12. How The Mafia Realized that Killing American Cops Was Not Good
By the 1870s, Italian criminals in New Orleans had established the Matranga crime family. Operating out of a salon and brothel, they expanded their activities from prostitution to labor racketeering and extortion rackets known as the Black Hand. They collected “tribute” from Italian workers, as well as from a rival Italian crime family, the Prozenzanos, who monopolized fruit shipments. In the 1880s, fighting broke out between the crime families, over control of New Orleans’ waterfront. As each family brought in more goons from Italy, the violence spilled over, putting pressure on the authorities to act. When New Orleans’ police chief launched an investigation, he was assassinated in 1890. His dying words before expiring were “the Dagoes shot me“.
19 Mafiosi were arrested and prosecuted, but in the first trial of 9 of them, the mafia tampered with the jury. Despite overwhelming evidence, 6 were acquitted outright, while the remaining 3 got hung juries. Next day, March 14th, 1891, a mob of thousands, including some of New Orleans’ most prominent citizens, gathered. They broke into the prison housing the defendants, and lynched 11 of them – the biggest single mass lynching (as opposed to massacre) in US history. It was an object lesson that the mafia never forgot. Unlike Sicily and southern Italy, where criminals could act in brazen contempt of the authorities and society, there were limits to what could be gotten away with in America. From that day to the present, the Italian-American mafia followed strict rules against targeting law enforcement, lest doing so invite a backlash ruinous to their business and to their health.