The New Orleans "Mafia" Trial: 1891

Defendants: Antonio Bagnetto, James Caruso, John Caruso, Loretto Comitz, Rocco Geraci, Bastian Incardona, Joseph P. Macheca, Antonio Marchesi, Gasperi Marchesi, Charles Matranga, Pietro Monasterio, Pietro Natali, Charles Patorno, Charles Pietzo, Emmanuelle Polizzi, Frank Romero, Antonio Scaffidi, Salvatore Sunzeri, and Charles Traina
Crimes Charged: Shooting with intent to murder, lying in wait to murder
Chief Defense Lawyers: Lionel Adams, Charles Butler, John 0. Flynn, Arthur Gastinel, A.D. Henriques, Thomas J. Semmes, and Charles Theard
Chief Prosecutors: W.L. Evans, Charles H. Luzenberg, and James C. Walker
Judge: Joshua G. Baker
Place: New Orleans, Louisiana
Dates of Trial: February 16-March 13, 1891
Verdicts: Scaffidi, Polizzi, and Monasterio: mistrials; Macheca, Matranga, Bagnetto, Incardona, and Antonio and Gasperi Marchesi: not guilty; Natali, Pietzo, Patorno, Sunzeri, and John and James Caruso: charges dismissed

SIGNIFICANCE: The acquittals and mistrial verdicts provoked the worst mass lynching in U.S. history and made the word "Mafia" part of the American vernacular.

On the misty night of October 15, 1890, New Orleans, Louisiana, Police Superintendent David Hennessy was fatally shot in an ambush a block from his home. The dying man's whispers would cause the most controversial trial ever held in New Orleans courts and provoke the most notorious international political incident of the Gilded Age. They would also make "Mafia" a household word in America for the very first time.

Who Killed the Chief?

In May 1890, stevedores of the Matranga & Locasio fruit importing company were ambushed at midnight on their way home from the New Orleans docks. Information was rarely volunteered by crime victims in the Italian immigrant community and, at first, this shooting was no different. However, after first denying that they had recognized their attackers, the stevedores fingered six men. The accused included members of the Provenzano family, who had lost the fruit-unloading work to Matranga & Locasio.

When the "midnight vendetta" trial came to court "Chief Hennessy's men were strangely absent from the prosecution's case. In fact, most police witnesses were called by the inept defense lawyers. Two Provenzano brothers and the other four defendants were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Yet Judge Joshua Baker ordered a retrial when affidavits surfaced from witnesses who heard the wounded stevedores say at the ambush scene that they had no idea who had shot them. Baker also ruled that "disinterested" testimony by police officers proved that two of the accused were elsewhere when the shooting occurred.

Popular interest in the "midnight vendetta" faded, but those watching the case closely believed that Chief Hennessy himself would take the stand on the Provenzanos' behalf in late October. When he was gunned down a few days before the retrial date, many people assumed that he had been silenced by the Matrangas. Little attention was given to the fact that the coming trial was no secret, giving anyone with a grudge against the chief a perfect opportunity to throw the blame on the city's Italians and Italian-Americans.

At the crime scene and at the hospital Hennessy gasped that "dagoes" had shot him. Friends repeatedly asked him to identify or describe his attackers, but he lived until the next morning without doing so. The dying man was taken at his word. Mass arrests, forced searches, and beatings shook the immigrant community.

Nineteen men were ultimately charged with planning or executing Hennessy's murder. Charles Matranga and Joseph P. Macheca were well-to-do fruit importers. James and John Caruso belonged to Matranga's dock crew, as did Rocco Geraci and Bastian Incardona, two of the men ambushed the previous spring. Most of the accused were poor men whose arrests were based on circumstantial evidence or outright hysteria. Pietro Monasterio, a shoemaker, was clubbed and arrested because Hennessy's killers had fired from a gateway beside his shack. Pietro Natali was arrested at the railway station "on suspicion" because his suit fit him badly.

To reduce the number of pretrial challenges, two successive trials were planned. The first nine defendants were Macheca, Matranga, Monasterio, Incardona, Antonio Scaffidi, Antonio Bagnetto, Emmanuelle Polizzi, Antonio Marchesi, and Marchesi's 14-year-old son, Gasperi. With the exception of Charles Patorno, who hired his own counsel, the accused were collectively represented by Adams & Henriques, the same law firm the district attorney's office had allowed to help prosecute the Provenzanos in the "midnight vendetta" shooting.

Absent Conspiracy, Missing Witnesses

Lionel Adams was a brilliant former New Orleans district attorney. Ironically, he had once successfully defended David Hennessy on the charge of killing the chief of detectives when Hennessy was a young cop. Ten years later, Adams was hired by the men accused of murdering Hennessy.

Adams tangled the state's case with challenges throughout the winter of 1890. He successfully had all 19 murder indictments thrown out by charging that an unauthorized stenographer was allowed into the grand-jury room during the questioning of witnesses. New indictments were quickly drawn, but Adams immediately submitted a motion to quash them, too. He argued that the grand jury was biased because it contained two members of a "Committee of Fifty" appointed by the mayor to investigate the Hennessy killing. Adams unsuccessfully subpoenaed the mayor and the entire Committee of Fifty, as well as their confidential minutes and affidavits. Officials interviewed 780 "talesmen," or potential jurors before an acceptable jury was found. Prosecutors were expected to present a clear case when testimony began February 28. Things went less smoothly in the courtroom. None of the State's witnesses could agree on whether the streetlight at the scene was burning brightly or nearly extinct when the shooting began in the misty darkness.

