by Gary Krist
As more and more days passed without any further progress in the case, tensions began to surface among the frustrated investigators. The police began accusing the Italian Vigilance Committee of meeting in secret and withholding important information. Peter Lamana, meanwhile, had all but cut off communication with the official investigators, choosing to follow his own lines of inquiry. Apparently, he felt that a heavy-handed police presence did more harm than good, interfering with the willingness of potential witnesses to tell what they knew.
Finally, some two weeks after the disappearance, another key name emerged from the cacophony of innuendoes and accusations. For days, Judge Patorno had been hearing from various Italian businessmen who had received extortion letters over the past weeks. But one of them actually claimed to know who wrote the letter he’d received. Taking the judge to the window of his own office, the merchant pointed to a man standing on the corner just outside. “That is the man who wrote it,” the merchant said. “Tony Gendusa!”
Judge Patorno did not act immediately on this revelation. It was, after all, only one of numerous accusations he was hearing every day. But when he eventually compared the merchant’s note with the original letter sent to Peter Lamana, he noticed that the handwriting was suspiciously similar. And when he went to Tony Gendusa’s home, he discovered that the man was now missing. Patorno sent some detectives out to Pecan Grove, a town near the Campisciano farm in St. Rose, where—according to Tony Gendusa’s brother Frank—the missing man’s sweetheart lived, but they found nothing.
Patorno, however, kept digging, and he soon began to turn up some suggestive connections between Tony Gendusa and a few of the other suspects in the crime. Gendusa, he learned, had been seen with prime suspect Tony Costa several times in the weeks before the kidnapping, often accompanied by another man, Francisco Luchesi. Now Luchesi was also missing. And so, apparently, was another known associate named Leonardo Gebbia, who lived with his sister and parents in a house just a few doors away from the Lamana residence. According to neighborhood gossip, the Gebbias knew more about Walter Lamana’s disappearance than they had revealed to the police. Mrs. Gebbia, Leonardo’s mother, had allegedly visited Mrs. Lamana several times since the kidnapping, assuring her that little Walter was safe and encouraging the Lamanas to pay the ransom to get him back. At the time, her words had been dismissed as the well-meant reassurances of an aging neighbor. But now they were beginning to seem rather more sinister.
Very early one morning, police staged a raid on the Gebbia home. Leonardo Gebbia was in the house, still in bed, and he was apprehended without incident. And his arrest proved to be the break that ultimately unraveled the entire conspiracy. Professing his own innocence in the plot, he nonetheless confessed to know all about it. He had seen Tony Costa leading the boy away from the undertaking parlor, he said. He’d seen Costa turn the boy over to a man named Stefano Monfre, who had been waiting at the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip with a covered wagon, driven by Francisco Luchesi. Gebbia also confirmed that Tony Gendusa had written the Black Hand letter demanding $6,000.
This was sufficient information for Judge Patorno to start making new arrests. He had the entire Gebbia family locked up, along with Tony Gendusa’s brother Frank, Stefano Monfre’s wife, and even the couple who, with the Gebbias, ran the rooming house on St. Philip.
But the most important revelation came in the confession of Gebbia’s sister, Nicolina, who verified what Patorno had long suspected—that the boy had been taken to the Campisciano farm in St. Rose. Ignazio Campisciano, of course, had been arrested and released some days earlier for lack of evidence. Now Patorno had the corroboration he needed to proceed more aggressively against the farmer. He arranged with the Illinois Central Railroad for a special train to St. Rose and assembled a posse to head out there that evening. Among the posse members was a trainmaster for the railroad named Frank T. Mooney—the same man who ten years later would become Superintendent of Police. Mooney, apparently interested in police work even then, involved himself closely in the Campisciano arrest, and even provided the Daily Picayune with a sensational account of it.
After the special train arrived at Pecan Grove at around midnight, Mooney explained, “We put out the headlight of the engine and all the lights in the coach, and [then] walked the tracks for one and a half miles to Campisciano’s houses.” Patorno put a guard around both buildings—Campisciano’s home and a shed about fifty yards away, where it was believed Walter Lamana might be held. Then they pounded on Campisciano’s door until they had roused him from sleep. The farmer finally came to the door in his underclothes.
