Joseph Mumfre was just the kind of garden variety Black Hand operator who tormented successful immigrants and fueled fears of a vast, powerful conspiracy. His square head, crooked nose, and scarred face gave him a threatening presence, but Mumfre had none of the sinister glamour of the stereotypical mob gangster. His rough braggadocio revealed him for the low-level thug that he was. Mumfre gave his profession as “labor agent”; his nickname—“Doc”—came from the patent medicines he sold on the side. The knife and bullet scars on his body, however, testified to the type of life he led. He had emigrated from Italy in his twenties and spoke heavily accented English. His background was varied: soldier, city employee, magazine salesman, money lender, letter writer for illiterate Italians, mule stealer, and horse thief. Black Hand extortion was his latest trade.
One fall day in 1907, grocer Camillo Graffagnini received a letter in Italian that began with the familiar “Dear Friend.” Graffagnini owned a grocery a few blocks east of the Vieux Carré. He’d done well, invested in property, and was proud of his success. He could easily have paid the $1,000 the letter requested. But he tossed the letter aside.
A few days later, Joseph Mumfre entered the store. He looked around the grocery and swaggered his way up to the counter.
How is business? he inquired.
The grocer shrugged his shoulders modestly. It’s fairly well.
Dear friend, said Mumfre. Do you have anything to give me?
Graffagnini knew what this meant. He hesitated. Then he picked up a cigar from one of the cigar boxes sitting on the counter and offered it to Mumfre. Here, he said. Have this. Mumfre took the cigar but looked at Graffagnini and asked again. Are you sure you have nothing else for me? Graffagnini shook his head. Mumfre turned toward the door, shaking his head as he walked out; this grocer was going to be trouble; he would need more encouragement.
Not long after, Graffagnini received another “Dear Friend” letter. This one warned him to comply, “Otherwise your family will fare badly.” Mumfre showed up a few days later and again left empty-handed.
Graffagnini saw Joe Mumfre one more time, about a month later, when he came by to have a drink in the saloon. Then the next night, just after midnight, a loud explosion outside their residence jolted the sleeping Graffagnini and his family out of their beds. When the stupefied grocer staggered outside to investigate, he found that he shouldn’t have dismissed the Black Hand so cavalierly. Someone had tried to throw a bomb into his family’s living quarters, up on the second story. Luckily, telephone wires had intercepted the bomb and it had dropped to the sidewalk. There it had exploded, gouging out a hole in the sidewalk next to the grocery and shattering every pane of glass in the building’s door and windows.
An investigation quickly resulted in Mumfre’s arrest, along with four others. Witnesses had seen him near Graffagnini’s store the night of the bombing. The police must have been relieved. They suspected him of being the ringleader of a Black Hand group and of involvement in several other crimes. A jury convicted him in fifteen minutes, and Mumfre was sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary.
“Doc” Mumfre was in the purgatory of the Louisiana State Penitentiary when Joe Davi had his head smashed in. But the Black Hander would come to be associated with the Axeman’s murders in a way no one could have anticipated.
≡ 6 ≡
The Cleaver Returns
AFTER JOE DAVI’S MURDER, Jim Reynolds fully expected another attack in the coming months. The Cleaver already had struck three times without being caught, without leaving any real clues to his identity. If he was a “fiend,” as Reynolds suspected, he would strike again soon; he wouldn’t be able to help himself. So the city waited. Especially the Sicilian shopkeepers, who looked nervously up and down the street when they shut up their stores in the evening and wondered when the Cleaver would make his next appearance.
But nothing happened. The months slid by without any sign of the Cleaver. Reynolds had plenty to keep him busy: weeding out corrupt policemen, putting more patrolmen on the streets at night, and making the city safe for Carnival. He handled robberies, suicides, run-of-the-mill homicides, and the occasional mysterious murder. But no midnight marauder split open the head of an Italian grocer in the dead of night. Gradually, in the face of daily life, fear of the Cleaver slipped away.
