Originally Posted by Moe_Tilden
Quote
According to a story published in the Washington Post, on March 14, 1891, a crowd of 8,000 assembled on New Orleans' Canal Street, "almost filling up the large space from curb to curb on each side of the boulevard." The crowd, possessed by an "ungovernable" fury, had guns and arrived at the parish prison at 10:30 that night. Prison guards let the mob into the prison, where they eventually found the Italian prisoners. "The shotguns belched forth and the slayers of Hennessy fell dead in their tracks," the story says.


Did these people kill Hennessy or were they wrongfully accused?

The article doesn't make it very clear.


On the evening of October 15, 1890, Hennessy was shot by several gunmen as he walked home from work. Hennessy returned fire and chased his attackers before collapsing. When asked who had shot him, Hennessy reportedly whispered to Captain William O'Connor: "Dagoes." Hennessy was awake in the hospital for several hours after the shooting and spoke to friends but did not name the shooters. The next day, complications set in and he died.

There had been an ongoing feud between the Provenzano and Mantranga families, who were business rivals on the New Orleans waterfront. Hennessy had put several of the Provenzanos in prison, and their appeal trial was coming up. According to some reports, Hennessy had been planning to offer new evidence at the trial to clear the Provenzanos and implicate the Mantrangas. That would mean that the Mantrangas, not the Provenzanos, had a motive for the murder.A policeman, a friend of Hennessy, later testified that Hennessy had told him he had no such plans.In any case, it was widely believed that Hennessy's killers were Italian. Local papers such as the Times-Democrat and the Daily Picayune freely blamed "Dagoes" for the murder.

For me Hennessy was killed by one of his much enemies that used the Matranga-Provenzano war to get away with murder,the fact that Hennessy told his killers "Dagos" doesn't mean nothing,he for sure know that the italian mafia wanted him dead and thinked that the dagoes shoot him.At the end 11 innocent men died because of the bigoted sons of bitches.