As it turned out, Italian immigrants in Louisiana were not content to confine themselves to the fields. If they weren’t exactly white yet, they definitely weren’t black, a reality that gave them freedom to move, to own property, to start and buy businesses that served white customers. According to historian John Baiamonte Jr., “by 1890 the Italians owned or controlled more than 3,000 wholesale and retail businesses in New Orleans,” and the city itself “relied upon the Sicilian-controlled market for a supply of fresh food.”

A labor feud between two Italian factions in the fruit trade would come to define the meaning of Hennessy’s death for New Orleans and the country at large for decades to come.

New Orleans in the 19th century was a violent place, from its culture of “chivalric honor” to the force required to maintain white supremacy, wrote historian Dennis Rousey. Even before the arrival of Italian immigrants, in the 1850s, New Orleans’ homicide rate was eight times greater than that of Philadelphia.

The Irish-American Hennessy was no stranger to that violence. His father, a Union Army veteran turned police officer, was shot dead in 1867 in a bar fight. Gen. Algernon Sidney Badger, the elder Hennessy’s former commander, took David Hennessy under his wing as he took charge of New Orleans’ integrated Reconstruction-era police force, the Metropolitan Police, and made Hennessy a messenger boy. Newspapers later described the young Hennessy as having a “particular aptitude for detective service,” even as a youth.

In 1874, 5,000 members of the white supremacist White League rose in open revolt against the state’s Republican government, successfully engaging the integrated Metropolitan Police in a bloody battle in which more than 60 were killed and temporarily driving the police from the city until federal troops arrived to restore order. Hennessy became a detective in the new force, whose organization was overseen by Gov. Francis Nicholls, a former Confederate general and Democrat supported by the White League.

David and his cousin Michael Hennessy became national heroes in 1881 after helping capture an Italian murderer named Giuseppe Esposito in New Orleans, who had been living in the US under a fake name. Esposito was returned to the custody of the Italian government and tried for murder, but his fate is unclear. Gambino writes that he spent life in prison; an 1892 New York Times obituary states he was executed by beheading.

Being a hero cop didn’t spare Hennessy from the same sort of bloody feuds that took his father from him. Michael and David Hennessy were later acquitted of murder after a fatal 1882 shoot-out with a rival cop. Michael later moved to Houston, where he was shot in the back four times by an unknown assassin in 1886.

David Hennessy resigned from the police department soon after and became a private detective, then was chosen by Mayor Shakspeare to be chief of police in 1888. Though portrayed in the press as a highly religious, straitlaced teetotaler, according to Baiamonte, Hennessy was invested in, and helped provide protection for, brothels in New Orleans’ red-light district, along with Joseph and Peter Provenzano, Italian immigrant businessmen involved in fruit shipping.

In 1886, the Provenzanos lost their contract with Italian-American fruit importer Joseph Macheca for unloading shipments on the docks to a rival Italian firm run by Tony and Charles Matranga. In 1890, a group of Matranga stevedores, including Tony, were ambushed by a group of men with guns. The Provenzanos were prosecuted, but the verdict of guilty was overturned by the judge, who ordered a new trial. Newspapers speculated that the Matrangas killed Hennessy because they blamed him for the Provenzanos’ acquittal, surmising that he had uncovered evidence that would also implicate the Matrangas.

The Matrangas and Provenzanos publicly accused one another of being mafiosi, which provided fodder for press reports concluding that New Orleans was subject to a reign of terror by the mafia. Although the Provenzanos and Matrangas were Italian and involved in a violent feud with one another, historians have noted that it was extremely un-mafia-like for them to violate the code of silence not only by speaking openly about the mafia, but also by seeking to prosecute one another in court.

Nevertheless, Mayor Shakspeare’s public declaration, echoed by the press, that the murder had been an act of “Sicilian vengeance” further fueled the notion that secret societies of Italian murderers had taken control of the city. Macheca had led a group of Italian volunteers known as the Innocenti in violently assaulting black voters in the New Orleans race riot in 1868, and fought alongside the White League in 1874. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a suspect in Hennessy’s murder.



Shortly after Hennessy’s death, Shakspeare appointed a committee of “50 leading citizens” to lead an inquiry into the activities of the mafia in New Orleans. The liaison between the committee and the council was William Parkerson, who, according to Baiamonte, was Shakspeare’s former campaign manager. Belmonte, citing historian John Kendall, describes the Committee of 50 as a “continuation” of the now-defunct White League. Their mandate was, in the words of one council member, to “thoroughly investigate the matter of the existence of secret societies or bands of oath-bound assassins” and to “devise necessary means and the most effectual and speedy measures for the uprooting and total annihilation of such hell-born association.” On October 23, the committee issued an open letter encouraging Italians to come forth with information on crimes involving Italians, warning, “We intend to put an end, peaceably and lawfully if we can, violently and summarily if we must. Upon you and your willingness to give information depends which of these courses will be pursued.”