The killer disappeared for six years.
Where was the Cleaver, or the Axeman as he would become known, after Joe Davi’s murder in June 1911? It’s not unknown for serial killers to take a long break, especially between their first and second kills, but the most likely answer is prison; the Cleaver probably went away for burglary or petty larceny. The railroad shoe pin he used was popular with thieves because it was so useful for prying open doors and windows, and the Cleaver handled one with ease. The Crutti job was almost certainly not his first. His practice of removing his shoes so as not to make noise on the wood floors also suggests some experience in housebreaking; the Cleaver knew what he was doing.
Perhaps that is how he got his start. Perhaps he didn’t set out to harm anyone. Perhaps August Crutti, the first victim, stirred in his sleep, startling the burglar whose original object was the week’s cash. When he hit the grocer out of fear, he discovered that he enjoyed it. It made him feel powerful, like nothing he’d ever felt before. For a moment he didn’t feel like a loser, an insignificant day laborer and freelance burglar. So he attacked Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto, viciously cutting both of them with his meat axe, producing plenty of blood. That they escaped alive was just luck. But with Joe Davi, the Axeman became a killer, a success in his own mind, luxuriating in a feeling of dominance and control as he bashed the young man’s brains onto his pillow.
Not long afterward, he was probably arrested for something else—burglary most likely—and shipped off to prison for a term. The Louisiana State Penitentiary was set up for punishment, not rehabilitation, so time spent there wouldn’t cure the itch to kill. Murder is addictive, and when the Axeman returned to New Orleans, he slunk around the city, like a demon choosing his next soul.
3 AM, December 22, 1917
The Cleaver returned one chilly December night.
Shrieks—hysterical, high-pitched shrieks—shattered the still winter air. Sixteen-year-old Mary Andollina was startled out of her sleep by her mother’s cries. Instantly awake, she darted from the room she shared with her four younger sisters into her parents’ bedroom to find her father sprawled on the floor, covered with blood and moaning in pain. Her first impulse was to go to her father, but her mother screamed at her: Get the children out of the house! Someone tried to kill your father! Get the children out of the house! They’ll be murdered!
Obediently, Mary turned back into her own bedroom. She shook the younger girls awake and hurried the sleepy, protesting children out of the house. Mrs. Andollina, with her infant daughter in her arms, soon followed Mary out into the street, screaming for someone to call an ambulance.
The neighbors responded, the ambulance came, and the police were called. Not only did Epifanio Andollina need to be taken to Charity Hospital, but so did his sons: the two boys—ages thirteen and fourteen—had minor injuries, but their father had several serious head wounds.
As the sun came up and the cool night air warmed into a mild winter day, the police settled down to unwinding what exactly had happened. Interviewing the family, they were able to patch together an account of the night’s events.
Epifanio and Anna Andollina, both Sicilian transplants, had for five years run a small grocery and saloon at the corner of Apple and Dante Streets in Carrollton, about four miles west of the Vieux Carré. The large family lived in a building attached to the grocery, the parents in one room with their infant daughter, the two boys in a back room, and the five girls in the third room.
Mrs. Andollina told the detectives that she had awoken to see a man standing on her husband’s side of the bed, a revolver in one hand and a hatchet in the other. Seeing her eyes open, the intruder leveled his p
istol directly at her and commanded, “Shut up!” She froze in terror. The man then hit her husband four or five times with the hatchet. That, apparently, was what he had come for because he then turned and walked out of the room. That’s when Mrs. Andollina began screaming.
On his way out of the house, the assailant ducked into the room of the two boys. As they struggled awake at the sound of their mother’s screams, the intruder stunned fourteen-year-old John with a blow to the head and whacked the younger Salvatore with his pistol butt on the arm. Then he slipped out through the kitchen, dropping the hatchet on the kitchen floor.
John Andollina shows off the wound he received from the Axeman; Detective Arthur Marullo demonstrates how the Axeman entered the Andollina grocery.
