Empire of Sin (43 page)

The remedy, as Railey well knew, was the one law enforcement agency not subject to Ring manipulation—that is, the US Department of War. Although the Armistice had ended the active fighting in Europe, the world war would not officially be over until a formal peace treaty was signed, so the
US government was still tasked with keeping the soldiers and sailors in New Orleans free of sin. Responding to the local reformers’ pressure, the feds launched their own investigation of Tom Anderson and the city’s other cabaret owners. In June of 1919, Harold Wilson, southern director of the War Department’s Commission on Training Activities, and William Edler, of the US Public Health Service, personally conducted
inspections of the city’s cabarets. With his impeccable sources of information, Anderson knew all about this supposedly undercover operation, and kept an eye out for the two gentlemen in question. But he couldn’t be present at the Arlington every night. And—more important—the prostitutes who frequented his establishment couldn’t always be relied upon to lie low when a federal agent walked into the place. Some of them, in fact, just couldn’t seem to comprehend that prostitution was no longer legal and that the good old days of open solicitation were long past.

It was on the
evening of June 26, 1919, that Wilson and Edler finally appeared at the Arlington and were seated at a small table on the busy main floor. Tom Anderson, talking at the bar with an acquaintance, saw them arrive. “
There he is now,” Anderson muttered to his companion. “I thought he’d be in here tonight.” Then he spoke to the manager. Before long, waiters were streaming through the room, whispering to the women seated at tables all around the floor. “Captain Wilson and Dr. Edler are up there,” the waiter told two women at one table (where, unbeknownst to them, they were flirting with one of Wilson’s undercover associates, Army sergeant Thomas Pierce). “Don’t move around, but keep quiet.”

A hush descended over the room, but not all of the women had gotten the message in time. One of them—“a little girl, dressed in black, with very large eyes”—walked over to the table where Wilson and Edler were sitting. “
That little fool,” a woman at Pierce’s table whispered. “She’ll queer the whole thing.”

And queer it she did. The black-clad woman sat right down beside Wilson and proceeded to proposition him in terms that could not be misinterpreted. When Wilson demurred, she turned to Edler and asked whether he wanted to “have a good time.” That’s when the Arlington’s jazz band began playing. According to Edler’s later court testimony: “
The girl began wriggling and shaking herself. She looked up in the air and rolled her eyes, and upon inquiry as to what this purported, she said she was ‘vamping.’ In the meantime, a woman sitting at the next table poked me in the back and winked her eyes.…”

It was, in other words, a disaster. For the next half hour, Wilson and Edler watched as numerous other women around the room, apparently unaware of the waiters’ warnings, went about their business as usual, propositioning men and then leaving for the upstairs hotel, with their quarry following close behind. Helpless to stop the spectacle, Tom Anderson could only grasp his gray head in despair.

And sure enough, within days of Wilson’s visit, the indictments started rolling in. “
The Orleans Parish Grand Jury,” the
Item
reported on June 29, “shook the foundations of serenity on which the Tango Belt of New Orleans seems long to have rested by returning true bills indicting Tom Anderson, Louisiana state legislator.” Anderson, cited along with two other cabaret owners, may not have truly been shaken by this first indictment. After all, he had many friends on the bench of the Criminal District Court, and he was unconcerned enough to quickly pay his $250 bond in order to attend a prizefight on the evening he was arrested. But ten days later, when
another indictment followed from the US District Court on a similar charge, he knew that the situation was serious. A federal court judge might not be so amenable to persuasion by Anderson’s Ring associates. And the $1,000 bond he had to pay to stay out of jail for this case seemed to promise an entirely different level of determination to see that justice was done.

On the morning of Monday, October 6, 1919—“
Cabaret Day in the court,” as the
Item
dubbed it—Anderson’s case was brought before Judge Landry in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. Testifying that day, according to the paper, would be “many of the rollicking dancers who chased away the hours until dawn a couple of years ago at the Balls of the Two Well Known Gentlemen.” Tom Anderson would in fact have no fewer than seventy character witnesses pleading on behalf of his defense. That number included a judge, an assistant district attorney, a member of the school board, two bank presidents, and an assortment of businessmen, detectives, and police officers. Tom Anderson may have been in diminished circumstances by 1919, but he still had a lot of friends.

