Vendetta In New Orleans (June 1973 | Volume: 24, Issue: 4)

Vendetta In New Orleans

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Authors: Joseph E. Persico

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June 1973 | Volume 24, Issue 4

The lamplight filtering through the haze and drizzle gave the streets of New Orleans an eerie pallor that October night in 1890. It was nearing midnight when Dave Hennessy, the city’s thirty-two-year-old police chief, left his office and headed home, escorted by an old friend, Captain William O’Connor. There had been threats on Hennessy’s life, but the popular and respected chief took them lightly. When the two men reached Girod Street, where Hennessy lived, the chief told O’Connor it was not necessary to accompany him any farther. The two men bade each other good night, and Hennessy headed up the damp and deserted street alone.

He had almost reached home when the silence of the night was shattered by the roar of gunfire. The shots came from a shanty on the other side of the street where a recently arrived immigrant Sicilian shoemaker was living. Hennessy was hit, but he managed to draw his service revolver and get off three or four shots as his attackers fled.

Captain O’Connor heard the gunfire, rushed to the scene, and found Hennessy on Basin Street, where he had collapsed after gamely pursuing his assailants. “Who gave it to you, Dave?” O’Connor asked. “The Dagoes did it,” Hennessy murmured.

Within hours the police found five weapons abandoned in the gutters a block or two from the scene of the crime. One was an ordinary double-barreled shotgun. The others were curious pieces—shotguns with the barrels sawed off and the stocks hinged so that the guns could be collapsed to the size of a horse pistol and easily concealed.

These weapons had done their work well. Three large slugs had torn vicious wounds in the chief. His face, neck, arms, and legs were riddled with shot. Hennessy lingered through the night in Charity Hospital but died the following morning.

Hennessy’s body was taken back to the house on Girod Street where the bachelor chief had lived with his elderly mother, and later to City Hall, where it lay in state. The thousands that came to mourn him rivalled the crowds that had appeared there some months before to view the body of ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The chief’s brutal murder was on everybody’s lips. Feeling against New Orleans’ Italian community ran at fever pitch. One grief-stricken mourner, a news-carrier friend of the chief, went directly from the funeral to the Parish Prison, where he asked to see one of the arrested suspects, Antonio Scaffidi, and shot and wounded him in the neck.

The shots that killed David Hennessy in October were the belated echo of a salvo of gunfire that had split the New Orleans night five months before.

The right to unload fruit vessels landing in New Orleans had been fiercely contested by two gangs of Italian stevedores, the Provenzanos and the Matrangas, so called after their rival bosses. Initially, the Provenzanos had controlled the business. But Charles Matranga, the operator of a gambling