The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  Despite the panic and the headlines, Petrosino found that his superiors, to his surprise and consternation, appeared largely indifferent to Black Hand crime. Time after time, Petrosino implored the NYPD to go after the Society and mount serious prosecutions. “He was laughed at,” reported the Washington Post, “and told that ‘Black Hand’ was but a term coined by some sensational writer and alarmist. ‘Run along and tend to your work on the waterfront,’ was the advice given.” It was as if the Italians, with their omertà and their stilettos, weren’t worth protecting.

  Petrosino himself opposed any cutoff in immigration from southern Italy, knowing that every time passage was denied to an Italian family, it snapped a lifeline for men and women desperate for dignity and bread. But he also knew that each sensational Black Hand crime tilted the balance of American sentiment closer and closer toward raw hate. Defeating the Society wasn’t just a matter of stopping a few murders. It was tightly bound up with the destiny of his people in the new land.

  …

  In the summer of 1904, Petrosino began to formulate a plan for stopping the Black Hand. Once he had worked out the details, he called a journalist friend and the two met for an interview. When the resulting piece was published, it became clear that the detective’s opinion of the Society had changed and grown more somber. “The ramifications of this confederation of outlawry,” he told the reporter, “reach the uttermost parts of the earth.” The explosion of violence and kidnapping had shaken him. But he believed he’d arrived at a solution. Petrosino was calling on the NYPD to create a special bureau of detectives, to be called “the Italian Squad,” to take on and destroy the Society. “Give me twenty active and ambitious men of my own people to drill in the detective service,” he said, “and within a few months at most, I shall root out every vestige of the accursed guilds from this free country.” Petrosino lost no time in presenting the idea to Commissioner William McAdoo at 300 Mulberry Street.

  The urbane McAdoo was an immigrant himself, having been born in County Donegal, Ireland, and brought to America during the height of the Civil War as a twelve-year-old boy. Balding, vigorous, and ruggedly handsome, he was a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey who’d worked his way through law school by taking a job as a reporter in Jersey City. It showed; he was a marvelous writer. His description of running a police department in wide-open Manhattan in the early 1900s could hardly be improved upon: “Imagine the captain of a steamer in mid-ocean on the bridge, his vessel struggling with a hurricane, fierce and cruel winds, mountainous seas, blasts of thunder, shafts of lightning; the bulwarks have gone, the anchors torn from their fastenings; the engines are plunging and racing; the whole fabric is rending and groaning.” His view of the commissionership, in which he was asked to please Tammany Hall while preventing New Yorkers from killing one another, was even darker: “His official life is a plaything of the moment. He is a king on sufferance . . . The more original, radical, honest, and earnest he is, the less likely he is to remain in office.”

  McAdoo was by all accounts an honest man; he was never touched by the corruption scandals that regularly rocked the department. But he didn’t want an Italian Squad: in this matter, he had no desire to be either “original” or “radical.” There was no German or Irish Squad, so why should there be an Italian one? As a native-born Irishman, McAdoo knew how unpopular the idea would be with his Celtic rank and file. A new squad would create a powerful bureau led by a deeply maligned group that maintained the merest fingerhold within the NYPD; only Italian speakers would be eligible to staff it, shutting out the Irish from jobs and promotions. Furthermore, every detective assigned to the Italian colonies was one who wasn’t protecting other New Yorkers. When he weighed the matter, McAdoo saw no reason to risk his position for an incorrigible lot of violent men.

  From the point of view of the men who controlled the NYPD—that is, the Irish grandees of Tammany—protecting Italians was a losing proposition. New York cops were meant to protect voters, who in their turn kept Tammany in power. And the Italians were notorious for not voting, for clinging to the memories of their orchards and their town squares at the expense of integrating into their new country. At the turn of the century, 90 percent of Irish immigrants were American citizens, but by 1912, fewer than half of their Italian peers were naturalized. If one scanned the list of state legislators supported by Tammany around 1900, one would see how successful the organization was in absorbing the waves of new immigrants into its fold: here was a Dolan and a McManus, yes, but also a Litthauer, a Goldsmith, and a Rosen from the very same streets where the Italians lived. But where were the Zangaras, the Tomasinos, the Fendis? There were none. In Tammany’s cosmos, the Italians were residents of a distant planet.

