by Gary Krist
Dantonio instead proposed another theory. “I am convinced the man is of a dual personality,” he said. “And it is very probable he is the man we tried so hard to get 10 years ago, when a series of ax and butcher-knife murders were committed within a few months.… Students of crime have established that a criminal of the dual-personality type may be a respectable, law-abiding citizen when [he is] his normal self. Then suddenly the impulse to kill comes upon him, and he must obey it.”
Dantonio pointed out that this serial ax murderer—like Jack the Ripper in London some years earlier—would be “cunning and hard to catch.” He would work methodically, making his plans well in advance to ensure that he wouldn’t be caught. But he would have a weakness: “This sort of criminal is easily frightened,” the detective claimed. “He fears a dog more than he does ten watchmen. My advice to the public is to put dogs in their yards.”
Just how many New Orleanians took Dantonio’s advice is impossible to say, but the axman hysteria did not dissipate quickly. People were now shooting at suspicious figures lurking in their neighbors’ backyards, and every character encountered on the streets at night was seen as a potential axman. In one incident, a man named Charles Cardajal insisted he saw the axman dressed as a woman, hiding behind a tree on Dupre Street. As Cardajal approached, the figure jumped out from its hiding place and ran away, and Cardajal himself did likewise. The figure later turned out to be “a badly frightened Negro woman” who had actually thought that Cardajal was the axman.
Superintendent Mooney was, if anything, just stoking this paranoia, insisting that any and all suspicious incidents should be reported immediately. “I believe it is criminal for citizens to withhold such cases from police,” he announced. “To withhold information means to assist the axman in his murderous work.” Confronted with “scathing criticism” for the absence of any arrest in the crimes, Mooney was eager to seem in command of the situation. But he clearly was not, and his repeated confident statements that the perpetrator would be caught were sounding increasingly desperate.
ON August 19, however, a development in the Besumer case allowed Mooney to at least make an arrest. Mrs. Lowe (who had finally admitted that she was not married to Besumer after all) had recovered sufficiently from her head wound to be released from the hospital, and she had been living again with Besumer for several weeks in the grocery/residence on Dorgenois Street. On that Monday morning, she stopped a passing patrolman and asked him to summon the superintendent. When Mooney arrived shortly thereafter, she told him that she had “recovered from the trance that had followed the attack on her,” and that all of the details of that night had come rushing back to her.
On the night I was assaulted, I asked Mr. Besumer for money due me. He had promised to pay me $10 a week. It was around 7:30 and the store had just been closed. He was writing on a blueprint. I asked him again for the money and he turned upon me with the most furious expression I ever saw on a man’s face.
I became frightened and turned around. Hardly had I taken two steps when I was struck from behind and felled. I heard Mr. Besumer say: “I am going to make fire for you in the bottom of the ocean.”
I have a recollection then of being dragged over the floor, and next I was in the hallway where there was a light. Oh, how I tried to call out to him that I had done nothing, and how I tried to raise my arm for protection. But I could not speak nor move. Then I felt the stinging pain on the right side of my face.
What happened from then to the time I found myself in bed—it seemed like morning then—I don’t know.
It’s doubtful that Mooney put much credence in Mrs. Lowe’s sudden recollection; this was the fourth or fifth time she had revised her account of the crime. But the new accusation was enough to have Louis Besumer arrested on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder. Other revelations by Mrs. Lowe also reignited the Justice Department’s interest in the case. Besumer, she claimed, had gone by several different names in the time they had been together. He told her several times that he was a German Jew, not a Pole, and he had a secret compartment in one of his trunks where he kept blueprints and documents in German. Police and federal agents confirmed this last claim, and that Besumer had sewn secret pockets into many of his clothes.
Besumer, of course, had explanations for everything. He adopted different names for each of his separate commercial ventures, he said. The secret compartment in the trunk was where he kept his wills, and the hidden pockets in his clothing were for hiding the ample sums of money he handled in his various business endeavors. He also continued to deny that he was anything but a Pole. “Mrs. Lowe is a good woman,” he insisted to investigators, but she was “changeable,” and she was for some reason telling them lies. “[She] knows who assaulted us. I just want to get to the bottom of this case and solve the mystery.”
