Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (12 page)

Over the months that followed, a desperate behind-the-scenes campaign was waged by Hennessy to get the killing of Devereaux dismissed as a justifiable homicide. However, Devereaux’s stockbroker friend claimed that he saw what happened, and that David Hennessy was nothing more than a cold-blooded killer.

In April 1882, six months after the shooting, David and Michael Hennessy went on trial for murder. After a relatively short three-week proceeding, the Hennessy cousins were found not guilty. The verdict kept David Hennessy from going to prison, but it wasn’t enough to repair the damage done to his career. The negative publicity forced Chief Tom Boylan, who had testified on David’s behalf at the trial, to ask for the resignation of both Hennessys from the police force.

Mike Hennessy left New Orleans for good. He moved to Houston, Texas, where he became the head of a private detective agency. In 1886, while returning home from the theatre one night, he was murdered—shot five times by parties unknown.

David Hennessy stayed in New Orleans and went to work for the Farrell Protection Police, one of the city’s many private detective agencies run by Irish ex-cops. Slowly but surely, he worked his way back into the public’s good graces as the Devereaux shooting receded from the collective memory. When Tom Boylan finally retired as city Police Chief, he formed the powerful Boylan Protective Police, with David Hennessy as his cofounder. In 1884, the New Orleans city council commissioned the Boylan police “as patrolmen with full police powers,” making them equals of the city police force. Hennessy was now, in fact, the second most powerful policeman in New Orleans, right behind the city department’s chief. Four years later, when Joseph Shakespeare was elected mayor of the city, one of his first moves—by popular demand—was to appoint David C. Hennessy Chief of the New Orleans police department.

It had been a long, circuitous journey, but Hennessy had finally arrived where he felt destined to be. He picked up right where he left off, only now he was slightly less gregarious, less trusting, and more protective of his position. Emboldened by the city’s newspapers, which ran banner headlines proclaiming that the city was infested by “1,100 Dago Criminals,” he resumed his career as a famous enemy of the mafia—or at least that’s how it appeared.

The Matranga family of New Orleans, headed by two brothers, Charles and Anthony, were one of two competing Italian factions overseeing what had once been an Irish and German domain along the city’s commercial wharves. The bounty at stake was substantial. New Orleans was the busiest port in the south, with the shipping trade flowing from inland cities via the Mississippi River and arriving from international destinations by way of the Gulf of Mexico. The stevedore union was the largest active labor union in the city, and competition among crime-connected labor factions on the wharves was fierce, if not violent. On May 6, 1890, a group of Matranga longshoremen got into a shootout with their main rivals, the Provenzano family. Three Matrangas were wounded by gunfire, including Anthony, whose injuries required the amputation of a leg.

Police Chief Hennessy was at the scene of the Matranga-Provenzano shooting just a few minutes after it occurred. He was approached by one of the Provenzanos, who said, “Chief Hennessy, a little misunderstanding, that’s all this was. I’m sure you will agree that you have much to gain by hearing our side of the story, yes?”

Hennessy listened and said nothing, but he liked what he heard. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

In the weeks that followed, the Chief was seen often in the company of one or more of the Provenzano brothers: Joseph, George, Vincent, and Peter. He allegedly went into business with the brothers and became part-owner of a popular bordello called the Red Lantern Club, located near Hennessy’s home in a part of the French Quarter known as the Swamp.

The fact that a cop, even the chief of police, would enter into a partnership with a criminal faction in the city was as endemic to life in New Orleans as jazz, jambalaya, and Mardi Gras. Since at least 1874, when the hated Metropolitan police force was ousted during an armed coup and a city-run department was instituted in its place, cops in New Orleans were the lowest paid of any big city police force in the United States. The only consolation was that they were allowed, even encouraged, to make money on the side by hiring themselves out to local business establishments as security guards, private detectives, silent partners, or guns for hire. This arrangement opened up untold opportunities for graft and corruption, as individual contractors sought out high-ranking officers to serve as their own private lawmen.

