Empire of Sin (8 page)

The roar of the spectators left no doubt about their answer. And after a few other men had made speeches from the foot of the Great Pacificator, the crowd, excited to a frenzied pitch, heeded Parkerson’s final words: “Men and citizens of New Orleans, follow me! I will be your leader!”

The crowd parted as Parkerson and the other leaders
made their way down Royal Street. At Hayne’s house on the corner of Bienville, a previously selected group of men armed themselves with the shotguns, Winchester rifles, and rope that they had cached there the night before. Then they returned to Canal Street and began their march toward the parish prison. “
The crowd accordingly fell in line, three and four abreast,” the
Daily Item
would later report. “The vanguard was composed of the most wealthy and respected citizens of New Orleans. They were followed by honest, hard-working mechanics, tradesmen, and laborers … Here was a body of men on their way to do what the law had failed to do.”

The mob moved “
like a mighty roaring stream” along Canal and then turned right up Rampart toward Congo Square. Along the way, crying women waved handkerchiefs from galleries; shouting men climbed on beer and grocery wagons, on awnings and rooftops, encouraging the marchers forward. Some began chanting, “Who killa de Chief? Who killa de Chief?”—a hateful ethnic taunt that would be flung at the Italians of New Orleans for decades to come. The few policemen in the crowd were driven out of the path under a salvo of stones and clumps of mud.

The armed men at the head of the procession marched on with almost military discipline. “
It was the most terrible thing I ever saw,” Parkerson would later boast to the newspapers, “the quiet determination of the crowd. There was no disorder.” With a Winchester rifle in one hand and a revolver tucked into his pocket, Parkerson led his followers to Congo Square, just one block from the prison. Here he stopped and addressed them again about the grave duty they were about to perform.

Two municipal detectives left the park and ran ahead to the parish prison to alert Warden Lemuel Davis of the approaching mob. The warden realized that it was too late to move the inmates to another location; he and his men would just have to hold off the mob as best they could. Moving quickly, he ordered that the doors to the prison be barred from the inside. After calling the Central Station with an urgent request for reinforcements, he went to see the prisoners in their cell on the second floor—a large, low-security area called the Star Chamber—where they were waiting for their release. When told of the approaching mob, Joseph Macheca, the most prominent of the prisoners, asked the warden that they all be given arms to defend themselves. Davis refused, but did agree to release them from the cell for their own safety. He sent a guard over to the women’s section of the prison, ordering that the female inmates be moved to allow the Italians to hide there. Then he turned a set of keys over to the prisoners and allowed them to scatter throughout the cavernous building.

By this time, the mob had reached the front gate of the prison. Officers from the Fourth Precinct station, which shared the same building as the prison, made futile attempts to keep the banquette clear in front of the entrance. One deputy sheriff pushed a man away from the gate, only to have the man silently raise a pistol to his head. “
I’ve done all I can,” the officer declared, backing away from the gate with his hands raised.

Eventually, Parkerson himself stepped up to the iron gate and called out to Warden Davis. He asked that the keys to the gate be turned over, on the authority of the people of New Orleans. Davis refused, and refused again after Parkerson threatened to break down the gate. Frustrated, the lawyer ordered that gunpowder and some stout pieces of wood be found to batter through the gate. He also sent a contingent around to the side of the massive prison, where a far less imposing wooden doorway led from the street to the warden’s private office.

It was the side door that eventually gave way. Though prison guards had nailed wooden boards across the inside of the door, Parkerson’s men were able to batter it in with cobblestones and railroad ties taken from a nearby construction site. Parkerson stationed several guards at the splintered door while his handpicked squad of executioners entered, leaving everyone else outside. A locked gate still stood between the armed men and their prey inside the prison, but this proved to be just a temporary hindrance. The men quickly broke the padlock and threw the gate back on its hinges.