If so, he would have to do it from prison. Worried about Besumer’s ability to pay the bail on a simple assault charge, Mooney had him charged as a “dangerous and suspicious character”—a “crime” that in the New Orleans of this day did not require any bail to be set. In the meantime, according to the Daily States, police and federal authorities were giving “some weight to the theory that Besumer may be an enemy agent,” and were investigating the matter closely again.
Whether or not Louis Besumer was actually the ax-wielder in the attack on Harriet Lowe, few people believed he could be the man responsible for the other ax attacks in the city. And so concern about the dreaded axman continued, though alleged sightings of the monster occurred with less frequency as more time elapsed since the Romano murder. By late August, some were even confident enough to see some humor in the situation: ATTENTION MR. MOONEY AND ALL CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS! read one notice in the Daily Item. THE AXMAN WILL APPEAR IN THE CITY ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 24. It turned out to be an advertisement for a chain of grocery stores. “He will ruthlessly use the Piggly Wiggly Ax in Cutting off the Heads of All High-Priced Groceries,” the ad continued. “His weapon is wonderful, and his system is unique. DON’T MISS SEEING HIM!”
By the time autumn arrived, the city had settled down into something like its normal self. The all-night axman vigils ended, and impressionable New Orleanians stopped scaring one another on the streets at night. Mooney and his overextended police department, relieved of the intense pressure to produce an axman suspect, could turn back to the task of clamping down on the city’s vice industry. Not that this was so difficult in 1918. Thanks to heavy-handed War Department strictures and the cresting of the Spanish flu epidemic, which at times required the closing of many public spaces, nightlife in the city remained relatively subdued. Music was still played around town, but aside from the great number of funerals caused by the raging epidemic, gigs were few and far between.
Meanwhile, the diaspora of jazzmen to cities north and west continued, and soon claimed some of New Orleans’ giants. Sidney Bechet, who had managed to avoid the military draft by claiming that he was supporting his parents, was still suffering from what he called “itchy feet,” hearing tales of the better life to be had beyond his hometown. “A whole lot of musicianers started to leave New Orleans for up North,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They was all writing back to New Orleans that work was plentiful, telling the New Orleans musicianers to come up.… It was a real excitement there.” Eager to get away, he joined another vaudeville troupe—the Bruce and Bruce Company—and toured throughout the country. When the troupe played in Chicago in May 1918, Bechet decided to stay on. He joined the band led by Lawrence Duhe (a fellow clarinetist who had been one of Kid Ory’s early bandmates in LaPlace). Bechet soon became their “featured hot man,” and apparently didn’t look back. He would never live in New Orleans again.
The city lost yet another important player before the year was out. On June 19, a dance at the Winter Garden played by the Ory-Oliver Band was raided by police. Paddy wagons were backed up to the doors at around eleven forty-five P.M.—when the night had barely started—and the frightened patrons were h
erded into them. “What about the band?” a patrolman asked the sergeant on the scene. “Oh,” he said, “I guess you better run them in too.” Any band members who couldn’t come up with $2.50 in bail money thus had to spend the night in jail. According to Ory, Joe Oliver was furious at this indignity, and totally fed up with the place New Orleans had become. When Ory saw that there was no other way to appease the man, he told him about an opportunity in Chicago—an offer he had recently received to bring his band to the Second City. Ory himself didn’t want to go, and although he was reluctant to lose the services of one of the best soloists working in New Orleans, he felt he had to offer it to Oliver. The cornetist didn’t hesitate to accept the job, and even persuaded clarinetist Jimmy Noone to go with him.
This was devastating news for Oliver’s young protégé, Louis Armstrong. But as with his stint at the Waif’s Home, it turned out to be a lucky misfortune. Armstrong later described the day he saw Oliver and Noone off at the station: “I was back on my job driving a coal cart,” he wrote, “but I took time off to go to the train with them. Kid Ory was at the station, and so were the rest of the Ory-Oliver jazz band. It was a rather sad parting. They really didn’t want to leave New Orleans, and I felt the old gang was breaking up. But in show business you always keep thinking something better is coming along.”
