Book summary “Empire of sin”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where municipal order feels permanent, but every modern city rests upon a chaotic foundation of violence, corruption, and moral warfare. You often look at urban centers as triumphs of clean government without realizing the brutal evolutionary struggles required to tame them.

New Orleans transformed from a lawless, multi-ethnic port into a modern American city through a brutal, century-long battle between entrenched vice and Victorian reform.

Gary Krist examines how a unique Franco-Latin culture clashed with Anglo-Saxon notions of progress. You will see how corruption, racial terror, and commercialized sin built the infrastructure of a major metropolis.

• How did a chaotic port city invent legal red-light districts and institutionalize organized crime?
• What drove the violent racial conflicts that shaped the urban landscape?
• How did the suppression of vice inadvertently spark the birth of jazz and scatter its creators across America?

1. The Battle for Respectability

Native-born elites launched a concerted crusade to overhaul primitive infrastructure, suppress vice, and break the power of entrenched political machines in a city burdened by a foreign Franco-Latin character.

You encounter a late-nineteenth-century New Orleans defined by a fluid, cosmopolitan environment. Aliases of convenience and shifting identities remained commonplace.

Phillip Lobrano lived openly as the business partner and lover of madam Josie Lobrano while she legally remained Miss Mary Deubler.

Cultural Context and Infrastructure Backwardness

New Orleans possessed a distinct Franco-Latin character and cultural multiplicity. This mix made the port appear foreign and alarming to mainstream American Protestant norms. Successive immigration waves and Catholic traditions created an urban culture vastly different from other major cities.

Decades of economic stagnation left the city severely lagging in basic infrastructure.

• New Orleans relied on mule-drawn streetcars instead of electrified transit;
• The city depended on gas lamps for illumination;
• Open gutter drainage replaced modern sanitation systems;
• National city size ranking dropped to ninth place by the late nineteenth century.

Lawyer William S. Parkerson formed the Young Men's Democratic Association in 1888 to combat moral decay and municipal corruption. Reformers ran a reform slate led by mayoral candidate Joseph A. Shakspeare.

The Murder of David Hennessy

Police corruption and an escalating feud between rival Italian dockworker factions culminated in violence. Chief David C. Hennessy cracked down on police extortion and investigated a war between the Provenzano and Matranga families.

On the rainy night of October 15, 1890, Hennessy was ambushed near 269 Girod Street.

After parting from his bodyguard William O'Connor, multiple masked gunmen using sawed-off shotguns fatally wounded the thirty-two-year-old officer. Hennessy whispered a final ethnic slur before losing consciousness.

2. The Parish Prison Lynching

The assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy triggered mass arrests, a controversial trial ending in acquittals, and the largest mass lynching in American history.

The Committee of Fifty and Mass Arrests

Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare and local aldermen orchestrated a class-based crusade. They created an 83-member Committee of Fifty led by Young Men's Democratic Association figures.

Mayor Shakspeare ordered police to scour the neighborhood and arrest every Italian across if necessary. Forty-two Italians were arrested immediately after the murder in broad, heavy-handed raids. The grand jury ultimately indicted nineteen men for conspiracy and direct involvement.

Only nine of the nineteen indicted defendants went to trial due to a severed prosecution. Over 1,300 potential jurors were examined to find twelve without a fixed opinion, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan attended the trial to show support. One hundred forty witnesses testified at trial before the jury deadlocked on three defendants and acquitted the remaining six.

Angered by the courtroom acquittals, a vigilance committee organized a massive public demonstration. Led by YMDA lawyer William S. Parkerson, the Regulators gathered at the Henry Clay statue to rally thousands of citizens.

Parkerson and his associates loaded a horse-drawn wagon with 150 Winchester rifles and shotguns, ammunition, and rope at a hardware store. Six thousand to eight thousand citizens thronged Canal Street for the mass meeting.

International and Political Aftermath

Led by Parkerson, the armed mob battered down a side door of the parish prison using railroad ties and cobblestones. Eleven men were killed in total at the parish prison, including three tried and acquitted men, three men whose jury had deadlocked, and five untried defendants.

Antonio Bagnetto and Emmanuele Polizzi were dragged outside and hanged from a tree and a lamppost, respectively, and riddled with bullets.

