Empire of Sin (7 page)

At one thirty
P.M.
, a knock was finally heard at the door of the deliberation room. Sheriff Gabriel Villere hurried through the door and went upstairs to consult with the jurors. After a few minutes, as nervous murmurs swept through the courtroom, Villere reappeared and crossed the room to the private office of Judge Joshua G. Baker. And when the judge himself came out into the courtroom, ordering Villere to ring up the parish prison and have the prisoners delivered to court, there was no longer any room for doubt: The wait was over. After nearly a full day of deliberations, the jury had finally reached a verdict.

Judge Baker ordered the courtroom cleared of everyone except members of the bar and the press; all others had to join the unruly crowds waiting outside. The excitement on the street was even greater than it had been on the morning of the chief’s death. Police Secretary Vandervoort, anticipating trouble, telephoned the Central Station for an extra detail of police to control the multitudes. The police, after all, didn’t want any harm to come to the defendants—at least, not until a proper verdict had been delivered.

At around two thirty
P.M.
, the jury filed into the courtroom. Most of the twelve members were averting their eyes. Although this is usually a bad sign for defendants (few jurors like to meet the gaze of men they are condemning), this was not necessarily the case here. The accusations of jury tampering had created an atmosphere of suspicion in the courtroom, and the jurors knew that their judgments would be met with skepticism no matter what the outcome.

The jury foreman, Jacob Seligman, handed the written verdict to the clerk, who passed it on to Judge Baker. After instructing the defendants to rise, the judge opened the folded paper and read the contents. He stared at the note for nearly a full minute—in what some reporters later interpreted as disapproval. Then he announced the jury’s findings to the room.

The verdict came as a shock to nearly everyone. With regard to three of the defendants, including the apparently deranged Polizzi, the jury had been deadlocked; a mistrial was declared, meaning that all three would have to be retried. As for the other six—everyone from the wealthy shipper Macheca to Asperi Marchesi, the young boy accused of whistling to alert the assassins to the chief’s approach—the decision was unanimous: all were found not guilty.

This outcome caused the spectators in the courtroom “
to turn and look at one another in mute amazement.” But then the shouting began—both inside and outside the courthouse. Reporters rushed the dismissed jurors as they gathered up their belongings to leave. Besieged with questions, they refused to reveal anything about their decision. Sheriff Villere, knowing the reception they were likely to get outside, advised them to exit the building by the side door. But after some discussion, the jurors decided to brave the judgment of their fellow citizens. They left by the main courthouse door. And although the mob outside was unruly and belligerent, the jurors were able to push through the milling throngs unmolested. A boy in the crowd, apparently convinced that the bribery rumors were true, shouted to one juror: “Say, how much did you get?”

The nine defendants, on the other hand, were met with more overt hostility. Though six of them had been acquitted of the murder charges, all had to be returned to prison until certain lesser charges against them could be formally withdrawn. They were thus again returned to the Black Marias waiting outside. A detail of police tried to hold back the jeering mob to clear a path. Despite some scuffling as spectators pushed against police lines, the prisoners were loaded into the vans without incident. Even so, a howl of frustrated rage rose up in their wake as they departed.

The afternoon newspaper editorials about the outcome were blistering: “
Red-handed murder … struck at the Law itself,” the
Daily Item
proclaimed, “and the agencies of the law were found impotent to punish the foul deed.” The writer for the
Daily States
was utterly apoplectic: “
Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted civilization.” And yet the spillers of that blood were now to be set free. Such a verdict, according to the paper, was an affront to justice, a grievous injury that admitted only one possible solution: “Rise, people of New Orleans!”

It was a suggestion that some “people of New Orleans” were already seriously contemplating.

W
HEN
William S. Parkerson stepped into his second-floor law office at 7 Commercial Place that evening, he found several dozen agitated men waiting for him, with more arriving at the office door every minute. Parkerson had been in another courtroom all afternoon, but by now he had heard about the outcome of the Hennessy trial. So he knew why these men were here: incensed by the verdicts, they were looking to him for guidance on how to right what they all regarded as a blatant miscarriage of justice.

That the men in his office—some of them much older and more prominent than he—should now turn to Parkerson for leadership was not surprising.
Balding, bespectacled, and somewhat portly, the thirty-five-year-old lawyer may not have looked the part of the dynamic leader of men, but his intensity in the courtroom was legendary. A powerful natural orator, he had been a political force in the Young Men’s Democratic Association for some time already. But it was his position as alleged leader of the YMDA’s unofficial militia that explained why these men were at his office. Described by one historian as a
“Southern ‘special gentlemen’s police,’ ” Parkerson’s so-called Regulators included many of the city’s most prominent citizens. These were the men who had brought Mayor Shakspeare and his reform government into office, and who now felt it their job to correct the “mistake” the jurors had made that day.

