Empire of Sin (25 page)

The trial lasted four days. During their testimony, the defendants predictably professed their own innocence of any active role in the affair, casting themselves as merely frightened witnesses to acts perpetrated by the five men and one woman still at large or not yet on trial. But in this case, unlike in the Hennessy case sixteen years earlier, the evidence against the accused was persuasive. The police work had been far more careful this time, and no one but the defense attorney seemed at all discomfited by the fact that Campisciano had been forced to confess with a rope around his neck. Even so, the jury, after deliberating for less than an hour, came back to the courtroom with a qualified verdict. “
Guilty,” the foreman announced, but “without capital punishment.” The evidence, as one juror later explained, was simply not conclusive enough to justify hanging.

It took three companies of the state militia, bayonets drawn, to prevent the enraged crowds outside the courtroom from administering their own form of justice—on the defendants
and
on the jurors. One confrontation nearly erupted into bloody violence when a train commandeered by an irate mob from New Orleans was turned back at gunpoint from the tiny Hahnville station. Back in New Orleans, Mayor Martin Behrman was forced to order the closing of all saloons, hotel bars, and private clubs in the city, and to send a force of special police into the Italian quarter to keep order and defend the Lamanas’ neighbors. These precautions proved effective. Despite the all-too-predictable mob cries of “
We want the Dagos!” the widespread violence that had characterized the Hennessy and Robert Charles affairs never materialized.

Meanwhile, the
Daily Item
was almost wistful in its editorial regrets over what it—and virtually every other paper in New Orleans—considered a ridiculous outcome. “
A real verdict, a verdict with a capital punishment attachment in this Lamana case, would have gone far to make them [i.e., ‘lower-class Sicilians’] recognize that American law was a vital and mighty thing—a thing to fear.… So much of good would surely have resulted from a legal execution in the premises.…”

In the end, the people of New Orleans did get that legal execution. The trial of Leonardo and Nicolina Gebbia—much delayed because of the high feeling provoked by the earlier trial—ended with both brother and sister being found guilty and sentenced to hang. Nicolina’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison (the prospect of executing a woman was still repugnant to many, no matter what the crime). But on
Friday, July 16, 1909, Leonardo Gebbia was led to a scaffold in the Hahnville prison yard and hanged by the neck until he was dead. Afterward, the noose was presented to Peter Lamana, who expressed his gratitude that at least one of the perpetrators had gotten his “
just deserts.”

Ultimately, something tangible did come out of the Lamana tragedy. The year after Gebbia’s execution, the Louisiana state legislature passed a law mandating
a death sentence for anyone convicted of kidnapping a child. It was—for some, at least—a satisfying outcome. But any notion that the Black Hand had been routed for good in the Crescent City would eventually be dispelled, and much sooner than even the most pessimistic New Orleanian might have expected.

THE SECOND WAVE OF REFORM ARRIVED IN 1907—IN the shape of a woman wielding an ax.

A few days before Christmas, a Northeastern Railroad train from Mississippi pulled into New Orleans bearing one of the iconic reform figures of the age. Carrie Nation, the hatchet-swinging firebrand from Garrard County, Kentucky—famous nationwide for her saloon-smashing campaign to stamp out “Demon Rum” and all of its attendant vices—had come to the city as
part of a speaking tour throughout the American South. Armed with a Bible and an ample supply of miniature gold-plated hatchets to distribute as souvenirs, she had planned out a full program of lectures and prayer meetings in some of the town’s most notorious dens of iniquity. She knew that she’d face plenty of opposition, but Carrie Nation was determined to save the Crescent City’s soul.

Initially, the white-haired, lantern-jawed reformer had been reluctant to bring her message to the so-called Great Southern Babylon. “
New Orleans is too tough a place for me to tackle,” she’d told reporters in Birmingham in mid-December. “It is a very, very bad place … and I am getting too old.”

But somehow she had thought better of her decision. “
I believe in being everlastingly on the warpath,” she announced a few days later, explaining her change of heart. “We must fight the devil. And there
are
real devils.” Nowhere was that truer, apparently, than in New Orleans, and so she had come after all.

Trailing an entourage of newsmen, admirers, and gawkers, Nation went straight from the train station to City Hall to meet with Mayor Martin Behrman. His Honor the Mayor, no slouch himself when it came to deviltry, seemed somewhat amused by the compact but passionate old woman who appeared at his office door in her trademark widow’s weeds. Speaking before reporters, Behrman welcomed her to the city but insisted that she refrain from any saloon-smashing while she was there.

But Nation could make no promises. “
I am nothing but a lump of mud in the hands of God,” she said. “Would the mayor be so audacious as to refuse the Lord his right to smash?”

Behrman thought about this for a moment before responding that “he would not attempt to prevent the Lord, but he certainly would have his officers prevent her.” Thus they parted on good if somewhat uneasy terms, with a promise to meet again before she left town.

Over the next three days, Mrs. Nation made a thorough tour of the city’s hotels, taverns, and barrelhouses, preaching her message of temperance to all who would listen. The time had come, she insisted, for the total prohibition of alcohol—not just in New Orleans but in the nation at large. “
President [Theodore] Roosevelt is a bag of wind,” she told one crowd at the St. Charles Hotel. “Roosevelt, Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, and Muerlein are the quintet which is doing America much harm. The first is a beer-guzzling Dutchman, and the others are making it [the beer] for him and his loyal subjects. The country should be ashamed of the people ruling it!”

