Empire of Sin Read Online Free PDF

had decided to take action.Inviting representatives of both clans to the Red Light Club on Customhouse Street, he all but forced them to shake hands in truce, warning them that the city would no longer tolerate their feuds. The perpetrator of any crime in the Italian community, Hennessy warned, would henceforth be hunted down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
    But the truce ended up lasting for less than a year. On the night of May 5, 1890, the Matranga brothers and five of their workers were returning home after a long day’s work on the docks when their horse-drawn wagon was ambushed by gunmen on Esplanade Avenue. Several men were injured, including family patriarch Antonio Matranga himself, who eventually lost a leg as a result of his injuries. Six Provenzano men were accused of the attack and subsequently tried. And although the six were convicted, Chief Hennessy was dissatisfied with the verdict. Convinced that the shooting victims had perjured themselves at the trial,he launched an investigation into the Matranga organization, even sending to Italy for information that might tie the family to alleged Mafia crime figures in Sicily. Exactly what Hennessy had turned up in his research was never made public, but it was apparently damning enough to convince a judge to vacate the Provenzano convictions and order a new trial—and to mark the chief himself, scheduled to testify in the retrial, as a rumored target for assassination.
    Buton this rainy Wednesday night in October, just two days before the scheduled start of the Provenzano retrial, Hennessy seemed anything but worried about his safety. “The chief was in the best of spirits,” O’Connor would later recall to reporters. And as the two men left the police station at a few minutes after eleven, the chief was even feeling sociable enough to invite his bodyguard into Dominic Verget’s saloon to share a dozen oysters (which Hennessy, the famous teetotaler, washed down with a small glass of milk).
    The driving rain had all but stopped by the time they left Verget’s. A drizzly mist now crept along the gleaming streets, muffling the men’s footsteps as they walked up Rampart. At the corner of Girod, just a few blocks from the chief’s house, they stopped.
    “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