New Orleans, Louisiana, March 14th, 1891.

A Saturday morning, mild and bright, and the largest lynch mob in American history was gathering at the foot of a statue of Henry Clay.

The night before had not gone the way the city wanted. Nine men, all Italian

immigrants or of Italian descent, had stood trial for the murder of police chief David Hennessy,

gunned down on a damp October evening five months earlier as he walked home from work. The prosecution

had promised a reckoning. The jury delivered something else entirely,

six acquittals, three mistrials, not a single conviction. And by the time the courtroom cleared,

the word on every lip in New Orleans was the same. The mafia had fixed it. Whether that was true

mattered less than what happened next. The story of how 11 men died inside the

Orleans Parish Prison begins, as most New Orleans stories do, on the waterfront. By 1890,

the Crescent City had become the primary port of entry for Sicilian immigrants to the American

South. Between 1884 and 1924, nearly 300,000 Italians poured into the city,

most of them from Sicily, earning the French quarter the nickname Little Palermo.

Sugar planters had recruited them to replace black labor in the cane fields. They took the work

nobody else wanted, loading and unloading ships

along the levee, peddling fruit from wooden carts, cobbling shoes and dim storefronts on Decatur

Street. They were industrious and clannish and Catholic, and the old-stock citizens of New Orleans despise

them for it. Mayor Joseph A. Shakespeare, a reform Democrat who owed his office to an

alliance with the remnants of the Republican Party, made no secret of his contempt. He called the

Sicilians the most idle, vicious, and worthless people among us, accused them of spreading disease,

and declared them devoid of courage, honor,

truth, pride, religion, or inequality that goes to make a good citizen. That the Italian vote

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