New Orleans Axeman Devoured on Italian Immigrants

Fear crippled New Orleans by August 1918. In the middle of the night, the Axeman of New Orleans attacked Italian grocery store owners and their families. He injured several and killed four. The assaults were brutal. Joseph Maggio broke his head with an axe and sliced his neck with a razor. When his wife Catherine had her neck slit, she asphyxiated on her own blood.

The Axeman was also suspected of other deadly assaults on non-Italians. New Orleans residents were frightened. Italian immigrants were particularly terrified, with panicked men staying up all night to protect their families, media said. New Orleans Police Superintendent Frank Mooney believed the killer was a "murderous degenerate fond of blood."

The Axeman hit New Orleans homes from 1917 until March 1919. The murderer then crossed the Mississippi River to Gretna. His usual attack on Charlie Cortimiglia on March 9 severely injured Charlie and his wife, Rosie, and killed their two-year-old daughter.

Mooney blamed their “degenerate.” However, Gretna Police Chief Peter Leson and Sheriff Louis Marrero identified the Cortimiglias' next-door neighbors, elderly Iorlando Jordano and his 17-year-old son Frank, as the perpetrators. They were grocers who had sued the Cortimiglias over a commercial disagreement.

A problem was that no evidence accused Jordanos. The authorities harassed the wounded Cortimiglias at Charity Hospital, demanding, “Who hit you?” Was it Jordanos? Frank did it, right? Rosie constantly denied knowing who assaulted her, according to her doctor. Marrero quickly detained Rosie as a material witness and imprisoned her in Gretna once she recovered. Her freedom was contingent on signing an affidavit incriminating her neighbors.

Iorlando and Frank were tried for their life on Rosie's identification, which even her doctor doubted. In less than a week, they were both convicted of murder. Iorlando, 69, was given life in jail; Frank was hanged.

Nine months later, Rosie came into the Times-Picayune and recanted. She stated St. Joseph urged her to reveal the truth in a dream. Rosie filed another declaration, claiming she hadn't seen her assailants and was persuaded to name the Jordanos.

Despite Rosie's recantation, the prosecution persisted. Rosie was threatened with perjury if she changed her tale. However, Iorlando and Frank were released in December 1920.

Why did Gretna officials think neighbors, against whom there was no proof, were the killers? Why did they disregard the New Orleans police chief's warning that a violent devil was targeting Italian grocers?

Italians were in the Crescent City before the Civil War, and an Italian commercial community existed. The late-19th century need for a cheap workforce drove a large influx of Sicilians into the state and city, including Iorlando Jordano (Americanized from Guargliardo), who came from Sicily to Louisiana.

Post-emancipation Louisiana sugar planters appreciated Sicilian workers, who were described as hard-working, money-saving, and satisfied with limited amenities. Sicilians dominated Italian immigration into Louisiana in the 1880s and 1890s, arriving in New Orleans at over 80%. Some remained. New Orleans had the biggest Italian population in the South by 1900, with 20,000 residents (including children of immigrants).

Most departed to work on sugar cane and cotton plantations, a hard existence that allowed them to save money. An immigrant who saved his income may start his own business in a few years. The planters' only issue with Italian labor was this. In two years, Italians would have “laid by a little money and are ready to start a fruit shop or grocery store at some cross-roads town,” planters complained. Small Italian-owned enterprises popped up over Louisiana by 1900.

Sicilian immigrants' business success couldn't shelter them from Southern racism. In Louisiana, Italians worked alongside black laborers in the fields. Italians, unaware of Southern racial hierarchy, accepted this, while local whites saw it as no different from “Negroes,” Chinese, or other “non-white” groups. Many called the dark Sicilians “black dagoes.” Contemporary observers noticed that even African-American laborers distinguished between whites and Italians and treated their coworkers with “a sometimes contemptuous, sometimes friendly, first-name familiarity” they would never have employed with other whites.

The 1870s and 1880s prejudice against Italian immigrants was fueled by the belief that “dagoes” were no better than “Negroes”. Lynch mobs and distrust plagued them. A 1929 New Orleans judge described most Sicilians as “of a thoroughly undesirable character, being largely composed of the most vicious, ignorant, degraded and filthy paupers, with something more than an admixture of the criminal element.”

The French Quarter, New Orleans' oldest area with dilapidated Creole homes, became Italian. In the early 20th century, so many Sicilians lived in the lower French Quarter along the river that Jackson Square to Esplanade Avenue, between Decatur and Chartres, was called “Little Palermo.”

