America's First Mafia War

New Orleans, 1868-1872

By Thomas Hunt
and Martha Macheca Sheldon

[Note: This article is an excerpt from Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia by Thomas Hunt and Martha Macheca Sheldon, published by iUniverse, 2007.]

On Wednesday evening, Oct. 28, 1868, the Innocenti political brigade suspended its violent Presidential election season rampages through Republican neighborhoods and headed indoors. Members held a large rally at the Orleans Ballroom on Bourbon and Orleans Streets. The purposes of the gathering were to honor Edward Malone, who fell victim to African American vengeance two nights earlier, and to celebrate the group’s successful obstruction of French Quarter radical Republicanism.

Late in the evening, however, the gathering received devastating news, and only the presence of U.S. troops on the street corners prevented Innocenti commander Joseph P. Macheca from initiating another bloody march.

Orleans Ballroom

Twenty-seven-year-old Litero Barba, a leader in New Orleans' Little Messina colony and a member of the Innocenti, was heading alone to his Hospital Street home after leaving the Orleans Ballroom. As he reached the corner of St. Philip and Chartres Streets, he was struck in the chest and abdomen by a shotgun blast. He was dead shortly after hitting the ground.

A number of Barba’s close friends believed Raffaele Agnello, boss of the local Mafia, was responsible for the killing.

Agnello arrived in New Orleans in 1860, one of the earlier Sicilian immigrants to reach American shores. He and his brother lived together for a time in the 5th Ward of the city - the central third of the French Quarter or Vieux Carré. The Agnellos appear to have had a Mafia pedigree from their home city of Palermo. Raffaele's prestige was enhanced by the U.S. Civil War. As federal forces moved into New Orleans in April 1862, Confederate military units and police forces were pulled out. Only the European Brigade of the state militia, of which Agnello was a prominent member, remained to keep order. Postwar immigration of western Sicilians into the city further strengthened Agnello. By 1868, he led one of three large gangs in the French Quarter. His rivals were an organization of immigrants from Messina on Sicily's east coast and the largely Sicilian Democratic militia known as the Innocenti. There was no clear dividing line between the organizations, as they shared a number of members in common.

That Agnello killed Barba in an effort to bring his rivals to heel made sense to many. But Agnello pointed an accusing finger at Octave Belot, an African-American cigar maker and Republican state legislator who lived on Claiborne Street. Agnello's version of the Barba killing appeared to be supported by rumors that Belot suddenly had left his home and was hiding with a family of freedmen (former slaves) somewhere in the Quarter. The hunt for Belot busied small bands of the Innocenti for several days. During that time, a number of the homes of New Orleans’ African Americans were broken into, searched and robbed, and the Belot cigar shop on Claiborne and St. Anne Street was looted and destroyed.

As Election Day approached and the number of federal troops in the city climbed, Macheca received a letter from temporary police superintendent General James Blair Steedman, pleading for a cessation of Innocenti marches. Steedman argued that Innocenti violence was playing into Republican hands, as it was providing cause for a return to the days of federal occupation.

Major General Lovell Harrison Rousseau, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of the Gulf, personally appeared before an Innocenti meeting on Saturday, October 30th. A bulletin from New Orleans was published in newspapers around the country:

General Rousseau

General Rousseau last night visited the club rooms of the “Innocents,” the club which was most prominent in the recent troubles with the negroes, and in which considerable feeling still exists on account of the death and wounding of several of its members. In a short speech the general warned them that the responsibility for all outrages and disorders in New Orleans was laid on his shoulders, and that he looked to them to keep the peace and encourage others to do the same. He said he felt it his duty to tell them that the laws must be observed, and that every man who had the right to vote shall vote unmolested on Election Day. Gen. Rousseau was enthusiastically received by the club. The number of troops in the city is small.

Possibly feeling that recent events had provided him and his cause a measure of recognition, Macheca halted his organization’s pre-election activities and began dismantling the Innocenti.

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