The Italian consul Pasquale Corte failed to secure protection for Italian nationals prior to the riot. The mass lynching brought the United States and Italy dangerously close to war.

The United States paid a $25,000 indemnity divided among the victims' families to resolve the political crisis with Italy. Locally, the business community and newspapers praised the mob's actions as a legitimate reclamation of popular sovereignty.

3. The Creation of Storyville

New Orleans was populated from its inception largely by marginal figures, convicts, and deportees, establishing an early reputation as a lawless den of iniquity. Founded under John Law's Company of the West in 1718, the colonial settlement lacked traditional civil order because French jails and hospitals were emptied to supply colonists. A chronic shortage of women was solved in part by importing female inmates from houses of correction.

Eighty-eight inmates from the Parisian house of correction known as La Salpêtrière were imported to New Orleans to serve as prospective wives for the colonists. Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 for 15 million dollars.

Municipal leaders established a legally tolerated vice district to isolate prostitution and protect respectable residential neighborhoods from contamination. Led by Mayor Walter C. Flower and Alderman Sidney Story, the city administration passed an ordinance making prostitution illegal everywhere except in a designated eighteen-block area downriver of Canal Street, hoping to regulate what could not be eliminated. Alderman Sidney Story drafted the ordinance after observing similar European models, officially bringing Storyville into existence on January 1, 1898, following the city council's vote on January 29, 1897.

A municipal tolerance zone required strict territorial containment to preserve public order elsewhere.

You can observe the administrative mechanics of this policy through specific legal requirements:

• Designate a specific, restricted geographical area where vice operations are tolerated.
• Prohibit prostitution in all other parts of the city by municipal ordinance.
• Issue eviction notices signed by the mayor to known prostitutes operating outside the restricted zone.

Tom Anderson and the Business of Vice

Tom Anderson built his early success on the streets through strategic networking, reciprocity, and providing useful services to both low-level criminals and local law enforcement. Growing up in the Irish Channel, Anderson understood that success required cultivating influential friends, making favors, and staying useful. He parlayed his early jobs and business ventures into political connections and salon ownership, creating a neutral ground for underworld figures and politicians to make deals.

As a boy selling newspapers, Anderson witnessed a petty theft and cooperated with a patrolman by pointing out the thief and testifying, earning a reputation as a reliable youth among the constabulary.

The Louisiana State Lottery Company donated 40,000 dollars annually to the Charity Hospital in exchange for its operating charter. Anderson and Frank Lamothe sponsored the Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen as a popular counterweight for the city's other half. Elite Carnival krewes like Comus and Momus organized exclusive events to enforce social hierarchy and exclude undesirables, while this alternative event featured a queen and court composed of prostitutes instead of virgins from prominent families.

Josie Arlington transformed her brothel into an elite establishment by emulating the luxury of high-end Gilded Age resort hotels. After visiting the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Josie adopted high-toned marketing strategies, changed her establishment's name to the Chateau Lobrano d'Arlington, and partnered with Tom Anderson to capture high-end clientele. Josie advertised a fictitious aristocrat named La Belle Stewart, claimed to be a baroness from the Court of St. Petersburg, to attract refined gentlemen.

The Rise of Jim Crow and Early Jazz

The end of Reconstruction brought a systematic rollback of civil rights and the imposition of rigid racial segregation in Louisiana. Following the Compromise of 1876 and the rise of white Redeemers, the state dismantled post-war equal rights provisions, banned interracial marriage and boxing, passed railroad segregation laws, and disenfranchised black voters through new state constitutions and the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.

Homer Plessy's arrest on June 7, 1892, was deliberately orchestrated by the Comité des Citoyens to challenge the constitutionality of Louisiana's Separate Car Act, which had been passed in 1890 as Act 111 to institute the state's first official Jim Crow law.

Jazz emerged in the mid-1890s out of working-class black New Orleans venues through self-taught musicians who improvised and ragged traditional tunes. Cornetist Buddy Bolden, born on September 6, 1877, pioneered a loud, bluesy, and improvisational style that broke away from schooled musical traditions. His band popularized the new sound among working-class audiences, drawing heavily on ragtime, church hymns, and street vendors' cries.

