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That Agnello killed Barba in an effort to bring his rivals to heel made sense to many. But Agnello pointed an accusing finger at Octave Belot, an AfricanAmerican cigar maker and Republican state legislator who lived on Claiborne Street. Agnellos version of the Barba killing appeared to be supported by rumors that Belot suddenly had left his home and was hiding with a family of freedmen former slaves somewhere in the Quarter. The hunt for Belot busied small bands of the Innocenti for several days. During that time, a number of the homes of New Orleans’ African Americans were broken into, searched and robbed, and the Belot cigar shop on Claiborne and St. Anne Street was looted and destroyed.As Election Day approached and the number of federal troops in the city climbed, Macheca received a letter from temporary police superintendent General James Blair Steedman, pleading for a cessation of Innocenti marches. Steedman argued that Innocenti violence was playing into Republican hands, as it was providing cause for a return to the days of federal occupation.On Wednesday evening, Oct. 28, 1868, the Innocenti political brigade suspended its violent Presidential election season rampages through Republican neighborhoods and headed indoors. Members held a large rally at the Orleans Ballroom on Bourbon and Orleans Streets. The purposes of the gathering were to honor Edward Malone, who fell victim to African American vengeance two nights earlier, and to celebrate the group’s successful obstruction of French Quarter radical Republicanism.Late in the evening, however, the gathering received devastating news, and only the presence of U.S. troops on the street corners prevented Innocenti commander Joseph P. Macheca from initiating another bloody Twentysevenyearold Litero Barba, a leader in New Orleans Little Messina colony and a member of the Innocenti, was heading alone to his Hospital Street home after leaving the Orleans Ballroom. As he reached the corner of St. Philip and Chartres Streets, he was struck in the chest and abdomen by a shotgun blast. He was dead shortly after hitting the ground.

 

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