Detectives closely questioned the family, but no one could describe the assailant. Mrs. Andollina, who’d seen the man only by the dim light of an oil lamp in the bedroom, couldn’t even tell if he was black or white. “It was too dark,” she explained, “and I was so excited at the time.”
Later, from his bed in Charity, Epifanio Andollina was no more help. He couldn’t describe the assailant because he’d been asleep when the first blow fell and had tried to protect himself by pulling the bedclothes up over his head. He denied knowing anyone who had it in for him. “I have no enemies,” the grocer declared. “I don’t know why anyone should make an attempt on my life.”
The hatchet man, as the press called him, had come in through the back door, chiseling out a large panel of the heavy wooden door. Nothing had been stolen. No one had seen a suspicious character hanging around the grocery. It was a puzzling crime, and some of the detectives were openly skeptical of the family’s story. Were they sure it wasn’t just a domestic spat that got out of hand? Or maybe they’d quarreled with a neighbor and knew the assailant?
No! the family insisted. That is not what happened. Well, perhaps it was a Black Hand crime. But the Andollinas denied ever receiving blackmail demands. They could only recall a previous incident about five years before when someone had knocked out a door panel and entered the house. He stole some money from the grocery but was frightened off as he was trying to break into the family’s quarters. Were the two cases connected?
Almost certainly the Andollinas’ attacker was the Cleaver of 1910 and 1911. That another assailant would target specifically Italian grocers in the same manner is extremely unlikely. If Jim Reynolds had been investigating the break-in, perhaps he would have made the connection with similar attacks on other Italian grocers six and a half years before. But Superintendent Reynolds was not on the case. He’d been murdered five months before.
On August 2, 1917, Terrance Mullen, a patrolman known to have mental problems, entered the crowded First City Criminal Court Building. He walked upstairs to police headquarters and in front of several of the department’s most senior officials shot Chief Reynolds in the eye, piercing his brain and killing him instantly. In the ensuing firefight, bullets flew in all directions, drilling into the courthouse walls and crashing into the tall glass windows as Mullen fired and ran, shooting until his revolver clicked empty. Policemen opened fire, some taking aim at the assassin as he retreated down the hallway; others, rattled, fired at random. For what seemed an eternity, chaos and confusion washed down the corridors of one of New Orleans’s most important government buildings.
Terry Mullen’s ten-minute rampage through the First City Criminal Court Building left a shattered police department in its wake. The most popular superintendent since Dave Hennessy was dead; several other officers were wounded, one mortally. The careers of several of the officers who’d failed to protect Reynolds were ruined, forced to take early retirement or resign. Terry Mullen spent the rest of his life locked up in a state asylum.
Mayor Martin Behrman was stunned and genuinely grieved by the death of his friend. And he was furious. He couldn’t understand, he said to one reporter, “how a man could be shot down in his own office surrounded by a number of men, who were there to protect him.”
Who could be trusted to take charge of the police department? Anger over the department’s apparent incompetence may well have played a role in the selection of the next superintendent. Instead of choosing from within the department, Behrman and the city’s Commission Council unanimously selected Frank T. Mooney, superintendent of terminals for the Illinois Central Railroad.
This appointment made more sense than it might appear. Even if his manners were a bit unrefined, Frank Mooney was a capable manager; he knew how to handle big projects and large numbers of men. He was familiar with city hall, the people in it and how it worked, and he already knew many of the officers in the police department. He was a loyal Democrat, and that he wanted the job there was no question; he’d been up for it before, in 1911, when he was beaten out by Jim Reynolds.
Superintendent of Police
Frank T. Mooney.
Running the Illinois Central Railroad—one of the most important of the nine rail lines that snaked their way into New Orleans—was a complicated business. While much of Mooney’s time was spent in necessary but dull public relations—attending Red Cross lectures, demonstrating the safety of the railroads to women’s clubs—he also had to pacify unhappy laborers, lobby the legislature, and hammer out agreements with other railroads, as well as be responsible for the over 200,000 IC railroad cars that went in and out of New Orleans each year. All this required tact, organization, and public speaking skills. To be in charge of the Illinois Central in the city of New Orleans was a tremendous responsibility, just the kind of challenge a man like Frank Mooney relished. What it didn’t require was police experience.
