Empire of Sin Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the time, particularly by the reform-minded element that had swept Shakspeare and his allies into office. True, Hennessy had detractors. As a young man, he had once shot and killed a rival detective on the street, and there were some who still claimed that the shooting was unprovoked. But the incident had ultimately been ruled a killing in self-defense and all charges against Hennessy had subsequently been dropped. Now, at thirty-two years of age, he was regarded by many as the straightest of straight arrows. According to the local papers, Hennessy didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble, and he even avoided fraternizing with women—except for his widowed mother, with whom he lived in a modest cottage on Girod Street. He was also a deeply religious man, stopping at the Jesuit church every evening at six to pray. He was seen by most reformers, in short, as a man of unimpeachable honesty and character—just the person they needed to reinvigorate the police department and start cleaning up the vice- and crime-ridden place their city had become.
    But as the testimony of the four witnesses was making painfully obvious, progress had been slow. One of the alleged victims, an Italian grocer named Philip Geraci, described the two officers entering his shop at seven P.M. and demanding cash from the till. Apparently, this was not the first confrontation between them. “You had threatened me before,” Geraci said, addressing Officer Thibodaux. “[You] had cursed me and called me a ‘dirty Dago.’ Everybody knows you are a bulldozer and a tough, and I was never in trouble until you forced me into it!”
    Shakspeare clearly found this story plausible enough, and when the other witnesses’ testimony proved just as damning, the mayor decided that he’d heard all he needed to hear. He, Hennessy, and the rest of the board agreed that the evidence of extortion was irrefutable. And so—with the self-righteous peremptoriness that was to characterize the reformers’ efforts for decades to come—they decided to dismiss the two officers on the spot, without waiting to hear their defense. Why bother with the niceties of judicial process, after all, when there was an entire city to clean up?
    After the police board meeting adjourned, the chief and another officer—Capt. William “Billy” O’Connor of the Boylan private detective agency—sat in Hennessy’s office at the Central Police Station, chatting idly for an hour before heading home for the night. O’Connor was the chief’s old friend, a former colleague who could often be found in Hennessy’s company around town. But tonight he wasaccompanying his friend on a semiofficial basis: O’Connor was acting as the chief’s bodyguard for the evening. After several anonymous threats to Hennessy’s life over the past few months, the city had arranged with the Boylan agency to provide the chief with round-the-clock protection. And though Hennessy himself regarded this precaution as unnecessary, Mayor Shakspeare had insisted upon it. The fact that the job had gone to the private Boylan agency indicated how much confidence the mayor put in his own police department.
    The death threats had stemmed from an ongoing investigation that the chief was conducting into the city’s Italian underworld. For some time now, New Orleans’ Italian community had beenroiled by a struggle between two rival families for the lucrative dockworker contracts on the city’s downriver wharves. The Provenzanos, who originally had the contracts with the city’s fruit importers, and the Matrangas, who eventually wrested them away, forcing the Provenzanos out of business, had been feuding violently. The resulting wave of back-alley shootings and stabbings had outraged the city’s business community, who cited it as just the kind of nonsense that was scaring away investment from Northern capitalists. After several violent murders of alleged Provenzano and Matranga associates in late 1888 and early 1889, Hennessy