  So when Petrosino brought the commissioner his idea, an argument broke out. When the detective pointed out the obvious—that Italians didn’t trust Irish cops, for excellent reasons—McAdoo had an answer waiting. The police in Sicily often dealt with Italians who didn’t trust them and still managed to make cases. Why couldn’t he? The problem wasn’t with the department. “The trouble now is that an Italian criminal at once seeks refuge behind racial and national sympathy,” he told the press. “Police work with the Italians, even at its best, will not get the results desired, unless it is followed up by a moral movement on the part of the better class of Italians.” The translation: the cancer lay within the Italian soul.

  This was a common response to “the Italian problem” in 1904. It was considered as impossible to separate an Italian from violence as it was to cleave an Irishman from the love of his mother or a German from his hard-earned money. And if the Italians were indeed incorrigible, what was the point in policing them? The fact was that Sicilians reacted especially badly when approached by a cop. “The sight of a uniform,” commented a magazine writer of the time, “means to them either a tax-gatherer, a compulsory enlistment in the army, or an arrest, and at its appearance the men will run and the women and children will turn to stone.”

  Petrosino refused to accept this argument. He told McAdoo that this wasn’t a question of genetics or culture but rather one of money, tactics, attention, the seriousness with which Americans confronted the Black Hand problem. “Do you know what my compatriots say when they talk about America?” he told the commissioner. “They say, ‘An Italian discovered it and the Jews and the Irish run it.’ Try giving the Italians a little power, too, and maybe there will be some change.”

  It must be pointed out that this quote, which comes from Petrosino’s Italian biographer Arrigo Pettaco, cannot be confirmed. Pettaco provides no source for the wonderful line, and it can’t be located in any newspaper of the time. It might easily be an example of wishful thinking on the part of an Italian writer outraged over the treatment of his people. But even if Pettaco couldn’t resist making up the quote out of whole cloth, the spirit of his account is accurate. This was an argument about power in New York City, about who wielded it and whether Italian Americans deserved a share of it, if only to save themselves from violent death.

  McAdoo stood firm. He vetoed the idea of an Italian Squad. The city’s Board of Aldermen backed the decision.

  Petrosino was in despair. His people were being abducted and killed, and the rulers of Manhattan didn’t care a whit. And it wasn’t just the NYPD. The courts, Petrosino believed, rarely took Black Hand crime seriously. The maximum sentence for attempted extortion was two and a half years; first offenders received even lighter sentences. In Franklin Park, New Jersey, a prolific extortionist who had signed his letters “President of the Black Hand” received just eight months in the workhouse after his conviction. “Of other crimes than murder on the part of Italian malefactors,” wrote the journalist Frank Marshall White, who was the sharpest observer of the Black Hand in New York, “few ever reach the courts or are heard of outside the Italian colonies.”

  With Roosevelt now occupying the White House, Petrosino was alone within the department. There are no mentions in the many
hundreds of articles on his career of his first mentor, Clubber Williams, intervening on his behalf. There were no Italian politicians to look to for support; the Italians were the fastest-growing segment of the city’s population but were barely represented in city or state government. It wasn’t just that Petrosino chose not to complain but that, had he done so, he would probably have lost the only support he had: the support of the public. “Petrosino could expect no favors,” wrote a journalist, “and in consequence he asked for none.”

  What he had, too, was the press. Petrosino the path breaker, the incorruptible one, had become a favorite theme of the metropolitan dailies. Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal as well as Adolph Ochs’s New York Times found in the burly, intellectual detective a champion. “When murder and blackmail are in the air,” declared the Times, “and the menfolk are white-faced and the womenfolk are saying litanies to the Blessed Mother . . . all Little Italy looks to the Italian detective to protect it and guard it.” If the press couldn’t quite love the Italians, it was bound and determined to love Petrosino.

