Free Empire of Sin by Gary Krist

Company Not Controlled by Trusts or Monopolies”), dispensing everything from axle grease to salad oils from a warehouse in the Central Business District. Some said Tom Anderson was extraordinarily lucky. But luck, as he well knew, was something that had to be made; luck was hard work and handshakes; it was cultivating influential friends from all walks of life, both high and low, and making sure they were happy. And now, flush with this early success, he was evencontemplating that inevitable next step—into politics, the game that in New Orleans was so often the key to greater prosperity.
    Tom Anderson, in short, was a man who so far had made very few mistakes in his life. Except one: namely, Mrs . Tom Anderson, the former Catherine Turnbull, Tom’s second wife. On January 24, 1894—in what must have been a weak moment—he’d married the pretty but combative young prostitute, and had regretted it almost immediately. Their marriage had beena disaster from the beginning—a nonstop melodrama of bickering, histrionics, and recriminations. Less than a year after the wedding, Anderson was already desperate to call it quits. He sued his wife for a separation of bed and board, hoping eventually to divorce (without alimony or division of joint property) and just move on as if the whole thing had never happened. But Kate was not about to let him off so easily. She was Mrs. Anderson now; there was no way she was just going to disappear with nothing to show for their association. So she was willing to fight him in court to prevent it.
    That their brief marriage had come to this impasse was somewhat out of character for the genial young businessman. Tom Anderson, after all, was well known for being accommodating to everyone, willing to go along to get along, forever the man eager to do a favor that would, in the natural course of things, eventually be repaid. It was the law of the streets he grew up on—reciprocity, mutual protection. Asthe product of a bloody-fisted childhood in the neighborhood known as the Irish Channel, Tom had learned early in life that those who escaped the rough Channel streets were those who hustled, made friends, avoided trouble, and kept an eye out for the main chance. When, as a young boy peddling the Daily Picayune on street corners, he happened to witness a petty theft on Basin Street, he did not, as so many other boys would have done, clam up when a patrolman asked him about it. Instead, he pointed out the thief’s hiding place, and even agreed to testify in court about everything he’d seen. For this service he received a small monetary reward; more important, the deed also earned him a reputation among the local constabulary as a boy who could be relied upon. Most likely, it had been a calculation on Tom’s part: a sneak thief could do nothing for him, but a beat cop … well, you never knew.…
    But Tom liked to make himself useful to others in the neighborhood as well. He wasn’t overly fussy about his associates, and he was soon helping out at the local brothels, running to the corner pharmacy to fetch the ladies their regular doses of opium and cocaine. When someone told the boy that those drugs, while easy to obtain in New Orleans, were actually illegal, he obligingly agreed to forgo the deliveries—at least while his police friends were watching.
    Though his career at school had been undistinguished and brief, Tom’s mathematical abilities had nonetheless been sharp enough to land him a job early on asa bookkeeper and shipping clerk for the Insurance Oil Company. Here he did everything right—working hard, ingratiating himself with his coworkers, and saving as much of his salary as possible. After just a few years of apprenticeship, he was ready for bigger things. One day in 1879, when he was just nineteen or twenty years old, he breezed into the office and made an announcement to his colleagues: “Well, boys, I am going to leave you. I got married to a young woman uptown, [and] I