Empire of Sin (2 page)

But now Frank Mooney had his own pair of murdered Italian grocers to deal with, and it was certain that everyone in New Orleans would be watching to see how their rookie superintendent handled the case. Ten months earlier, when he was first named to the position, the
Times-Picayune
had questioned the wisdom of Mooney’s selection. Was it a good idea, the paper had asked, to trust command of the entire police department to a former railroad executive whose law enforcement experience amounted to little more than a short stint as a rail-yard cop many years ago? The new superintendent was clearly a police outsider, appointed by a mayor well known for bestowing city jobs on his political allies. Mooney didn’t even
look
like a cop—with his gold-rimmed spectacles, brushy mustache, and stout, well-banqueted physique, he looked more like an insurance executive on his way to an industry convention in Omaha. And even though the
Times-Picayune
had praised Mooney’s sterling qualities as a manager, the paper pointed out that these credentials did not guarantee success as commander of the New Orleans police: “
As police superintendent, he will be judged not by his [past] record, however creditable … but by the record he has yet to make.”

For Mooney, then, there was strong incentive to see Andrew Maggio as the perpetrator of these two murders, and to write them off as isolated revenge killings or a domestic crime of passion—the kind of easily explicable incident that was all too common in New Orleans’ poorer neighborhoods. Far better this explanation than attributing the attack to a return of Black Hand terrorism, long after the police had supposedly eliminated that threat. The campaign against the Italian underworld—part of a larger effort by the so-called respectable white establishment to wrest control of their city from the forces of vice, crime, and corruption—had roiled New Orleans for the better part of three decades, eventually degenerating into something like all-out class warfare. A generation-long ordeal of lynchings, riots, and large-scale police raids had taken a harsh toll on the entire city. So for an untested police superintendent trying to convince his constituents that New Orleans’ bad old days were indeed over, a resurrection of the “Dago Evil,” as it was called, would be an ominous development indeed.

But not, perhaps, the worst possible development. That would come a few months later. For, by the end of that summer of 1918—with three more similar ax murders terrorizing the city and the
Times-Picayune
openly speculating about a crazed serial killer on the loose—it would be clear that a very different kind of evil was at large in the squalid backstreets of New Orleans.

SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK ON A BRIGHT November morning, a handsome middle-aged man dashed up to the front door of the brothel at 172 Customhouse Street in the French Quarter and let himself in with a key. It was still early for any kind of business at a New Orleans house of prostitution, so no one except the servants was up and about. But the man—Phillip Lobrano—didn’t have to be formally shown in. He was well known in the house; the front ground-floor bedroom was where he regularly consorted with the madam of the place, a woman who called herself Josie Lobrano. The two had been lovers and business partners for almost a decade—ever since Josie was sixteen and the much-older Lobrano had offered her his protection. And while she was technically and legally still Miss Mary Deubler, she used Phillip’s surname for professional purposes—though few people were apparently deceived.

This was, after all, New Orleans in 1890—the Crescent City of the Gilded Age, where aliases of convenience and unconventional living arrangements were anything but out of the ordinary, at least in certain parts of town. Identities were fluid here, and names and appearances weren’t always the best guide to telling who was who. Dressed in knee-length frock coats, pinstriped trousers, and suavely cocked felt derbies, men who may or may not have been gentlemen strolled the gaslit avenues with fashionable young women who may or may not have been their wives. Clerks in the department stores on busy Canal Street were careful to ask their female customers that all-important question—“And where do we send the bill, madam?”—in a hushed, confidential, knowing tone of voice. Newsboys of uncertain parentage hawked papers on street corners, and one could only wonder who was bankrolling the rakish ne’er-do-wells dropping hundreds at the Fair Grounds Racetrack or in one of the backroom gambling dens in saloons all around town.

And so Phillip Lobrano—aging but dapper, well dressed but not conspicuously employed—entered the brothel of the woman known by some as his wife. He found Josie still in bed, sleeping late after the strain of a busy Friday night. Clearly in a state of some agitation, Lobrano told her to get up immediately and get dressed. He said that he had just seen one of her brothers—Peter Deubler, who worked sporadically as a streetcar motorman—in a bar on Royal Street, supremely drunk and apparently hungry for trouble. Peter was on his way over to the brothel, and when he arrived, Josie was to send the maid to the door to say they weren’t home. If she let Peter in, Lobrano warned, she would have to take responsibility for the consequences.

As Josie dressed, Lobrano recounted
what had happened on Royal Street. He had been sitting in Louis George’s saloon, quietly reading the newspaper, when an obviously intoxicated Peter Deubler wandered in. Seeing Lobrano, the young man ordered a bottle from the bartender and carried it over to his table. Phillip wasn’t particularly welcoming. He’d always disliked Josie’s family, whom he considered little more than a “
flock of vultures,” forever borrowing money and monopolizing too much of her time and attention. Even so, he tried at first to be civil. But Peter was still reeling from an all-night spree and was in a foul, abusive mood. In sarcastic tones, he invited Lobrano to have a drink with him, and when Lobrano declined, Peter became angry.

“
You bastard, come take a drink,” he insisted, filling a glass and shoving it across the table.

The bartender tried to intervene. “
It looks as if you want to raise hell,” he observed warily. Peter, a large, muscular man who had once singlehandedly knocked down six men in a street fight, agreed that this was indeed his intention. Then, for reasons that would remain obscure, he began to deride Lobrano in a loud, menacing voice. Intimidated, Lobrano quickly finished his drink and got up to leave.