The armed vigilantes now fanned out through the enormous building as other inmates of the prison—
among them Phillip Lobrano, still incarcerated while awaiting trial for the murder of Peter Deubler—looked on. According to some reports, Parkerson had beforehand made up a list of the prisoners to be executed and those to be spared. The boy Asperi Marchesi, for one, was to be left alone, presumably because of his age; so, too, were the two defendants given a directed not-guilty verdict by the judge. But the others were to be captured and marched outside, there to be judged and executed with great solemnity.
“The intention had been not to shoot any of them,” Parkerson would later tell an interviewer. But that’s not how it happened. “When my men were inside—there were about fifty of them—they got very furious, and after the first taste of blood, it was impossible to keep them back.”

Several of the executioners ran into the now-deserted prison yard. One of them saw a face at a window on the second floor. “
There’s Scaffidi!” he yelled, identifying one of the defendants, and he raised his revolver and fired. This was all the encouragement the others needed. Breaking discipline, they also fired at the window, shredding its whitewashed frame and sending down a shower of white dust and shards of wood. Warden Davis rushed into the yard, urging calm and restraint, but the men merely pushed past him toward the stairway to the second floor.

Now the killing began in earnest. Egged on by the crowds outside, which began cheering and screaming at the first sound of gunfire, the executioners set off after their quarry.
Macheca was the first to be found. Spotted from below, he and two others were in a third-floor gallery, where they had run—against the warden’s advice—to find a route out of the prison. Macheca was trying key after key to open a locked door that would have led into the Fourth Precinct police station. As his pursuers rushed up the stairs, he gave up on the keys and began hammering the padlock with an Indian club. But the lock would not give. Macheca spun around as the gate from the stairs to the gallery burst open—and was immediately shot in the face. The two men with him were also killed, one shot long-range from the floor below. The other—the father of Asperi Marchesi—had been thrown back against a wall when the gate flew open. As he stood there, dazed by the blow to his head, two men with shotguns approached and triumphantly discharged them into his chest.

Others were being routed elsewhere in the prison. Seven of the Italians had fled as instructed to the women’s section of the prison, but they were soon found by one of the execution squads. Flushed from their hiding places, the prisoners huddled together at one corner of the women’s yard. They were begging for mercy, but the vigilantes had by this time lost all restraint. They lifted their weapons and fired indiscriminately into the gaggle of men. Five were killed instantly, and a sixth was shot again when he lifted a trembling arm from the pile of bodies.

One of the prisoners in the pile, Antonio Bagnetto, was found still alive. He was unceremoniously dragged from the yard and carried out to the front of the prison. Emmanuele Polizzi, the supposed madman, had also been found alive and was likewise pulled outside. And there—amid cheers and shouts from the crowd—both men were strung up on ropes. Bagnetto was hanged from a tree just outside the prison, Polizzi from a lamppost at the corner of Tremé and St. Anne Streets. As the bodies of the two men dangled above, they were riddled with bullets before a crowd of thousands.

When all was finished, Parkerson emerged from the parish prison to resounding cheers. He himself had not fired a single shot, but he took full responsibility for the results. “
Bagnetto, Scaffidi, Polizzi, Joe Macheca, Monastero, and Marchesi are dead,” he announced to the crowd from atop an overturned streetcar. “I have performed the most painful duty of my life today.… If you have confidence in me and in the gentlemen associated with me, I ask you to disperse and go quietly to your homes. You have acted like men. Now, go home like men.”

But some in the crowd were not ready to disperse. In triumph, they marched back to the Clay statue on Canal Street, carrying Parkerson on their shoulders. There the lawyer made another speech—“
You have today wiped the stain from your city’s name!”—and then asked them again to disperse, promising that more would be done to address those accused of bribing the jury. For that day, at least, their mission was complete.

