Empire of Sin by Gary Krist Read Free Book Online Page B

their eyes. Although this is usually a bad sign for defendants (few jurors like to meet the gaze of men they are condemning), this was not necessarily the case here. The accusations of jury tampering had created an atmosphere of suspicion in the courtroom, and the jurors knew that their judgments would be met with skepticism no matter what the outcome.
    The jury foreman, Jacob Seligman, handed the written verdict to the clerk, who passed it on to Judge Baker. After instructing the defendants to rise, the judge opened the folded paper and read the contents. He stared at the note for nearly a full minute—in what some reporters later interpreted as disapproval. Then he announced the jury’s findings to the room.
    The verdict came as a shock to nearly everyone. With regard to three of the defendants, including the apparently deranged Polizzi, the jury had been deadlocked; a mistrial was declared, meaning that all three would have to be retried. As for the other six—everyone from the wealthy shipper Macheca to Asperi Marchesi, the young boy accused of whistling to alert the assassins to the chief’s approach—the decision was unanimous: all were found not guilty.
    This outcome caused the spectators in the courtroom “to turn and look at one another in mute amazement.” But then the shouting began—both inside and outside the courthouse. Reporters rushed the dismissed jurors as they gathered up their belongings to leave. Besieged with questions, they refused to reveal anything about their decision. Sheriff Villere, knowing the reception they were likely to get outside, advised them to exit the building by the side door. But after some discussion, the jurors decided to brave the judgment of their fellow citizens. They left by the main courthouse door. And although the mob outside was unruly and belligerent, the jurors were able to push through the milling throngs unmolested. A boy in the crowd, apparently convinced that the bribery rumors were true, shouted to one juror: “Say, how much did you get?”
    The nine defendants, on the other hand, were met with more overt hostility. Though six of them had been acquitted of the murder charges, all had to be returned to prison until certain lesser charges against them could be formally withdrawn. They were thus again returned to the Black Marias waiting outside. A detail of police tried to hold back the jeering mob to clear a path. Despite some scuffling as spectators pushed against police lines, the prisoners were loaded into the vans without incident. Even so, a howl of frustrated rage rose up in their wake as they departed.
    The afternoon newspaper editorials about the outcome were blistering: “Red-handed murder … struck at the Law itself,” the Daily Item proclaimed, “and the agencies of the law were found impotent to punish the foul deed.” The writer for the Daily States was utterly apoplectic: “Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted civilization.” And yet the spillers of that blood were now to be set free. Such a verdict, according to the paper, was an affront to justice, a grievous injury that admitted only one possible solution: “Rise, people of New Orleans!”
    It was a suggestion that some “people of New Orleans” were already seriously contemplating.

    W HEN William S. Parkerson stepped into his second-floor law office at 7 Commercial Place that evening, he found several dozen agitated men waiting for him, with more arriving at the office door every minute. Parkerson had been in another courtroom all afternoon, but by now he had heard about the outcome of the Hennessy trial. So he knew why these men were here: incensed by the verdicts, they were looking to him for guidance on how to right what they all regarded as a blatant miscarriage of justice.
    That the men in his office—some of them much older and more prominent than he—should now turn to Parkerson for leadership was not