Empire of Sin (24 page)

Following up on these and several other leads,
police had by Friday arrested ten suspects, most notably Tony Costa, who had been found holed up in a house on Clouet Street. Also in custody were the farmer Campisciano, the Harvey Canal informant mentioned in the anonymous letter, the owner of the ice-cream store near the Lamana home, and—at the special request of the Italian Vigilance Committee—Francesco Genova, the alleged capo who had been involved in the Luciano shootings five years earlier. Genova was by this time a wealthy businessman, allegedly feared by all Italians of New Orleans. What evidence, if any, the committee had of Genova’s involvement in the case is unclear. But since he was the leading figure in what passed for the local “Mafia Society,” police seemed certain that he was in some way implicated.

At this point,
Capt. Thomas Capo, the inconveniently named officer in charge of the investigation, had some justification for believing that he was making progress. But virtually all of the evidence on which these men were held was circumstantial. After the intervention of lawyers,
police were forced to release all except Tony Costa, who nonetheless still protested his innocence in the most vehement terms possible. Even so, police were careful to keep the released suspects under constant surveillance, and to keep pursuing tips and other leads, which were being brought to the Vigilance Committee in increasing numbers.

By now, more than a week had passed since Walter Lamana disappeared, and hopes that the boy would be found alive were fading. Acting on
persistent rumors that the boy had been killed and concealed in the bayou behind the Campisciano farm, police on June 21 hired a special train and transported a twenty-five-man search party to the site. But the swamp in this area was one of the densest and most forbidding in Louisiana. Although the men
searched with a team of bloodhounds for an entire day—often knee-deep in muck and tormented by mosquitoes—they found nothing. At dusk the exhausted searchers emerged empty-handed from the swamp, as the tight-lipped Campisciano, ostensibly working his land, looked on.

As more and more days passed without any further progress in the case,
tensions began to surface among the frustrated investigators. The police began accusing the Italian Vigilance Committee of meeting in secret and withholding important information. Peter Lamana, meanwhile, had all but cut off communication with the official investigators, choosing to follow his own lines of inquiry. Apparently, he felt that a heavy-handed police presence did more harm than good, interfering with the willingness of potential witnesses to tell what they knew.

Finally, some two weeks after the disappearance, another key name emerged from the cacophony of innuendoes and accusations. For days, Judge Patorno had been hearing from various Italian businessmen who had received extortion letters over the past weeks. But one of them actually claimed to know who wrote the letter he’d received. Taking the judge to the window of his own office, the merchant pointed to a man standing on the corner just outside.
“That is the man who wrote it,” the merchant said. “Tony Gendusa!”

Judge Patorno did not act immediately on this revelation. It was, after all, only one of numerous accusations he was hearing every day. But when he eventually compared the merchant’s note with the original letter sent to Peter Lamana, he noticed that the handwriting was suspiciously similar. And when he went to Tony Gendusa’s home, he discovered that the man was now missing.
Patorno sent some detectives out to Pecan Grove, a town near the Campisciano farm in St. Rose, where—according to Tony Gendusa’s brother Frank—the missing man’s sweetheart lived, but they found nothing.

Patorno, however, kept digging, and he
soon began to turn up some suggestive connections between Tony Gendusa and a few of the other suspects in the crime. Gendusa, he learned, had been seen with prime suspect Tony Costa several times in the weeks before the kidnapping, often accompanied by another man, Francisco Luchesi. Now Luchesi was also missing. And so, apparently, was another known associate named Leonardo Gebbia, who lived with his sister and parents in a house just a few doors away from the Lamana residence. According to neighborhood gossip, the Gebbias knew more about Walter Lamana’s disappearance than they had revealed to the police. Mrs. Gebbia, Leonardo’s mother, had allegedly visited Mrs. Lamana several times since the kidnapping, assuring her that little Walter was safe and encouraging the Lamanas to pay the ransom to get him back. At the time, her words had been dismissed as the well-meant reassurances of an aging neighbor. But now they were beginning to seem rather more sinister.

