Empire of Sin (46 page)

Rather than pacifying her father, this apology just ended up enraging him. He wrote a lengthy letter back to her (addressed simply to “Mrs. George Delsa”), bitterly resenting Irene’s characterization of Dix as “such a person” and insisting that Irene’s mother, Emma Schwartz, had been “such a person” herself. He vigorously defended Dix, noting that she had nursed him selflessly through his recent illness, and told Irene that he intended to marry his concubine before the week was out. He closed by warning Irene that he would someday tell her more about her own history—something that might make her reconsider her sanctimonious attitude toward Dix.

Still fuming, Anderson then went to his lawyer to rewrite his existing will, which split his estate evenly between Irene and Gertrude Dix. “I want to disinherit my daughter Irene,” he told P. S. Benedict, the lawyer who had represented his interests for years.

Surprised, Benedict informed him that under the Civil Code of Louisiana, a son or daughter could only be written out of a parent’s will if certain conditions were met. “First,” Benedict said, “did she marry without your consent?”

“Oh, no,” Anderson replied. “She married with my consent.”

Benedict proceeded to enumerate the other allowable reasons for disinheriting a child—striking a parent, for instance, or refusing to bail a parent out of jail, or being guilty of cruelty to a parent.

“No, none of those things apply,” Anderson said.

“Then I think you cannot disinherit your daughter.”

Anderson pondered this for a while. Then he seemed to decide something. “Friend Benedict,” he said finally, “I am going to tell you something you don’t know. [Irene] is not my legal daughter. I was never married to her mother.”

This, of course, seemed like an awfully convenient revelation, given the circumstances. Whether Benedict actually believed it or not is unclear, but he did agree to rewrite Anderson’s will, leaving all of his estate to the new Mrs. Gertrude Anderson. But just to make certain that his wishes would be carried out, Anderson also wrote a letter to three of his closest associates, to be opened after his death and only if Irene contested the will. “To whom it may concern,” it began. “I am not the father of Mrs. George Delsa, known as Irene Anderson. While I called her my daughter, [this] was for her benefit and protection. I was never married to her mother, Miss Emma Schwartz, [n]or was I her seducer. I met her like all young men meet such women. When she took sick and gave birth to her child, I took charge of her at her mother’s request.…”

This was spite carried to an almost obscene level of bitterness. Tom Anderson, the man who had built an empire by being loyal to his friends and helpful to everyone, was ending his life with an act of utter betrayal toward his own daughter and grandchildren. That
Irene was in fact the issue of a legal marriage between Anderson and Emma Schwartz is certain. The evidence—as it emerged in the inevitable and ugly trial that resulted when Irene contested the will—was all but indisputable. Even the judge at the trial
remarked on the startling resemblance between Irene Delsa and the deceased man. Ultimately, in fact, all of Anderson’s written denials were thrown out of evidence as obviously fraudulent, and Irene inherited one-third of her father’s $120,000 estate.

But thanks to the dispute between them, Anderson and his daughter were never reconciled during his lifetime. Instead of moving next door to her on Canal Street, Anderson bought a palatial $35,000 mansion on upper St. Charles Avenue and moved there with his new wife—about as far away from Irene and his grandchildren as he could get.

Late on
the night of December 9, 1931, Tom and Gertrude Anderson were home alone at the St. Charles Street house when Tom began complaining of shortness of breath. This was not particularly unusual—Tom was now seventy-three years old and had been sickly for some years. So he merely went to bed, hoping to feel better in the morning. But he awoke a few hours later in considerable distress and called for Gertrude. He discouraged her when she proposed calling the doctor at that hour (it was one
A.M.
), but she insisted. Tom scoffed. “I’ll be all right before the doctor even gets here,” he said.

He died of a massive heart attack a few minutes later.

The front-page obituaries the next day were effusive. “
Mr. Anderson,” the
Daily States
wrote, “was widely known. He was beloved by hundreds who had known and enjoyed his bounties.” The papers extolled him for his long service as a state legislator, as a political leader in the Fourth Ward, as a prominent businessman in the oil industry, and as a philanthropist to many charities. No reference was made to his other career as a vice lord, racing and boxing entrepreneur, cabaret owner, and restaurateur. Even two of his four marriages (to the prostitutes Catherine Turnbull and Olive Noble) were conveniently forgotten. The closest anyone came to suggesting his other life, in fact, was the comment by the
States
writer that Anderson’s favorite quote was the biblical injunction “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” These official obituaries were clearly for Tom Anderson’s right hand alone. It was as if the left—the hand of the old mayor of Storyville—had never even existed.

B
UT
although Tom Anderson’s death had made the front pages of the newspapers, Anderson and his world had long ago become old news for most people in 1930s New Orleans. The revival of the Ring in 1925 had proved ephemeral. Martin Behrman had died less than a year after his surprise reelection. His successor was a mediocrity, and the old Ring organization was plunged into disarray once again, leaving a statewide power vacuum. It was soon filled by Huey P. Long, now a rising young politician, who would lead New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana into its next chapter of infamy.

The Crescent City, meanwhile, was not doing well in the new era of economic depression. The reformers’ attempt to turn the city into an efficient manufacturing powerhouse in the ’20s had not come off. Business was stagnant, and New Orleans had fallen behind other Southern cities—such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Houston—in industrial development. Desperate to revive their sagging fortunes, city fathers in the late ’30s
tried to reinvent New Orleans yet again as an interesting destination for travelers. And in their efforts to grow the city’s tourism industry, they came to a realization—namely, that the city could actually exploit its checkered and exotic past as an enticement to visitors from the rest of the country and around the world.

