Empire of Sin (3 page)

Peter Deubler underwent surgery that afternoon and was moved to one of the Hôtel-Dieu’s recovery wards, where doctors refused to allow anyone, even Josie, to see him. His condition stabilized and then improved over the next few days; at one point he even seemed well enough to be sent home. But his recovery was short-lived. Within a week he was back at the Hôtel-Dieu, “
sinking rapidly” with a raging fever. He died there on December 9 at 2:15 in the afternoon, ten days after being shot.

T
HE
incident at Josie Lobrano’s brothel became the talk of the Vieux Carré for some time thereafter. Murder, of course, was no novelty in the city’s vice districts in 1890. But the Lobranos were well-known characters in that world, and so the shooting took on all the allure of celebrity scandal among the city’s demimondaines. However, like many crimes in nineteenth-century New Orleans, it ultimately had few dire consequences for the perpetrator. Phillip Lobrano went on to be tried—twice—for the murder of Peter Deubler. Both times the defense successfully convinced a majority of jurors that the shooting had been committed in self-defense. The initial trial, after many delays and false starts, ended in a hung jury; the second, however, brought an actual acquittal, and on March 31, 1892, Lobrano was released from prison, after fourteen months of incarceration.

But Lobrano’s easy life as the kept man of a successful New Orleans madam was over. Long before his release, Josie Lobrano, devastated by her brother’s death and determined to be rid of her longtime paramour, had abruptly cut all business and romantic ties to him. At the same time,
she also resolved to change a few other aspects of her life. For the previous fifteen years as a prostitute and madam, Josie had been living a violent, dissolute existence among society’s most debauched elements. But the pointless killing of her brother had altered something in her. She’d apparently done some soul-searching, and now claimed that she was ready to
“turn over a new leaf.” Josie wouldn’t close the brothel, of course; the business was too lucrative, and sex work was the only thing she knew. But she was determined to change the way she lived—to end her old low-life associations, get rid of her current roster of fractious girls, and cater to a new and better class of customer. She would also find herself a more agreeable inamorato and perhaps even a wealthy patron to partner with. It might take some time and more than a little money, but Josie Lobrano—until now known as one of the rudest and roughest madams in the Vieux Carré—had decided to become respectable.

RESPECTABILITY. JOSIE LOBRANO WAS NOT ALONE IN her pursuit of it in Gilded Age New Orleans. The concept of respectability was very much in the air in the city of the 1880s and ’90s, championed in newspaper editorials, debated in clubs and parlors, and trumpeted from church pulpits all over town. This was, after all, the era of high Victorianism, and even a place like the Crescent City was not impervious to the stringent ideals of the day. Granted, “respectability” might have meant one thing to a French Quarter madam, involving not much more than an enthusiastic embrace of the trappings of wealth, exclusivity, and a certain faux high-class refinement. But for members of what was optimistically called “polite society,” the standards were somewhat higher. Keeping brawls and gunfire out of one’s home was the least of it.

In nineteenth-century New Orleans, however, respectability was arguably more difficult to achieve and maintain than in almost any other place on the continent. Threats to decency were everywhere, and the city’s lax cosmopolitan ethos hardly conformed to mainstream American norms of behavior. Thanks to its unique history, in fact, New Orleans scarcely seemed American at all. Founded as a French outpost in the early 1700s, the city had come of age under Spanish rule in the latter half of the eighteenth century, giving the place a distinctive Franco-Latin character that still manifested itself in everything from its architecture to its municipal administration. And although the 1803 Louisiana Purchase had forcibly thrust the city into the rapidly growing United States, several decades as capital of the American South had done only so much to make it seem less foreign. “
I doubt if there is a city in the world,” Frederick Law Olmsted said of New Orleans in 1856, “where the resident population has been so divided in its origin, or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits, manners, and moral codes of the citizens.” And this extraordinary multiplicity—augmented by successive waves of immigration from Europe and the Caribbean—had only grown more pronounced as the century progressed. “
What a mingling of peoples!” another visitor marveled in 1880: “Americans and Brazilians; West Indians, Spanish and French; Germans, Creoles, quadroons, mulattoes, Chinese, and Negroes.”

The urban culture that developed around this confluence of races and ethnicities was something that the rest of the country soon came to regard with a combination of wonder, suspicion, and often abhorrence. Worldly New Orleans was emphatically unlike, say, Lutheran Minneapolis, or even the Baptist cities in the rest of the South. For one thing, New Orleans wasn’t even Protestant, at least not much beyond the handful of uptown neighborhoods containing the enclaves of Anglo-American privilege; it was still a largely Latin, Catholic city, with entrenched attitudes and mores that could seem—to anyone aspiring to conservative Protestant standards of rectitude—distressingly exotic. As such, it was a strange and disturbing place to many—a place where married white men attended “Quadroon Balls” to find mixed-race concubines, where macabre voodoo rituals occurred in shanties and back alleys, and where even prominent politicians might meet in City Park to duel with pistols or épées at dawn. In the city’s notorious tenderloin districts, brothels specialized in all manner of interracial mixing and arcane sexual practices, while narcotics, alcohol, and loud, degenerate kinds of music filled the saloons and dance halls, promoting deviant behavior of all kinds.

