Empire of Sin (33 page)

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.

R
EFORMERS
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 half 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.

T
HE
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!”