What chiefly makes crime worth reading about, either as fiction or fact, is the human element, the strange problems it presents in human conduct, the revelations it makes of the dark recesses of the human heart.
--Edmund L. Pearson, “The Perfect Murder,” Scribner's, July 1937
If a murder case is measured by its social, political, and cultural impact, few would rival the murder of the chief of police of the city of New Orleans, the case that brought the word Mafia -- and the concept of organized Italian crime gangs -- into the American lexicon. When Chief David Hennessy was killed in 1890, eleven men were lynched for the crime. Were they guilty?
Author Tom Smith has penned several chapters on historic crime cases, and recently he published his first book-length historic true crime account. It’s The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans "Mafia" Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob. The professional reviews have been full of high praise, particularly for Smith’s writing style.
Clews recently had a chance to chat up the author. Here’s the Q & A. (The photo of Chief Hennessy is from Wikipedia).
It has to be hard to settle on one single case for a full-length book treatment. What attracted you to this story set in late 19th-century New Orleans?
I thought it was a great story long before I had any intention of writing about it. I was aware of the case from The French Quarter, by Herbert Asbury, who’s best known for Gangs of New York. I’d also read about it in Gumbo Ya Ya, the 1945 Louisiana Writers Project collection of folk tales. A friend who knew I was reading Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy for fun suggested that I write a crime story about New Orleans, since I’d lived there in the late 1970s and love the place. It was the most notorious case I recalled from years of reading about the city and, after some preliminary research, I thought there was a book in it.
Why did this mass lynching have such an impact not only in Louisiana but internationally?
I think many Americans were rattled by the novelty of it. Imagine picking up your daily paper, which would’ve been your only source of national news, to learn that a foreign gang of killers had murdered the chief of police in a major city. They’d then made a mockery of the justice system by bribing a jury, but were lynched en masse by citizens claiming to have restored the rule of law. This wasn’t particularly truthful, but it’s what most Americans read in the days and months after the lynching, so public paranoia was understandable.
Unfortunately, whenever that kind of fear is unleashed, the country historically suffers an accompanying wave of bigotry and disdain for constitutional law. The reaction was different overseas, where outrage over the lynching prompted the Italian government to demand reparations and a national apology. When the feds here refused, replying that their hands were tied until state authorities had investigated the matter, diplomatic relations between Italy and the U.S. collapsed, leading to rumors of war and posturing on both sides.
Meanwhile, the furor tarnished our national reputation and left some foreign governments wondering aloud if treaties guaranteeing protection for their citizens in the U.S. were worthless.
Were you able to uncover previously unreported facts about the case?
Actually I spent more time discovering and correcting misreported “facts” about the case that had been quoted for so many years that they’d taken on the weight of truth. One instance was the story of the Reverend Rose, who’d often been described as an English clergyman whose ears were chopped off and mailed to his wife by Sicilian kidnappers.
For a century this story had been cited as an example of Mafia savagery and a thread in the plot against Hennessy. In fact, I found that Rose was a mine manager, a bachelor who was successfully ransomed with both ears intact. By the time we sold the book, however, this was no longer a scoop. Rimanelli and Postman outed it as a tall tale in “The 1891 New Orleans Lynching and Italian-American Relations,” a detailed examination of the diplomatic aspects of the case.
What conclusions did you draw after studying the case? Were the eleven men who were extrajudicially executed for murdering the police chief actually guilty?
The pool of potential suspects was deeper than the one presented by the city government, prosecutors, and many later historians. I try to present the case in a manner that encourages readers to draw their own conclusions. You’re getting the same evidence and verbatim arguments that the jury heard, although admittedly in condensed form.
Personally, I think the jurors got a bad rap. I’ve read all of the testimony and after weighing what prosecutors promised to prove versus the evidence actually produced in court, I think the jury’s decisions are understandable. It’s also necessary to remember that five of the lynched men had not yet had their day in court and that all of the surviving defendants were freed by the d.a. after the lynching, with no explanation as to why they were suddenly less complicit in the chief’s murder. Unless their indictments were the result of prosecutorial overkill, we’ll never know why these men were jailed in the first place.
You've enjoyed high praise from professional reviewers who appreciated your prose and especially the dialogue in your book. Did you find that your writing was influenced by the 19th-century newspaper accounts you studied?
Absolutely, for we wouldn’t have any facts about the case if it weren’t for the press. Court and police records disappeared long ago. Luckily there were plenty of New Orleans newspapers relating these events to the public, sometimes in multiple daily editions. Part of my job was to compare and evaluate the daily texts of these newspapers. There was also a helpful dissenting voice amid the rhetoric of the rest of the local press, a weekly scandal sheet called The Mascot.
One of the first editorial requests I got was to eliminate any undocumented or invented dialogue. So all of the courtroom dialogue comes from transcripts printed in the daily newspapers. There were minor differences in the wording of the testimony, so occasionally I needed to make a judgment call and choose what seemed the truest representation of how a witness might have actually spoken in court.
Similarly, there are instances in which court testimony is used to reconstruct what certain characters said elsewhere, earlier in the case. This too involved a certain amount of judgment: about whether or not the words were corroborated by others, if a character had motives to lie, and so on. Vetting and framing all this was much more complex than a simple “cut & paste” job.
Reflecting how the prose of the original newspaper reports influenced events is also responsible for some of the book’s tone.
Is it harder to convince publishers to take an interest in a century-old mystery?
The book was published 16 years after I completed the first draft, so I’ll say yes. When agent Ed Knappman at New England Publishing Associates agreed to try to sell it in 1991, he warned me that publishers weren’t particularly interested in historical true crime books. One result of our conversation was that he subsequently hired me to contribute to the abovementioned “great trials” books he was editing. The other result was that, like most writers, I collected enough rejection letters to wallpaper my bathroom.
What subjects did you write about for the three compilations that include your work -- Sex, Sin & Mayhem: Notorious Trials of the '90s, Great American Trials, and Great World Trials?
Most involved murder or terrorism, plus a few civil cases like the estate of bluesman Robert Johnson. The oldest was the 1842 murder trial of arms manufacturer Samuel Colt’s brother John, who whacked a printer on the head with a hatchet and tried to ship the corpse out of Manhattan. All three books required succinct explanations of the crimes and trials, although the tone of Sex, Sin & Mayhem was more relaxed because it wasn’t meant to be a reference book.
I was sometimes surprised at how difficult it was to find information. For example, well-known films have been based on the Sleepy Lagoon and Gregorio Cortez cases and both turn up frequently in cultural histories, but finding details about what actually happened in court involved searching newspaper morgues and consulting legal books whose covers were so old that the leather stained my hands like rust.
What are the best books you've read in the genre?
Bella Stumbo’s Until the Twelfth of Never and Kenneth Gross’ The Alice Crimmins Case stood out among the books I read while working on the great trials series. I lived in Leicester, England around the time of the murders in Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding, so that gave me the creeps.
The most recent true crime book I’ve read is Desire Street by New Orleans journalist Jed Horne, author of the skillfully written Katrina book Breach of Faith. The next one will be Nate Blakeslee’s Tulia.
My reading habits don’t have a pattern. I look forward to anything written by Ted Conover or Peter Guralnick.
Are you working on any other stories in the theme of crime?
I want to know more about violence between the Know Nothings and Irish immigrants in 19th century New Orleans. I’ve just begun researching a crime in another city from the same period, so if all goes well, maybe I’ll eventually get two books out of it! I’ll let you know how it turns out.
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Thanks, Tom, and good luck with the next project, too!
For more about Tom Smith and his book, visit his website at http://www.crescentcitylynchings.com/.
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