At forty-seven, Mooney had the solid frame of a man who’d been an athlete in his youth but put on flesh in his middle years. A photo of Mooney in his thirties projects a picture of rectitude, an upright, honorable man who believed in duty and service and the efficacy of hard work. All that had certainly worked for him. Frank Mooney was a self-made man. The son of an Irish immigrant, he’d begun his career as a thirteen-year-old flagman in the Illinois Central and risen higher and higher because of his industriousness and gift for finding efficiencies. He planned to apply the same businesslike formula to the police department; what the department needed, he was sure, was a firm hand and a few new ideas. Reynolds had tightened discipline in the force, to be sure, but Mooney knew there was much more to do. The chief had been too much one of the lads, too indulgent of his men, and too lax in enforcement of moral legislation. The new superintendent planned on shaking the department up.
But Mooney hadn’t been involved in the investigations of the 1910–1911 attacks on Italian grocers. John Dantonio, the Italian detective who’d helped investigate those crimes, was also gone from the force by this time. Dantonio had retired in October 1917. He was only fifty-three, but he’d fallen sick with the illness that would kill him three years later. Besides, he was an early victim of Superintendent Mooney’s new economizing. By 1917 Dantonio was chief of the night detective bureau, and one of Mooney’s first acts was to abolish it. Dantonio reckoned that this would be a good time to retire. After twenty-one years on the force, he was eligible for a pension, and he took it.
He was replaced as the Italian expert by Arthur Marullo, an Italian immigrant who’d been a detective in New York City before joining the New Orleans Police Department in 1915. Marullo investigated the Andollina case, but of course since he hadn’t been on the force then, he may well have not known about the earlier attacks. Chief of Detectives George Long had been one of the investigators of the Davi murder, but he’d been of the opinion that it, as well as the other attacks, was simple robbery gone wrong. At any rate, no evidence suggests that anyone made the connection between Epifanio Andollina’s assailant and the killer of six years before.
What interested detectives was the connection between the Andollina case and similar attacks in the same section of the city. This was the third assault on this side of the city in a mile and a half radius in the last year.
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On a moonless Saturday night seven months earlier, a French-born dairyman, Vincent Miramon, had been sleeping soundly in the hayloft above his cow barn at 4131 Washington Avenue. About 1 AM, May 19, someone took Miramon’s hammer from its resting place on a shelf in the barn and crept up the stairs to the Frenchman’s cot. With the first blow, the prowler bashed in Miramon’s head, fracturing his skull. He hit the unconscious dairyman at least six more times, hammering his face into a broken, swollen, bloody mess. The assailant then descended the stairs without taking the $150 in cash Miramon carried in his pocket. He dropped the bloodstained hammer on his way out.
The police developed only a handful of suspects in the attack: several black truck farmers who’d threatened Miramon because he didn’t keep his cows out of their cornfields. Eventually, they narrowed their focus to one, Cornelius Jones. But the quarrel over the roaming cows was the only evidence they had against him. It wasn’t much of a motive, and everyone knew the police didn’t have much of a case.
At Charity Hospital, Miramon appeared to be recovering when meningitis set in. He died five days after the attack.
The other case was eerily similar to the Andollina attack. Just before 4 AM on a warm, rainy night ten days after the attack on Vincent Miramon, a man entered the residence of Joseph Girard, grocer and ice dealer at 3429 Fern Street. The area was rural and thinly populated, grassy lots dotting the racially mixed neighborhood. The thirty-seven-year-old Louisiana born son of French parents ran a tiny grocery in the front room of his house; in the back two rooms he squeezed his wife and seven children.
The Axeman of New Orleans Page 9