But alcohol was only one of the targets of Mrs. Nation’s wrath. Gambling, smoking, foul language, “sexual impurity,” and, of course, prostitution were also on her prohibition agenda, so
she made sure to investigate Storyville itself. She first accepted an invitation from Emma Johnson to visit the House of All Nations, perhaps the most flagrantly depraved of all the Storyville brothels. Invited into the parlor with the madam and her charges, the fiery orator ended up doing more listening than preaching. One by one, the women of the place explained to her how they had come to prostitution not as a result of coercion or entrapment by an evil seducer—the tendentious “white slavery” explanation put forth by many reformers of the day—but rather by their own free will. Forced to fend for themselves in a world where female workers made pennies a day in so-called legitimate jobs, they had instead chosen their current profession. All who spoke to Mrs. Nation, in fact, professed to be content with their lives and saw very little wrong in them. Madam Johnson herself even claimed that she prayed regularly, and fully expected to end up in heaven.

This last may have been the most shocking thing Mrs. Nation heard in Storyville on that Saturday night. But she found a more suitably repentant audience at her second stop in the District—at Josie Arlington’s palace on Basin Street. Here the ladies of the house listened respectfully as Nation roundly rebuked them and urged them to repent their ways, falling onto her knees at one point to pray for their salvation. Josie Arlington, whose thoughts of late had been turning in precisely this direction, proved to be a particularly receptive auditor. With some emotion, the queen of the demimonde promised the great reformer that she would heed the call to return to a more respectable way of life. Josie claimed that she would retire soon and use her fortune—now totaling some $60,000, as she pointedly confided—to build a home for fallen women, so that they would not have to turn to prostitution to survive. She would do this, Josie said, just
“as soon as [I get] a little richer.”

Perhaps frustrated by the conspicuous lack of any instant converts to her cause in Storyville, Nation arrived at her last stop of the night, Tom Anderson’s Annex, with her usual pugnacity—and her ax, apparently—on full display. According to one story, Anderson had heard beforehand that she was on her way, and so had cleared the long bar of all but the cheapest whiskey. When Nation and her entourage entered the Annex, Anderson was there to greet her, dressed in his finest evening clothes. “
Welcome, Mrs. Nation,” he said, giving her a deferential bow. “I’ve been expecting you.”

She was not impressed. After snatching a cigarette from the mouth of one of the customers hovering around her, she allegedly walked over to the bar with her ax and smashed several of the whiskey glasses standing on it. Then she turned to Anderson and said, “Want to make something of it?”

Unruffled as always, Anderson bowed again. “Mrs. Nation,” he oozed, “the pleasure is all mine.”

It was to be her toughest audience of the night. Provided with a crate to stand on, Nation addressed the crowd of men in the bar, urging them to shun the saloons, the gambling houses, and the brothels and instead to “be men.” Numerous times she was interrupted by drunken hecklers, but she was undeterred. She talked, in fact, for almost a full hour—until manager Billy Struve, concerned about the Sunday Closing Law, forcefully brought the proceedings to a close at a few minutes before twelve. By the stroke of midnight, Nation and her audience were all out on the banquette in front of the Annex. She then rode home from her evening of slumming in Storyville, according to the
Daily Picayune
, “none the worse for her lively experience.”

By the time Mrs. Nation left the city the next day, however, she was looking noticeably pale and worn out. After giving a lecture to
an audience of eight hundred at the local YMCA (a lecture that reportedly included such lurid descriptions of the goings-on in Storyville that even the
Picayune
was scandalized on behalf of the women present), she returned to City Hall to pay her respects to the mayor. At their meeting, she asked Behrman to promise that he would stamp out the horrible practices she had witnessed in the District.
The mayor’s response is unrecorded, but most likely he demurred. And with that, Carrie Nation moved on. She was, by her own admission, old and tired now, and maybe New Orleans really was too tough a place for her. That evening, after three days in the belly of the beast, she quietly boarded a ship bound for Florida, where, one can presume, the resident sinners weren’t quite so recalcitrant.

T
O
say that Carrie Nation’s visit in late 1907 galvanized the city’s slumbering moral reformers would perhaps be an exaggeration. But her appearance did coincide with the beginning of renewed efforts to take control of New Orleans’ persistent sin problem, and to do so in a rather less accommodative way. Tolerance and segregation of vice had been tried, and this is what had resulted—rich madams, contented whores, booming business in saloons and gambling halls, and a nightly tableau of debauchery in the District that was all too reminiscent of a painting by Brueghel the Younger. The sheer complacency and matter-of-factness of sin in the Crescent City—captured vividly in a series of Storyville portraits executed around this time by a white Creole photographer named E. J. Bellocq—indicated to many that a different approach was needed, and that the whole idea of Storyville had outlived its usefulness. In any case, Victorian attitudes toward prostitution were changing. No longer was it viewed as a distasteful but necessary safeguard for respectable women—as a safety valve of sorts for the release of male sexual energy. With the
rise of the Social Hygiene and other Progressive Era movements, prostitution was increasingly being seen as a threat, a conduit by which ills like syphilis and gonorrhea could invade the sanctity of the home. As such, it was not enough just to tuck it away in its own district. Rather, it had to be stamped out entirely. And as Carrie Nation’s sermons had made clear, the new spirit of prohibition was nothing if not comprehensive, targeting not just prostitution and alcohol but gambling, dancing, tobacco use, and—in New Orleans, at least—the lingering affront to decency of interracial fraternization, represented most visibly by the so-called octoroon houses of Basin Street.