The Crescent City was also a place cursed with a deep-rooted culture of violence and crime: colorful miscreants stalked the streets; warring vice lords shot up their rivals’ saloons and gambling dens; and mysterious Italians, purportedly members of the murky organization called “the Mafia” or “the Black Hand,” assassinated one another for obscure and sinister reasons. For visitors from other parts of the country—and for the city’s growing ranks of white Protestant elites—the opportunities for moral contamination were legion. As one Victorian minister put it in 1868, “
It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.”

Even so, it wasn’t until the last decades of the nineteenth century that respectability had become such a burning preoccupation among the “better element” in New Orleans—or crime and indecency the source of such widespread outrage. True, gambling, prostitution, street violence, and bawdy entertainment had been a prominent feature of the city’s life for its entire history. But up till this point they had been confined to certain well-defined zones along the waterfront and in several lower-class neighborhoods—places that could easily be avoided in the course of the average upstanding citizen’s day. Ensconced in the Garden District around St. Charles Avenue, decent men and (especially) women could insulate themselves from the goings-on “back of town” or in the mixed neighborhoods downriver from Canal Street. But in the decades after Reconstruction,
these goings-on had begun to spread from the traditional vice areas into reputable residential and commercial districts all over town, endangering the morals of anyone who rode a streetcar, dined at a restaurant, or shopped in one of the city’s markets or department stores.

The assaults on respectability, in fact, had become all but ubiquitous in New Orleans. The rise of “
concert saloons”—raucous theaters where patrons could drink while watching erotically suggestive stage performances—had brought crime and high-profile immorality to some of the busiest shopping avenues in the city. Establishments offering
so-called coon music, considered a dangerous inducement to lewd dancing and cross-racial fraternization, were also making inroads; once confined to the black clubs and dance halls of poorer neighborhoods, the music could now assail the ears of bankers and merchants on Canal Street itself—the main artery of the business district. And perhaps most scandalous of all,
brothels and assignation houses had become impossible to avoid, cropping up in many places where decent middle-class families lived. Many felt that a man could no longer feel comfortable in his own home, never knowing when the house next door might be sold and turned into a disorderly house, forcing his wife and children to bear witness to scenes of the utmost wickedness and depravity.

“
The social evil is rampant in our midst,” wrote the
Mascot
, the city’s major crusading weekly, in 1892. “Houses of assignation and ill-fame … are springing up all over the city … Many a man has purchased a house and lot on a quiet street … but has woke up some morning to find the house next door occupied by disreputable people who carouse, receive visitors, hammer the piano all night, use obscene language, and convert his paradise into a hell.”

The effects of this expansion of vice and crime were now plain to see throughout the city. Stories abounded of honest, job-seeking women being ruined by unscrupulous concert-saloon proprietors; of agents steering underage girls to bordello keepers for a commission; and of dressmakers’ assistants and messenger boys being seduced into the “sporting life” while making deliveries to brothels, saloons, and gambling houses. By the late 1880s, criminality of all types in the city seemed virtually out of control: “
At no time since the war … has crime been so rampant or criminals so free as at present,” observed the
Mascot
in 1888. “Within [the past] two months, several brutal and deliberate murders have been planned and perpetrated. Young girls have been outraged, homes have been burglarized, citizens have been maltreated by officers of the law, poor little newborn babes have been pitilessly slaughtered, and any number of men have taken their own lives for real or fancied causes, but as yet there has been no stop to the era of blood and degradation.”

Blacks and immigrants—especially Italians—were of course scapegoated for much of the lawlessness and moral corruption. Complaints about the debased behavior at “
Negro dives” were a frequent feature of local newspaper coverage, which became especially virulent when that behavior crossed the color line. Meanwhile, the violence and crime endemic to the city’s “Little Palermo” (the ramshackle downriver end of the Vieux Carré) was the cause of even greater editorial spleen in the press. “
If given our choice between the Negro and the ‘Dago,’ ” one writer fulminated in 1889, “we are inclined to believe that we would take the wooly son of Africa in preference to the greezy, filthy son of Italy.… The Dagos are a curse to New Orleans.” The fact that both groups were considered a “disruptive element” in local politics only deepened the antagonism of the city’s native-born Anglo-American elite. Black votes were widely regarded as for sale to the highest bidder, while Italians and other immigrants provided a reliable base of
support for “the Ring”—the powerful and corrupt Democratic machine that had controlled city government for much of its recent history.

For so-called respectable New Orleans, then, the situation had become dire indeed. The lawlessness, municipal dysfunction, flagrant sexuality, and increasing visibility of vice posed a threat not just to individual reputations but also to the reputation of the city as a whole. And all of this was happening at a time when New Orleans desperately needed to project an image of competence and stability to the world. The city’s antebellum glory days—when booming business in sugar, cotton, and slaves made it the Queen City of the South, indispensable to world trade—were long past. Decades of
civil war and federal occupation had been hard on the local economy, while competition from newer railroad centers and other, faster-growing ports had eaten away at the city’s commercial supremacy. Formerly the fourth-largest city in the country, New Orleans had since dropped to ninth place. And while business was still growing in absolute numbers, the city government had taken on a level of debt that severely limited its ability to remain competitive.