by Gary Krist
It was, in any case, to be the last alleged axman crime. Several suspects were arrested for one or another of the ax crimes over the next weeks, but all eventually had to be released for lack of evidence. And as time passed without another ax attack, the hysteria in the city subsided. Even the Jordanos, convicted in the Cortimiglia case, were ultimately released. Young Rose Cortimiglia apparently had a nighttime visitation from Saint Joseph, who urged her to clear her conscience before she died. She subsequently recanted her testimony against the Jordanos. “Everyone kept saying to me that it was them,” she explained, and so she began to believe it. “I was not in my right mind.” But now she claimed to understand the seriousness of her false accusation, and she apologized to her erstwhile neighbors. “God, I hope I can sleep now,” she told the judge, who, after some procedural difficulties, managed to get the convicted murderers released.
And so even this one “solved” ax crime became unsolved once more. But although there would be no more murders in the night, the shadowy axman would claim one more victim. Superintendent of Police Frank Mooney, under continuing criticism for his inability to solve the murders, was eventually forced to resign in late 1920. He went back to the job he did best—running a railroad, which he did in the wilds of Honduras until his death after a heart attack in August 1923.
But the axman ordeal did have a final chapter. Late in 1921, New Orleans police would learn something that would shed new light on the long series of attacks, pointing to one well-known career criminal who might have been responsible for the mayhem (see Afterword). In the meantime, the case remained unsolved, and the city seemed to forget about its nemesis. Order had been restored to the streets, and the city had returned to its more circumspect postwar self. The ever-conservative Times-Picayune seemed positively delighted by the quieter, more respectable atmosphere. After New Year’s Day of 1920, the paper could report on an admirably sober observation of the holiday. PUNCTILIOUSNESS, PRIMNESS, AND PRUDERY PREVAIL HERE read the headline in the January 2 issue, over an article about the tameness of the usually raucous celebration. “The first day of the new year was observed, rather than celebrated,” the paper reported, “with hushful, Sabbatical ceremony …[New Orleanians] paraded with dignity and aplomb, feeling that they looked as virtuous as they felt.” Casualties were few, and arrests were “practically nil.”
But the reformers—though clearly in the ascendant—were not finished with the city quite yet. There was, after all, still one symbolic figure who had survived this triumph of supposed virtue in New Orleans. Tom Anderson, the erstwhile mayor of Storyville, was still sitting in his seat of power in the state legislature. In order for the reform revolution to be complete, many felt that this situation had to be rectified. Tom Anderson—and the political machine that supported him—would have to be destroyed entirely.
BY 1919, TOM ANDERSON’S EMPIRE WAS IN SIGNIFICANT disarray. With the closing of the restricted district and the failure of the resulting lawsuits to overturn the decision, Anderson’s business interests were suffering. For a time, he and the other vice lords of New Orleans had hoped that the end of the world war might derail the juggernaut of wartime puritanism, but the hectoring had only grown more insistent over time. Reform groups like the Citizens League had not backed down a bit after the Armistice. In fact, they were now putting so much pressure on city officials that even a police force still largely under Ring control had been forced to respond with aggressive enforcement efforts.
As a result, the vice underworld of the city was not so much collapsing as fragmenting, dispersing, going truly underground. Open brothels were now largely a thing of the past, replaced by discreet assignation houses, call girls with pimps, and temporary cribs that would have to close down the moment some meddling preacher got wind of their existence. Those who tried to operate in the old ways now paid a price, as some of the formerly prominent madams soon found out. Lulu White and Willie Piazza, for instance, were each arrested at least once in the immediate post-Storyville years, and Anderson’s consort, Gertrude Dix, even had to spend a short time in jail for trying to operate her brothel. Of course, vice was still alive in the city—as Mayor Behrman once famously remarked, “You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana, but you can’t make it unpopular”—but as a business proposition, it was becoming less and less tenable.
