The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  Pennsylvania officials knew that Helltown was only the most notorious of several similar villages ruled by the Society. In May 1907 they interviewed Italians from all over the state who had “mustered up courage enough” to talk about their lives. They found that there were agents of the Society in nearly every mining village and town in the coalfields. Helltown was the capital of the Pennsylvania Black Hand, but it was hardly unique.

  If the Society could take over a place like Hillsville, American officials and law enforcement officers feared, they could eventually run a Scranton or a Cincinnati or a New York. The police already saw links between the Society and Italian anarchists who were quite explicit in their desire to overthrow the government. At times, the two terms, “Black Hander” and “anarchist,” were used interchangeably. While chasing the suspected Black Hand murder of a prominent local Italian, Pennsylvania authorities stumbled on a group of anarchists who regularly met in a shack near the town of Baird. In the shack were letters from fellow radicals urging the thirty-one members to assassinate Governors Pennypacker of Pennsylvania and John M. Pattison of Ohio. When arrested, the members were found to be wearing badges with the picture of Gaetano Bresci, the man who had killed King Umberto I.

  More and more, newspaper editors, police chiefs, and politicians came to believe that the terror practiced by the Society was a prelude to something deeper and more permanent. The hysteria around the figure of the Italian immigrant mounted. The crime spree elevated the Society in the minds of some Americans from a diabolical gang of cutthroats to nothing less than a threat to the future of the republic.

  8

  * * *

  The General

  Back in New York, Petrosino marked the second year of the Italian Squad’s campaign by bolstering its ranks. In 1906 the unit grew to forty men and added a Brooklyn branch, headed by Sergeant Anthony Vachris, who would become one of the detective’s closest friends. As the Black Hand atrocities earned headlines, spreading the Society’s message and intimidating the public, the newly expanded Italian Squad struck back with major public victories. Even the case of Willie Labarbera, the boy kidnapped off a street while playing with his friends, had a happy ending.

  One Monday, weeks after the boy had vanished, Petrosino was working late at night. He was reading police bulletins from across the city, searching for any clue to Willie’s whereabouts, when he came across a report among hundreds, this one from Brooklyn: a crying boy had been found wandering the streets, mumbling something about “Barbara.” The child had been brought to a nearby precinct station, then to a local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  Petrosino reread the description of the boy, then rushed to Brooklyn. He asked the matrons for the child, who had not been able to give his name, and they brought forth a sleepy boy. It was Willie. It was now three o’clock in the morning. Petrosino brought the boy some food and took him to police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street in Little Italy. On the streetcar, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder. Once the detective had deposited the boy at headquarters, he made his way to the Labarberas’ house.

  When the door to the home opened, an object emerged. A revolver.

  “Metti via la pistola,” Petrosino said. “Put the gun away.” The Black Hand had frightened the public to such a degree that Italians could now be arrested just for owning a pistol. “It’s Petrosino,” he continued in Italian.

  William Labarbera opened the door, peering at the figure lit by pale moonlight.

  “Have you got my boy?” he asked.

  “I’ve got him.”

  William lowered the gun and called back into the house in rapid-fire Italian. After a few seconds, the figure of Caterina Labarbera appeared in the doorway. She fell to her knees on the threshold and bent down to kiss Petrosino’s feet, then gestured upward, as if to the particular saints she’d called on to find her boy.

  Petrosino calmed the pair, told them to dress, and then brought the couple to 300 Mulberry Street. When she walked in, Caterina grabbed her son and embraced him. “I thought she would eat little Willie,” Petrosino said later, amused. Willie disappointed his mother by saying he only wanted to see his sister Rosie.

  Most of the children kidnapped by the Black Hand never forgot the ordeal. Some returned home unable to speak about it, having been told by the Black Handers that if they gave any details, their families would be slain. Some were murdered. Others carried the scars from straps or ropes that had been tied around their wrists; at least one bore marks of burning on his body. A Chicago boy was described this way: “His eyes have the haunted look of a scared child, and his little body is emaciated.”

