Bloody ends of early NOLA bosses - Part 4

Crescent City underworld leaders lost their lives in long Mafia feud

From Part 3: Giuseppe “Joseph” Agnello took over the leadership of the Palermo Mafia faction in New Orleans following the April 1, 1869, assassination of his brother Raffaele. Joseph Agnello's priority was seeing rival leaders Casabianca and Alluchi successfully prosecuted for the killing of bystander Daniel Clark during a Poydras Market gunfight. Agnello forces pressured witnesses and tried to kill at least one witness for the defense. An attempt was made on the life of Joseph Agnello at Lafayette Square when he reported there on a legal matter. Two rival faction leaders were charged with that attempt. On June 13, 1869, police arrested a suspect in the Raffaele Agnello assassination, Joseph Florda/Fleuet. Seeking to have the man freed from police custody, Agnello relative Frank Saccaro announced that Florda was not the gunman who killed Agnello.

Alluchi and Banano

Violence erupted near the Old French Market on Thursday morning, July 22, 1869. The local press was somewhat confused in its early reporting, but a morning of gunplay appears to have been sparked by a brief confrontation near the market.

The New Orleans Times reported that Joseph Agnello encountered two rivals there at the corner of Chartres (formerly Conde) and Dumaine streets about seven-thirty, and shots were fired. The Times said the shots were fired by Agnello. The other two men, reportedly unarmed, fled northwest (away from the river) on Dumaine. A police officer arrived and began to arrest Agnello, but Agnello insisted that the other two men had shot at him and were now getting away. The officer found Agnello's story convincing, let him go and went in pursuit of the others.¹

It is not clear if this was an entirely different incident (with some mixed up details) from one that was apparently more reliably reported in the New Orleans Daily Picayune.

According to the Picayune, Agnello's top gunman Salvatore Rosa was out at the French Market around eight that morning. He was at the levee near the foot of St. Philip Street, when he observed a number of men he knew to be enemies gathered a block away at Ursulines Street. They saw Rosa and began calling and gesturing to him. One may have pointed a firearm in Rosa's direction. Salvatore Rosa fled up St. Philip Street and armed himself in a nearby house.²

A very short time passed. Rosa's group of enemies thinned out a bit. Just two remained of the group that threatened him. Pietro Alluchi and Joseph Banano, leaders of the Messina/Trapani underworld faction in the city, were conversing outside the market near the railroad tracks and did not notice that a horse-drawn spring wagon - a common enough sight for the location - had been positioned near them.