Buddy Bolden took cornet lessons from Manuel Hall starting around 1894 and rapidly gained fame for blowing his horn with immense volume and inserting unscripted rides into standard tunes.

4. Race Riots and Industrial Vice

The Robert Charles tragedy sparked devastating white mob violence against black citizens while entrepreneurs like Tom Anderson built Storyville into a rationalized, failure-proof economic powerhouse.

The Robert Charles Manhunt

The grievances of black sharecropper Robert Charles against systemic white supremacy culminated in a fatal shootout with police and triggered the largest manhunt in New Orleans history. You find yourself in 1900 during a tropical Monday evening in July when the initial incident occurred.

Robert Charles shot and killed police officers Captain Day, Sergeant Porteus, and Corporal Lally before being cornered at 1208 Saratoga Street and killed by a crowd and police officers. The 34-year-old fugitive hid out on Saratoga Street, manufacturing his own lead bullets and successfully defending himself against waves of armed citizens and police.

The manhunt for Robert Charles unleashed widespread white mob violence against innocent black residents of New Orleans and severely disrupted the city's nascent jazz scene. Frustrated by their inability to capture Charles immediately, roving white mobs beat and killed black citizens, attacked public transport, and raided the entertainment district.

During the riots, a mob attacked the Big 25 club on Franklin Street, forcing musicians like Buddy Bolden and 'Big Eye' Louis Nelson to flee through the back windows. Two thousand whites formed a mob in Lee Circle on Wednesday night. Three black individuals were brutally killed by the morning after the worst of the rioting, prompting the mayor to call 500 special volunteer police to quell the violence.

Entrepreneurs of the District

Tom Anderson established his monumental Annex as the dazzling commercial and geographical linchpin of the newly legalized vice district. Opened in 1901 at Basin and Customhouse Streets, the Annex featured modern electric lighting and massive bars, serving as a gatehouse where patrons could plan their evenings and consult comprehensive local directories.

Tom Anderson celebrated the opening of his Annex by selling over one hundred cases of champagne on opening night. One hundred electric lights were suspended from the ceiling of Anderson's Annex within the 18-block district.

Storyville operated as a highly rationalized, failure-proof economic ecosystem that generated massive profits through the containment of the city's vice industry.

The district was spatially organized by market tier and class, allowing small business owners, madams, and entrepreneurs to capitalize on unlimited demand while paying off minor law enforcement fees. Entrepreneurs like Tom Anderson and Josie Arlington built opulent palaces of vice that generated substantial weekly profits from room rentals, liquor sales, and gambling percentages.

When Anderson's Annex opened, an estimated 1,500 prostitutes operated in the District, with 500 more imported seasonally for high winter tourist traffic. Despite the hardening Jim Crow segregation outside its borders, early Storyville functioned as a uniquely integrated marketplace specializing in interracial sexual commerce.

High-end establishments on Basin Street catered to white male clients seeking relationships with mixed-race women, run by powerful madams who cultivated extravagant, luxury-laden personas. Lulu White operated Mahogany Hall on Basin Street, featuring an elevator for two, expensive furnishings, and a stable of octoroon beauties. Two thousand dollars in costs were said to be spent on the furniture alone at Lulu White's Mahogany Hall.

Elite madams in Storyville frequently attempted to compartmentalize their illicit professional lives from their personal aspirations for Victorian respectability and family legitimacy. Successful entrepreneurs maintained strict boundaries between their business operations and their private family lives, often sending relatives to distant institutions to shield them from the stigma of the trade.

Josie Arlington hid her profession from her teenage niece Anna Deubler, renting a home for her family far from Storyville and eventually sending her to a convent school in Maryland. In 1901, Anna Deubler was 17 years old, while Josie Arlington operated her brothel at 225 Basin Street.

5. Early Jazz and the Moral Backlash

As working-class jazz thrived in cabarets and lake resorts under pioneers like Buddy Bolden, moral reformers and politicians intensified their legislative attacks on the city's vice ecosystem.

You can trace early New Orleans jazz through unconventional venues like lake resorts, fish fries, parks, and dance halls that fostered the cross-pollination of musical styles. Bassist Pops Foster described how horse-drawn carriages decorated with pretty girls and musicians advertised fish fries, and the band with the best music drew the biggest crowds. Lake resorts such as Spanish Fort, West End, and Milneburg allowed bands to hear each other and blend styles. Lincoln and Johnson Parks served in 1902 as major gathering spots for the black population to enjoy baseball, picnics, and music.