Very early one morning,
police staged a raid on the Gebbia home. Leonardo Gebbia was in the house, still in bed, and he was apprehended without incident. And his arrest proved to be the break that ultimately unraveled the entire conspiracy. Professing his own innocence in the plot, he nonetheless confessed to know all about it. He had seen Tony Costa leading the boy away from the undertaking parlor, he said. He’d seen Costa turn the boy over to a man named Stefano Monfre, who had been waiting at the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip with a covered wagon, driven by Francisco Luchesi. Gebbia also confirmed that Tony Gendusa had written the Black Hand letter demanding $6,000.

This was sufficient information for Judge Patorno to start making new arrests. He had the entire Gebbia family locked up, along with Tony Gendusa’s brother Frank, Stefano Monfre’s wife, and even the couple who, with the Gebbias, ran the rooming house on St. Philip.

But the most important revelation came in
the confession of Gebbia’s sister, Nicolina, who verified what Patorno had long suspected—that the boy had been taken to the Campisciano farm in St. Rose. Ignazio Campisciano, of course, had been arrested and released some days earlier for lack of evidence. Now Patorno had the corroboration he needed to proceed more aggressively against the farmer. He arranged with the Illinois Central Railroad for a special train to St. Rose and assembled a posse to head out there that evening. Among the posse members was a trainmaster for the railroad named Frank T. Mooney—the same man who ten years later would become Superintendent of Police. Mooney, apparently interested in police work even then, involved himself closely in the Campisciano arrest, and even provided the
Daily Picayune
with a sensational account of it.

After the special train arrived at Pecan Grove at around midnight, Mooney explained, “
We put out the headlight of the engine and all the lights in the coach, and [then] walked the tracks for one and a half miles to Campisciano’s houses.” Patorno put a guard around both buildings—Campisciano’s home and a shed about fifty yards away, where it was believed Walter Lamana might be held. Then they pounded on Campisciano’s door until they had roused him from sleep. The farmer finally came to the door in his underclothes.

“Our party pushed the door open and stepped inside,” Mooney told the
Picayune
:

Judge Patorno spoke out sharply: “Give us the boy. We came for the child.”

Campisciano stood without a word
.

“Where is the Lamana boy?” demanded Judge Patorno, without a quiver
.

The Italian only shrugged his shoulders in the Roman style, pleading ignorance. He declared he knew nothing of the matter and stoutly maintained that position
.

[But] the party had come there determined. It was not to be put off as it had been once before. Campisciano was quickly seized and
bound hand and foot. His hands were pinioned behind his back and his legs were bound with ropes. He was carried outside and a rope [was] quickly fastened around his neck
.

Intimidated by this somewhat less-than-legal interrogation technique, Campisciano relented and indicated that he would speak. The noose around his neck was loosened, and he proceeded to tell how Monfre, Luchesi, and two other men, one of whom he knew as Angelo Incarcaterra, had brought the boy to his house in a covered wagon. But when Patorno asked the farmer where the boy was now, the man turned stonily silent. Again the rope was tightened around his neck, and he was threatened with hanging from a nearby tree. Finally, he gave in. When the rope was again loosened, Campisciano made the admission that everyone had feared: “The boy is dead.”

“He went on to relate every detail of the heinous crime,” Mooney continued. “He took us over to the other house and showed us the very spot and the position the child was lying [in] when he was murdered, choked to death. He pleaded that he had nothing whatsoever to do with it and that the others had committed the deed.”

Judge Patorno demanded that Campisciano lead them to the boy’s body. The farmer wanted to wait until morning, since the place was deep in the swamps behind his house and the moon had already set. But Patorno insisted. And so they set off, several men holding lanterns as they picked their way through the marshy wilderness. Campisciano begged his captors to untie his hands, so he could at least push aside the reeds as he walked. Patorno agreed, but they kept a rope around his neck and another around his shoulders, each held by one of the posse, to ensure that the farmer didn’t slip away in the gloom.

