Letter Signed, probably Secretarial, on printed stationery as “Commission Merchant, Importer and Wholesale Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Fruits and Nuts”. 1 pp.

To John W. Park, Greenville, Georgia, a noted attorney, one-time President of the state Bar Association, accepting his advice to wait 10 more days to collect a $40 debt. The subject of a recently-published biography, Joseph P. Macheca, a New Orleans fruit merchant, was “Godfather” of a criminal gang on the city’s waterfront which became the foundation of the Mafia in America. In 1891, after being acquitted of plotting the murder of the New Orleans Chief of Police, Macheca was lynched by an officially-sanctioned mob of xenophobic vigilantes who broke into the prison where he was being held, killing him and other Italo-Americans accused of the assassination. Most Macheca business and family records were destroyed in a fire a year after his death. Macheca’s biographers located only a dozen commercial notes held by the University of New Orleans, and it’s possible that even those were neither written nor signed by him personally. This letter, dated eleven years before his murder, is the only known example of Macheca correspondence to appear at auction.