Empire of Sin (40 page)

If so, he would have to do it from prison. Worried about Besumer’s ability to pay the bail on a simple assault charge, Mooney had him charged as a “
dangerous and suspicious character”—a “crime” that in the New Orleans of this day did not require any bail to be set. In the meantime, according to the
Daily States
, police and federal authorities were giving “
some weight to the theory that Besumer may be an enemy agent,” and were investigating the matter closely again.

Whether or not Louis Besumer was actually the ax-wielder in the attack on Harriet Lowe, few people believed he could be the man responsible for the other ax attacks in the city. And so concern about the dreaded axman continued, though alleged sightings of the monster occurred with less frequency as more time elapsed since the Romano murder. By late August, some were even confident enough to see some humor in the situation:
ATTENTION MR. MOONEY AND ALL CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS!
read one notice in the
Daily Item
.
THE AXMAN WILL APPEAR IN THE CITY ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 24
. It turned out to be an advertisement for a chain of grocery stores. “He will ruthlessly use the Piggly Wiggly Ax in Cutting off the Heads of All High-Priced Groceries,” the ad continued. “His weapon is wonderful, and his system is unique. DON’T MISS SEEING HIM!”

By the time autumn arrived, the city had settled down into something like its normal self. The all-night axman vigils ended, and impressionable New Orleanians stopped scaring one another on the streets at night. Mooney and his overextended police department, relieved of the intense pressure to produce an axman suspect, could turn back to the task of clamping down on the city’s vice industry. Not that this was so difficult in 1918. Thanks to heavy-handed War Department strictures and the
cresting of the Spanish flu epidemic, which at times required the closing of many public spaces, nightlife in the city remained relatively subdued. Music was still played around town, but aside from the
great number of funerals caused by the raging epidemic, gigs were few and far between.

Meanwhile, the diaspora of jazzmen to cities north and west continued, and soon claimed some of New Orleans’ giants. Sidney Bechet, who had managed to avoid the military draft by claiming that he was supporting his parents, was still suffering from what he called “
itchy feet,” hearing tales of the better life to be had beyond his hometown. “
A whole lot of musicianers started to leave New Orleans for up North,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They was all writing back to New Orleans that work was plentiful, telling the New Orleans musicianers to come up.… It was a real excitement there.” Eager to get away, he joined another vaudeville troupe—the Bruce and Bruce Company—and toured throughout the country. When the troupe played in Chicago in May 1918, Bechet decided to stay on. He
joined the band led by Lawrence Duhe (a fellow clarinetist who had been one of Kid Ory’s early bandmates in LaPlace). Bechet soon became their “
featured hot man,” and apparently didn’t look back. He would never live in New Orleans again.

The city lost yet another important player before the year was out.
On June 19, a dance at the Winter Garden played by the Ory-Oliver Band was raided by police. Paddy wagons were backed up to the doors at around eleven forty-five
P.M.
—when the night had barely started—and the frightened patrons were herded into them. “
What about the band?” a patrolman asked the sergeant on the scene. “Oh,” he said, “I guess you better run them in too.” Any band members who couldn’t come up with $2.50 in bail money thus had to spend the night in jail. According to Ory, Joe Oliver was furious at this indignity, and totally fed up with the place New Orleans had become. When Ory saw that there was no other way to appease the man, he told him about an opportunity in Chicago—an offer he had recently received to bring his band to the Second City. Ory himself didn’t want to go, and although he was reluctant to lose the services of one of the best soloists working in New Orleans, he felt he had to offer it to Oliver. The cornetist didn’t hesitate to accept the job, and even persuaded clarinetist Jimmy Noone to go with him.

This was devastating news for Oliver’s young protégé, Louis Armstrong. But as with his stint at the Waif’s Home, it turned out to be a lucky misfortune. Armstrong later described the day he saw Oliver and Noone off at the station: “
I was back on my job driving a coal cart,” he wrote, “but I took time off to go to the train with them. Kid Ory was at the station, and so were the rest of the Ory-Oliver jazz band. It was a rather sad parting. They really didn’t want to leave New Orleans, and I felt the old gang was breaking up. But in show business you always keep thinking something better is coming along.”

And something better came along for Louis that day. After the train had departed, Ory called him over. “
You still blowin’ that cornet?” he asked. Louis said that he was. So Ory invited him to come play with the band that night in Oliver’s stead. “
What a thrill that was!” Armstrong wrote. “To think I was considered up to taking Joe Oliver’s place in the best band in town!”

Ory wasn’t entirely sure the boy
was
up to it. He remembered the time Louis had subbed for Oliver and could play only a handful of tunes. But Louis had apparently learned a lot from his mentor in the meantime, and Ory saw the boy’s potential. So he told him to put on a pair of long trousers and show up for the
gig that night at Economy Hall.

It became a legendary night in jazz history. Louis showed up looking like a miniature version of Joe Oliver, right down to the bath towel draped around his neck. And, by his own account, he managed to “
blow up a storm.” “After that first gig with the Kid I was in,” he wrote. “I began to get real popular with the dance fans as well as the musicians.”