Back at the parish prison, some of Parkerson’s associates had arranged
a gruesome tableau, so that all New Orleanians could bear witness to what had been done for their welfare. The two hanged men were left swinging outside for all to see, while several other bodies were lined up in a large room inside the prison for more convenient viewing. For five hours, thousands of men, women, and children filed past to see them. Some of the women allegedly dipped lace handkerchiefs into pools of blood to keep as mementos of the day, while others took away bits of the victims’ clothing and shoelaces. One enterprising man even began peeling strips of bark from the tree on which Bagnetto had been strung up, to bring home as a souvenir.

E
LEVEN
men in all were killed at the Orleans Parish Prison that day. Three of the slain had been tried and acquitted; a jury had failed to agree on three others; five more belonged to the second group of defendants that had not even been tried yet. Asked later whether he regretted what had happened in the prison, Parkerson was adamant. “
Of course, it is not a courageous thing to attack a man who is not armed,” he admitted. “But we looked upon these [men] as so many reptiles.… This was a great emergency, greater than has ever happened in New York, Cincinnati, or Chicago … Hennessy’s killing struck at the very root of American institutions. The intimidation of the Mafia and the corruption of our juries are to be met only with strong measures. I recognize no power above the people.”

Parkerson was not alone in this judgment. Many in New Orleans were soon hailing the lawyer and his followers as heroes. The city’s business community was
virtually unanimous in its approval; the Board of Trade and the Cotton, Sugar, Produce, Lumberman’s, and Stock Exchanges all passed resolutions praising the vigilante action. The local newspapers also came to the mob’s defense: “
Government powers are delegated by the people,” the
Daily Picayune
opined, “and [the people] can reclaim them if they feel that the power is not being executed properly.” The
Item
agreed: “
When the ordinary means of justice fail, extraordinary means are resorted to. This is a characteristic of the American people, and has today been illustrated once more in a most impressive fashion.”

Emboldened by this definitive blow for order and self-defense, Parkerson and his Vigilance Committee
promised further extralegal means to ensure the submission of the so-called Mafia threat. Vowing to burn down the Italian quarter if revenge were taken on the lynchers, Parkerson proceeded to investigate claims of jury bribery (even as an official grand jury was doing likewise). Evidence was eventually found that certain members of the jury pool had indeed been promised money, but apparently no actual jurors were bribed. That didn’t help the twelve men who had delivered the unpopular verdict.
Many were forced to leave town, including jury foreman Jacob M. Seligman, who was summarily expelled from the Stock Exchange and the Young Men’s Gymnastics Club. Eventually, finding life in New Orleans untenable, he moved to Cincinnati.

As for the lynchers themselves, the grand jury, citing its inability to fix guilt on “
the entire people of the parish and city of New Orleans,” indicted precisely no one, calling the incident “a spontaneous uprising of the people.” Those people themselves, however, were in no doubt as to who their leaders were. Parkerson, universally identified as the head of the lynch mob,
became something of a national celebrity, and was soon being invited to give speeches in places as distant as Boston and Bloomington, Indiana. Over the next few years, he would receive threatening letters, many of them in Italian, and his home in New Orleans would twice suffer minor damage by arsonists’ fires. But neither he nor any of the others would ever suffer serious consequences—legal or otherwise—for their actions.

For “respectable” New Orleans, then, the lynching was a triumph. Though opinion throughout the rest of the country was deeply divided, many prominent figures came out in favor of the action. Even a young Theodore Roosevelt, then a Civil Service commissioner in Washington, DC, approved of it; the future president called the lynching “
a rather good thing,” and said so at a party attended by what he described as “various Dago diplomats.” Those diplomats, of course—as well as their fellow Italians both here and in Europe—had a very different perspective. In fact, the incident—regarded as the largest mass lynching in American history—caused something of a political crisis between Italy and the United States, at one point bringing the two countries dangerously close to a declaration of war. But eventually, with the payment of a $25,000 indemnity divided among the victims’ families, the crisis passed. In the minds of many “law-abiding citizens,” both in New Orleans and in the rest of the country, Parkerson and his band had accomplished an important and worthy goal: they had taught the Crescent City’s lawless Italians the harsh lesson that the city council had called for back in October.