After fifteen minutes, Parkerson broke up the meeting, instructing the men in his office to assemble again later that night. They would meet at the home of Franklin Brevard Hayne, a young cotton merchant who was also a leader of the Regulators militia. And when they reconvened in the parlor of Hayne’s home—
at the corner of Royal and Bienville Streets in the Vieux Carré—their ire was, if anything, stoked even higher than before.
Many had heard stories of raucous demonstrations in the Italian colony that day; one report even had some Italians spitting on an American flag in joyous defiance. To the 150 men present, the meaning of this was obvious. The Mafia society was flaunting its power, celebrating its victory over the forces of law and order in New Orleans.

Many at the meeting wanted to march to the parish prison at that very moment to exact their revenge. But Parkerson dissuaded them. Convinced that any such vigilante action needed a popular mandate behind it, he argued instead for a mass meeting to be held the next morning—a gathering that would attract a large number of participants. And so together they composed an announcement to be printed in all of the morning papers. Signed by sixty-one men, it read:

MASS MEETING!

A
LL GOOD CITIZENS ARE INVITED TO ATTEND A MASS MEETING ON
SATURDAY, M
ARCH 14
,
AT 10 O’CLOCK A.M., AT
C
LAY
S
TATUE, TO TAKE STEPS TO REMEDY THE FAILURE OF JUSTICE IN THE
HENNESSY CASE.

  
C
OME PREPARED FOR ACTION
.
  

The announcement did not specify what action was meant, but Parkerson’s intentions were clearly telegraphed by what he did next: After adjourning the meeting at Hayne’s house, he and a select group of trusted friends
rode a horse-drawn wagon to a hardware store across town. There they loaded it up with an ample supply of rope, plenty of ammunition, and 150 Winchester rifles and shotguns. Then they carried this arsenal back to Hayne’s, where they loaded it into several large trunks, to be easily available the next day.

W
HEN
Sheriff Gabriel Villere read the newspapers the next morning, he was under no illusions about the probable result of the announced mass meeting, and he wanted to be ready for it. Whatever his own sympathies, he was responsible for the safety of the nineteen prisoners in his charge. So
at eight thirty
A.M.
he left his office at the parish prison and headed toward City Hall to find Mayor Shakspeare. If the crowds at the mass meeting turned into an unruly mob, he wanted the mayor to give him more men, or maybe even help from the state militia.

At roughly the same time of the morning, Pasquale Corte, Italy’s consul to New Orleans, was
heading through the streets in the same direction. The announcement in the papers had distressed the consul considerably. At least two of the defendants in the trial were Italian nationals, and Corte saw it as his responsibility to make certain of their safety. So he, too, was going to see the mayor, hoping to persuade him to protect the acquitted men.

Sheriff Villere was already at City Hall when Corte arrived, but both were to be disappointed. Neither Mayor Shakspeare nor his secretary were in their offices, and no one seemed to know where they were. Chief of Police Dexter Gaster, Hennessy’s successor, was present, but the neophyte chief seemed reluctant to do more than send a few extra patrolmen over to the parish prison. If Corte and Villere wanted any greater precaution than that, they would have to speak to the mayor, who—conveniently, some would later say—wasn’t due in City Hall before noon.

Frustrated, and in a state of rising alarm,
Corte and Villere hurried over to consult with Louisiana governor Francis T. Nicholls, who was known to be in town at his lawyer’s office. But here they got no help either. Nicholls,
a white-haired former Confederate general, seemed sympathetic to their concerns, but he claimed that there was nothing he could do to aid them. To deploy the militia in any city, he would have to receive an official written request from its mayor. Without such a document, he said, he was powerless. But Nicholls at least knew where Shakspeare could be found: the mayor was breakfasting at the Pickwick Club. If the gentlemen would simply have a seat, he would send a message over to the club and ask Mayor Shakspeare to come to the office.

By this time,
crowds were already gathering at the foot of the Henry Clay statue, which in 1891 still stood on the neutral ground (the median) of Canal Street at the intersection of Royal. At ten o’clock, when Parkerson and his self-styled “Vigilance Committee” arrived on the scene, approximately six to eight thousand citizens already thronged the avenue. Intersections were blocked to traffic and the Canal Street trolleys were so swamped that they could barely move.

Amid shouts and cheering, Parkerson and the other leaders of the committee got the meeting started. They marched three times around the monument to give the other leaders a chance to fall in behind them. Then Parkerson climbed the steps to the foot of the statue. He took off his hat as another cheer rose up from the crowd.

“
People of New Orleans, once before I stood before you for public duty,” he began, referring to his role in the 1888 elections. “I now appear before you again, actuated by no desire for fame or prominence. Affairs have reached such a crisis that men living in an organized and civilized community, finding their laws fruitless and ineffective, are forced to protect themselves. When courts fail, the people must act!”

Again the crowd roared its approval. By now, spectators had climbed to the roofs of the paralyzed streetcars to get a better view. Others looked on with opera glasses from nearby windows and balconies.

“What protection is there left us,” Parkerson went on, “when the very head of our police department—our Chief of Police—is assassinated in our very midst by the Mafia Society, and his assassins [are] again turned loose on the community? The time has come for the people of New Orleans to say whether they are going to stand [for] these outrages.… I ask you to consider this fairly: Are you going to let it continue? Will every man here follow me, and see the murder of D.C. Hennessy vindicated? Are there men enough here to set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel?”