Meanwhile, Tom Anderson’s share of even this diminished market was shrinking. He had begun downsizing his vice holdings as early as 1907, when he sold his tony restaurant the Stag to Henry Ramos (already famous as the inventor of the Ramos Gin Fizz). In 1918, disgusted by his failure to save Storyville, he had divested himself of the district’s so-called city hall—the Annex on Basin Street, which he turned over to his longtime lieutenant, Billy Struve. Even his stately home on Canal Street was no longer his own; he’d given it to his daughter, Irene Delsa, so that she and her husband could raise his grandchildren in comfort (albeit with the agreement that Anderson could still use it for entertaining and political business). Now he lived modestly in an apartment on Rampart Street, a few doors down from his sole remaining vice headquarters, the Arlington, the establishment with which he had begun his empire in the 1890s. And even here he wasn’t left alone, with police pestering him continually for alleged violations of one law or another. Staying in business now required constant vigilance, not to mention an untold number of favors called in to make the violations disappear. For the former mayor of Storyville, the situation was downright humiliating.
But the city’s reformers were still far from satisfied. Their ultimate goal was to end the entire era of Ring rule—not just in New Orleans, but at the state level as well. And they knew that the way to do this was to focus their attacks on a symbol of Ring turpitude who could be used as an example to discredit the entire organization as the 1920 elections approached. That symbol, naturally enough, turned out to be Representative Thomas C. Anderson, now serving his fifth term in the state legislature. If they could accomplish the total demolition of Anderson, they reasoned, Martin Behrman and the entire Ring could be toppled—first in the state elections, which were to take place in early 1920, and then in the New Orleans municipal elections at the end of that year.
This new reform offensive began in late 1918. From pulpits and lecture halls around the city, orators tirelessly pounded away at Anderson and his Ring supporters. As they did before the closing of Storyville, Jean Gordon and William Railey of the Citizens League fulminated at length before large crowds, demanding that officials take Anderson to task for his flagrant disregard of the Gay-Shattuck Law. “Why was Anderson never prosecuted for repeated violations of this law?” Railey asked in an open letter to the Times-Picayune. “Was the district attorney ignorant of a fact that was well known all over town?… The police are not such boneheads as not to know where gambling and prostitution are being carried on when it is well known to the public. [But DA] Luzenberg doesn’t act; [Superintendent] Mooney doesn’t act; the police board doesn’t act and the mayor doesn’t act. What is the remedy for this carnival of gambling and law violation that is openly carried on in our city every day?”
The remedy, as Railey well knew, was the one law enforcement agency not subject to Ring manipulation—that is, the US Department of War. Although the Armistice had ended the active fighting in Europe, the world war would not officially be over until a formal peace treaty was signed, so the US government was still tasked with keeping the soldiers and sailors in New Orleans free of sin. Responding to the local reformers’ pressure, the feds launched their own investigation of Tom Anderson and the city’s other cabaret owners. In June of 1919, Harold Wilson, southern director of the War Department’s Commission on Training Activities, and William Edler, of the US Public Health Service, personally conducted inspections of the city’s cabarets. With his impeccable sources of information, Anderson knew all about this supposedly undercover operation, and kept an eye out for the two gentlemen in question. But he couldn’t be present at the Arlington every night. And—
more important—the prostitutes who frequented his establishment couldn’t always be relied upon to lie low when a federal agent walked into the place. Some of them, in fact, just couldn’t seem to comprehend that prostitution was no longer legal and that the good old days of open solicitation were long past.
It was on the evening of June 26, 1919, that Wilson and Edler finally appeared at the Arlington and were seated at a small table on the busy main floor. Tom Anderson, talking at the bar with an acquaintance, saw them arrive. “There he is now,” Anderson muttered to his companion. “I thought he’d be in here tonight.” Then he spoke to the manager. Before long, waiters were streaming through the room, whispering to the women seated at tables all around the floor. “Captain Wilson and Dr. Edler are up there,” the waiter told two women at one table (where, unbeknownst to them, they were flirting with one of Wilson’s undercover associates, Army sergeant Thomas Pierce). “Don’t move around, but keep quiet.”
