This Day in Southern History

March 14, 1891 – Outraged by a jury’s refusal to return a guilty verdict on any count involving the murder of the city’s police chief, a New Orleans mob stormed the prison where the Italian-American defendants were being temporarily held.

The resulting Crescent City Lynchings represented more than another sorry example of Southern vigilantism, inter- and intra-ethnic group tensions, or even the rise of an Italian-American component of the underworld. It also ignited an international incident that, before grown men came to their senses, almost brought the United States into a state of war with Italy.

For more than a generation, dating back to the Civil War, the growing Italian-American presence on the New Orleans waterfront had coincided with the rise of organized crime in the Big Easy. The city’s attempt to maintain its status as a leading port in the antebellum era led it to import as much cheap labor as it could.

In the pre-war era, much of that labor would have been supplied by Irish emigrants willing to work in high-risk jobs such as digging a canal around a vast cypress swamp for the New Orleans Canal and Banking Co. in the 1830s. Thousands of the emigrant workers in this last project perished from yellow fever, cholera and malaria, but slaveowners were glad that their African-American “property” were protected. As time went on, posing little or no threat to the established order, the Irish made their way up the socioeconomic ladder. Italian emigrants were ready to fill the void.

Two trends occurring simultaneously began to affect Louisianans’ attitudes toward the newcomers: the rising commercial presence of the group on the waterfront and the large number of young, often unmarried and at-loose-ends, men in these occupations—a group often subject to temptation and criminal activity. These young men increasingly found themselves recruited by the two sides hoping to dominate the waterfront: Charles and Tony Matranga, aided by their lieutenant Joseph Macheca, and the Provenzanos. The two factions even looked outside the country, back to Italy, for further muscle, with the Provenzanos drawing on the group whose name became virtually synonymous in time with Italian-American underworld activity: the Mafia.

Things came to a head in the spring of 1990 with the “midnight massacre”—the ambush of stevedores from the Matranga and Locasio fruit importing company on their way home from the docks. The stevedores’ identification of the Provenzanos as their assailants—a major break with the traditional Sicilian “code of silence”—went for naught when the judge threw out the attempted murder convictions.

No police witnesses were called by the prosecution at the trial. Indeed, as the retrial neared, speculation grew that New Orleans police chief David Hennessy—who had futilely tried to mediate the struggle between the two Italian-American groups—had uncovered something in his own investigation of the incident, and would testify on behalf of the Provenzanos.

On the night of October 15, 1890, Hennessy –who had assumed his post following a mandate to clean up the city—was gunned down only a block from his home. All through the night, despite the pleas of friends that he describe or identify his attackers, Hennessy did nothing more than to say that it was “the dagoes” who were responsible. That left a vacuum of testimony and evidence that was filled following mass arrests, forced searches and beatings. The nineteen men who ended up being charged with planning or executing Hennessy’s murder would be tried in two separate groups.

The trial was a fiasco for the prosecution, with famed defense attorney Lionel Adams—a former D.A. himself—keeping them off-balance with successful challenges to the various charges, alibis for all the defendants, and suggestions that there must be a problem with the prosecution’s case if they didn’t call two witnesses who could testify to key incidents on the night of the murder. With the prosecution unable to introduce a single piece of evidence against them, the judge ordered the jury to find two defendants, Charles Matranga and Bastian Incardona, innocent.

In the end, three of the defendants got mistrials while the other six in that phase of the proceedings were acquitted. This did not sit well with a public that, for the last several months, had been driven to a state of frenzy over stories featuring Sicilian brigands, unsolved killings in the emigrant community, and the use of the term “Mafia”—perhaps the first time that a large group of Americans even heard of this word. Rumors spread of jury tampering by Adams’ detective associate, Dominick O’Malley.

On the morning after the verdict, the defendants were being held to await trial on a lesser offense when a mob of over 6,000 broke into Orleans Parish prison. Four of the defendants who had been tried were shot. Five others—not yet having stood trial –met a similar fate. Two met particularly grisly ends—one, hung from a lamp post, where his lifeless body served as target practice; the other, strung up from a tree.

Heinous as it was, the lynching attracted further unwelcome attention because two victims were Italian nationals. President Benjamin Harrison, having explained that the case lay outside federal jurisdiction, became incensed by the demand by the Italian ambassador to the U.S. for an indemnity to be paid. Both the U.S. and Italian governments withdrew their ambassadors.

At last, with the Italian government giving up on its ban on imported American pork, Secretary of State James G. Blaine had the opening he needed to push for a settlement. In March 1892, a year after the Crescent City Lynchings, Harrison sent the American ambassador back to Rome. A month later, after the U.S. government paid an indemnity of $25,000, Italy sent its minister back to DC.