“Our party pushed the door open and stepped inside,” Mooney told the Picayune:
Judge Patorno spoke out sharply: “Give us the boy. We came for the child.”
Campisciano stood without a word.
“Where is the Lamana boy?” demanded Judge Patorno, without a quiver.
The Italian only shrugged his shoulders in the Roman style, pleading ignorance. He declared he knew nothing of the matter and stoutly maintained that position.
[But] the party had come there determined. It was not to be put off as it had been once before. Campisciano was quickly seized and bound hand and foot. His hands were pinioned behind his back and his legs were bound with ropes. He was carried outside and a rope [was] quickly fastened around his neck.
Intimidated by this somewhat less-than-legal interrogation technique, Campisciano relented and indicated that he would speak. The noose around his neck was loosened, and he proceeded to tell how Monfre, Luchesi, and two other men, one of whom he knew as Angelo Incarcaterra, had brought the boy to his house in a covered wagon. But when Patorno asked the farmer where the boy was now, the man turned stonily silent. Again the rope was tightened around his neck, and he was threatened with hanging from a nearby tree. Finally, he gave in. When the rope was again loosened, Campisciano made the admission that everyone had feared: “The boy is dead.”
“He went on to relate every detail of the heinous crime,” Mooney continued. “He took us over to the other house and showed us the very spot and the position the child was lying [in] when he was murdered, choked to death. He pleaded that he had nothing whatsoever to do with it and that the others had committed the deed.”
Judge Patorno demanded that Campisciano lead them to the boy’s body. The farmer wanted to wait until morning, since the place was deep in the swamps behind his house and the moon had already set. But Patorno insisted. And so they set off, several men holding lanterns as they picked their way through the marshy wilderness. Campisciano begged his captors to untie his hands, so he could at least push aside the reeds as he walked. Patorno agreed, but they kept a rope around his neck and another around his shoulders, each held by one of the posse, to ensure that the farmer didn’t slip away in the gloom.
“You can imagine the situation,” Mooney told the Picayune, “this Italian leading a party through the swamp, wading in water to their waists and through brush and briars. None of us felt sure that he had told us the truth, and who knew that this leader of the Black Hand was not leading us into a death trap.” But finally, several miles into the fetid swamp, Campisciano stopped and pointed to a spot under some willow branches. “There,” he said.
“And he told the truth,” Mooney reported. “Upon lifting the heavy boughs, we saw this gray-colored bundle. It was resting on some wild cane reeds. The odor was terrible, and as the bundle was picked up and the blanket unwrapped, the head dropped from the shoulders.”
This last macabre detail—of the boy’s head detaching from the torso, apparently as a result of advanced decomposition—would be picked up and headlined in newspapers all around the country over the next few days. In New Orleans, it raised the level of mob hysteria to a new and feverish pitch. When the body was brought back to the city and laid out in the morgue, thousands of people assailed the building. The Daily Picayune described the scene:
The mob thronged the yard and jammed through the narrow doo
r of the dead house. There, the insane desire to possess some gruesome souvenir of the most horrible crime to shock New Orleans since the Hennessy assassination took hold of the people, and they fought and fell over each other in an effort to tear off pieces of the clothes in which the body had been found, and which still lay, reeking with maggots and shreds of rotting flesh, on the slab.
Meanwhile, other information was emerging from interrogations with the incarcerated suspects. According to Campisciano, Walter Lamana had actually been killed on the Wednesday following the kidnapping, meaning that the child had been dead for ten days already. Apparently, the kidnappers had been frightened by news of the mob actions in New Orleans that evening and had decided to abort the kidnapping. So Angelo Incarcaterra—allegedly on the order of Leonardo Gebbia, the leader of the group—had seized the boy and unceremoniously strangled him to death. Then they had wrapped the body in a blanket and carried it out to a remote corner of the swamp, where they hoped it would never be found.