A hush descended over the room, but not all of the women had gotten the message in time. One of them—“a little girl, dressed in black, with very large eyes”—walked over to the table where Wilson and Edler were sitting. “That little fool,” a woman at Pierce’s table whispered. “She’ll queer the whole thing.”
And queer it she did. The black-clad woman sat right down beside Wilson and proceeded to proposition him in terms that could not be misinterpreted. When Wilson demurred, she turned to Edler and asked whether he wanted to “have a good time.” That’s when the Arlington’s jazz band began playing. According to Edler’s later court testimony: “The girl began wriggling and shaking herself. She looked up in the air and rolled her eyes, and upon inquiry as to what this purported, she said she was ‘vamping.’ In the meantime, a woman sitting at the next table poked me in the back and winked her eyes.…”
It was, in other words, a disaster. For the next half hour, Wilson and Edler watched as numerous other women around the room, apparently unaware of the waiters’ warnings, went about their business as usual, propositioning men and then leaving for the upstairs hotel, with their quarry following close behind. Helpless to stop the spectacle, Tom Anderson could only grasp his gray head in despair.
And sure enough, within days of Wilson’s visit, the indictments started rolling in. “The Orleans Parish Grand Jury,” the Item reported on June 29, “shook the foundations of serenity on which the Tango Belt of New Orleans seems long to have rested by returning true bills indicting Tom Anderson, Louisiana state legislator.” Anderson, cited along with two other cabaret owners, may not have truly been shaken by this first indictment. After all, he had many friends on the bench of the Criminal District Court, and he was unconcerned enough to quickly pay his $250 bond in order to attend a prizefight on the evening he was arrested. But ten days later, when another indictment followed from the US District Court on a similar charge, he knew that the situation was serious. A federal court judge might not be so amenable to persuasion by Anderson’s Ring associates. And the $1,000 bond he had to pay to stay out of jail for this case seemed to promise an entirely different level of determination to see that justice was done.
On the morning of Monday, October 6, 1919—“Cabaret Day in the court,” as the Item dubbed it—Anderson’s case was brought before Judge Landry in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. Testifying that day, according to the paper, would be “many of the rollicking dancers who chased away the hours until dawn a couple of years ago at the Balls of the Two Well Known Gentlemen.” Tom Anderson would in fact have no fewer than seventy character witnesses pleading on behalf of his defense. That number included a judge, an assistant district attorney, a member of the school board, two bank presidents, and an assortment of businessmen, detectives, and police officers. Tom Anderson may have been in diminished circumstances by 1919, but he still had a lot of friends.
And true friends they proved to be. ANDERSON CAFÉ SPOTLESS, SAY BUSINESSMEN ran the headline in Tuesday’s Item. Dozens of prominent citizens had testified unanimously, under oath, that “Tom Anderson’s cabaret on North Rampart Street—the famous Arlington Cabaret in the heart of New Orleans’ Tango Belt—had never to their knowledge been aught but a respectable and high-class restaurant.” Not one of these witnesses, moreover, had ever been solicited by a woman in the place: “Did you ever see anything in the conduct of the women there that would cause you to believe them immoral?” the prosecutor asked Thomas J. Hill, former manager of the Tourist and Convention Bureau, who had claimed that he frequented the Arlington for years.
“Absolutely not!” Hill replied, with great earnestness (and to considerable laughter in the courtroom).
Against this wall of adamant denial, the prosecutor could present only two witnesses with a contrary story—Harold Wilson and William Edler. They testified quite vehemently that they had practically been accosted by eager prostitutes the moment they crossed the Arlington’s threshold. But Judge Landry, eager to be rid of a case that undoubtedly subjected him to intense pressure from all sides, had heard enough. Weighing the balance of the evidence given, he decided that the state had failed to make its case. “There is no evidence to show that Mr. Anderson … knew what was going on at that time [when Wilson and Edler were openly solicited], and none to show that there was any intention on his part to violate the act as charged.” The ruling? Case dismissed, and the defendant discharged.