The Evolution of Jazz Venues

Traditional Creole musicians initially disdained the vulgar, bluesy, and spontaneous raggy music played by Buddy Bolden and his followers. However, as Jim Crow restricted traditional Creole trades, younger Creoles adopted the new hot style, combining their superior reading skills and technique with Uptown raunchiness. Clarinetist George Baquet played a stunt routine during a cutting contest against Bolden's band, throwing away parts of his clarinet until playing only the mouthpiece to win the contest for John Robichaux's sweet band.

Cornetist Buddy Bolden revolutionized early jazz with his loud, hot, and bluesy style before mental illness and severe health struggles tragically cut short his career. In 1905, he reached the peak of his popularity, defining the early sound of jazz with numbers like "Funky Butt." During a performance at Jackson Hall in 1905, a deadly shooting broke out, and Bolden blew high notes on his trumpet from the balcony to try to keep the panicked crowd calm. By March 13, 1907, Alice Bolden had her son arrested for the final time after he experienced severe headaches, disorientation, and paranoia.

Political Bosses and White Musicians

Tom Anderson dominated Storyville as a powerful political boss and commercial kingpin across eighteen square blocks who regulated the district and maintained immense influence across New Orleans. In 1904, Customhouse Street was renamed Iberville Street. When a writer for Collier's magazine visited New Orleans, he documented how Anderson acted as the law-giver who routinely got arrested brothel workers released without cash bail.

Working-class white musicians and audiences increasingly embraced jazz despite social stigma, police harassment, and vehement opposition from moral reformers. Giarolamo LaRocca was so angered by his son Nick's interest in jazz that he took his cornet out to the yard and destroyed it with an ax twice after the boy bought a replacement. Between 1900 and 1910, New Orleans' per-capita murder rate exceeded Chicago's by a factor of 3.

6. Organized Crime and the Reform Offensive

The brutal kidnapping of Walter Lamana by Black Hand extortionists fueled intense public outrage, prompting strict new laws like the Gay-Shattuck Act to dismantle the foundations of Storyville.

The Black Hand and the Lamana Case

Eight-year-old Walter Lamana was lured away from his father's undertaking business on St. Philip Street on a June evening in 1907 and was later strangled to death and hidden in the St. Rose Plantation swamp by conspirators led by Leonardo Gebbia and Ignazio Campisciano. Peter Lamana, a prosperous undertaker and Progressive Union member, received a Black Hand ransom note demanding six thousand dollars in gold for his son's safe return. The father was told to deliver the ransom seventy miles north toward Bogalusa, while a police search party of twenty-five men went into the swamp.

Ignazio Campisciano was coerced into confessing where Walter Lamana's body was hidden after members of a posse placed a rope around his neck and threatened to hang him from a nearby tree. The first trial in Hahnville lasted four days, and Leonardo Gebbia was hanged on July 16, 1909. Josie Arlington spent eight thousand dollars on a red-marble tomb.

The Gay-Shattuck Law and Terminal Pressures

The 1908 Gay-Shattuck Bill banned women from working in or patronizing saloons, prohibited serving blacks and whites in the same establishment, and outlawed musical performances in bars. Saloon keepers in Storyville circumvented the strict regulations of the Gay-Shattuck Law by setting up makeshift tamale stands or passing around an antique sandwich indefinitely to prove their culinary status. The Daily Item predicted that one-half of New Orleans barrooms would face bankruptcy.

The new union railroad terminal opened on June 1, 1908. In August 1908, the Travelers Aid Society actively agitated to move the brothels away from the Frisco depot.

Reverend J. Benjamin Lawrence and undercover companions entered the Arlington Restaurant on a Sunday in June 1910, ordered whiskey, beer, and cigarettes, and turned the preserved evidence over to waiting police to secure Tom Anderson's arrest. The total fines paid by Tom Anderson to settle the case involving alcohol illegally sold to a seventeen-year-old minor amounted to seventy-five dollars. Ollie Anderson died on December 26, 1907. Josie Arlington staged a raid on the Mardi Gras ball in 1906, and Philip Werlein vowed to eliminate octoroon houses in February 1910.

