanos, the Matrangas may have felt a similar strategy was required: Why cut the tail off the dog? Why not go for the head, which, in this case, was represented by Chief David Hennessy?
A strapping man, thirty-two years of age, with a handlebar mustache and a public reputation for rectitude, Hennessy was a legend in his own time. The city’s mafiosi felt that his reputation was mostly a charade, that Hennessy was on the payroll of the Giardinieri and that he spent much of his free time at a bordello called the Red Lantern, of which he owned a piece. The Matrangas felt that Hennessy was a dirty cop who, for more than a decade, had been promoting himself as an anti-mafia crusader, all the while getting his beak wet at the hands of their mafia rivals.
On a dark, foggy night in October 1890, just five months after the ambush of the Matranga work crew on Esplanade, Chief Hennessy was out by himself on a street corner in the Vieux Carré. A series of gunshots rang out. It was dark, and no one got a good look at the assailants, but the shooters had been close enough to hit Hennessy with multiple gunshots. Hennessy’s deputy had been nearby at the time; he arrived on the scene to find the chief lying in the street, barely able to breathe. The deputy asked, “Chief, who did this to you? Who shot you?”
Hennessy’s final word, according to the deputy, was “Dagos.” He identified his killers as mafiosi shortly before being rushed to the hospital, where he died the next day.
Rope Around the Neck
For the death of David Hennessy, there would be hell to pay. To the citizens of New Orleans, the chief had always been presented as an incorruptible figure. People in the know knew otherwise. In American life, both urban and rural, there had evolved the proclivity of fantasy presentations in the press and through popular storytelling (dime store novels and comic books). The truth often lay buried beneath the surface, known only to the politicians, municipal reporters, businessmen, madams, prostitutes, and other denizens of the underworld, where all of the above sometimes intermingled and shared “ya ya,” as gossip was called in the parlance of Creole Louisiana. The public trafficked in legend and misinformation because it made it easier for leaders to manipulate public opinion.
In the wake of Hennessy’s assassination, the lie that trafficked best in the general population was the claim that the mafia in New Orleans was out of control and needed to be stopped; that all Sicilians were suspect; that, furthermore, Italians were a lower breed of human to begin with, not white, not fully American, not capable of mixing with the WASP citizenry.
Mayor Joseph A. Shakespeare expressed the common anti-Italian prejudice, complaining that New Orleans had become home to “the worst classes of Europe: Southern Italians and Sicilians . . . the most idle, vicious, and worthless people among us.” He claimed that they were “filthy in their persons and homes” and blamed them for the spread of disease, concluding that they were “without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen.”
Within hours of Chief Hennessy’s death, Mayor Shakespeare told the police to “scour the whole neighborhood [of Little Palermo], arrest every Italian you come across.” Within twenty-four hours, forty-five people were arrested, and as many as two hundred and fifty Italians were rounded up. Nineteen men were ultimately charged with the murder of Hennessy or as accessories after the fact and held without bail in the Parish Prison. These included Charles Matranga, who turned himself in and was charged with plotting the murder.
The legal proceedings were to be divided into two trials. Four months after Hennessy’s murder, in mid-February 1891, the first trial took place involving nine defendants, including Matranga.
After one month of deliberations, the mafia boss and another man were found not guilty by directed verdict, as no evidence had been presented against them. The jury declared four other defendants not guilty and asked the judge to declare a mistrial of three others, as they could not agree on a verdict. Meanwhile, all nine men, though victorious, were returned to the adjoining Parish Prison—a move that would prove fatal for most of them.
Outside, the crowd was irate. That night, an emergency meeting was called, led by a consortium of businessmen that declared themselves the “Vigilance Committee.” A crowd gathered at the intersections of Canal, St. Charles, and Royal Streets, near the statue of Henry Clay, a prominent leader of the Whig Party and an inspiration for the nascent Know Nothing anti-immigrant movement. William Stirling Parkerson, a leader of the Regulators, a vigilante squad, stood before the crowd and announced, “People of New Orleans . . . when courts fail, the people must act. What protection or assurance of protection is there left us, when the very head of the police department—our chief of police—is assassinated, in our midst, by the Mafia Society, and his assassins again turned loose on the community?”
The crowd roared. The decision had already been made. A mob of more than two hundred and fifty men stormed the nearby Parish Prison. The guards were no match for the rabble, many of whom were armed with clubs and guns. The crowd easily broke through the prison gates and went looking for their prey.