In this regard, David Hennessy was no more or less venal than many other New Orleans policemen. Hennessy’s record reveals a man who was certainly ambitious, but not without virtue. Once, when an Irish cop named McCabe tried to have two African American cops removed from the force for not backing up his story of a dirty police shooting, Hennessy vouched for the black officers’ good characters in their hearing before the Board of Police Commissioners; the charges against the black officers were dropped. For a white policeman to testify on behalf of two black cops against a white cop in the Deep South at that time was an act of considerable courage. Clearly, Hennessy was a complex man. On the take? Perhaps. Entangled with mafiosi? Certainly. But he was not as blatantly corrupt as many other officers on the New Orleans police force.

To the Matranga family, however, the relative merits or deficiencies of David Hennessy’s character were of no interest whatsoever. To them, Hennessy was an all-too-familiar type, an Irish cop who had gotten himself involved in the city’s criminal rackets, in this case by aligning himself against them in a bitter labor war. The fact that Hennessy’s reputation in the city was impeccable, that he was seen as a great enemy of the Mafia, only added fuel to the fire. By their estimation, the man was a hypocrite, plain and simple, a dirty cop who passed himself off as a pillar of society. Only now, the Chief’s reputation was being used against them. It was rumored that Hennessy would be testifying on behalf of the Provenzanos in an upcoming trial for their role in the shooting of the Matranga brothers. This was an affront that could not be ignored. The Sicilians had a way of dealing with such matters.

The time had come for David C. Hennessy to pay for his sins.

“Who Killa de Chief?”

In the wake of Hennessy’s assassination, Mayor Shakespeare expressed outrage and ordered the wholesale arrest of Italian males between the ages of twelve and fifty-five. There were no witnesses to the shooting, of course, and little immediate evidence other than detective William O’Connor’s retelling of Hennessy’s dying word: “Dagos.” No one other than O’Connor heard this alleged identification of the killers, but it was enough to reconfirm the ardent belief of lawmen, public officials, and citizens throughout the city that the dreaded Mafia needed to be addressed.

Within three hours of the chief’s death on October 16, 1890, five of the dozens of Italians questioned and arrested were charged “for the willful murder of David C. Hennessy.” Outside the Central Police Station, an angry mob of citizens gathered.

“They killed our hero!” exclaimed one man in utter disbelief.

“We must have our revenge!” shouted another.

“Yes,” someone agreed, “an eye for an eye.”

When a number of wives and other female relatives of the scorned Italians attempted to enter the jail, they were cursed at, jostled, and spat upon.

Around 1:30
A
.
M
., the five who had been booked were transported in a mule-drawn Black Maria to the New Orleans Parish Prison. The angry mob followed. When the prisoners were transported under heavy guard from the paddy wagon to the prison, the crowd began a loud, mocking chant: “Who killa de chief? Who killa de chief?” Eventually, they were dispersed by police.

In the subsequent editorials and post-mortems on Hennessy’s career, there was no mention of his controversial past, which included the shooting of Devereaux, his forced resignation, and his shadowy relationship with the Provenzanos—an especially pertinent detail that would not be revealed until many months after the fact. In death, David Hennessy was offered up as a martyr. At his lavish funeral, candlelight wreathed his face in a glow that the press described as “saintly” and “otherworldly,” which is exactly how the public chose to remember their fallen hero.

Among the many citizens driven to despair by the murder of Chief Hennessy was a twenty-nine-year-old newspaper peddler named Thomas Duffy. Duffy had occasionally sold a morning newspaper to Hennessy outside police headquarters and had become enamored of the man who had risen to become perhaps the single most powerful Irishman in the city. At Hennessy’s funeral, Duffy was seen crying and muttering to himself. Afterward, he wandered the city streets with a gun in his pocket, came upon an exhibit of drawings of Chief Hennessy at the entrance of the Grand Opera House, and then headed for Parish Prison. What he did next would resemble the actions of another vengeful gunman seventy-three years later—Jack Ruby—following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The Irish newspaper peddler was known to many at Parish Prison. Duffy presented himself at the bullpen area and announced that he heard a man named “Scafiro” had been arrested for the shooting of Hennessy and that he could identify him as one of the killers. A guard went to get Anthony Scaffidi, who had been charged as the main assassin.