7. The Fall of an Empire

Federal intervention under the Selective Service Act of 1917 finally forced Mayor Martin Behrman to shutter Storyville permanently, driving jazz musicians northward in a historic diaspora.

The dance-hall boom in Storyville provided a major economic boon and full-time employment for early jazz musicians. Fueled by a national dance craze featuring steps like the turkey trot and bunny hug, numerous cabarets and dance halls opened on Franklin Street. Clarinetist Alphonse Picou described working all week, advertising dances from wagons on Saturdays, playing all night, taking a train to play at lake picnics all day Sunday, and playing Sunday night and Monday.

Cornetist Joe Oliver rose to prominence through aggressive musical duels and innovative mutes, earning the moniker King Oliver. One night at Aberdeen's, Oliver walked out onto the street playing his cornet to draw crowds away from rival clubs where Freddie Keppard and Manuel Perez were performing, ultimately leading the entire crowd back to his venue. A juvenile arrest and subsequent incarceration at the Colored Waif's Home provided Louis Armstrong with vital discipline and formal music training. Louis Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif's Home on January 1, 1913, after firing a pistol into the air on Rampart Street during New Year celebrations.

The assassination of a saloonkeeper by imported thugs at the Tuxedo dance hall prompted police to shut down Storyville's dance halls. Gyp the Blood crept behind Billy Phillips at the Tuxedo bar on Easter Monday 1913 and fired multiple shots into his torso at point-blank range. Stricter local laws and dwindling local opportunities prompted New Orleans jazz musicians and bands to migrate northward to cities like Chicago. In May 1915, Tom Brown's Band left New Orleans under a six-week contract to play at Lamb's Cafe in Chicago, where their syncopated beat became an instant hit.

The Closure of Storyville

Section 13 of the Selective Service Act of 1917 outlawed prostitution within a ten-mile radius of military encampments, leaving Mayor Behrman no choice but to draft an ordinance closing the District. Judge F.D. King denied Gertrude Dix's request for an injunction, and moving vans cleared out Storyville establishments as the district officially closed at midnight on November 12, 1917.

The Axman Murders and the Rise of Louis Armstrong

The continuation of brutal middle-of-the-night ax attacks on pregnant women and grocers plunged New Orleans into a state of panic and mass vigilantism. Pauline and Mary Bruno awoke to find a heavyset man at the foot of their bed before he slipped away like he had wings and fatally struck their uncle Joseph Romano.

You can protect your home from threats of this type by following simple precautions:

• Put dogs in yards to deter the axman, as criminals of this type fear dogs more than watchmen.
• Divide the night into regular watches and stand guard over sleeping kin with shotguns loaded with buckshot.

10 Key Ideas

1. Late-nineteenth-century New Orleans possessed a distinct Franco-Latin character and cultural multiplicity that made the port appear alarming to mainstream American Protestant norms.
2. The assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy triggered mass arrests and the largest mass lynching in American history when an armed mob battered down the parish prison.
3. Municipal leaders established Storyville on January 1, 1898, creating a legally tolerated vice district to isolate prostitution and protect respectable residential neighborhoods from contamination.
4. Cornetist Buddy Bolden pioneered a loud, bluesy, and improvisational style that broke away from schooled musical traditions and birthed early jazz in working-class venues.
5. The Robert Charles manhunt in 1900 unleashed widespread white mob violence against innocent black residents and severely disrupted the city's nascent jazz scene.
6. Tom Anderson established his monumental Annex as the dazzling commercial and geographical linchpin of the newly legalized vice district while dominating local politics.
7. The 1908 Gay-Shattuck Bill banned women from working in or patronizing saloons and outlawed musical performances in bars to dismantle the foundations of Storyville.
8. The brutal kidnapping and murder of eight-year-old Walter Lamana by Black Hand extortionists fueled intense public outrage and led to the execution of Leonardo Gebbia.
9. Section 13 of the Selective Service Act of 1917 outlawed prostitution within a ten-mile radius of military encampments, forcing Mayor Behrman to shutter Storyville permanently.
10. Stricter local laws, the federal closure of Storyville, and dwindling local opportunities prompted New Orleans jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong to migrate northward to cities like Chicago.