And something better came along for Louis that day. After the train had departed, Ory called him over. “You still blowin’ that cornet?” he asked. Louis said that he was. So Ory invited him to come play with the band that night in Oliver’s stead. “What a thrill that was!” Armstrong wrote. “To think I was considered up to taking Joe Oliver’s place in the best band in town!”
Ory wasn’t entirely sure the boy was up to it. He remembered the time Louis had subbed for Oliver and could play only a handful of tunes. But Louis had apparently learned a lot from his mentor in the meantime, and Ory saw the boy’s potential. So he told him to put on a pair of long trousers and show up for the gig that night at Economy Hall.
It became a legendary night in jazz history. Louis showed up looking like a miniature version of Joe Oliver, right down to the bath towel draped around his neck. And, by his own account, he managed to “blow up a storm.” “After that first gig with the Kid I was in,” he wrote. “I began to get real popular with the dance fans as well as the musicians.”
But the music scene in New Orleans remained depressed, and Armstrong still had to work various jobs as a saloon bellboy, carpenter, coal-cart driver, and (at least until the day he saw a huge rat on the wharves and quit) as a stevedore. He was still delivering coal on his old cart (with Lady the mule) on the day the war ended—on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice was signed. “I was carrying the coal inside [Fabacher’s restaurant] and sweating like mad,” he later recalled, “when I heard several automobiles going down St. Charles Street with great big tin cans tied to them, dragging on the ground and making all kinds of noise.” When he asked a bystander what was going on, the man told him that the war in Europe was over. The news hit him, he said, like “a bolt of lightning.” He realized that the end of the war would likely mean a resurgence of jobs for musicians. “I immediately dropped that shovel,” he wrote, “slowly put on my jacket, looked at Lady and said: ‘So long, my dear. I don’t think I’ll ever see you again.’ And I cut out, leaving mule cart, load of coal, and everything connected with it. I haven’t seen them since.”
But Armstrong’s optimism about a revival of New Orleans nightlife proved misplaced. Though the lights did go on in some previously closed clubs, the jazz scene would never return to its old glories. Thanks to the coming of nationwide Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified just two months after the Armistice), the forces of reform would retain the upper hand in New Orleans for years to come. As one music writer has put it: “The freewheeling days of the honky-tonks and cabarets were over.”
AND so the atmosphere in New Orleans remained muted. The Mardi Gras celebration in early 1919 proved to be another subdued affair. With little time after Armistice Day to design and assemble any elaborate parade floats, the processions were canceled again, and the few spontaneous street celebrations that did occur were relatively tepid. Even the axman seemed to go into hibernation. With Louis Besumer in jail (now on a murder charge, since Harriet Lowe had finally succumbed to her head injury in September 1918), some may have speculated that the axman was silent because the actual perpetrator was behind bars. But Mooney and his detectives never seriously entertained the idea that Besumer was responsible for the other ax attacks. They were convinced that he had killed his housekeeper and then injured himself to make it look like an axman attack.
The calm, however, proved short-lived. Early on the morning of March 10, 1919, an Italian grocer in Gretna—a town on the other side of the Mississippi—heard screams coming from the grocery across the street from his own store. He ran over and discovered Charles Cortimiglia, bloody and unconscious on the floor, and his wife standing over him, screaming, with a bloody child in her arms. It was clearly an attack like the others; the telltale signs were all there—the missing door panel, the bloody ax left in the yard, no sign of burglary. After a seven-month lull, the axman was back.
Who is the axman, and what is his motive? Is the fiend who committed the Gretna butchery the same man who executed the Maggio and Romano murders and who made similar attempts on other families? If so, is he madman, robber, vendetta agent, or sadist?
