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subtlety. “Scour the whole neighborhood,” he said. “Arrest every Italian you come across, if necessary. And scour it again tomorrow morning as soon as there is light enough. Get all the men you need.”

    A T Charity Hospital,Chief Hennessy was now lying on the table in the operating amphitheater, which by this time was filled with anxious friends, colleagues, and reporters. The chief’s bloodstained shirt and undershirt had been cut away, and he was being examined by assistant house surgeon J. D. Bloom and several student physicians. What they found was not encouraging. Hennessy had received multiple bullet wounds—one in his right leg, another in his left forearm. But the most serious wounds were the four ugly, gaping holes that cratered the left side of his torso. One of these seemed especially dangerous; a bullet, after entering the chest just below the left nipple, had apparently grazed the pericardium (or heart sac), perforated the right lung, and lodged under the skin near the eighth rib. In Bloom’s opinion, the wound was inoperable. And though it was not necessarily fatal, the surgeon thought it best, after bandaging all of the wounds, to call in a priest to administer last rites.
    Shortly after one o’clock, old Mrs. Hennessy was finally brought to the amphitheater, clinging to the arm of Thomas C. Anderson, one of her son’s closest friends. Hennessy was still conscious and spoke in consoling tones to her, assuring her that she needn’t worry about him. “Now go home, Mother,” he said after a few minutes with her. “I am all right.” Reluctantly, the old woman let herself be led away.
    Assistant recorder David Hollander then approached the wounded man. “Chief, you know who I am,” he whispered. “Do you wish to make a declaration?”
    The question was veiled but unambiguous. If the chief had recognized or could give a description of any of his assailants, now was the time to make a statement—a dying declaration that would be admissible evidence in court. But Hennessy stubbornly refused. “No, I don’t think I am that bad off,” he said. Then he asked for a glass of milk—a request that was gently refused by his doctor.
    Over the next few hours, between periodic examinations by Dr. Bloom, several of Hennessy’s friends and colleagues attempted to elicit a statement from him. But the chief, who was now resting more comfortably under a heavy dose of opiates, continued to insist that he would recover. Toward dawn, however, Hennessy’s condition worsened noticeably. Messengers were again sent to fetch his mother. Before she arrived, Captain Beanham tried a last time to coax a statement from the dying man. “Captain, I tell you I am going to get well,” the chief insisted, and when Beanham persisted, Hennessy bluntly dismissed his concerns: “Your alarm is unnecessary,” he said. “These people can’t kill me.”
    This bit of bravado, however, proved empty. After spending a few more minutes with his mother, going over his financial affairs, the chief began to sink rapidly. He held on for a few more hours as friends gathered around his sickbed to pay their last respects. By now, he was incapable of making a declaration even if he wanted to. He died at ten minutes past nine on Thursday morning.

    B Y midday, virtually everyone in the city had heard about the “dastardly deed” perpetrated on Girod Street the night before. Evidence that the murder had in fact been the work of Italians was hardly conclusive, but the shocked citizens of New Orleans were fully prepared to think the worst of a group they had long regarded as threatening and undesirable. And so outrage against the city’s Sicilian population was growing by the hour. A quickly composed editorial in the Daily States echoed the opinion of many New Orleanians in condemning “a class of foreigners who infest this city, known as Dagos”—a term that no one seemed shy about using, even in print. “Heretofore these people have