  But on the night of October 9, the Labarbera boy was safe in his bed, and Petrosino, a devout Catholic, was thankful. That time, at least, he and his men had won.

  Even Enrico Caruso, the great Italian tenor, called on the squad’s services. When Caruso, then at the height of his fame, came to New York to perform, the Black Hand threatened to kill him if he didn’t pay them $2,000 in protection money. He paid. Almost immediately, new letters arrived, until the opera star had collected a stack “a foot high.” Caruso went to the NYPD for relief. A crowd of cops and reporters gathered around the desk where an officer was writing up a report and listened to him tell his story: the threats; the three Italian bodyguards he’d hired to go everywhere with him; the sharpened sword that lay within the black cane he walked with, ready to be drawn out; the pistol he kept tucked inside his coat. Even in a grim police office in the middle of Manhattan, the flamboyant Caruso couldn’t resist putting on a performance. “I will give nothing to these blackmailers except cold steel or bullets!” he told the crowd. “Let them come on. I am prepared. They are a set of cowards.” The American officers, even the Irish ones, beamed at the diminutive singer. Here was an Italian who would not only talk back to the Black Hand but also meet them bullet for bullet. “His face wore the gladsome smile of a child,” wrote one journalist, “who feels that he has done something worthy of applause, and all the Americans in the office were smiling at him.” But among the onlookers, one man—an Italian, as it turned out, an educated official who assisted the police in suppressing crime—scowled at the famous tenor. “The fool!” he exclaimed to the reporter. “He gives Italians a bad name. He ought to keep his ——— mouth shut!”

  But the threats from the Society continued, and Caruso’s courage faded. The singer grew increasingly nervous about venturing out in public. Around this time, he was introduced to Petrosino, and the two became friends. Caruso eventually confided to the detective that a new demand for $5,000 had arrived, and he’d decided to hand over the money. Caruso was not merely a fabulous earner—he made over $2 million from his contract with the Victor record company alone—but a shrewd investor. By the time World War I broke out, his annual tax bill alone totaled $154,000. The amount demanded was a trifle to him.

  But Petrosino was horrified: Caruso, his hero, the flower of Italian opera, the man with a tone so pure he performed in large stadiums without a microphone, was going to bow down to these animals? In Petrosino’s own city? The detective knew the demands would only grow, until they consumed Caruso’s entire fortune. “It’s an empty pit,” he told the singer. He begged Caruso to reconsider and came up with an alternate plan. The tenor, after careful consideration, agreed to it.

  Caruso sent a message to the extortionists. He agreed to pay the $5,000. But he would only hand over the money at a rendezvous in Manhattan. Petrosino would impersonate the tenor at the handoff. The Society agreed to his terms. On the appointed day, Petrosino dressed in a cape and suit resembling the singer’s own, and hurried to the meeting. He met with the thugs, overpowered and arrested them, then brought back the cash to a relieved Caruso. The story of Petrosino’s gambit circulated on the streets of Little Italy for years.

  It was a heartening triumph for the detective, but the wave of terror continued to roil the streets of lower Manhattan, and the outcry in New York newspapers be
came a drumbeat. Tammany Hall, with its quivering antennae for anything that might disturb the smooth progress of its reign, realized that the crime issue needed attention. Mayor George McClellan Jr., the son of the Civil War general George B. McClellan, began looking for a new commissioner to replace William McAdoo. He found his man in a profane, colorful, and altogether American military man named Theodore A. Bingham, nicknamed “the General.”