—New Orleans Daily States, March 11, 1919
IT WAS, IN MANY RESPECTS, THE MOST BRUTAL ASSAULT so far: a two-year-old child killed instantly by a single blow to the skull; her critically injured parents rendered senseless by multiple head traumas. Clotted gore soaked the bed where they all lay. Across the walls and curtains around them, blood spatters radiated like birdshot. And yet, despite this evidence of what must have been a savage frenzy of violence, no one in the neighborhood had heard a thing. The perpetrator had been able to escape without a single witness to the crime, and with hours to spare before his deed was detected. The axman was apparently becoming even more adept at his trade with time.
The crime had been discovered at about seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Several neighbors had made earlier visits to the grocery, which usually opened at five A.M., and had merely walked away when they found it closed. But one little girl named Hazel Johnson was more persistent. After getting no response at the front door, she decided to try around back. In the alley leading to the rear of the building, she found a chair set up below a side window. She climbed up on the chair and peered inside, but couldn’t see anything in the murky morning light. So she continued down the alley to the backyard. There she found the back door closed, but with one of its lower panels missing. Puzzled, she called a passerby into the yard, and he persuaded her to go inside, perhaps because she was small enough to fit through the missing panel. She crawled in—and moments later burst out the back door, screaming.
Aroused by this clamor, a young neighbor named Frank Jordano ran over with his aging father, Iorlando. They found Charles Cortimiglia half-conscious on the floor, and Rose Cortimiglia clutching her lifeless toddler and sobbing inarticulately. Her husband, Charles, roused out of his stupor by the younger Jordano, sat up on the floor. “Frank,” he said. “I’m dying. Go for my brother-in-law.” It was the last thing he would say for several days.
Since the town of Gretna was in Jefferson Parish, Peter Leson, chief of the Gretna police, and Jefferson sheriff Louis Marrero would conduct the investigation of the Cortimiglia case, with Superintendent Mooney’s force merely assisting from afar. What Leson and Marrero found at the scene, however, indicated that the crime was clearly related to the previous year’s cases across the river. The axman’s signature modus operandi was obvious—from chiseled door panel to rummaged belongings, with little sign of anything of value actually being taken. This time, a box containing money and jewelry was found undisturbed in the bedroom, along with $129 in cash hidden under the Cortimiglias’ mat
tress. But two trunks and a dresser had been practically torn apart in some kind of frenzied search; even the face of the mantelpiece clock had been pried open and examined. As in the other axman cases, however, no fingerprints were found anywhere, and any footprints in the yard had unfortunately been trampled by the curious crowd of neighbors that had gathered at the scene after hearing Hazel Johnson’s screams.
The discovery of two axes on the premises—one bloody and obviously the murder weapon, another covered with fresh mud—led Leson to believe that two men might have been responsible for this attack. Perhaps one had stood on the chair in the alley to keep an eye on the victims—and simultaneously on the street—while his partner worked on the back-door panel to gain entrance. This two-perpetrator idea could even illuminate one nagging aspect of the earlier attacks. Having an accomplice could explain how the axman was so successful at eluding detection, even while chiseling away at a back door—an activity that must have been noisy enough to be heard by anyone lying awake in bed or passing on the street. In other words, the axman may not have had wings (as the impressionable Bruno girl had speculated), but he could have had a second set of eyes—keeping a lookout while he performed his grim duties inside.
But Leson and Marrero were not interested in solving the earlier crimes; they were concerned only with the one in their own jurisdiction, and they pursued their investigation with an aggressive single-mindedness that they would later come to regret. While interviewing the Cortimiglias’ neighbors, they gleaned hints that the Jordanos might not be the Good Samaritans they at first had seemed. According to the neighbors, the two families had been feuding for some time, ever since the Cortimiglias had taken over the languishing Jordano grocery in 1916 and turned it into a success. The Jordanos had taken back the business just a few months ago, forcing the Cortimiglias to find a shop elsewhere in Gretna. But recently the Cortimiglias had come back, setting up a brand-new grocery on the lot adjoining that of the Jordano store. And now, just two weeks later, the Cortimiglias were lying near death after being brutally attacked in the night. When asked about the situation, the Jordanos insisted that they had made peace with the Cortimiglias and were now good friends, but Marrero had his doubts.