This realization precipitated a radical change in the city’s attitude toward many of its previously suppressed idiosyncrasies. The French Quarter and its Tango Belt, for instance, would no longer be regarded as a run-down immigrant slum embarrassing to businessmen; instead, it would be
restored as an intriguing holdover of a romantic foreign past that people might pay to see. The city’s jazz culture, rather than something to be suppressed and condemned, became
something to be revived and promoted (albeit as a much whiter phenomenon). Before long, even the city’s reputation as a den of sin and iniquity was being turned into a plus rather than a minus. The re-creation of wicked old New Orleans on Bourbon Street, complete with strip clubs and raucous dance halls, began to attract fun-seeking masses from all over—and ended up bearing more than a passing resemblance to Storyville in its heyday.

Granted, the city’s racial atmosphere would take more time to loosen up. When Louis Armstrong, now an international star, was invited back to his hometown in 1949 to receive the key to the city, that key apparently opened only the doors to black New Orleans; the beloved Satchmo was
forced to stay at a “colored hotel.” And some journalists of the 1960s were quick to note the stark irony of using African American jazz culture to attract visitors to a place “
still shackled by the iron grip of institutionalized racism and apartheid.” But the tourist reinvention of the city did at least preserve some of the culture of the past, and a more genuine version of the city’s former self did eventually emerge, especially after the demise of Jim Crow. And when the oil bust of the mid-1980s threatened to send the local economy into crisis, it was New Orleans’ notoriety as a destination for jazz, sex, alcohol-soaked nightlife, and exotic culture—the very things the old reformers had tried to stamp out—that enabled the city to weather the bad times.

Of course, it remains to be seen how completely the city will rebound from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As of this writing, recovery is still somewhat spotty, and some of the poorer African American neighborhoods may never return to their former vitality. But as the turn-of-the-century reformers could attest (to their vexation), New Orleans’ rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place—its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity—are likely to live on.

AND WHAT OF THE AXMAN, THAT OTHER DISRUPTIVE figure who—like the brothel madam, the Ring politician, and the jazzman—seemed to drop from prominence in the new New Orleans of the early 1920s? After the Pipitone murder of October 1919, he had not been heard from again. As the months passed without another ax attack, police began to suspect that their “fell demon from the hottest hell”—whoever he was—had simply left town, like so many other figures from the city’s underworld.

That conclusion was given some credence in December 1921, when inquiries came from authorities in Los Angeles about a man from New Orleans named Joseph Monfre, who had been shot dead in L.A. the day before.
Monfre’s killer was another ex-New Orleanian—one Mrs. Esther Albano, the former Mrs. Esther Pipitone, widow of the man widely regarded as the axman’s last victim. According to Mrs. Albano, Monfre had killed her second husband, Angelo Albano—a small-time gangster who had gone missing in L.A. several weeks earlier—after he had refused to pay $500 in extortion money. When Monfre had shown up to collect the money from the widow, claiming that he was willing to kill her as well, Esther Albano was ready for him. “
I grabbed my revolver,” she told police, “and began to shoot. He tried to run. After one revolver was emptied, I seized another and killed him on the steps of my house.”

But Mrs. Albano also claimed (at least once before changing her story) that Joseph Monfre had been one of the killers of her first husband as well. Why she had denied knowing Mike Pipitone’s assailant at the time of the initial police investigation in 1919 is impossible to say; perhaps she was afraid of Monfre at the time, or even in some way complicit in the murder of her husband. But New Orleans Police, who knew Monfre well as a convicted dynamiter, suspected mob assassin, and notorious Black Hand extortionist, were inclined to believe her now.

Los Angeles authorities went on to try Esther Albano for the killing of Joseph Monfre, but their counterparts in New Orleans saw in the revelations about Monfre something of greater interest to them—namely, a thread by which they could tie together much of the Italian crime that had plagued the city over the previous fifteen years. Joseph Monfre, after all, had been implicated in everything from the Lamana kidnapping of 1907 (in which he was suspected of aiding his relative Stefano, one of the principal co-conspirators) to the Black Hand grocery bombings of the same year. He was also suspected of involvement in the back-and-forth mob murders of 1915 involving Paolo Di Christina and Vincenzo Moreci (Monfre was arrested, though never charged, in the Moreci assassination). Now Mrs. Albano’s implication of him in the 1919 murder of her first husband allowed police to tie him to the most notorious unsolved crimes of all. Since the Pipitone slaying of 1919 was regarded as the last of the axman attacks, could Monfre have been the axman himself, and thus responsible for all of those killings as well? Clearly his description—a tallish, heavyset, dark-complexioned white man—fit the one given by several witnesses to the axman crimes. And in going over Monfre’s criminal records,
investigators noticed a pattern. Though arrest and prison records in New Orleans at this time were notoriously confused and incomplete, it seemed that the waves and lulls in the axman’s reign of terror jibed suspiciously well with Monfre’s arrivals and departures from prison for his various deeds—most notably the lull in axman attacks from August 1918 to March 1919, which coincided almost exactly with one of Monfre’s stints in prison.