Mafia dealt with defaulters. A number of Italians asked for police protection.
Organized crime had long been a force in New Orleans. In 1890, Police Chief David Hennessy had arrested a Mafia leader and his henchmen, and threatened to expose other Mafiosi in the forthcoming trial. But jury members were bribed and threatened, and the Mafiosi walked free. Finally, when Chief Hennessy was gunned down by Mafia assassins, the citizens of New Orleans became incensed. A mob marched on the prison and lynched 11 mobsters, as a warning to others. After that organized crime went underground.
However, in 1911, a gang known as “The Black Hand” was thought to have been responsible for axe murders. This was a spin-off from Midwestern mob whose activities there had been curtailed by a series of trials in 1907. It got its name from the black-hand symbol that appeared on notes threatening those who did not comply with its demands. Italians were expected to hand over a proportion of their wages to the mobsters. If they did not, they risked harassment, injury and even death. Since the 1911 killings, there was thought to have been a resurgence of organized crime in New Orleans. There were even rumour that the Black Hand had set up a crime school where they taught potential mobsters the finer points of intimidation and murder.
New Orleans had only just recovered from the shock of the Maggios’ murders when, two weeks later, the axeman struck again. On the morning of 6 June, John Zanca was delivering bread to a grocer named Louis Besumer. When he reached Besumer’s store on La Harpe and Dorgenois, he found it still closed. This was peculiar as 59- year-old Besumer usually opened early and was waiting for his bread.
Zanca went around to the side door and knocked. He heard movement inside and Besumer opened the door. His face was covered in blood. Besumer said he had been attacked and pointed with a quivering hand toward the bedroom. When Zanca went to look, he found Anna Harriet Low lying on the bed under a blood-soaked sheet. She had a terrible head wound and was barely alive. Bloody prints of bare feet led from the bed to a piece of wig—as a Jewish woman, Anna would have kept her real hair covered.
Zanca wanted to call the police, but Besumer tried to stop him. Instead he said he would call a private physician. But Zanca took charge and called the police and an ambulance.
Again the attacker had got in by prying out a panel of the back door with a wood chisel. The murder weapon was a rusty hatchet that belonged to Besumer. Again it was found in the bathroom. However, Besumer was not Italian, but Polish, and he had lived in New Orleans for just three months. Despite the fact that he survived the attack and was conscious and alive, Besumer was unable to give a description of the attack or a coherent account of the attack.
Anna Lowe died of her injuries some time later in Charity Hospital. But before she died, Anna said that she had been attacked by a “mulatto”. A black man who Besumer’s had employed the previous week was immediately arrested. Although the story he told was inconsistent, he was released when Anna changed her story. She then accused Besumer of attacking her with an axe and of being part of a German conspiracy. He was, she said, a spy. At the time, with a war on, this accusation was explosive. The newspapers ran stories saying that Besumer’s grocery store was merely a front for espionage. In his home, there were trunks filled with secret papers, they said, written in German, Russian and Yiddish. The Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. sent agents to investigate, but the allegations were found to be without foundation. Stories also circulated that drugs had been found in Besumer’s store. A neighbour said that he and the woman they took to be his wife were opium addicts.
After Besumer left the hospital, he admitted that Anna was not his wife. He then made a peculiar request. He asked to be allowed to investigate his own case. But Besumer was a grocer, not a police officer. Clearly, he had something to hide. The police began to believe that the couple’s injuries were the result of a private domestic quarrel that had turned violent and bloody. This theory was supported by the bloody footprints on the floor—both Lowe and Besumer said that they had walked across the floor after the “attack”. When the police were called, they had simply concocted the story of an attack to cover their tracks. At first, Lowe had colluded as she was just as culpable as Besumer, but when it became clear that she was going to die, she sought to damage Besumer as much as possible by accusing him of being a spy.
