Empire of Sin (5 page)

“Don’t come any further with me now,” Hennessy told his friend. “You go on and look after your business.”

O’Connor was reluctant at first, but he knew that several other Boylan officers were stationed near the chief’s house on Girod, watching over the neighborhood. And there were still many other people abroad in the streets, despite the late hour and rainy weather. So O’Connor decided that his friend would be safe enough. The two men bade each other good night and headed off in opposite directions into the gloom.

Chief Hennessy began walking the remaining two blocks to his house. This part of Girod Street was hardly a fashionable neighborhood in 1890, its motley collection of cottages, rooming houses, and cobbler shops inhabited by a variety of working-class blacks and immigrants. But old Mrs. Hennessy had lived there for many years and was reluctant to move. And so the chief—deeply devoted as he was to his mother—still lived there too, though he could certainly have afforded a home in the more prosperous neighborhoods farther uptown. Besides, the house was just a few minutes by foot from his office at the Central Police Station—always an advantage when a late-night emergency cropped up.

Shortly before the chief reached the end of the first block, a young boy emerged from a doorway ahead of him. The boy began whistling a tune, then raced ahead and turned the corner onto Basin Street. The chief apparently thought nothing suspicious in this, and he continued up Girod Street without pause. But after a few more steps, just as he was passing the shut-up secondhand store at number 269, a volley of gunshots erupted from an alley directly across the street. Before the chief could react, shotgun pellets tore through his umbrella and overcoat, searing his chest, wrist, and legs. Knocked sideways into the wall of the building, he instinctively reached for his pearl-handled Colt revolver and managed to get off a few wild rounds. But his bullets apparently missed their mark. Pistols began firing from another location on the street. Then, according to several witnesses roused by the initial burst of gunfire, two or three men with sawed-off shotguns emerged from the alley, firing again as they stepped into the street. The chief was hit repeatedly as he fell to the sidewalk, blood soaking his vest and white-checked trousers. Finally, with a shout, the gunmen were gone, scattering in several directions through the puddle-streaked streets.

William O’Connor, after parting from the chief, had not even reached the next intersection when he heard the initial gunfire. He turned in time to see the flash of more shots coming from a small, two-story frame house a block and a half away, then heard the four shots from Hennessy’s revolver. He immediately started running back up Girod Street. On the way, he encountered Officer M. Kotter, one of the Boylan men assigned to patrol the neighborhood.

“
Which way did they run?” O’Connor asked.

“I believe it was uptown.”

O’Connor sent the man in pursuit of the gunmen. Then he continued running up Girod in search of Hennessy. The chief seemed to have disappeared, but when O’Connor had nearly reached Basin Street, he heard a call coming from around the corner: “Oh, Billy … Billy …” O’Connor turned the corner and saw his friend slumped in a doorway down the street.

“They have given it to me,” the chief said as O’Connor rushed up to him. “I gave them back the best I could.”

Hennessy was bleeding profusely from his face, arms, and legs; his bloodied overcoat was shredded up and down the left side; the spent revolver hung from his right hand.

“Who gave it to you, Dave?” O’Connor asked.

Hennessy told him to come closer. And then, as O’Connor bent over him, the chief allegedly uttered a single word: “Dagos.”

By now, numerous neighbors and uniformed police were on the street, gathering around the chief’s hunched form in the doorway.
Several men helped carry the wounded Hennessy into the house—the Gillis residence at 189 Basin—while O’Connor ran to a grocery across the street to telephone for an ambulance and notify the Central Police Station. When he returned, he found Hennessy propped up on pillows on the floor of the Gillises’ parlor, being tended by Auguste Gillis and her mother. They untied the chief’s cravat and loosened his bloody collar and cuffs. Hennessy was obviously in great pain, but said very little. When one of the women offered to go and get his mother, however, he roused himself to speak. “
No! For God’s sake, don’t do that,” he said, “… my poor mother …”

Soon the horse-drawn ambulance arrived on Basin Street. The chief was wrapped in a heavy blanket and carried out to the waiting vehicle. The ambulance then rushed him to nearby Charity Hospital, with O’Connor following in a police patrol wagon.

A
HALF
mile downriver on Basin Street, the Central Police Station was in an uproar. Mayor Shakspeare, summoned from his home by news of the shooting, was meeting with police department officials to orchestrate the investigation. No one seemed to doubt who was responsible for the ambush. Scores of police were out in the streets, gathering evidence and searching for Italian suspects. Already one weapon—a double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun with a collapsible stock, allegedly a “Mafia weapon”—had been found in a gutter on Franklin Street, dropped by one of the fleeing gunmen. But now day officers, roused from sleep, were at the station waiting to be deployed. George Vandervoort, Chief Hennessy’s secretary, asked Mayor Shakspeare for instructions.

The mayor was in no mood for subtlety. “
Scour the whole neighborhood,” he said. “Arrest every Italian you come across, if necessary. And scour it again tomorrow morning as soon as there is light enough. Get all the men you need.”

