The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  As it turned out, despite their declaration that Black Hand crimes didn’t fall under their jurisdiction, Secret Service agents had arrived in Springfield soon after the letter was dropped into the Wessons’ mailbox. Why, when they’d rejected Petrosino’s urgent request for the exact same services? “The writer of the Black Hand letters,” reported the Boston Daily Globe, “comes under U.S. jurisdiction by virtue of having sent the letters to Mr. Wesson through the mails.” But, Petrosino could have cried, so did every Black Hander who threatened a poor Italian! The Wesson case revealed what Petrosino knew well by 1906: the Secret Service was willing to go into the field to protect Americans against the Black Hand, but only if they were rich.

  When four-year-old Horace Marvin, the blond, blue-eyed child of a prominent doctor in Delaware, went missing one day, apparently snatched off the top of a haystack on the family’s sprawling 537-acre farm near Delaware Bay, President Roosevelt himself wrote the boy’s father in sympathy:

  My dear Dr. Marvin:

  I am in receipt of your telegram of the twenty-second. Anything that the government can do to help you will, of course, be done, for save only the crime of assault upon women, there is none so dreadful as that which has brought heartbreaking sorrow to your household. I have at once communicated with the Post Office Department, asking that all aid we have in our power be given along the lines you mention, or along any other that may prove practicable.

  Sincerely yours,

  Theo. Roosevelt.

  A group of Secret Service agents, led by a general superintendent, were dispatched to Delaware soon after and began interviewing witnesses.

  The response to the lost boy with the blue eyes couldn’t have been more different from the one afforded to the dozens of dark-eyed boys and girls snatched away from their families by the Black Hand. Roosevelt never once sent agents to find an Italian child, never wrote a note of condolence to his or her parents, never spoke out, never acted. The two sets of children existed in separate categories of American life.

  How empty the president’s common-man rhetoric must have sounded to Petrosino in those moments.

  …

  The onslaught spared no one. Governors, mayors, judges, even the heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, Asa G. Candler, earned the Society’s wrath. (Candler’s persecutor turned out to be a fellow member of his Methodist church, who was promptly arrested by the Secret Service.) A justice of the peace in Paterson, New Jersey, who had helped police track the Society received “an infernal machine” in the mail. When he opened the package, it exploded, blowing the man to pieces. The scourge even crossed the Atlantic. Count István Tisza, the former prime minister of Austria-Hungary, received Black Hand letters from America threatening his relatives with death unless he paid $2,000. Papers around the world gaped at the audacity. The Secret Service traced the letters to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where suspicion soon fell on Ignace Wenzler, an iron molder who worked in one of the local steel mills. A Secret Service agent befriended Wenzler and asked him to write a letter in German to a friend of his. Wenzler agreed. The agent took the letter, thanked the iron molder, then rushed back to the agency’s temporary headquarters and placed the new note alongside two Black Hand missives. The handwriting was a match. Wenzler was arrested.

  Despite the squads of Pinkerton men, police chiefs, postmasters, and Secret Service agents dedicated to protecting the rich, no millionaire was ever shot, bombed, stilettoed, or otherwise physically assaulted by the Black Hand, though quite a few were scared out of their wits. The tormentors who pursued these wealthy men often turned out to be Black Hand impostors—that is, nonviolent (and non-Italian) opportunists who saw their chance to make a quick dollar. As Italian Americans died or watched their homes go up in flames while their persecutors remained free, the rich, far more often, saw their victimizers caught, convicted, and jailed.

  By the end of 1906, the Black Hand held sway in cities from coast to coast, and many citizens feared that darker days were on the way. “A reign of murder and terror has existed which steadily grows worse,” proclaimed the New York Tribune. No easy remedies presented themselves. There was no national law enforcement agency willing to go after the Society or capable of doing so; the FBI wouldn’t come into existence for another two years.

