The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Many of the inhabitants of Little Palermo, like their countrymen on plantations, were determined to start their own businesses as soon as they could. Usually these were small enterprises needing a minimum of investment. Tiny shoe shops were everywhere; eventually, 75 percent of shoemakers in New Orleans were Italian. Barbershops, too, were on every block. They were particularly popular as start-ups because it was easy enough to turn one’s own parlor into a barbershop: all one needed was a straight razor, a mirror, a chair, and a steady hand.

  But the real Italian niche was food.

  One of the most common upward trajectories for an ambitious Sicilian was that from plantation worker to truck farmer and peddler to grocer, probably the route Iorlando took. Many in New Orleans followed the same path. Much of the area on the outskirts of New Orleans was still quite rural. Dairy cows, chickens, hogs, and horses could be found in the sparsely populated Carrollton neighborhood west of the French Quarter, Amesville across the river, and Marigny, just outside the Quarter across Esplanade. From these locations truck farmers set out to furnish the city with its fruits and vegetables, or its milk and eggs, loading their produce onto horse-drawn wagons. They drove into town, selling to markets and groceries or hawking their goods on the street, the “humble, loud-voiced vendor, driving his cart . . . along the streets and calling out the different varieties [of produce] in English impossible to understand.”

  Most Italian enterprises remained fairly modest. By the early twentieth century, corner grocery stores were expanding all over New Orleans, multiplying until they were ubiquitous; by 1910 when Iorlando and his family moved to Gretna there was one on practically every corner. This is one reason Italians were scattered all over the city. In the early decades of the twentieth century, no one had refrigerators. Iceboxes were stocked with big blocks of ice bought from the ice wagon. Most houses were modest, with small kitchens and very limited storage space. Housewives often shopped twice a day: once for the noon meal and again in the afternoon for supper. A grocery down the block, even a small one, was often more convenient than a central market. Corner groceries flourished, and Italian grocers flourished with them. In 1880 only 7 percent of grocers were Italians. By 1920 Italians owned half of all groceries in New Orleans.

  Iorlando shunned cramped Little Palermo and settled his family across the river in Gretna, a growing suburb of New Orleans. There, at the corner of Second and Jefferson Streets, he ran one of the little neighborhood groceries that sold all the basics: canned goods, fruits and vegetables, cheese and bread, and multiple varieties of pasta. When a customer entered the unpretentious wooden building, she was greeted with the briny smell of olives overlaying the sharp, pungent smell of cheese; Italian sausage added a peppery flavor to the air. Canvas bags of fava beans sprawled on the concrete floor. Cans of tomatoes and tins of sardines were stacked on the shelves that lined the walls, stretching up almost to the ceiling. During the summer, watermelons were piled neatly outside the store. The shopper was usually greeted by Iorlando or his wife; Iorlando was an old man by this time, gray and slightly stooped, but still slim with a full mustache, speaking with a thick Italian accent—“Good-a morning. Nice-a day.” No doubt, many of his lady customers thought him charming.

  For modern tourists, the legacy of the New Orleans Italian groceries is the muffuletta, a daunting combination of salami, capicola, ham, provolone, emmentaler cheese, and olive salad on bread. Its invention is most often attributed to Salvatore Lupo, owner of Central Grocery, which still stands on Decatur Street, across from the French Market. According to tradition, the sandwich originated in the early 1900s with the lunches of the Sicilian truck farmers who provided the French Market with its produce. Day after day Lupo watched the Sicilians sit on crates, balancing their trays of bread, cheese, ham, salami, and olive salad on their knees as they ate. Finally, Lupo took all the ingredients, put them together in round Sicilian sesame bread, and New Orleans’s most famous sandwich was born. Today it’s not longshoremen from the sugar wharves or peddlers from the French Market who get their lunches from Central Grocery, but tourists waiting for a muffuletta and a Dixie Beer who endure long lines that spill out into Decatur Street.