A
T
Charity Hospital,
Chief Hennessy was now lying on the table in the operating amphitheater, which by this time was filled with anxious friends, colleagues, and reporters. The chief’s bloodstained shirt and undershirt had been cut away, and he was being examined by assistant house surgeon J. D. Bloom and several student physicians. What they found was not encouraging. Hennessy had received multiple bullet wounds—one in his right leg, another in his left forearm. But the most serious wounds were the four ugly, gaping holes that cratered the left side of his torso. One of these seemed especially dangerous; a bullet, after entering the chest just below the left nipple, had apparently grazed the pericardium (or heart sac), perforated the right lung, and lodged under the skin near the eighth rib. In Bloom’s opinion, the wound was inoperable. And though it was not necessarily fatal, the surgeon thought it best, after bandaging all of the wounds, to call in a priest to administer last rites.

Shortly after one o’clock, old Mrs. Hennessy was finally brought to the amphitheater, clinging to the arm of Thomas C. Anderson, one of her son’s closest friends. Hennessy was still conscious and spoke in consoling tones to her, assuring her that she needn’t worry about him. “
Now go home, Mother,” he said after a few minutes with her. “I am all right.” Reluctantly, the old woman let herself be led away.

Assistant recorder David Hollander then approached the wounded man. “
Chief, you know who I am,” he whispered. “Do you wish to make a declaration?”

The question was veiled but unambiguous. If the chief had recognized or could give a description of any of his assailants, now was the time to make a statement—a dying declaration that would be admissible evidence in court. But Hennessy stubbornly refused. “No, I don’t think I am that bad off,” he said. Then he asked for a glass of milk—a request that was gently refused by his doctor.

Over the next few hours, between periodic examinations by Dr. Bloom, several of Hennessy’s friends and colleagues attempted to elicit a statement from him. But the chief, who was now resting more comfortably under a heavy dose of opiates, continued to insist that he would recover. Toward dawn, however, Hennessy’s condition worsened noticeably. Messengers were again sent to fetch his mother. Before she arrived, Captain Beanham tried a last time to coax a statement from the dying man. “
Captain, I tell you I am going to get well,” the chief insisted, and when Beanham persisted, Hennessy bluntly dismissed his concerns: “Your alarm is unnecessary,” he said. “These people can’t kill me.”

This bit of bravado, however, proved empty. After spending a few more minutes with his mother, going over his financial affairs, the chief began to sink rapidly. He held on for a few more hours as friends gathered around his sickbed to pay their last respects. By now, he was incapable of making a declaration even if he wanted to. He died at ten minutes past nine on Thursday morning.

B
Y
midday, virtually everyone in the city had heard about the “dastardly deed” perpetrated on Girod Street the night before. Evidence that the murder had in fact been the work of Italians was hardly conclusive, but the shocked citizens of New Orleans were fully prepared to think the worst of a group they had long regarded as threatening and undesirable. And so outrage against the city’s Sicilian population was growing by the hour. A quickly composed editorial in the
Daily States
echoed the opinion of many New Orleanians in condemning “
a class of foreigners who infest this city, known as Dagos”—a term that no one seemed shy about using, even in print. “Heretofore these people have confined themselves to murdering each other,” the paper observed, “and hence, except that these terrible deeds reflect upon the good name of New Orleans, there has not been much for us to complain of.” But now that the city had finally begun taking them to task for their outrages, they had struck back in a manner that was utterly intolerable: “They have had the audacity to murder the Chief of Police,” the
States
wrote, “because [he] had ferreted out some of their crimes and had become a lion in their path.”

Several notices, signed by prominent members of the community, appeared in the late editions of the morning newspapers, urging citizens to attend mass meetings and form committees “
to assist the officers of the law in driving the murderous Mafia from our midst.”
Forty-two Italians had already been arrested, many on the flimsiest of evidence, and more were being rounded up every hour. Police were ransacking homes in the Italian quarter and elsewhere. Anyone remotely associated with the Matranga family was considered a suspect, no matter what the person’s alibi. Many residents kept to their houses all day, knowing that they might be stopped on the street and arrested on the mere suspicion of being Italian.

At the Central Police Station, a shrouded portrait of Chief Hennessy now stood in a window overlooking Common Street. Telegrams expressing sympathy and outrage were pouring into the station from all over the country. The city’s commercial exchanges were closed, as were many government offices and private businesses.
Makeshift memorials to the chief were being put up everywhere—at the Grand Opera House, in the department-store windows on Canal Street, and at police stations and firehouses all over the city.

At four o’clock that afternoon, a contingent of uniformed
police assembled at Francis Johnson & Sons undertakers to carry Hennessy’s coffin to his house on Girod Street. Crowds were already surrounding the little shotgun cottage as the officers carried the silk-lined mahogany casket into the front parlor, which was filled with floral arrangements that had been arriving all day. While the grief-stricken Mrs. Hennessy looked on, the casket was opened and its lid replaced with a pane of glass to allow visitors to see the chief’s face, which had been heavily made-up to conceal his wounds. Over the next hours, hundreds of people came through the house to view the body. More were still waiting outside at ten o’clock when, seeing Mrs. Hennessy’s exhaustion, a group of Boylan men closed up the house and asked the bystanders to leave. Only the mother and a small number of intimate friends remained inside, keeping vigil overnight—until six
A.M.
, when the doors would be opened again to allow the flow of mourners to resume.