  Like an epidemic or a natural disaster, the Society even created a new class of internal refugee in America: the Black Hand victim on the run. “From the moment he stepped on American shores,” noted the Cincinnati Enquirer about one such refugee, “he has been haunted from city to city, from house to house by desperate men bent upon inflicting vengeance. He moved from town to town, but everywhere were new, mysterious, dangerous figures lurking for him in dark corners and alleyways.” One morning the refugee would be gone from the new city where he’d only just arrived. The sight of a face seen once too often in one too many places would send him fleeing to the next way station.

  In the tiny Pennsylvania town of Hillsville, two hundred Italians left for Italy in the space of six months. “Many more” had fled the larger town of Newcastle, leaving neither explanations nor forwarding addresses. It was easy to stumble into the nightmare: one could do so simply by overhearing a conversation. Benjamin de Gilda had immigrated to Philadelphia and built up a shoemaking business through hard work and scrupulous saving. His roommate, a man named Morelli, was secretly a Black Hand member, and soon became convinced that de Gilda had overheard a conversation that implicated Morelli in a murder plot. The Society gave de Gilda a choice: join or die. He refused. “Persuasion and dangerous threats,” according to a local newspaper, “did not move the shoemaker.”

  De Gilda moved to another town and tried not to draw attention to himself. Then one afternoon, as he was repairing a customer’s shoe, he looked up from his workbench and saw Morelli staring at him through the shop window. De Gilda’s heart sank. But Morelli smiled and motioned to him. The shoemaker put down his tools and edged toward the window. In a pleasant tone, Morelli called for him to come outside for a talk: there was nothing wrong; he would do de Gilda no harm. De Gilda finally opened the door of his shop and the two men went for a stroll. When they came to a secluded spot, Morelli pulled out a razor and swept it quickly at de Gilda’s throat. The victim flinched at the last moment and the blade missed its target, instead slicing a deep cut diagonally across de Gilda’s face. Bleeding profusely, de Gilda ran for his life. When Morelli was caught by a policeman, he confessed that he was a member of a Black Hand gang, and the leader, a man named de Felix, had paid him $75 to silence the shoemaker forever.

  The police told de Gilda they planned to arrest and prosecute the gang leader, but the young shoemaker, his location exposed, his face scarred and instantly recognizable, knew that his life was effectively over. He bought a gun. One day he closed his shop and boarded a streetcar to Philadelphia. When he arrived, he began to prowl the streets, looking for de Felix at his favorite haunts. When he spotted the Black Hand chief walking with his father, de Gilda drew out his pistol, aimed, and fired. De Felix fell to the ground, blood spilling from his wounds. A red mist now descended on de Gilda: he shot at de Felix’s father, but the bullet flew wide. Taking out a knife, de Gilda plunged it into the elderly man’s chest, killing him. Then he picked up the gun, put it to his own temple, and fired. He stumbled several hundred yards to a field, where he dropped dead.

  Several victims committed suicide rather than run. On June 23, 1906, a Pennsylvanian put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger after receiving a series of Black Hand threats. He left a wife and six children to deal with the aftermath. In West Mount Vernon, New York, Max Bonaventure, a saloonkeeper, shut his store seven days before Christmas and hung a sign on the door: “This store is closed on account of a death in the family.” He walked to the back of the saloon, threw a rope over a beam, and hanged himself. Men from the Society had demanded $500 or, they vowed, he would die before Christmas morning. Bonaventure didn’t have the money. His son, who came across the body swinging from the rafters,
also found a note: “My dear Lena, goodbye. Charlie, Lena, Anna and Frank, I loved you all of my life. Goodbye.”

  Many others were simply terrorized into silence. A few months later, back in New York, one of Petrosino’s Black Hand cases would be thrown into chaos when a Mrs. Fiandini, whose husband had been killed by the Society, stood up in a Manhattan courtroom and declared that her husband hadn’t been the victim of a murder. In fact, she refused to grant even that Mr. Fiandini—who was at that moment lying on a slab in the city morgue—was dead. The court was stunned. No prosecutor in memory had ever had to deal with a chief witness in a murder case denying that a loved one had, in actuality, ceased to exist. The reports of the case don’t mention whether the prosecutor considered bringing the corpse into the courtroom for the jury to examine, but eventually the case was dismissed. Mrs. Fiandini clearly knew the cost of offending the Society, and she declined to pay it.