“You can imagine the situation,” Mooney told the
Picayune
, “this Italian leading a party through the swamp, wading in water to their waists and through brush and briars. None of us felt sure that he had told us the truth, and who knew that this leader of the Black Hand was not leading us into a death trap.” But finally, several miles into the fetid swamp, Campisciano stopped and pointed to a spot under some willow branches. “There,” he said.

“And he told the truth,” Mooney reported. “Upon lifting the heavy boughs, we saw this gray-colored bundle. It was resting on some wild cane reeds. The odor was terrible, and as the bundle was picked up and the blanket unwrapped, the head dropped from the shoulders.”

This last macabre detail—of the boy’s head detaching from the torso, apparently as a result of advanced decomposition—would be picked up and headlined in newspapers all around the country over the next few days. In New Orleans, it raised the level of mob hysteria to a new and feverish pitch. When the body was brought back to the city and laid out in the morgue, thousands of people assailed the building. The
Daily Picayune
described the scene:

The mob thronged the yard and jammed through the narrow door of the dead house. There, the insane desire to possess some gruesome souvenir of the most horrible crime to shock New Orleans since the Hennessy assassination took hold of the people, and they fought and fell over each other in an effort to tear off pieces of the clothes in which the body had been found, and which still lay, reeking with maggots and shreds of rotting flesh, on the slab
.

Meanwhile,
other information was emerging from interrogations with the incarcerated suspects. According to Campisciano, Walter Lamana had actually been killed on the Wednesday following the kidnapping, meaning that the child had been dead for ten days already. Apparently, the kidnappers had been frightened by news of the mob actions in New Orleans that evening and had decided to abort the kidnapping. So
Angelo Incarcaterra—allegedly on the order of Leonardo Gebbia, the leader of the group—had seized the boy and unceremoniously strangled him to death. Then they had wrapped the body in a blanket and carried it out to a remote corner of the swamp, where they hoped it would never be found.

The extent of the conspiracy involved in this ugly piece of business was difficult for officials to assess. Police had six of the principal suspects in custody—Campisciano and his wife, Tony Costa, Frank Gendusa, and Leonardo and Nicolina Gebbia. At least four were still at large, including Luchesi the wagon driver; Tony Gendusa the letter writer; Stefano Monfre, who owned the covered wagon; and Angelo Incarcaterra, who had actually strangled the boy. But there were several other conspirators mentioned in various bits of testimony who remained unaccounted-for—a “
tall man named Joe,” whom Campisciano had seen with Stefano Monfre on the morning after the kidnapping; a mysterious man with a pockmarked face who had come to Monfre’s house several times before the kidnapping; and—perhaps most tellingly—a “wronged man” named “Mr. Cristina.” Could this have been Paolo Di Christina, the associate of capo Francisco Genova who had been involved in the 1902 Luciano incident? Whatever the connections, it was clear that the kidnapping cabal was large and complex. That such an elaborate conspiracy could have flourished in the festering alleys of the lower French Quarter—apparently known to so many residents, none of whom saw fit to report it to the police—was appalling. So much for the so-called lesson of the Hennessy lynching.

Still, at least some members of the community had come forward with information, and so the Italian Vigilance Committee tried to put as good a face on the situation as they could. “
The reign of the Black Hand is over in New Orleans,” they told the
Times-Democrat
—though it was clearly a declaration more hopeful than justified.

Police continued to pursue the missing suspects, even
sending detectives to Kansas to check out a tip that Stefano Monfre might be hiding out with relatives there. But it soon became apparent that Monfre and the other absent conspirators were gone for good. The six suspects in custody, meanwhile, were indicted and sent to the prison in Hahnville, the seat of St. Charles Parish (where the case would be tried, since the murder had occurred in that parish).

The trial of the first four defendants began at the courthouse in Hahnville on July 15. Nicolina and Leonardo Gebbia would be tried at a later date, but the Campiscianos, Tony Costa, and Frank Gendusa would face a jury first. Autopsy results had indicated that Walter Lamana had been killed by a hatchet blow to the forehead; this had only increased the public’s rage at the perpetrators, and the trial attracted huge, hostile crowds to the little county seat. Security was heavy, with scores of sheriff’s deputies and other police on hand to keep order.