The extent of the conspiracy involved in this ugly piece of business was difficult for officials to assess. Police had six of the principal suspects in custody—Campisciano and his wife, Tony Costa, Frank Gendusa, and Leonardo and Nicolina Gebbia. At least four were still at large, including Luchesi the wagon driver; Tony Gendusa the letter writer; Stefano Monfre, who owned the covered wagon; and Angelo Incarcaterra, who had actually strangled the boy. But there were several other conspirators mentioned in various bits of testimony who remained unaccounted-for—a “tall man named Joe,” whom Campisciano had seen with Stefano Monfre on the morning after the kidnapping; a mysterious man with a pockmarked face who had come to Monfre’s house several times before the kidnapping; and—perhaps most tellingly—a “wronged man” named “Mr. Cristina.” Could this have been Paolo Di Christina, the associate of capo Francisco Genova who had been involved in the 1902 Luciano incident? Whatever the connections, it was clear that the kidnapping cabal was large and complex. That such an elaborate conspiracy could have flourished in the festering alleys of the lower French Quarter—apparently known to so many residents, none of whom saw fit to report it to the police—was appalling. So much for the so-called lesson of the Hennessy lynching.
Still, at least some members of the community had come forward with information, and so the Italian Vigilance Committee tried to put as good a face on the situation as they could. “The reign of the Black Hand is over in New Orleans,” they told the Times-Democrat—though it was clearly a declaration more hopeful than justified.
Police continued to pursue the missing suspects, even sending detectives to Kansas to check out a tip that Stefano Monfre might be hiding out with relatives there. But it soon became apparent that Monfre and the other absent conspirators were gone for good. The six suspects in custody, meanwhile, were indicted and sent to the prison in Hahnville, the seat of St. Charles Parish (where the case would be tried, since the murder had occurred in that parish).
The trial of the first four defendants began at the courthouse in Hahnville on July 15. Nicolina and Leonardo Gebbia would be tried at a later date, but the Campiscianos, Tony Costa, and Frank Gendusa would face a jury first. Autopsy results had indicated that Walter Lamana had been killed by a hatchet blow to the forehead; this had only increased the public’s rage at the perpetrators, and the trial attracted huge, hostile crowds to the little county seat. Security was heavy, with scores of sheriff’s deputies and other police on hand to keep order.
The trial lasted four days. During their testimony, the defendants predictably professed their own innocence of any active role in the affair, casting themselves as merely frightened witnesses to acts perpetrated by the five men and one woman still at large or not yet on trial. But in this case, unlike in the Hennessy case sixteen years earlier, the evidence against the accused was persuasive. The police work had been far more careful this time, and no one but the defense attorney seemed at all discomfited by the fact that Campisciano had been forced to confess with a rope around his neck. Even so, the jury, after deliberating for less than an hour, came back to the courtroom with a qualified verdict. “Guilty,” the foreman announced, but “without capital punishment.” The evidence, as one juror later explained, was simply not conclusive enough to justify hanging.
It took three companies of the state militia, bayonets drawn, to prevent the enraged crowds outside the courtroom from administering their own form of justice—on the defendants and on the jurors. One confrontation nearly erupted into bloody violence when a train commandeered by an irate mob from New Orleans was turned back at gunpoint from the tiny Hahnville station. Back in New Orleans, Mayor Martin Behrman was forced to order the closing of all saloons, hotel bars, and private clubs in the city, and to send a force of special police into the Italian quarter to keep order and defend the Lamanas’ neighbors. These precautions proved effective. Despite the all-too-predictable mob cries of “We want the Dagos!” the widespread violence that had characterized the Hennessy and Robert Charles affairs never materialized.
Meanwhile, the Daily Item was almost wistful in its editorial regrets over what it—and virtually every other paper in New Orleans—considered a ridiculous outcome. “A real verdict, a verdict with a capital punishment attachment in this Lamana case, would have gone far to make them [i.e., ‘lower-class Sicilians’] recognize that American law was a vital and mighty thing—a thing to fear.… So much of good would surely have resulted from a legal execution in the premises.…”
In the end, the people of New Orleans did get that legal execution. The trial of Leonardo and Nicolina Gebbia—much delayed because of the high feeling provoked by the earlier trial—ended with both brother and sister being found guilty and sentenced to hang. Nicolina’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison (the prospect of executing a woman was still repugnant to many, no matter what the crime). But on Friday, July 16, 1909, Leonardo Gebbia was led to a scaffold in the Hahnville prison yard and hanged by the neck until he was dead. Afterward, the noose was presented to Peter Lamana, who expressed his gratitude that at least one of the perpetrators had gotten his “just deserts.”