  Bingham was an imposing Yankee, an army man through and through. He was tall and rangy, with a body that reminded one reporter of “a starved panther,” constantly in motion. “He is a soldier in every particular,” observed the Los Angeles Times, “an animate picture of vigor, rough grace, and daring.” The General’s bloodline was divided between divines and warriors; it included a handful of Revolutionary War soldiers and Connecticut clergymen. He made valedictorian at Yale before following his ancestors to West Point, after which he received a commission as a second lieutenant. But Bingham was destined never to see warfare. His field was engineering, and he came to Washington, D.C., in 1897 with the rank of colonel to oversee the capital’s public buildings. After a successful tenure, he moved on to the White House, where, in the words of one newspaper, he served President McKinley as a “major domo, drum major, social secretary or something to that effect.” It’s difficult to imagine this brusque and irascible man as the White House social arbiter, but he had a mind for organization, and the McKinleys were well satisfied with his work.

  When Teddy Roosevelt became president, however, things did not go so smoothly. There was “friction and fire” between the men. “The White House was not big enough for two Theodores,” wrote one journalist, and a mysterious altercation at a White House dinner—the details of which were never revealed—finalized the breach. Bingham was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and sent off to an engineering project in upstate New York, where, in the course of his duties, a seven-hundred-pound derrick collapsed on his leg. Doctors amputated the limb, and from then on the General was required to use a stout cane, which he often flourished like a war club. His military career was over. The appointment as commissioner of the NYPD came at a low moment in his life.

  With his bristling handlebar mustache and bright blue eyes, Bingham was a dynamo who fed on illimitable reserves of energy. As for his personality, he seemed to await the arrival of an Evelyn Waugh to do him full justice. He was blunt, outrageous, politically naïve, and possessed of one of the most original vocabularies on the American scene. Everything he said was expressed with force. “It is said,” wrote one reporter, “that when he gets ready to express an emphatic opinion or utter a firm resolve, his jaws click loud enough to awaken the office cat.” For emphasis, Bingham would slam his cane on a lectern or any handy surface. He was known for swearing like a marine, for saying “you all” (a habit he’d picked up while on an assignment in the Plains), and for a blazing intolerance of fools.

  Bingham was surprised to get the job of NYPD commissioner but accepted with alacrity. His introduction to his men and the city’s press corps was a memorable one. Journalists publicly lamented the fact that they couldn’t reproduce his opening speech for their readers because it contained so many words “which render it unfit for reproduction in any great religious journal,” but one newsman jotted down an expletive-free bit of it:

  Men, I’m glad to meet you. You look like a manly lot of officers. I love a man. I try to be a man myself. I’ve been sent here to do a certain piece of work, and I’m going to do it if I can and if I’ve the strength . . . We are strangers now and I come here with nothing against you, no suspicions . . . But, by the nine gods of war, you’ve got to deal with me on the level . . . That’s a straight tip. See to it that you do your work, and don’t go back on the hand I’ve stretched out to you.

  The cops loved it. The press loved it more. The speech, according to one journalist, “went off, biff, bang, bing—Bingham.” When asked what his politics were, the new commissioner shot back, “You know an Army man is just an American citizen, damn it!” which struck the right note in a city that was so bitterly divided between Republican and Democrat. The newspapers invented a new verb, “to Bingham,” which meant “to talk as if you meant it.”

  Bingham reminded many of Teddy Roosevelt, but without the political cunning. He certainly worked as hard as T.R. (including, to the bluecoats’ disgust, on Saturdays) and had strong ideas: he demanded his men greet him with a crisp military salute, introduced a modern card-file system to the department, and bolstered the police’s recruiting methods. He kept a record of every individual policeman in a separate envelope and vowed to crack down on any malfeasance. “It’s going to be the business,” he said, somewhat inscrutably, “or the torture.” Any cop who neglected his duties or took bribes would be fined for the first two offenses, “and then I’ll reach for the ax.”

  He freely admitted to trusting no one, not even himself. The job of commissioner was a feeding trough for the corrupt, he acknowledged, and all he could promise was to try to resist the lures of the city. “I’ll watch myself,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Up to date, I have been satisfactory. Can’t say anything, however, about tomorrow. No decent man can. My only danger is money. May be seized, you understand, with the universal frenzy. ‘Get a million,’ says the devil. After that, it can be easy disgrace, with horses, automobiles, Jersey cows, and a house in the country—the insane asylum or the penitentiary.” In fact, it would be ruthless ambition—not corruption—that would haunt Bingham’s administration and his relationship with Petrosino. But at least in the beginning, he seemed determined to master himself and his flaws.