Laborer Zachary Foster swore that Scaffidi, Polizzi, Monasterio, and Antonio Marchesi were "like the ones" he saw shooting at Hennessy. The chief's neighbors agreed that the gun battle was brief, but a young bartender named John Daure claimed to have run four blocks in time to see Scaffidi, Bagnetto, and Antonio Marchesi firing. House painter M.L. Peeler said he saw the shooting from an upstairs gallery. Peeler identified Scaffidi, but testimony suggested painter was drunk at the time. A police officer claimed to have recognized Emmanuelle Polizzi by the back of his head from over a block away.

The courtroom tension was too much for the man newspapers called "Manuel Politz." Polizzi became hysterical, causing attorney Charles Theard to quit the case. Judge Baker replaced Theard with John Q. Flynn, who applied himself to the case more diligently than his predecessor. Four days later, however, Polizzi tried to dive through the sheriff's office window. The press theorized that Polizzi had confessed and was deathly afraid of the other defendants.

District Attorney Charles Luzenberg claimed he would prove a conspiracy in which Chief Hennessy was killed for meddling in the Matranga-Provenzano feud. Joseph Macheca was accused of renting the shack where Monasterio lived, thus arranging an ambush to be carried out by hired assassins. Witnesses of varying degrees of reliability identified Scaffidi, Monasterio, Polizzi, Bagnetto, and the elder Marches as the shooters. Yet spectators waiting for details of the alleged plot were disappointed.

In the months after Hennessy's murder, newspapers remained well stocked with stories about cruel Sicilian brigands, the Committee of Fifty's mandate to "root out foreign murder societies," and unsolved killings in the immigrant community. Violence once vaguely blamed on "stiletto societies" and "the practice of the vendetta" was now attributed to "the Mafia," a single shadowy organization devoted to murder and extortion. Much of the information the press used to accuse the Matrangas of leading a New Orleans Mafia came from their enemies, the Provenzanos, who had unsuccessfully attributed a series of extortion letters to Charles Matranga during their own trial.

Expectations of a plot being proven were high in such a climate. Yet no actual evidence of the Mafia conspiracy sketched by the daily press—or any conspiracy at all, for that matter—was offered by the prosecution during the trial.

The defense insinuated that prosecution witnesses were more interested in city-appropriated reward money than in telling the truth. Lionel Adams produced alibis—called "the felon's defense" by cynics—for all of the accused. The defense also pointed out the absence of two expected witnesses. Hennessy had been walking home with a former cop named Billy O'Connor, from whom he parted just before the shooting. Private security guard J.C. Roe was on duty at Hennessy's house that night and had been superficially wounded by the gunfire. Neither O'Connor nor Roe was called by the state. The defense claimed that their testimony would have destroyed the credibility of prosecution witnesses like John Daure.

When final arguments ended after two weeks of testimony, Judge Baker ordered the jury to find Charles Matranga and Bastian Incardona innocent. The state had introduced no evidence against them.

The First, the Best, and Even the Most Law-Abiding

The March 13 verdicts shocked the city. Monasterio, Bagnetto, and Scaffidi got mistrials on the murder charge. The other six defendants were acquitted. All nine were returned to the Orleans Parish prison, expecting the redundant "lying in wait" charge to be dismissed the next day. On the morning of March 14, however, an armed committee headed by two politically prominent New Orleans attorneys and a newspaper editor led a mob of over 6,000 people to the prison and smashed their way in. Macheca, Scaffidi, Monasterio, and Antonio Marchesi were shot to death. So were Geraci, Romero, Traina, Comitz, and James Caruso, none of whom had been tried. Polizzi was dragged out to the street, where a crowd hung him from a lamp post and emptied pistols into him. Bagnetto's broken body was strung up from a tree.

The surviving defendants were soon released by District Attorney Luzenberg, who denied the existence of Polizzi's "confession." A Grand Jury cleared the lynch mob's leaders, saying that "the first, the best and even the most law-abiding" citizens of New Orleans were driven to act because justice had been subverted by jury bribers, a jab at Adams & Henriques' slippery detective associate, Dominick O'Malley.

The Hennessy case jurors denied being bribed. The acquittals, they said, resulted from impatience in the jury room, the absence of Billy O'Connor and Officer Roe, and other holes in the state's case. Two men later got short prison terms for making suggestive comments to potential jurors, but no link between the defense and the chosen jury was unearthed.

Several of the lynched men were Italian subjects. A war scare swept America as the enraged Italian government broke off diplomatic relations. Two years later, the U.S. government paid Italy a $25,000 indemnity, and diplomacy was restored. Yet a national pattern of indiscriminately blaming violent crime in Italian-American communities on a single entity known as the Mafia had been set, helping to fuel anti-immigration sentiment. The anti-Italian insult "Who killa d' Chief?" lived on in New Orleans for decades. To this day, no one has proven who killed Chief David Hennessy.

—Thomas C. Smith

Suggestion for Further Reading

Asbury, Herbert J. The French Quarter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

Coxe, John E. "The New Orleans Mafia Incident," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Vol. 20 (1937) 1067-1110.

Gambino, Richard. Vendetta: A true story of the worst lynching in America, the mass-murder of Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, the vicious motivation behind it, and the tragic repercussions that linger to this day. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, & Co. 1977.

Karlin, J. Alexander. "New Orleans Lynchings in 1891 and the American Press," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24 (1941): 187-204.

Kendall, John S. "Who Killa de Chief?" Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Vol. 22 (1939): 492-530.

"The Mafia and What Led to the Lynching," Harper's IVeekly, Vol. 35 (March 28, 1891): 602-612.

Saxon, Lyle, et al. Gumbo Ya-Ya. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945.