Ultimately, something tangible did come out of the Lamana tragedy. The year after Gebbia’s execution, the Louisiana state legislature passed a law mandating a death sentence for anyone convicted of kidnapping a child. It was—for some, at least—a satisfying outcome. But any notion that the Black Hand had been routed for good in the Crescent City would eventually be dispelled, and much sooner than even the most pessimistic New Orleanian might have expected.
THE SECOND WAVE OF REFORM ARRIVED IN 1907—IN the shape of a woman wielding an ax.
A few days before Christmas, a Northeastern Railroad train from Mississippi pulled into New Orleans bearing one of the iconic reform figures of the age. Carrie Nation, the hatchet-swinging firebrand from Garrard County, Kentucky—famous nationwide for her saloon-smashing campaign to stamp out “Demon Rum” and all of its attendant vices—had come to the city as part of a speaking tour throughout the American South. Armed with a Bible and an ample supply of miniature gold-plated hatchets to distribute as souvenirs, she had planned out a full program of lectures and prayer meetings in some of the town’s most notorious dens of iniquity. She knew that she’d face plenty of opposition, but Carrie Nation was determined to save the Crescent City’s soul.
Initially, the white-haired, lantern-jawed reformer had been reluctant to bring her message to the so-called Great Southern Babylon. “New Orleans is too tough a place for me to tackle,” she’d told reporters in Birmingham in mid-December. “It is a very, very bad place … and I am getting too old.”
But somehow she had thought better of her decision. “I believe in being everlastingly on the warpath,” she announced a few days later, explaining her change of heart. “We must fight the devil. And there are real devils.” Nowhere was that truer, apparently, than in New Orleans, and so she had come after all.
Trailing an entourage of newsmen, admirers, and gawkers, Na
tion went straight from the train station to City Hall to meet with Mayor Martin Behrman. His Honor the Mayor, no slouch himself when it came to deviltry, seemed somewhat amused by the compact but passionate old woman who appeared at his office door in her trademark widow’s weeds. Speaking before reporters, Behrman welcomed her to the city but insisted that she refrain from any saloon-smashing while she was there.
But Nation could make no promises. “I am nothing but a lump of mud in the hands of God,” she said. “Would the mayor be so audacious as to refuse the Lord his right to smash?”
Behrman thought about this for a moment before responding that “he would not attempt to prevent the Lord, but he certainly would have his officers prevent her.” Thus they parted on good if somewhat uneasy terms, with a promise to meet again before she left town.
Over the next three days, Mrs. Nation made a thorough tour of the city’s hotels, taverns, and barrelhouses, preaching her message of temperance to all who would listen. The time had come, she insisted, for the total prohibition of alcohol—not just in New Orleans but in the nation at large. “President [Theodore] Roosevelt is a bag of wind,” she told one crowd at the St. Charles Hotel. “Roosevelt, Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, and Muerlein are the quintet which is doing America much harm. The first is a beer-guzzling Dutchman, and the others are making it [the beer] for him and his loyal subjects. The country should be ashamed of the people ruling it!”
But alcohol was only one of the targets of Mrs. Nation’s wrath. Gambling, smoking, foul language, “sexual impurity,” and, of course, prostitution were also on her prohibition agenda, so she made sure to investigate Storyville itself. She first accepted an invitation from Emma Johnson to visit the House of All Nations, perhaps the most flagrantly depraved of all the Storyville brothels. Invited into the parlor with the madam and her charges, the fiery orator ended up doing more listening than preaching. One by one, the women of the place explained to her how they had come to prostitution not as a result of coercion or entrapment by an evil seducer—the tendentious “white slavery” explanation put forth by many reformers of the day—but rather by their own free will. Forced to fend for themselves in a world where female workers made pennies a day in so-called legitimate jobs, they had instead chosen their current profession. All who spoke to Mrs. Nation, in fact, professed to be content with their lives and saw very little wrong in them. Madam Johnson herself even claimed that she prayed regularly, and fully expected to end up in heaven.