  The people who gave New Orleans the muffuletta—hardworking, self-reliant, frugal, and ambitious—these were the Axeman’s targets. Despite the odds against them, Italian immigrants managed to carve out a slice of the American Dream for themselves. But for some, their success created resentment. And someone wanted to take it away.

  Iorlando Guagliardo and his family would pay a high price for the Axeman’s crimes. Iorlando and Lillie prospered in Gretna as their business flourished. They were successful enough to put a little money away for the future. At some point the family had taken the name Jordano—Guagliardo was too easy for Americans to trip over. Iorlando Guagliardo became Iorlando Jordano; his eldest son, Frank Jordano. With the murder of Mary Cortimiglia, their American dream appeared to be over. Iorlando and Frank would be accused of murdering the little girl.

  ≡ 4 ≡

  The Davi Murder

  Wednesday, June 28, 1911

  JOSEPH DAVI TOOK THIRTY hours to die.

  The doctors at Charity were astonished at the amount of fight still in the young grocer. His brains were seeping out of his head, having been bashed out of his skull. He should have died more or less on the spot. Perhaps being a newly married husband and expectant father made him reluctant to give it all up. And resist his fate he did. For over a day the doctors at Charity could do nothing but admire his struggle against death. But in the end the trim, handsome twenty-six-year-old was no match for his injuries. He slipped away without regaining consciousness. No one told Mary Davi that she was now a sixteen-year-old widow.

  In those days, the New Orleans coroner didn’t fuss with invasive autopsies—no opening of the chest cavity, measuring of organs, or toxicology reports. Assistant Coroner Charles Groetsch’s job was limited to getting a good look at the body after all the blood had been scraped off and deciding what had killed him. In Davi’s case, this wasn’t hard. He had sustained repeated blows to the front of his head that smashed his skull and pulped his brain.

  A clerk in the Coroner’s Office called the police to notify them that they were now in the midst of a murder investigation.

  Joseph Davi, the Axeman’s first fatality.

  In Baltimore, New Orleans inspector of police James Reynolds tore open the envelope the messenger handed him and read it without much surprise. His fears had been realized. The Cleaver was back.

  When Jim Reynolds had been appointed inspector of police only four months earlier, he had a force of fewer than 250 to police a city of 339,000. Fortunately, the serious crime rate in New Orleans was relatively low. Robberies and burglaries were common; murders, mercifully, were not. New Orleanians did have a murder rate considerably higher than most other southern cities and comparable northern cities such as Chicago. Nevertheless, New Orleans wasn’t a particularly dangerous place for ordinary citizens as long as they stayed out of barroom brawls and conducted domestic spats well out of reach of guns and knives. The murder rate in New Orleans in 1911 was much lower than it would be a hundred years later. And it was considerably lower than it had been in the 1880s when murder was so common it couldn’t even be used to sell newspapers.

  New Orleans murderers at the turn of the century were not an exceptionally clever lot. In 1910, the city had fifty-two murders, and the police immediately identified the killer in almost all of them. Most homicides were easy to solve for the simple reason that most murderers committed their crimes in front of witnesses. The majority of these killings were intensely personal—a domestic argument, a fight over a woman, a barroom brawl over an imagined insult. Death in the course of a robbery was unusual. Murders like that of Joseph Davi were exceptionally rare.

  But the people of New Orleans were only just beginning to suspect how unusual the killing of Joe Davi was.

  The police world was in the midst of a revolution of pr
ocedure and professionalism that would turn a badly paid, poorly trained, low-status force into an efficient law enforcement organization. In 1911 modern policing was still less than a hundred years old. New Orleans was hardly on the cutting edge of this trend, and in the early twentieth century only just starting to catch up.

  In the years after Reconstruction, New Orleans police officers were known for their corruption and incompetence. The financially strapped city had one of the worst-paid police departments in the country so, not surprisingly, it didn’t attract the highest caliber of applicants. Poorly paid, haphazardly trained, often inexperienced, New Orleans policemen were almost as much a menace as the criminals they pursued. They routinely broke the law against carrying concealed weapons. Worse, when they drew their revolvers, they were lousy shots, usually missing the criminals at whom they aimed and frequently hitting innocent bystanders.