In New Orleans and elsewhere, enterprising Sicilians often worked their way up from plantation laborer to truck farmer, peddler, and grocer.

Italians took over corner groceries by the early 20th century. They owned just 7% of New Orleans food establishments in 1880. By 1920, Italians controlled half of the city's supermarkets, up from 19% in 1900.

Joseph Vaccaro sold fruit from a mule-drawn cart in New Orleans after working on sugar cane farms. He started his wholesale company with a fruit booth in the New Orleans French Market and earned millions importing oranges and bananas. Before launching Progresso Food Products, Giuseppe Uddo sold olive oil and cheese from a horse-drawn cart.

Despite triumphs, Italian immigrants were stereotyped, some of which were true. Sicilians brought clannishness and mistrust of government to America, thus they settled disagreements via vendettas. This court system continued in Sicily until the 20th century; immigrants transferred it to New Orleans, where personal and professional vendettas were rampant. So many gunshots and knife battles happened on Decatur Street, it was called “Vendetta Alley.”

Immigrant crime dread peaked in 1890-1891 with the assassination of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. The night of October 15, 1890, the popular official returned home to shotgun fire. Deathly wounded, Hennessy said, “The dagos got me.” He was engaged in a violent conflict between the Provenzanos and Matrangas.

The enmity and organized Italian criminal groups known as “the Mafia” were simple for New Orleanians to link to Hennessy's murder.

Two groups of Sicilians were detained by police for trial. A crowd stormed the prison and killed 11 defendants after first acquittals. They lynched acquitted and untried defendants.

Criminal Italian gangs were active in New Orleans, but crime historian Humbert S. Nelli says they “could not accurately be ascribed to Mafiosi.” According to historian Robert M. Lombardo, “the Mafia was not a secret criminal organization but a form of social organization that developed in Sicily and the south of Italy under very specific circumstances.” He says it was “a form of behavior and a kind of power, not a formal organization.”

However, Black Hand crime—a practice, not an organization—threatened victims with violence if they didn't pay. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw such crime in southern Italian communities across the U.S., including New Orleans. It only stopped when immigrants' descendants became Americanized enough to complain to the police.

The vendetta, the Mafia, and the Black Hand were often confused by New Orleans residents in the early 20th century, who used both terms to refer to a formal criminal organization. Considering this history, New Orleanians suspected the attacks on Italian grocers were related to a vendetta or Black Hand blackmail.

New Orleans investigator John Dantonio, a nationally recognized "Mafia" specialist, disputed the concept, stating a Black Hand assault wouldn't have left survivors like the Axeman did. Like New Orleans police superintendent Frank Mooney, he believed the assaults were committed by a "fiend," a Jekyll and Hyde personality like Jack the Ripper. He suddenly feels compelled to murder and must comply. Basically, a serial murderer.

Mooney and Dantonio disagreed, but Gretna officials were more likely to accept a grudge between two Italian companies than a frenzied “fiend” stalking the streets when the Axeman assaulted the Cortimiglias. Even some New Orleans police believed the vendetta could explain the Axeman murders.

Gretna authorities were also familiar enough with Sicilian immigrants' Old World practices to fabricate evidence against their “obvious” suspects. This misuse of authority is unjustified. They are not responsible for their ignorance about serial murderers, a new notion. And believing an Italian revenge wasn’t altogether unreasonable at an era when conflicts among Italian immigrants not occasionally ended in violence or murder.

A detailed review of the attacks ascribed to the Axeman demonstrates that not all of these assaults were indeed his workmanship. But someone was specifically targeting Italian grocers, both in 1917-1919, and in 1910-1911 when a similar spate of attacks occurred. According to eyewitness accounts of survivors, the Axeman was a white working-class male in his 30s when the attacks began. From the ease with which he broke into the groceries and his use of a railroad shoe pin, a common burglary tool, the police concluded that he was an experienced burglar.

The Axeman vanished from New Orleans after the attack on the Cortimiglias. (The murder of Mike Pepitone in August 1919, while sometimes attributed to the Axeman, actually appears to have been part of a longstanding vendetta.) He killed Joseph Spero and his daughter in Alexandria in December 1920, Giovanni Orlando in DeRidder in January 1921, and Frank Scalisi in Lake Charles in April 1921, according to police and press reporting. The murderer broke into an Italian shop at night and attacked the merchant and his family with their own axe. The Axeman vanished.

Neither did New Orleans Italians. Their success continued. As supermarkets expanded, corner stores faded, but they, like many immigrants before them, integrated into American culture while retaining their ethnicity.

Reference

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/axeman-new-orleans-preyed-italian-immigrants-180968037/