Free Empire of Sin by Gary Krist Page A

am going into business for myself.”
    The young woman in question washis childhood sweetheart, Emma Schwartz, the daughter of Dutch immigrants living in his old neighborhood. The newlyweds set up house downtown on St. Louis Street. And within a year, Emma gave birth to a daughter, Irene. Young as he was, Tom was apparently very happy to be a family man. (“William,” he told one of his old coworkers from Insurance Oil, “I got a fine little baby girl up home.”) But it was not to last long. In November of 1881,Emma succumbed to typhoid fever. (“William,” Tom told the same colleague when next they met on the street, “my wife is dead.”) Clearly unprepared to raise an eighteen-month-old child alone, he turned Irene over to the St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum. There the child lived until she turned five, at which point he enrolled her in the St. Mary’s Convent School in nearby Carrollton. It was hardly an ideal arrangement, but Tom apparently felt he had no choice. His own mother was working full-time as a domestic and couldn’t care for the child, and Emma’s family was apparently in similar circumstances. This way, at least, the baby would be close enough for him to visit when he could.
    The 1880s proved to be a profitable decade for the young widower. He did not, as he had told his friends, go into business for himself, at least not yet. Instead, he worked as a bookkeeper for a number of other enterprises, including the Louisiana State Lottery Company. For an ambitious young man seeking to find his way in New Orleans’ semi-legitimate economy, there could have been no better training ground. Long the nemesis of Louisiana’s good-government reformers (W. S. Parkerson was a major foe), the Lottery wasa boondoggle of impressive proportions. Run as a private corporation, it was chartered by the state government to hold regular drawings and distribute cash prizes to the lucky winners. In exchange, the company donated the small sum of $40,000 annually to the Charity Hospital; the rest of the profits went to shareholders in the corporation. Of course, keeping such a government-sanctioned swindle in operation required copious incentives in high places, and the company’s attentive bookkeeper was sure to take note of exactly how these were provided. In this way, he learned the important lesson that you had to spend money to make money. And he was careful to do likewise in his own endeavors. Tom saved where he could, but also generously contributed to political campaigns, police department benefits, and charity drives sponsored by the men’s clubs he made sure to join. Soon the young lottery clerk was on intimate terms with some of the most prominent businessmen and political figures in town. These, of course, did not include the blue-blooded elites of the Boston and Pickwick Clubs; they never would have looked twice at an Irish Channel man. Instead, Tom’s new associates were the more down-to-earth sorts: the ward politicians and tavern owners, the newspaper reporters and fire department chiefs. These were the people a man could deal with, even if his forebears hadn’t had generations in which to wipe the soil of the potato fields from the family escutcheon. And although reformers were eventually successful in getting rid of the Lottery in 1893 (when the company’s charter expired and it was forced to move its operations to Honduras), Tom Anderson had by then gotten what he needed from the venture, having made connections in many of the significant places of power in the city.
    He cultivated those connections with all the care of a St. Charles Avenue yardman. When he scraped together enough money to open his first restaurant—atNo. 110–112 North Rampart Street, in collaboration with a friend named David Heller—he played the generous host to all of his police, politico, and demimonde friends. At Tom Anderson’s convivial establishment, such men could always find plenty of good food and fine liquor; perhaps