The New Orleans "Mafia" Trial: 1891 - The First, The Best, And Even The Most Law-abiding

The March 13 verdicts shocked the city. Monasterio, Bagnetto, and Scaffidi got mistrials on the murder charge. The other six defendants were acquitted. All nine were returned to the Orleans Parish prison, expecting the redundant "lying in wait" charge to be dismissed the next day. On the morning of March 14, however, an armed committee headed by two politically prominent New Orleans attorneys and a newspaper editor led a mob of over 6,000 people to the prison and smashed their way in. Macheca, Scaffidi, Monasterio, and Antonio Marchesi were shot to death. So were Geraci, Romero, Traina, Comitz, and James Caruso, none of whom had been tried. Polizzi was dragged out to the street, where a crowd hung him from a lamp post and emptied pistols into him. Bagnetto's broken body was strung up from a tree.

The surviving defendants were soon released by District Attorney Luzenberg, who denied the existence of Polizzi's "confession." A Grand Jury cleared the lynch mob's leaders, saying that "the first, the best and even the most law-abiding" citizens of New Orleans were driven to act because justice had been subverted by jury bribers, a jab at Adams & Henriques' slippery detective associate, Dominick O'Malley.

The Hennessy case jurors denied being bribed. The acquittals, they said, resulted from impatience in the jury room, the absence of Billy O'Connor and Officer Roe, and other holes in the state's case. Two men later got short prison terms for making suggestive comments to potential jurors, but no link between the defense and the chosen jury was unearthed.

Several of the lynched men were Italian subjects. A war scare swept America as the enraged Italian government broke off diplomatic relations. Two years later, the U.S. government paid Italy a $25,000 indemnity, and diplomacy was restored. Yet a national pattern of indiscriminately blaming violent crime in Italian-American communities on a single entity known as the Mafia had been set, helping to fuel anti-immigration sentiment. The anti-Italian insult "Who killa d' Chief?" lived on in New Orleans for decades. To this day, no one has proven who killed Chief David Hennessy.