And true friends they proved to be.
ANDERSON CAFÉ SPOTLESS, SAY BUSINESSMEN
ran the headline in Tuesday’s
Item
. Dozens of prominent citizens had testified unanimously, under oath, that “Tom Anderson’s cabaret on North Rampart Street—the famous Arlington Cabaret in the heart of New Orleans’ Tango Belt—had never to their knowledge been aught but a respectable and high-class restaurant.” Not one of these witnesses, moreover, had ever been solicited by a woman in the place: “Did you ever see anything in the conduct of the women there that would cause you to believe them immoral?” the prosecutor asked Thomas J. Hill, former manager of the Tourist and Convention Bureau, who had claimed that he frequented the Arlington for years.

“Absolutely not!” Hill replied, with great earnestness (and to considerable laughter in the courtroom).

Against this wall of adamant denial, the prosecutor could present only two witnesses with a contrary story—Harold Wilson and William Edler. They testified quite vehemently that they had practically been accosted by eager prostitutes the moment they crossed the Arlington’s threshold. But Judge Landry, eager to be rid of a case that undoubtedly subjected him to intense pressure from all sides, had heard enough. Weighing the balance of the evidence given, he decided that the state had failed to make its case. “
There is no evidence to show that Mr. Anderson … knew what was going on at that time [when Wilson and Edler were openly solicited], and none to show that there was any intention on his part to violate the act as charged.” The ruling? Case dismissed, and the defendant discharged.

“
I will not discuss the case!” William Edler fumed as he left the courtroom. “I might be held for contempt of court if I said what I thought!”

The defendant himself seemed unsurprised by the dismissal. “
I conducted a first-class saloon and high-class restaurant,” he told reporters afterward, “which was patronized by some of the most prominent and influential business and professional men in New Orleans. Many of these men have brought their families to the restaurant. I have built up a reputation as a businessman in the community during the last 30 years and I would be the last man in the city to try and violate the law.”

Harold Wilson, of course, had his own thoughts on this last point, but he did see something positive in the outcome. The results of the trial, he insisted—including “
the amazing spectacle of reputable citizens testifying to the good character of a place notorious even to the remotest hamlet in the United States”—would surely serve as a kind of “public irritant.” It would enrage the truly respectable people of the city and harden their resolve to complete the ongoing cleansing of New Orleans. “
The best element of the citizenry of this town is thoroughly aroused,” he said. And he vowed that he would make every effort to ensure that Thomas Anderson would be tried again—this time in a federal court.

Tom Anderson’s lawyers, on the other hand, were soon making every effort to ensure the opposite. In a petition to the federal court, they argued that the six counts of the federal indictment were all
matters of state law, and that the state court had cleared their client of all of them. Recent US court decisions, in any case, had held that the war was officially ended (the Treaty of Versailles having been signed on June 28); that meant that “
the period of emergency [was] past, and legislation intended only for that period [was] no longer operative.” In other words, the federal prohibition against prostitution, as an emergency wartime measure, was defunct now that the war was over. The charges against Tom Anderson—even if they could be proved—would thus no longer be violations of US law, and would not be within the purview of a federal court.

The logic behind this argument, if somewhat convoluted, was not entirely specious, and there were rumors circulating in mid-October that the federal government might indeed drop the case. But those rumors just sent local reformers into even greater paroxysms of fury. An appeal sent out by Rev. U. G. Foote, chairman of the New Orleans Ministerial Union, urged local clergymen to speak out from their pulpits and give voice to “
the indignation of the best elements.” And the preachers responded, even going so far as to
threaten the US prosecutor with removal from office.