  …

  In America, unlike in Italy, the sheer size of the country could make it easier for Black Hand victims to disappear—or so one would think. John Benteregna was a barber in New York who’d fallen in with a Black Hand gang but tried to leave, either because of a dispute or in disgust at its methods. When one of his associates attempted to kill him on the street, he fled to Chicago, “where the Society made life miserable for him.” He ran to St. Louis, then Omaha, then Denver, then—giving up on cities altogether—an isolated ranch farther west, where he hoped to hide out while working as a farmhand. But in each place he was discovered and his life threatened. Finally, he reached the end of the continent: Los Angeles, which must have seemed, with its sun and openness and lack of Italian ghettoes, a kind of oasis.

  But soon after his arrival in California, letters postmarked Manhattan were slipped under his door. “Leave here,” read one note, adorned with a skull and crossbones. “This is your last chance.” Benteregna tore up the letter. Another arrived and he gave it to the police, who did nothing. While he was walking along the street one day, someone fired at him. Benteregna ducked five bullets, then went into hiding. Nearly broke, he took some of his remaining money and rented a chair at a barbershop, where he began working.

  The Los Angeles Times reported what happened next. One day, a man appeared outside the barbershop where Benteregna worked. “His assassin tapped on the front window to attract his attention. As Benteregna turned around, a shot was fired through the window, the bullet entering his left side and piercing his intestines.” Through his final conscious minutes, Benteregna refused to say who’d killed him, though he admitted it was one of the Black Handers who had pursued him so doggedly from city to city.

  There were instances in which men were told the hour and minute they would die, and the sentences were carried out to the last tick of the clock. And another in which a man testified in court against the Society, with whom he’d been involved in several crimes, and requested that the judge sentence him to twenty years in the penitentiary, “because that means twenty years of life.” After being threatened with having his throat cut, a Newark baker sold his business for a pittance and fled, like so many others before him, back to the hometown in Italy he’d left, nearly penniless, years before. Three days after his arrival, his body was found in the road outside his house. He’d been shot and, as a matter of punctilious duty, his throat had been neatly opened from ear to ear.

  Americans in the 1900s, at least city dwellers, weren’t innocents. They lived with corrupt governments, filthy streets, news of horrifying industrial accidents, global epidemics, scandals large and small. They’d weathered crime waves before, including the political violence of the Molly Maguires and the mass brainings of demented Irish gang members by other, even more demented Irish gang members. But the Black Hand was different. There was something almost occult about it, a whiff of some darker, more corrupt conception of life than the one envisioned by the Founding Fathers. It was an old sickness in a young country.

  The tales of long pursuit ending in murder fascinated and appalled Americans. “The far-reaching power and relentless vengeance of the Mano Nera have no equals in the history of crime,” declared an article in the Washington Post. “Across deserts, rivers, seas,” wrote another journalist, “the long arm of the Black Hand reaches. In every State of the Union, its crushing grip may be felt, and even in Europe it may strike and to its enemies bring death.”

  How could a young nation make sense of such bewildering acts? One way it tried was through its growing popular culture. By 1905, the Society was increasingly featured in movies, novels, pulp magazines, poetry, and stage plays. When the melodrama Kidnapped in New York opened at the Bijou in Manhattan, audiences watched as Jack Dooley, an Irish newspaperman and amateur detective, tracked down a kidnapped girl who has been abducted (apparently) by her lily-white governess, Mary. After several wild turns, Jack uncovers a Black Hand conspiracy, rescues the girl, and marries the governess. The plot of A Midnight Escape, a play that made it at least as far as Hartford, Connecticut, ran along the same lines, with the hero and his betrothed “bound in the dark chamber of the Black Hand Society” and realizing they are facing an execution squad of eight men with rifles. “There were two good-sized audiences present yesterday,” the Hartford Courant reported, “and at both performances nervous women screamed.” The plots were creaky, but in each of them the Society went down in defeat.