There were some extraordinary holes in the investigation. Although fingerprinting had been used in criminal investigations since 1901, no one dusted in the Maggio or Besumer homes for prints. That, as least, would have indicated if someone else had been present. Nevertheless, Besumer was arrested and charged with murder, though he was clearly not responsible for the attack on the Maggios, or the murders in 1911. But whoever had killed the Maggios was still very much in business, as he demonstrated two months later.
On 5 August, a businessman named Edward Schneider worked late at his office. When he returned home, he expected his wife, who was eight months pregnant, to meet him at the front door. She was not there. When he opened the door, the house was quiet. He called out to his wife, but there was no reply. He began to search the house. In the bedroom, he found his wife, lying on the bed covered in blood. She had a gaping head wound and some of her teeth had been knocked out, but she was alive. Schneider called an ambulance and the police.
Rushed to Charity Hospital, Mrs Schneider lay in critical condition for a few days. But then, slowly, she returned to consciousness. However, she could not give a description of her attacker. When the attack took place, she had been taking a nap, she said. She awoke to see a dark figure standing over her. Then the axe came down repeatedly. That was all she remembered. Happily, the attack did not affect her pregnancy. Three weeks later she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Meanwhile a newspaper ran headline: “IS AN AXEMAN AT LARGE IN NEW ORLEANS?” They soon got an answer.
Just five days after the Schneider attack, the axeman struck again. On 10 August, Pauline and Mary Bruno were awoken early in the morning by the sound of loud thumps that seemed to be coming from the room of their elderly uncle Joseph Romano. Pauline sat up and saw the tall, dark figure standing right over her bed. She screamed. The man fled. The girls found their uncle with gashes to his head and face, his nightshirt soaked with blood. His room had been ransacked
“I don’t know who did it,” he said and told Pauline to call Charity Hospital, before lapsing into unconsciousness. He died in hospital soon after.
Detectives discovered that the door panel had been chiselled out and an axe was left in the yard. Romano was Italian, but he was a barber not a grocer. The best description his nieces could give was that the attacker was “dark, tall, heavy-set, wearing a dark suit and a black slouch hat”. And he was extremely agile. Pauline said later said that he flew as if he had wings.
“He was awfully light on his feet,” she told a journalist.
Panic spread. No one could sleep easy in their bed as that was the very place that the axeman might attack them. With the populace sleepless and alert, there were sightings all over the city. Stories of chisels and axes abounded, and some people claimed they had scared an intruder away. A grocer found a wood chisel on the ground outside his back door. Another said he had found an axe lying in his yard and a panel gouged out of his door. A third, hearing scraping sounds, shot through the door. When police arrived, they found signs of someone chiselling at the wood. There was even a story that “the Axeman” had been seen, strolling around dressed as a woman.
The police were stumped. The attacker left no clues and the victims seemed to have been picked at random. Some were grocers; others were not. All any witness could remember was that he had an almost supernatural ability to get in and out of their homes. No survivor had even seen him well enough to recall a single clear detail and it was not possible to go and arrest a “dark, looming figure”. The police did not know whether the attacks were the work of a Mafia assassin, a single madman or a bunch of different people. This was of little help to the newspapers. They fell back on Joseph Dantonio, the retired detective who had investigated the axe murders in 1911. He said: “Students of crime have established that a criminal of the dual personality type may be a respectable, law-abiding citizen. Then suddenly the impulse to kill comes upon him and he must obey it.”
This idea had come from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel
Dantonio believed that the perpetrator of the 1918 attacks was the same man that he had been pursuing seven years before. In the meantime, he thought the man had lived quite respectably before he had suddenly suffered the impulse to kill again. Dantonio speculated that the culprit could live and work alongside his victims and still remain practically invisible.
For seven months, the killer lay low. World War I ended and people got on with their lives. Then he struck again; this time it was across the river in the immigrant suburb of Gretna. On the night of 10 March 1919, screams were heard emanating from the Cortimiglia residence behind their grocery store on the corner of Second Street and Jefferson. A neighbour named Iorlando Jordano went to investigate and found the badly wounded Rosie Cortimiglia