But the music scene in New Orleans remained depressed, and Armstrong still
had to work various jobs as a saloon bellboy, carpenter, coal-cart driver, and (at least until the day he saw a huge rat on the wharves and quit) as a stevedore. He was still delivering coal on his old cart (with Lady the mule) on the day the war ended—on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice was signed. “
I was carrying the coal inside [Fabacher’s restaurant] and sweating like mad,” he later recalled, “when I heard several automobiles going down St. Charles Street with great big tin cans tied to them, dragging on the ground and making all kinds of noise.” When he asked a bystander what was going on, the man told him that the war in Europe was over. The news hit him, he said, like “
a bolt of lightning.” He realized that the end of the war would likely mean a resurgence of jobs for musicians. “I immediately dropped that shovel,” he wrote, “slowly put on my jacket, looked at Lady and said: ‘So long, my dear. I don’t think I’ll ever see you again.’ And I cut out, leaving mule cart, load of coal, and everything connected with it. I haven’t seen them since.”

But Armstrong’s optimism about a revival of New Orleans nightlife proved misplaced. Though the lights did go on in some previously closed clubs, the jazz scene would never return to its old glories. Thanks to the coming of nationwide Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified just two months after the Armistice), the forces of reform would retain the upper hand in New Orleans for years to come. As one music writer has put it: “
The freewheeling days of the honky-tonks and cabarets were over.”

A
ND
so the atmosphere in New Orleans remained muted. The Mardi Gras celebration in early 1919 proved to be
another subdued affair. With little time after Armistice Day to design and assemble any elaborate parade floats, the processions were canceled again, and the few spontaneous street celebrations that did occur were relatively tepid. Even the axman seemed to go into hibernation. With Louis Besumer in jail (
now on a murder charge, since Harriet Lowe had finally succumbed to her head injury in September 1918), some may have speculated that the axman was silent because the actual perpetrator was behind bars. But Mooney and his detectives never seriously entertained the idea that Besumer was responsible for the other ax attacks. They were convinced that he had killed his housekeeper and then injured himself to make it
look
like an axman attack.

The calm, however, proved short-lived. Early on the
morning of March 10, 1919, an Italian grocer in Gretna—a town on the other side of the Mississippi—heard screams coming from the grocery across the street from his own store. He ran over and discovered Charles Cortimiglia, bloody and unconscious on the floor, and his wife standing over him, screaming, with a bloody child in her arms. It was clearly an attack like the others; the telltale signs were all there—the missing door panel, the bloody ax left in the yard, no sign of burglary. After a seven-month lull, the axman was back.

Who is the axman, and what is his motive? Is the fiend who committed the Gretna butchery the same man who executed the Maggio and Romano murders and who made similar attempts on other families? If so, is he madman, robber, vendetta agent, or sadist?

—New Orleans Daily States
, March 11, 1919

IT WAS, IN MANY RESPECTS,
THE MOST BRUTAL ASSAULT so far: a two-year-old child killed instantly by a single blow to the skull; her critically injured parents rendered senseless by multiple head traumas. Clotted gore soaked the bed where they all lay. Across the walls and curtains around them, blood spatters radiated like birdshot. And yet, despite this evidence of what must have been a savage frenzy of violence, no one in the neighborhood had heard a thing. The perpetrator had been able to escape without a single witness to the crime, and with hours to spare before his deed was detected. The axman was apparently becoming even more adept at his trade with time.

The crime had been discovered at about seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Several neighbors had made earlier visits to the grocery, which usually opened at five
A.M.
, and had merely walked away when they found it closed. But one little girl named Hazel Johnson was more persistent. After getting no response at the front door, she decided to try around back. In the alley leading to the rear of the building, she found a chair set up below a side window. She climbed up on the chair and peered inside, but couldn’t see anything in the murky morning light. So she continued down the alley to the backyard. There she found the back door closed, but with one of its lower panels missing. Puzzled, she called a passerby into the yard, and he persuaded her to go inside, perhaps because she was small enough to fit through the missing panel. She crawled in—and moments later burst out the back door, screaming.

Aroused by this clamor, a young neighbor named Frank Jordano ran over with his aging father, Iorlando. They found Charles Cortimiglia half-conscious on the floor, and Rose Cortimiglia clutching her lifeless toddler and sobbing inarticulately. Her husband, Charles, roused out of his stupor by the younger Jordano, sat up on the floor. “Frank,” he said.
“I’m dying. Go for my brother-in-law.” It was the last thing he would say for several days.

Since the town of Gretna was in Jefferson Parish, Peter Leson, chief of the Gretna police, and Jefferson sheriff Louis Marrero would conduct the investigation of the Cortimiglia case, with Superintendent Mooney’s force merely assisting from afar. What Leson and Marrero found at the scene, however, indicated that the crime was clearly related to the previous year’s cases across the river. The axman’s signature modus operandi was obvious—from chiseled door panel to rummaged belongings, with little sign of anything of value actually being taken. This time, a box containing money and jewelry was found undisturbed in the bedroom, along with
$129 in cash hidden under the Cortimiglias’ mattress. But two trunks and a dresser had been practically torn apart in some kind of frenzied search; even the face of the mantelpiece clock had been pried open and examined. As in the other axman cases, however, no fingerprints were found anywhere, and any footprints in the yard had unfortunately been trampled by the curious crowd of neighbors that had gathered at the scene after hearing Hazel Johnson’s screams.