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Orleans,” indicted precisely no one, calling the incident “a spontaneous uprising of the people.” Those people themselves, however, were in no doubt as to who their leaders were. Parkerson, universally identified as the head of the lynch mob,became something of a national celebrity, and was soon being invited to give speeches in places as distant as Boston and Bloomington, Indiana. Over the next few years, he would receive threatening letters, many of them in Italian, and his home in New Orleans would twice suffer minor damage by arsonists’ fires. But neither he nor any of the others would ever suffer serious consequences—legal or otherwise—for their actions.
    For “respectable” New Orleans, then, the lynching was a triumph. Though opinion throughout the rest of the country was deeply divided, many prominent figures came out in favor of the action. Even a young Theodore Roosevelt, then a Civil Service commissioner in Washington, DC, approved of it; the future president called the lynching “a rather good thing,” and said so at a party attended by what he described as “various Dago diplomats.” Those diplomats, of course—as well as their fellow Italians both here and in Europe—had a very different perspective. In fact, the incident—regarded as the largest mass lynching in American history—caused something of a political crisis between Italy and the United States, at one point bringing the two countries dangerously close to a declaration of war. But eventually, with the payment of a $25,000 indemnity divided among the victims’ families, the crisis passed. In the minds of many “law-abiding citizens,” both in New Orleans and in the rest of the country, Parkerson and his band had accomplished an important and worthy goal: they had taught the Crescent City’s lawless Italians the harsh lesson that the city council had called for back in October.
    Mayor Shakspeare could not have been more pleased at the outcome. After receiving laudatory letters from all over the country (one of them praising “the able manner in which ‘you stayed at home and attended to your own private business’ ” while the prison was under siege), he was inclined to thank his friend and former campaign manager for a much-needed cleansing of the Italian community. Asked by a newspaper reporter about the position of the Mafia in New Orleans after the lynching, the mayor was upbeat. “They are quiet, quieter than they have been for years,” he said. “The lesson taught them at the parish prison has had a most excellent effect and I do not anticipate we will have any more trouble with them. You may announce that the reign of the Mafia in New Orleans is over.”
    That utterance, of course, would eventually prove to be far too optimistic. But for the time being,the city’s Italian underworld—“Mafia” or not—was subdued. The Italian colony would in fact remain relatively quiet through the rest of the 1890s.
    But the reformers’ efforts to clean up the city would not end with the killings at the Orleans Parish Prison. There were still other lessons to be taught, other threats to be neutralized. The war for control of New Orleans had actually just begun.





 
    TOM ANDERSON WAS A MAN ON THE RISE. IN MID-1890S New Orleans, this was already a well-known fact. Now in his thirties—dapper and always well groomed with his pomaded reddish-brown hair and carefully waxed mustache—the young Scots-Irishman had already established himself as a shrewd businessman witha hand in many different ventures around town. In the few short years since his friend David Hennessy’s unfortunate death, Tom had come far—making a name in sporting circles as a boxing manager, a horseracing entrepreneur, and a saloon- and restaurant-owner with an unstinting sense of hospitality. He’d also had success in more “legitimate” endeavors, as proprietor of a small but growing oil business—the Record Oil Company (the “Only Independent Oil