While waiting, Duffy paced nervously.

“What’ve you got for the dago?” joked a guard. “Some kind of bomb?”

“No,” Duffy answered curtly, not seeing the humor.

Scaffidi was brought into the bullpen. Duffy stiffened and asked the Italian to raise his hands. Scaffidi complied. Then Duffy whipped out his .32-caliber revolver and pointed it at the prisoner. The guards pounced, but not before Duffy got off one shot that hit Scaffidi in the throat. As Duffy was wrestled to the ground, he called out, “If there were seventy-five more men like me in New Orleans, we’d run all the dagos out of the city!”

Scaffidi was rushed to the hospital and eventually recovered from his wound.

Duffy was lionized by many as some kind of Irish avenger. Months later, he was tried and found guilty of the shooting, but was sentenced to a mere six months in Parish Prison.

In the end, nineteen men were indicted for planning and carrying out the execution of Chief Hennessy. On February 16, 1891, nine men went on trial. Apart from detective O’Connor’s testimony, the prosecution still didn’t have much evidence. The proceedings lasted less than a month. Despite the public’s demand for vengeance, a jury found the nine defendants not guilty.

Outside of Little Palermo, where there was much celebration, the populace was outraged. A rumor started that the jury had been bought off by one Dominick O’Malley, a wily Irishman and former city detective who had been hired by the defense. A meeting of prominent citizens was called, and an angry crowd gathered in the public square. Many political leaders stood at the podium beneath a public statue and exhorted the crowd to take matters into their own hands.

“This is our city,” shouted one man. “Justice must be done. We will not live in fear of the Mafia.”

What followed would go down as one of the most shocking events in the city’s history. Banding together into groups of ten and twenty men, the citizens stormed the Parish Prison. Armed with guns and clubs, they crashed the gates and made their way inside. Seven Italians were dragged into the prison yard and shot down execution-style. Two more were found hiding in a doghouse where the warden normally kept his bull terrier. They were shot dead on the spot. Another prisoner was dragged from the prison and hanged from a lamppost outside. Still another was found lying among the dead in the prison yard, pretending to be dead himself. To the excitement and satisfaction of the crowd, he was hanged from a tree in front of the prison, on Orleans Street. All told, eleven Italian Americans were lynched to death by a mob of over twenty thousand people that day.

While some newspapers denounced the actions of the mob, the people of New Orleans and the nation generally greeted the event with approval. Among the papers that voiced support and understanding were the
Washington Post
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the
New York Times
, who editorialized that the death of the Italians made “life and property safer” in the southern metropolis. Closer to home, Mayor Shakespeare declared, “I do consider that the act was—however deplorable—a necessity and justifiable. The Italians had taken the law into their own hands, and we had to do the same.”

If the citizenry of New Orleans believed that by slaughtering eleven Italians they were flushing the Mafia out of their nest, they were wrong. The city’s Sicilian community retreated behind closed doors. Driven underground, they resumed their commitment to a secret society that they vowed would never be penetrated by American law enforcement, or anyone else for that matter.

It would be inaccurate to portray what happened that day in New Orleans as primarily a conflict between Irish and Italian factions in the city. After all, the mob’s swift and brutal charge against the dagos was led by some of the city’s most prominent citizens—WASP, southern aristocrat, German, and Irish. But to the Sicilian mafiosi in New Orleans and elsewhere, the message was clear. Hennessy represented a certain faction of the city’s power structure: the police. The New Orleans police department was a bastion of the Irish, many of whom received tribute from Italian gangsters on the docks and elsewhere. To the Italians, Irish cops were part and parcel of the underworld. They were mobsters in uniform.

Somehow, by killing Chief Hennessy, the Italians had unleashed the wrath of American moralism and unmasked the hypocrisy of American life. They knew David Hennessy was no saint, but the public refused to see him that way. Never again could the Sicilian underworld trust the delicate system of financial appeasement between them and city authorities to work in their favor. Clearly, the city, the mayor, and the country at large were against them. At the heart of this treachery was the corrupt Irishman—be he a cop, a gangster, or both.