“I know where to find you,” Peter said ominously as Lobrano turned away.

A few minutes later, as Lobrano was hurrying over to Josie’s, a friend who had been in the bar caught up with him on Canal Street. Peter, the friend warned, had begun to make threats against Lobrano just after the two had parted. “
I am going to kill that bastard Lobrano,” Peter had said explicitly—in front of several witnesses—before stumbling out of the saloon.

Lobrano had barely finished telling this story to Josie when the brothel’s front doorbell rang. That was Peter now, Lobrano warned, and he urged her again not to let him in. But Josie seemed unconcerned.
Twenty-six years old, sturdily built like her brother, with attractive, somewhat hardened features accentuated by striking black eyebrows, she was hardly the timid, fearful type.
Driven into prostitution as an eleven-year-old orphan, Josie had been forced to fend for herself and her two younger brothers from the beginning. Years of struggling to survive on the streets of New Orleans had turned her into a tough and often combative woman. She had in fact been
arrested for disorderly conduct several times, once for horsewhipping a young man on Palmyra Street, and again for brawling with a fellow prostitute named Beulah Ripley (who allegedly “
staggered from the scene of combat missing part of her lower lip and half an ear”). So Josie was not one to shy away from a confrontation, especially not with a member of her own family. Calling the maid, Josie instructed her to answer the door and see her brother in. She would talk to him alone in the parlor and see what was the matter.

Peter, however, turned out to be “
too drunk to take to the parlor.” Apparently worried that he might make a scene and upset the other occupants of the house, Josie decided instead to bring him back to her bedroom. “Are
you
here?” Peter sneered when he saw his sister’s paramour in the room. Lobrano asked him what he wanted, but Peter informed him that it was none of his business. Lobrano then insisted that Peter leave immediately, and when the intoxicated young man claimed he had a right to enter his sister’s bedroom whenever he wished, Josie actually took her brother’s side. She pointed out that the house belonged to her and that Lobrano had no right to order anyone out of it.

What happened next would be a matter of dispute for years to come.
According to Phillip Lobrano, after a few more angry words, he decided he’d had enough. He was just stepping to the door to leave when Peter suddenly lunged at him, punched him on the side of the face, and then made a gesture as if to pull a gun. According to Josie Lobrano, however, there was no lunge, no punch, and no threatening gesture. But the Lobranos did agree about Phillip’s next move: spitting out a “vile epithet,” he reached into his coat for his own .32-caliber revolver, pointed it at Peter Deubler, and pulled the trigger.

His aim was perhaps truer than he expected. The bullet struck Josie’s brother squarely in the nose, tore through the base of his brain, and lodged in the back wall of his skull. Peter collapsed onto the bedroom floor, his face awash in blood.

Josie screamed and fell to her knees beside her brother’s fallen body. Amazingly, Peter still seemed to be conscious. “
You’ve done it, Phil!” he allegedly cried through his shattered face. But Lobrano, standing amid the coiling smoke from the barrel of his pistol, didn’t linger to see what it was he’d done. Pushing past the maid, who now stood horrified just outside the doorway, he ran out of the bedroom, hurried down the hallway, and exited by a side door into an alley off Burgundy Street.

D
RAWN
by the sound of gunfire, a crowd soon gathered on Customhouse Street outside. The Lobranos’ neighbors in the French Quarter—or the Vieux Carré, as it was more commonly called—had been expecting trouble at the brothel for some time. Phillip and Josie had never lived peaceably together, and their domestic quarrels had brought police to the door more than once over the years. But in recent weeks, the discord between the two had become even fiercer than usual. As several members of the crowd later told a reporter, they’d all “
expected a tragedy to take place at almost any time” in that house.

Within minutes, Cpl. Thomas Duffy of the New Orleans Police arrived on the scene and shoved his way through the crowd. He entered the brothel and found Josie standing over her brother’s blood-drenched form, surrounded by a half dozen of her prostitutes in various states of undress.

Duffy quickly summoned an ambulance and then tried to question the witnesses about the incident. But he didn’t get very far. Josie, tough as she was, was apparently too upset to make much sense, and the other women professed to know nothing about the shooting; at the time it occurred, they claimed, they’d all been upstairs in their bedrooms, waiting for breakfast to be served.

Convinced that they were not telling everything they knew, Duffy threatened to take the whole lot of them down to the station in a paddy wagon. This caused something of an uproar among the women.
They
had done nothing wrong, they argued, and certainly didn’t deserve to be carted away like common criminals. Some said they wouldn’t go unless they could walk to the station; others insisted on traveling in cabs.

But Duffy’s patience had by now been exhausted. When the horse-drawn paddy wagon arrived, he and several other policemen herded the quarrelsome young women into the vehicle. Then he rode with them through the roiling streets of the Vieux Carré to the Third Precinct Station, where they were questioned and, amid much complaint about the cruel treatment they had received, released.

In the meantime, Phillip Lobrano had apparently thought better of leaving the scene of the shooting. Shortly after noon,
he walked into the Central Police Station on Basin Street and surrendered himself to the officer in charge, Capt. John Journée. The latest word from the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital was that Peter Deubler’s wound was “very dangerous,” perhaps even fatal. So Journée immediately took Lobrano into custody. He threw the prisoner into one of the station’s holding cells, where he sat for a few hours before being transferred to the Second Recorder’s Court. There he was arraigned on a charge of “shooting with intent to murder.” Pleading not guilty, he was remanded to the Orleans Parish Prison in the Tremé district, to be held without bail.