“I will not discuss the case!” William Edler fumed as he left the courtroom. “I might be held for contempt of court if I said what I thought!”
The defendant himself seemed unsurprised by the dismissal. “I conducted a first-class saloon and high-class restaurant,” he told reporters afterward, “which was patronized by some of the most prominent and influential business and professional men in New Orleans. Many of these men have brought their families to the restaurant. I have built up a reputation as a businessman in the community during the last 30 years and I would be the last man in the city to try and violate the law.”
Harold Wilson, of course, had his own thoughts on this last point, but he did see something positive in the outcome. The results of the trial, he insisted—including “the amazing spectacle of reputable citizens testifying to the good character of a place notorious even to the remotest hamlet in the United States”—would surely serve as a kind of “public irritant.” It would enrage the truly respectable people of the city and harden their resolve to complete the ongoing cleansing of New Orleans. “The best element of the citizenry of this town is thoroughly aroused,” he said. And he vowed that he would make every effort to ensure that Thomas Anderson would be tried again—this time in a federal court.
Tom Anderson’s lawyers, on the other hand, were soon making every effort to ensure the opposite. In a petition to the federal court, they argued that the six counts of the federal indictment were all matters of state law, and that the state court had cleared their client of all of them. Recent US court decisions, in any case, had held that the war was officially ended (the Treaty of Versailles having been signed on June 28); that meant that “the period of emergency [was] past, and legislation intended only for that period [was] no longer operative.” In other words, the federal prohibition against prostitution, as an emergency wartime measure, was defunct now that the war was over. The charges against Tom Anderson—even if they could be proved—would thus no longer be violations of US law, and would not be within the purview of a federal court.
The logic behind this argument, if somewhat convoluted, was not entirely specious, and there were rumors circulating in mid-October that the federal government might indeed drop the case. But those rumors just sent local reformers into even greater paroxysms of fury. An appeal sent out by Rev. U. G. Foote, chairman of the New Orleans Ministerial Union, urged local clergymen to speak out from their pulpits and give voice to “the indignation of the best elements.” And the preachers responded, even going so far as to threaten the US prosecutor with removal from office.
But while the city’s clergymen fo
cused their ire on the former mayor of Storyville himself, their more politically minded brethren were after bigger game as well. Anderson may have won his first day in court, but the publicity generated by the trial provided excellent ammunition to be used against his political allies in the upcoming state elections. Specifically, the Ring-backed candidate for governor, Col. Frank P. Stubbs, was soon being tarred with the Tom Anderson brush in election rallies all over the state, with opponents warning that his election would bring about a “thoroughly Tomandersonized” atmosphere at both the state and city level of government. Soon the reform candidate himself began picking up the anti-Anderson rhetoric. “In this state,” John M. Parker intoned at a campaign rally shortly thereafter, “there are two kinds of democracy: the Thomas Anderson Democracy and the Thomas Jefferson Democracy.… The Thomas Jefferson Democracy is government of the people and for the people. The Thomas Anderson Democracy is government of the people, by the bosses for private gain. I admit that I have never been a Thomas Anderson Democrat.… I have always fought this system, and hope, with your help, to destroy it.”
Even an ambitious young railroad commissioner named Huey P. Long (who would eventually become the nemesis of both Parker and the New Orleans Ring) took up the cry against Anderson and the machine he represented. “This New Orleans Ring sends to the legislature the men who run the red-light district, and these men make the laws under which the ministers and the boys and girls throughout the state must live,” he wrote in a statement published in the newspapers. “Surely the country should make it possible for the citizens of New Orleans to free themselves from this octopus.”
