Free Empire of Sin by Gary Krist Page B

most helpfully, they could also find private rooms where deals, payoffs, and rendezvous could be made, far from the prying eyes of strict constructionists of the law. In fact, Anderson’s soon became known as a kind of “neutral ground,” a place where representatives from different spheres could meet and hammer out their mutually beneficial understandings. And whenever such parties came together, Tom Anderson was always right there—to make introductions, arbitrate disputes, and keep everyone’s beer mugs full to the brim.
    His hospitality (“My motto,” he always claimed in advertisements, “[is] ‘The Best of Everything’ ”) was soon the stuff of urban lore. When he branched out into the boxing game—as manager of Andy Bowen, the lightweight champion of the South—there were always free tickets to distribute to his friends and associates. When the horse owned by his oil company ran a race at the City Park or Fair Grounds Racetrack, choice grandstand seats were available to anyone who might look kindly on one of his future projects. Yes, the prickly reform types might be immune to such blandishments, and they were not above harassing him in small ways, seeing that he was fined or even briefly arrested on minor charges of illegal gambling or serving liquor on a Sunday. But these petty annoyances could always be made to go away, particularly for a man with so many friends who happened to be cops or judges.
    Sometime in the early 1880s, while he was still in his twenties, Anderson and another friend, Frank Lamothe, had begun sponsoring an annual Mardi Gras fete, a so-called French ball to which ladies of a certain type were admitted free of charge. Advertised as “The Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen,” it soon became one of the most sought-after tickets of the season. To many, it was a welcome corrective to the stuffy, formal affairs sponsored by the more established Carnival krewes. Anderson’s fete was a kind of parody of those other celebrations, which had grown up in the decades after Reconstruction. Elite krewes like Comus, Momus, and the Twelfth Night Revelers had beencreated expressly to bring order and hierarchy to Mardi Gras; their elaborate programs of balls and processions were designed to be exclusive—in order to keep undesirables out, to push disrespectable riffraff off to the sidelines.
    The Ball of the Two Well Known Gentlemen, on the other hand, was the regular New Orleanian’s answer to this high-handed appropriation of Mardi Gras. Like the elite krewes’ balls, Tom Anderson’s affair featured a royal court and a series of costumed tableaux. But “the queen and her court were prostitutes, not virgins from prominent families. Women in tights, not men in costumes, performed the tableaux.” The result was an alternative Mardi Gras, a Carnival for the city’s other half. And for a man on the rise like Tom Anderson, being co-host of an event like this was priceless publicity, an excellent means of raising his profile and setting himself up as a mover and shaker in the city’s semi-legitimate economy.
    It was at this point in his life, in the early 1890s, that he decided to give marriage a second chance. Little is known about Catherine Turnbull, the twenty-nine-year-old woman from St. Louis he married in early 1894. Apparently, she was a widow who had fallen into prostitution after the premature death of her first husband, a man named M. L. Roder. But her profession made little difference to Tom Anderson. Having grown up as a messenger boy for Irish Channel brothels, he held little truck with the hypocrisies of Victorian moral ideals, and seemed to truly enjoy the company of prostitutes. But Kate soon became an exception. Within months of his bringing her into the Prytania Street home that he shared with his widowed mother, Honora, the battle was on. The elder Mrs. Anderson developed a vehement dislike of her new daughter-in-law, and Tom, like the dutiful Irish son he was, always took