  Bat Masterson, the celebrated real-life western lawman and friend to Wyatt Earp, was a celebrity in 1900s America. His fame soared to such heights that he became a fictional character in the “Bat Masterson Library,” a serial that ran in major newspapers beginning in March 1905. The inaugural issue, “Bat Masterson in New York, or On the Trail of the Black Hand,” opens with a U.S. marshal crying out, “You cur. You have stabbed me!” The marshal had been alone in his office when he was accosted by Vito la Duca, “dread bulwark of the Black Hand,” who informs the lawman, “You shall not escape me this time.” La Duca buries his dagger in the lawman’s chest three times and is about to finish him off when a stranger, his spurs jangling—never mind that he is in midtown Manhattan—appears. “Back,” he cries, “or Mary Jane, the trusted revolver that never misses her target, will hark in your vitals.” The stranger and the Society thug fight, and the stranger executes some jujitsu moves before tossing the villain over his shoulders. “Who are you?” the marshal asks the man. “‘Bat Masterson, the blood stained avenger of Butte,’ cried the latter—for it was he—tearing off the whiskers from his handsome countenance.” In the absence of an actual solution to the problem of the Society, the serial’s writers had turned to a fading legend to defeat it.

  …

  As the terror wave rolled onward, Americans began to worry that the Society would no longer stop at individuals but would seek to infiltrate and control governments. What if the Society’s ultimate target wasn’t money but power? Perhaps, theorized a writer at Collier’s magazine, the individual groups were not only in touch with one another and coordinating their attacks but also now awaiting “the electrifying touch of executive power from the alta [high] mafia and then will come—hell.” This was a persistent fear. Even the police commissioner believed it was a possibility. If a “master hand” molded the gangs together, he said, “what a monster we would have to contend with! To successfully fight it would be impossible.”

  In fact, the Society had already taken over governments within the United States. If one had visited Hillsville, Pennsylvania, in 1906, one would have found a town that was operated by and for the benefit of the Black Hand. Immigrants arrived in Hillsville to work in the enormous quarries owned by the Carbone Limestone Company, which were said to be the largest in the world at that time. The little town featured all the normal institutions: a mayor, a police force (on loan from nearby Clinton County), laws, and statutes, as in any other village or city in America. But Hillsville—nicknamed “Helltown” by its inhabitants—was actually ruled over by one Joe Bagnato, the leader of the local Black Hand. Every payday, Bagnato would wait
a few feet from the window where the miners came to receive envelopes filled with their wages. Each laborer would open his packet and give Bagnato his tribute. “The money collected,” reported the New York Times, “was understood to be the price of life and liberty until next pay day.” Workers who managed to accumulate some savings in the local banks regularly disappeared; days after they vanished, bank drafts would arrive for the total amount in their savings accounts, down to the last penny.

  When the children of Helltown went out raspberry picking on the hillsides near the mines, they knew to avoid the mounds that dotted the slopes. These marked the graves of those who failed to pay the Society. “There are people buried up here, yet nobody knows where,” one miner said. “The Black Hand ran everything.” The police were overwhelmed and outnumbered. If they found the victim of a “dago killing,” they would lay the body out by the roadside for his family or friends to pick up. Many times, no investigations were conducted. Hundreds of emigrants were driven out of the town by the terror and fled back to Italy. “I lived in fear,” said one resident. “We were all scared to death.”

  Some of the Helltown thugs were said to be graduates of a school for the Black Hand discovered one night during a raid in rural Pennsylvania by fifty detectives from “all over the country.” Inside a secluded house, the astonished lawmen found a group of seventeen Italians sitting in front of a teacher and a rubber mannequin; the men were “intensely interested in a lesson explaining the exact spot on the human body in which a stiletto should be plunged to ensure instant death.” The business operated under the pretense of being a “fencing” school and was run by a man named John Jotti, a longtime criminal from the town of Santo Stefano d’Aspromonte in Petrosino’s home region of Campania. In addition to the rubber mannequin, marked at the spots where a blade would do its most effective work, was a trunk containing Black Hand form letters, along with daggers and revolvers. One of the letters contained threats against Baltimore detectives. “Use not clubs against these policemen,” it read, “but kill.” The place was, in effect, a vocational college for Society members.