  Why did the residents tolerate such incompetence? Because of the nature of city politics. After Reconstruction, New Orleans was dominated by the Regular Democratic Organization, a political machine generally known as the Ring or the Choctaw Club (named for the social club on Saint Charles Avenue where its members met). This city machine operated by systematically getting out the vote on Election Day, rewarding its members with city jobs and contracts, and engaging in a bit of ballot-box stuffing when necessary. By the early twentieth century the Ring was led by Martin Behrman, one of the great city bosses in an era of city bosses. Pudgy, mustached Behrman looked like the German grocer he had been. The son of Jewish immigrants, Behrman began as a ward worker in his neighborhood of Algiers and quickly climbed the hierarchy of the Ring to become mayor in 1904. One of the most gifted politicians of his generation, he was to control the machine—and the city—for the next twenty years.

  The New Orleans Police Department, like most United States police departments at the time, ran on patronage. After 1877, New Orleans mayors had the power to appoint police officers, and they used that power to reward supporters and punish opponents. Policemen were therefore not hired or promoted on the basis of ability or job performance, but because of political and familial ties. For politicians, the advantage was both the ability to give jobs to supporters and a loyal police force with which to harass political opponents. The disadvantages for the people of New Orleans are obvious.

  The police department that Jim Reynolds joined was loaded with bribery, kickbacks, abuse of authority, and a general lack of discipline. Patronage wasn’t the only culprit responsible for these faults. The conditions under which policemen worked were also to blame. Successful police work—tracking stolen property, locating a suspect—often meant a thorough knowledge of the criminal world. Counting criminals among one’s acquaintances often led to temptations that a poorly paid policeman would find hard to resist. They enforced laws selectively, arrested people solely in order to meet quotas, and took bribes from criminals. The New Orleans Police Department had developed an entirely deserved reputation for corruption.

  When James Reynolds became the police chief in February 1911, he was a popular choice, a career policeman rather than a politician, and was free from the taint of corruption. He could hardly have been chosen without being a Behrman ally, but Reynolds publicly promised to “keep the police force entirely out of politics.”

  He did his best to enforce training and discipline, cracking down on lazy and delinquent policemen. But there were limits to what the police inspector could do. Reynolds could no more stamp out the petty graft of day-to-day life than he could banish prostitution or illegal gambling. He had to police the city with the force he had.

  Monday, June 26, 1911

  It was a perfectly ordinary day for Joe and Mary Davi. They woke up early, had their grocery store at Arts and Galvez Streets open by 5:30 AM, and spent a long day waiting on customers. The Davis were still newlyweds, married only five months, and the routine was not yet old. Mary usually handled the business of the store while her husband ran the saloon. Italian immigrants who had come to the United States as children, they made an attractive couple. Mary was pretty in a plump, youthful way, with masses of thick, light brown hair, brightened by a hint of gold and radiating with the glow of her first pregnancy. Joe was a good-looking fellow with a handlebar mustache whom everyone thought a “steady, sober and good young man.”

  The Davi grocery and home, where Joseph Davi was killed.

  Usually, Mary closed the shop with Joe and they went to bed together. But tonight she was unusually tired and retired early. Joe closed up by himself about 10 PM. After counting his receipts for the day, he took the cash with him into the bedroom. The bedroom door didn’t fasten properly, so Joe propped up a makeshift alarm on the top of the door—several empty seltzer water bottles that would clatter to the floor if anyone entered in the night. He also kept a loaded revolver on the table next to the bed. If he faced any burglars, he planned to be prepared. He finally slipped under the mosquito netting and crawled into bed next to his sleeping wife at about 11 PM. One imagines that Joe leaned over, kissed Mary good night, and, tired from his long day, quickly fell into a deep sleep.

  Mary Davi, pregnant and widowed at sixteen.