But while the city’s clergymen focused their ire on the former mayor of Storyville himself, their more politically minded brethren were after bigger game as well. Anderson may have won his first day in court, but the publicity generated by the trial provided excellent ammunition to be used against his political allies in the upcoming state elections. Specifically, the Ring-backed candidate for governor, Col. Frank P. Stubbs, was soon being tarred with the Tom Anderson brush in election rallies all over the state, with opponents warning that his election would bring about a “
thoroughly Tomandersonized” atmosphere at both the state and city level of government. Soon the reform candidate himself began picking up the anti-Anderson rhetoric. “
In this state,” John M. Parker intoned at a campaign rally shortly thereafter, “there are two kinds of democracy: the Thomas Anderson Democracy and the Thomas Jefferson Democracy.… The Thomas Jefferson Democracy is government of the people and for the people. The Thomas Anderson Democracy is government of the people, by the bosses for private gain. I admit that I have never been a Thomas Anderson Democrat.… I have always fought this system, and hope, with your help, to destroy it.”

Even an ambitious young railroad commissioner named Huey P. Long (who would eventually become the nemesis of both Parker
and
the New Orleans Ring) took up the cry against Anderson and the machine he represented. “
This New Orleans Ring sends to the legislature the men who run the red-light district, and these men make the laws under which the ministers and the boys and girls throughout the state must live,” he wrote in a statement published in the newspapers. “Surely the country should make it possible for the citizens of New Orleans to free themselves from this octopus.”

Faced with this barrage of attacks, that octopus could do little else but distance itself from its newly noxious tentacle. Anderson was thus dropped as the Ring candidate for a sixth term in the House (causing him to rail against his former friends’ “
ingratitude” in private conversations). Even so, the barrage of anti-Andersonism went on unabated.

The
Times-Picayune
, firmly in the anti-Ring camp, did its part by running a series of exposé articles in early January, on the eve of national Prohibition (and just before the state primaries). The series, under the title “
New Orleans Nights,” depicted the adventures of a young couple just looking to have a little naughty fun in the city’s demimonde. What they find, however, is an increasingly ugly world of dissipation and lawlessness, of aggressive prostitutes, addicted gamblers, and paid-off cops looking the other way. The series—which of course included a late-night visit to Anderson’s Arlington cabaret—culminated in an editorial diatribe against the notorious political machine that continued to let this filth thrive. “
Under 20 YEARS OF RING RULE,” the paper complained, “this crawling, fetid, contaminating monster of the UNDERWORLD has grown and grown, poisoning and corrupting all it touches.” Every word published in “New Orleans Nights,” the paper insisted, was true. “Our prayer is for you mothers and fathers and decent people of New Orleans, that the TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.”

For Stubbs and the rest of the Ring-backed candidates, this was the coup de grace. When the Democratic primary was held just a few days later, John M. Parker—the reformer who in his youth had been part of the mob of worthies who perpetrated the Orleans Parish Prison lynchings—
defeated his opponent Stubbs by some 12,000 votes and went on to become governor. He vowed that this was not the end: “
We are going to finish the destruction of the New Orleans Ring,” he told supporters at a rally in Lafayette Square, “[with] a final, smashing, knockout blow in the municipal campaign in September!”

For Tom Anderson, meanwhile, the news just kept getting worse. Despite protracted efforts by his lawyers to have the federal charges against him dismissed, the case in US District Court did go forward. At 11:51
A.M.
on Tuesday, February 3, 1920, Judge Foster called to order what the
Times-Picayune
called “
the case which has probably attracted more attention than any other cause lodged in federal courts here in many years.” The official charge against Anderson was for “
knowingly conducting an immoral resort within 10 miles of a military camp.” That word “knowingly” was going to be the key to the entire case. Given the evidence, no jury could possibly doubt that immoral liaisons were initiated at the Arlington; Anderson’s conscious involvement in those activities, however, would be harder to prove.

The first witness called was William Edler, the public health officer whose testimony in the first trial had been so damaging to Anderson’s cause. Here again he described the experience of his and Harold Wilson’s visit to the Arlington in June (much of which, according to the reporter from the
Item
, “
was of such a character that it cannot be admitted to print”). Anderson’s lawyers raised objections of all kinds to this testimony, and the exchanges between the defense and the prosecutors became rather heated. But Anderson himself just sat impassively behind his “screen of lawyers.” “Not one single strand of his thinning, iron-gray hair was out of place,” the
Item
reported, “and the only evidence of mental disturbance or agitation that could be remarked in his appearance was that he sat with his lower jaw sagging just a trifle, so that his mouth was open.”