Read Online Empire of Sin by Gary Krist - Free Book Online

back on its hinges.
    The armed vigilantes now fanned out through the enormous building as other inmates of the prison—among them Phillip Lobrano, still incarcerated while awaiting trial for the murder of Peter Deubler—looked on. According to some reports, Parkerson had beforehand made up a list of the prisoners to be executed and those to be spared. The boy Asperi Marchesi, for one, was to be left alone, presumably because of his age; so, too, were the two defendants given a directed not-guilty verdict by the judge. But the others were to be captured and marched outside, there to be judged and executed with great solemnity.“The intention had been not to shoot any of them,” Parkerson would later tell an interviewer. But that’s not how it happened. “When my men were inside—there were about fifty of them—they got very furious, and after the first taste of blood, it was impossible to keep them back.”
    Several of the executioners ran into the now-deserted prison yard. One of them saw a face at a window on the second floor. “There’s Scaffidi!” he yelled, identifying one of the defendants, and he raised his revolver and fired. This was all the encouragement the others needed. Breaking discipline, they also fired at the window, shredding its whitewashed frame and sending down a shower of white dust and shards of wood. Warden Davis rushed into the yard, urging calm and restraint, but the men merely pushed past him toward the stairway to the second floor.
    Now the killing began in earnest. Egged on by the crowds outside, which began cheering and screaming at the first sound of gunfire, the executioners set off after their quarry.Macheca was the first to be found. Spotted from below, he and two others were in a third-floor gallery, where they had run—against the warden’s advice—to find a route out of the prison. Macheca was trying key after key to open a locked door that would have led into the Fourth Precinct police station. As his pursuers rushed up the stairs, he gave up on the keys and began hammering the padlock with an Indian club. But the lock would not give. Macheca spun around as the gate from the stairs to the gallery burst open—and was immediately shot in the face. The two men with him were also killed, one shot long-range from the floor below. The other—the father of Asperi Marchesi—had been thrown back against a wall when the gate flew open. As he stood there, dazed by the blow to his head, two men with shotguns approached and triumphantly discharged them into his chest.
    Others were being routed elsewhere in the prison. Seven of the Italians had fled as instructed to the women’s section of the prison, but they were soon found by one of the execution squads. Flushed from their hiding places, the prisoners huddled together at one corner of the women’s yard. They were begging for mercy, but the vigilantes had by this time lost all restraint. They lifted their weapons and fired indiscriminately into the gaggle of men. Five were killed instantly, and a sixth was shot again when he lifted a trembling arm from the pile of bodies.
    One of the prisoners in the pile, Antonio Bagnetto, was found still alive. He was unceremoniously dragged from the yard and carried out to the front of the prison. Emmanuele Polizzi, the supposed madman, had also been found alive and was likewise pulled outside. And there—amid cheers and shouts from the crowd—both men were strung up on ropes. Bagnetto was hanged from a tree just outside the prison, Polizzi from a lamppost at the corner of Tremé and St. Anne Streets. As the bodies of the two men dangled above, they were riddled with bullets before a crowd of thousands.
    When all was finished, Parkerson emerged from the parish prison to resounding cheers. He himself had not fired a single shot, but he took full responsibility for the results. “Bagnetto, Scaffidi, Polizzi, Joe Macheca, Monastero, and Marchesi are dead,” he announced to the crowd from atop an