  Bingham was a hit with the public from day one. New Yorkers wanted someone who would be tough on crime, and Bingham fit the bill. The General’s gruff talk and martial metaphors indicated he was ready to go to war with the Society. “The people of New York,” wrote one observer, “expect the Black Hand to be pretty stiffly Binghamed before the police administration goes out.”

  Petrosino was delighted with his new commissioner. McAdoo had been an adroit politician and had approved the Italian Squad, but his heart never seemed to be in the struggle. Bingham was itching for a fight. He ordered that suspected leaders of the biggest Black Hand gangs be placed under continual surveillance and offered any policeman who could find evidence to convict the men a promotion to detective first class. “At last,” Petrosino announced, “we’ve found a commissioner who understands us.” The “us” might have referred to cops or the squad or Italians or all three.

  To serve in his new administration, Bingham hired Arthur Woods as deputy police commissioner. Woods was another Yankee, tall, personable, and scholarly. He’d grown up in Boston in a prominent and wealthy family, attended the Latin School, and went on to Harvard. The young graduate began teaching at Groton, where one of his students was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the prep school’s idyllic campus proved too tame for Woods. Inspired by the burgeoning Progressive movement, he left for New York and became a reporter for the Evening Sun, earning a paltry $15 a week. He took rooms at the Harvard Club and joined the Racquet Club to keep in shape.

  Before Woods accepted the deputy commissioner job, he asked for time to go to Europe and study the methods of the police there, at his own expense. He analyzed the procedures of the men at Scotland Yard, then returned to New York. Woods proved an innovative thinker who was far better at showing the human touch than his boss. When one reporter sat down for an interview, he found that Woods “gave a strong impression of eagerness, kindness, quick senses of humor, joy in his work, love of a square deal, and a powerful liking for people.” One of Woods’s assignments in his new job was to oversee the Italian Squad.

  If one cloud darkened the General’s early days, it arrived from the direction of Tammany Hall. The political machine, led by Big Tim Sullivan and his quiet, diminutive cousin Little Tim Sullivan, were cool to the appointment of this military man and outspoken reformer. Big Tim Sullivan was the undisputed ruler of Manhat
tan below 14th Street. He was handsome, tall, gregarious, and sharp as a new knife, “the greatest overlord the politics of New York ever saw.” That he was corrupt goes without saying, but he was a highly effective politician who looked after his constituents. When an Irish gang began tormenting a number of Orthodox Jews in a Tammany district, word soon reached Big Tim, who immediately ordered the NYPD to swoop down on the outfit’s clubhouse and turf the hooligans out of their nest. When the gang was gone, and the premises cleared, Sullivan personally signed a lease for the space, procured a Torah, converted the club into a synagogue, invited the Orthodox Jews back in, and met them at the door with a handshake. Such gestures made Sullivan a legend, and his high living only added to its luster: in his suite at the fabulous Occidental Hotel, he ran a poker game that went on for five straight years without a break. His interests in vaudeville, gambling, and outright graft had made him a millionaire, but for the Irish he was a demigod, the living symbol of what was possible for their kind in America.

  His cousin Little Tim was the shadow to Big Tim’s great light. He was small, tightly wound, and bristling with anger. He’d come up the hard way as well, shining shoes on Broome Street just as Petrosino had, before becoming a runner for journalists on Park Row and getting his law degree by a special act of the state legislature. His sharp elbows and conspiratorial turn of mind had made him into a formidable opponent. But he believed sincerely in the Irish way of doing things. “The Tammany man,” Little Tim once told the New York Times, “must feed the starving, clothe the naked, bury the paupers, and be good friends with everybody.”