the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt eleven)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

Sicilian criminals appeared in New Orleans soon after the beginning of the great wave of immigration from southern Europe before the Civil War, and within a few years were operating in well-organized bands in various parts of the city. As early as 1861, on June 22, the True Delta declared that “recent developments have satisfied the police of the city that an organized gang of Spanish and Sicilians thieves and burglars have long made their headquarters in the Second and Third Districts.” Two months later the same newspaper reported the arrest of a band of Sicilian counterfeiters and again called attention to the presence in New Orleans of large numbers of Sicilian robbers and assassins. On March 19, 1869 the Times said that the Second District was infested by “well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars, who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general co-partnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city.” This “co-partnership” was the Stoppagherra Society, organized as a branch of the Mafia by four men, who, driven from Palermo by the Sicilian authorities, arrived in New Orleans early in 1869. The assassins of the Stoppagherra quickly disposed of a gang of Messina men who attempted to set up a rival band in the autumn of 1869, and thereafter the Mafia was the dominating element in Italian crime, not only in New Orleans but elsewhere in the United States, for with the Louisiana metropolis as headquarters, branches were soon established in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other large cities. To these havens of refuge and opportunity, largely through the kind offices of politicians who found the Mafia a great help at election times, flowed a stream of criminals from Sicily and other parts of Italy. In New Orleans alone during the late 1880’s, according to the Italian Consul, Pasquale Corte, there were a hundred escaped Italian criminals, not one of whom had entered the country legally. Many had become naturalized citizens. These desperadoes, and other members of the Mafia, kept the Italian colony of New Orleans in a state of terror for more than twenty years, and grew rich and powerful upon the proceeds of robbery, extortion, and assassination, most of the victims being fellow-countrymen who had failed to pay the sums demanded by the Mafia leaders. A few of these killings – there were about seventy during the two decades – were committed with knives, but in most of them the murderers used a weapon known to the New Orleans police as “the Mafia gun” – a shotgun with the barrels sawed off to about eighteen inches, and the stock sawed through near the trigger and hollowed out. The stock was then fitted with hinges, and the entire gun folded up like a jackknife. It was carried inside the coat on a hook. Loaded with slugs or buckshot, it was as deadly a weapon up to thirty yards as had ever been devised.