  The detective pressed his case. Without an Italian Squad, he feared the Society would become even more powerful and cruel; it would spread across the country and cripple any chance his people had of being accepted as true Americans. Already the knife-wielding Italian was a stock figure on the stages of Broadway and Chicago. As long as the Black Hand ruled the headlines, the Italian would always be a thing apart. A monster.

  Petrosino reasoned with the bureaucracy at 300 Mulberry. “He endeavored to impress upon them,” wrote one journalist, “the urgent need of drastic measures to crush the ever-growing peril.” On occasion, Petrosino was granted a meeting. “At other times, he was dismissed with scant courtesy, although even the highest in authority well knew that this policeman’s record was flawless, and that in no essential was he an alarmist.” The detective buttonholed journalists and repeated his warnings about the Society. He even managed to enlist a powerful ally, Elliott Norton, the president of the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, who called on McAdoo and urged him to approve the Italian Squad. But McAdoo rebuffed Petrosino again, and the detective fell into a depression.

  His mind turned to the people he was trying to protect. He felt betrayed by the many hundreds of Black Hand victims who’d failed to testify against the Society and who’d funded its outrages, breathed life into it. “The problem with my people,” he told one journalist, “is that . . . they are timid, and will not give information about their fellow-countrymen. If they would form a Vigilance League that would drive into the hands of the police Italian malefactors, they would be as safe as any one else and not have as the penalty of their industry and prosperity the payment of large sums to the idle and worthless.” This was his public stance; it was one of quiet regret. But there were moments when Petrosino lost patience with his own people and hated the victims of the Black Hand more than he hated the criminals themselves. He “called the victims sheep,” said the Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini, “and threw on them fierce invective.” Petrosino was at a low point, filled with despair. Why did his people refuse to unite against these barbarians?

  And yet the city he was so enamored with, the city that Italians were building with their exhausting labor, had also failed to live up to its duty. It was freeing Black Handers to kill and kidnap again. “The endless frustration,” wrote his Italian biographer, “of seeing the courts promptly release men he had arduously hunted down made him hard and pitiless.” In the face of the city’s indifference, Petrosino issued a warning. The Society, he told reporters, was just beginning its work. If it wasn’t stopped, the pestilence would spread. “At present,” he said, “the Black Hand desperadoes attack only their own countrymen, but unless they are checked, they will get bolder and attack Americans.” It wasn’t just a tactic; Petrosino really believed this to be true and repeated the statement often.

  The detective could sense the future for Italian Americans darkening; he foresaw catastrophe. The belief in himself and his country that had propelled him to smash his shoeshine box that afternoon years before was nearing exhaustion. “He felt abandoned,” said Barzini, “left alone in the huge fight.”

  4

  The Mysterious Six

  The battle went on all through the summer of 1904. Petrosino continued to lobby for an Italian Squad; McAdoo issued rejection after rejection. Then a series of grisly Black Hand crimes tipped the balance. It became clear that the Society, rather than disappearing, was growing in power and that the journalists on Park Row would continue to play up the stories. Headlines trumpeted the Society’s rise.

  On September 14, McAdoo called Petrosino into his office. “They finally granted your request,” he told the detective grudgingly. “You are now authorized to set up an Italian Squad. You yourself will select its members.” It was an unexpected coup. Petrosino’s would be the first such bureau in the nation’s history. But McAdoo was being sly. Petrosino had asked for “a little power” for the Italians and that’s exactly what the commissioner gave him—a little power. Petrosino had requested twenty men but got five instead, and no budget to speak of.

  When McAdoo announced the new squad to the press, he gave it a benign mission. “The honest Italian,” McAdoo said, “must be made to understand that the police are not his enemies, but his friends.” Petrosino knew that this was only half the story: first he had to stun the Black Hand into submission; only then could he win the confidence of his people.