  Some time later, something woke Mary. At first she wasn’t sure what it was. Then a movement caught her eye. She looked up to see a stranger in the bedroom. By the dim light of the oil lamp burning in a corner of the room, she saw a man near the wardrobe. She shook her husband: “What is that man doing here?”

  Joe only moaned in response. Hearing a voice, the intruder turned to her: “Where is your money?” he wanted to know. Mary simply stared, too frightened to reply. Apparently infuriated, the intruder grabbed a heavy porcelain mug and hit her hard on the side of the head. She fell back on her pillow, unconscious. When she could look around the room again, the man had disappeared. Mary didn’t yet realize the extent of her wounds, but she had cuts on her face and her right hand and arm, and she could feel the blood dripping down her face. Panicky questions flashed through her head. Who was he? Where was he? Was he robbing the grocery? Would he come back to kill her and Joe if she screamed for help? Perhaps if she remained perfectly still, he wouldn’t return. Mary lay frozen, paralyzed with fear and shock, listening to her husband’s ragged breathing, as the hours dragged by.

  5:30 AM, Tuesday, June 27, 1911

  Standing in front of the Davi grocery in the postdawn glow, Ernest Boyer, a young bartender, was puzzled. And he was getting impatient. He needed two loaves of bread, but the grocery was locked and ghostly silent. That was strange. He pounded on the door again, and again he got no answer. He went around to the side of the building, the side where the Davis lived, and rapped on the bedroom window, hoping to rouse someone.

  After a moment, Mary Davi appeared at the window and peered hesitantly at him though the blinds. He asked for some bread, but she told him the store wasn’t open.

  “Call your husband,” he insisted.

  “I can’t,” she replied. “He’s asleep.”

  Boyer knew immediately something was wrong. Mary Davi was acting very oddly. She seemed confused, even frightened. As he continued to study her through the blinds, he noticed blood on her face. Why is your husband asleep? What’s the matter? Dazed, almost unwillingly, the young woman finally admitted that she couldn’t wake her husband because he was bleeding. Would Boyer go fetch Benjamin Gallin, a close friend of her husband’s?

  When Gallin, Boyer, and a few other concerned neighbors entered the house a short time later, they discovered Joe lying on his blood-soaked bed with a badly fractured skull. His breath came in gasps, as his brain, swelling as a result of trauma, pressed against the respiratory centers in his brainstem. Mary was in shock, herself cut and bleeding. Disoriented and shaking, the young woman gave every sign of not having really absorbed what had happened in the night.

  The Fifth Precinct Station, only a mile and a half away, got a telephone call just after 6 AM Tuesday morning. A man and a woman had been injured at Arts and Galvez Streets, s
aid the caller. Could they send someone right away? A sergeant with a detail of patrolmen was sent to investigate. He took one look at the dying man and traumatized girl and immediately alerted police headquarters. Soon afterward, after the couple had been taken to Charity Hospital, detectives were on the scene.

  Inspector Reynolds was out of town. He had gone up north to attend the annual conference of the International Police Chiefs Union. In his absence, George Long, the new chief of detectives, took charge of the investigation. By ten o’clock, over half a dozen investigators crowded into the grocery and its tiny living quarters to take an inventory of the crime scene.

  The Davi place was a small grocery store at Arts and Galvez Streets. Business was good, considering that it was in a sparsely populated area at the edge of the city. It was only a little over a mile from Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto’s store, and not far from the swamp and woods that defined the city’s boundary. A rough partition sectioned off part of the grocery for use as a saloon. The residence was behind the store and consisted of a dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. The building was fairly isolated. Overgrown, grassy lots lay behind and to the side of the grocery.

  The intruder had pried open a window with a railroad shoe pin and climbed into the saloon. Once he made his way into the store, he had raised the hinged section of the grocery counter to gain access to the door leading up two or three steps into the residence. He then had gone through the dining room to the bedroom door. The investigators found the seltzer water bottles deliberately placed next to the door. The homemade alarm hadn’t worked.