A Mass Lynching That Helped Establish a Key Mob Rule
As the gang war between the Matrangas and Prozenzanos heated up, the violence spilled over. That put pressure on New Orleans’ authorities to act, so the police chief launched an investigation. For his troubles, he was assassinated in 1890. Unable to identify his killers, he stated “the Dagoes shot me“, just before he died. The result was a fierce backlash, and nineteen New Orleans Mafiosi were arrested and prosecuted. In the first trial of nine of them, the criminal defendants successfully tampered with the jury. Despite mountains of evidence against them, six were acquitted outright, while the other three had hung juries. The next day, March 14th, 1891, a mob of thousands, whose numbers included some of New Orleans’ most prominent citizens, stormed and broke into the prison that housed the defendants.
They dragged out and lynched eleven of them – the biggest single mass lynching (as opposed to massacre – there are specific terms for different types of atrocities) in US history. That had a salutary effect on the mafia. It demonstrated that America differed from Sicily and southern Italy, where criminals could act in brazen defiance of the authorities and society, with little to fear from either. In the US, there were limits to what criminals could get away with. From then on, the Italian-American mafia adopted strict rules against the targeting of law enforcement, and rigorously enforced them. As seen below, the mafia did not hesitate to preemptively kill major mobsters who sought to go after cops and prosecutors, and thus threatened to bring down unwanted heat upon their criminal operations.