  The detective began to look around Manhattan’s squad rooms for his five men. In selecting his team, the detective didn’t have a large pool to choose from. The NYPD had around ten thousand policemen in 1904, but fewer than twenty could speak Italian, and perhaps only four or five could converse in Sicilian. The first members of the Italian Squad were detectives whom Petrosino pulled from various precincts in the city, men he’d worked with or knew by reputation.

  His first choice was Maurice Bonnoil, son of French-Irish parents who’d grown up in Little Italy. Bonnoil was known for his fluency: his Sicilian was actually better than his English. He’d worked with Petrosino for years and was in the middle of a highly colorful career, in which he’d done everything from saving a young woman from being forced into an opium den to arresting “the Beautiful Twins,” transvestite brothers who were fond of strolling down Broadway in “rustling skirts and picture hats.” Next came Peter Dondero, a well-spoken twenty-seven-year-old who’d been on the force for three years and had proved himself a bit of an aesthete. “This is the prettiest decorated city I have ever had the pleasure to visit,” he told the Los Angeles Herald while on a visit to pick up a prisoner. “The bright sunshine with the cool breeze makes this an ideal city.” Despite his fine eye for urban planning, Dondero was tough; he would later wear a jagged scar across his face from a battle with a vagrant named Harry “Pussy” Meyers. During another collar, an Italian criminal pressed a revolver to Dondero’s mouth and pulled back the hammer. Dondero managed to snatch the gun away from his face just before it fired.

  George Silva, John Lagomarsini, and Ugo Cassidi rounded out the squad. The last recruit asked his new partners to call him “Hugh Cassidy,” in tribute to his favorite Wild West gunfighter, Butch Cassidy. His most famous case before joining the squad was retrieving $6,000 stolen from a chiffonier owned by the son of the favorite masseur of the king of Belgium by thieves who’d lowered themselves through a roof scuttle on East 113th Street. Cassidi had a bit of the outlaw in him: in 1895, when he was a patrolman, he’d been charged with attempting to extort a large sum of cash from a suspect. The accuser was an ex-surveyor who claimed that Cassidi had threatened him with false arrest, then assaulted him when he refused the deal. The detective maintained his innocence, and charges were dropped two years later. As virtuous and clean-living as a priest, Petrosino was still willing to take a risk on flawed men.

  Once the squad was up and running, Petrosino proved to be an unusual boss, intensely hardworking a
nd brilliant, yet not quite trusting. His phenomenal memory, along with years of working on his own, had made him self-sufficient. He’d never had fellow cops he could rely on, and the constant insults from the brotherhood of Irish officers had made him paranoid. One squad member, eager to start his first day of work, was told to follow certain suspects through the city streets, but Petrosino refused to tell him what the men were suspected of or even what the case was about. This went on for weeks. Petrosino had suffered bitterly from Italians’ calling him out on the street and revealing his presence to the mafiosi. How was he to know these detectives were any different?

  Despite their varied backgrounds, there was one force that bonded Petrosino and the others—dubbed “the mysterious six” by the Evening World—to one another: the hostility of their fellow cops. The detective bureau, which was heavily Irish, froze out the newcomers, as did its commanding officers. “They had no office,” noted one newspaper, “no gold-lettered door, no shiny desks, no direct line telephone, no stenographer, no messenger.” They lacked even cabinets to store their files. In the beginning, Petrosino carried around the squad’s files in his head, as he was accustomed to doing with his own cases. His apartment became the Italian Squad’s temporary headquarters. In the mornings, they would attend the daily lineup at 300 Mulberry; then, when the members of the homicide squad and the detective bureau returned to their offices, the six Italians would retire to a small alcove off a busy hallway and plan out their day, talking in low voices. The Irish cops watched, delighting in the “forlorn” expressions of the Italian misfits.

  The squad’s orders were “to deal with the peculiar problems constantly arising in the Italian districts.” Essentially, McAdoo had just handed over half a million Italians, spread across several square miles of territory, to six men. For comparison’s sake, the citizens of Rome, who numbered around 500,000 in 1904, were overseen by thousands of policemen and carabinieri, with the full support of courts, prosecutors, and police officials. The squad was expected to do the same work with laughable resources.