Bozzuffi contemplated the situation, then looked around his office until he found a piece of pasteboard. He dipped his fountain pen in the inkwell and wrote out a message, in Italian. He poked two holes at the top corners of the pasteboard, strung a piece of twine between them, and took the sign to the window that faced out onto First Avenue, where Italian pedestrians moved up and down the sidewalk at all hours of the day. He pushed a tack into the wooden frame of the window and hung the sign on it, facing outward. The sign read: “THE MONEY IN THIS BANK BELONGS TO THE DEPOSITORS AND IT WILL BE PAID TO THEM IF I NEVER SEE MY SON AGAIN.”
Bozzuffi’s family and friends begged him to reconsider, but the banker—having encouraged the cobbler and the grocer to stand fast—couldn’t do it. “I have six other children,” he told them. “They can take them one by one, but not a cent will they get from me in tribute.” To pay would be to become party to a crime that was blackening the name of his unborn descendants.
On the third day of the standoff, Antonio escaped. When one of his captors was left alone to guard him, the boy slipped his bonds and ran out the door, dashing up First Avenue. Some in the city believed it was an honest mistake; others theorized that the kidnappers, realizing Bozzuffi wouldn’t budge, chose the least humiliating way out of the situation. In any case, Bozzuffi embraced his son and joyfully called Petrosino to give him the news.
The story of the Italian who’d defied the Black Hand made headlines from Los Angeles to St. Louis, from Wilmington to Minneapolis to Walla Walla, Washington. Bozzuffi had broken a cardinal rule of Italian culture: he’d risked his child’s life—his firstborn son’s life, in fact, which was an important distinction—for a principle. Americans were filled with admiration. “I believe that I have as much of the instinct of a parent as any human,” Bozzuffi told reporters who gathered at his bank, “but I have something beyond that. I have never ceased to love my fatherland and the people of it . . . I will give all I have—money and children, home and wealth, life itself—before I will be a means to hindering the honest development of my people as Americans.” They could have been Petrosino’s words.
Still, the threat wasn’t over. Bozzuffi took his children to the studio of a local photographer and had pictures taken of each of them in case they were kidnapped and flyers with their images had to be passed around the colony. But his story had a happy ending. Not only was Antonio returned to him, but also the run on his bank stopped, and his firmness even won him new customers. “Today,” reported the Times, “the banker stands higher in the regard of the people in the colony than ever before.”
It was for Italians like these that Petrosino risked his life.
…
Not every story had such a sweet ending. In Brooklyn, a twenty-four-year-old named Francesco Abate arrived in the neighborhood of East New York, where there was a thriving Italian community. No one in East New York had experienced Black Hand threats before; it was virgin territory, and Abate was determined to claim it. He rented an apartment at 136 Sackman Street, holed up in his room, and began a period of intensive research. He bought books and pamphlets on how to make a bomb, some written in Italian and some in French. He found (where was never discovered, but locally) a volume detailing how extortion gangs had worked their arts in the Argentine Republic. He collected samples of Black Hand letters and “hundreds of clippings” on the workings of Society outfits in New York and Chicago. He found a treatise on dynamite and read lists of its ingredients and procedures for concocting it. “The police of this city,” a journalist wrote after Abate’s nest had been raided, “have never found so complete a library of what might be specified as Black Hand literature.”
Having surveyed the academic field, as it were, Abate put his knowledge to work. Letters began showing up at local businesses demanding tribute. The merchants, who’d heard horrible stories from the colonies in lower Manhattan and Harlem, had no idea who the extortionist was. Fearful for their families, and impressed by the ferocity of Abate’s notes, they paid.
It was American self-invention at its purest. By declaring himself a member of the Black Hand, Abate had become a member of the Black Hand.
Soon the young man’s lifestyle showed a marked improvement. He “blossomed forth in fine raiment,” showed up on Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania Avenue in beautiful suits; in no time, he’d made a name for himself as a lady-killer. The local beauties didn’t mind the fact that Abate seemed not to have a job, because he always had plenty of cash and wasn’t shy about spending it. Abate had a knack for his work. “He surrounded himself,” said one journalist, “with an air of mystery that made him doubly interesting.” He did this by not only extorting money from the merchants of East New York, but also then paying social calls on those same merchants in the evening. “The young upstart,” reported the Evening World, “had the unutterable cheek to come into their homes and flirt with their wives and daughters, showering presents upon them.” The money for the presents, of course, had come from the fathers of the girls he was courting.
Abate soon found that romancing the women of East New York on the scale that he envisioned was expensive, and so he raised his demands. The businessmen convened a meeting and sent a message to Abate: they agreed to the new prices. The men arranged to meet Abate at the gates of the Acacia Cemetery in Ozone Park to hand over their first installment under the new regime. That night, at the entrance, Abate arrived beneath a bright moon. As best the Italian Squad was later to figure out, the merchants greeted him, then pulled out a collection of knives, axes, and even a pickaxe like the ones used to dig the Manhattan subway tunnels, and fell on the beautifully dressed extortionist. The men cut Abate to pieces and left his remains at the cemetery gate. The Society experiment in East New York was over.
If one knew the local Black Handers, fighting back was easier. One immigrant, “known throughout the Italian community as a robust, strong, and fearless man,” bought a gun as soon as he received the first letter. Then he visited some acquaintances whom he knew to have Black Hand connections and told them that if any harm came to himself or his family, he would kill them. He never got a second letter. Another man, who was legendary in the neighborhood for his feats of strength—he would pick people up off the street and carry them for blocks with his arms fully extended, simply to amuse himself—found out that his brother’s business had become a target of the Society. The man gathered all the weapons he owned, hid them in his clothing, and walked to his brother’s establishment to stand guard. For three days, he never left the storefront, scanning the faces of pedestrians. In seventy-two hours, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then on the third day, he recognized a member of the Society walking by. He seized the man by the collar, raised him into the air, and began shaking him violently. As the Black Hander looked down in terror, the man asked him why the gang hadn’t come to bomb his brother’s store, because he’d been waiting and it had cost him three nights’ sleep. He set the Black Hander back on the pavement and told him that if anything happened to his brother or his place of business, he would hunt down each member of the gang personally and eliminate them. Again, no more letters arrived.
Giovanni Barberri, a wealthy baker in Mount Vernon, in suburban Westchester County, was being pestered by extortion letters; they demanded $500 on pain of death. When he refused to answer them, a man named Antonio Fotti took a train from the city and got off at the Mount Vernon station. He walked into Barberri’s shop, pulled out two revolvers from beneath his coat, and pointed them at the baker. Barberri ran into the street, followed by the gunman. Two passing neighbors, both women, saw Fotti emerge and grabbed his arms. He cried out and fired two shots wildly. The baker, seeing his chance, ran back into his shop and emerged with a shotgun loaded with birdshot. Calmly, he told the women to let Fotti go. When they did, he leveled both barrels at the Black Hander and fired. Police followed the blood trail to a hospital in Yonkers and arrested Fotti.
Two days later, on the outskirts of Mamaroneck, another Westchester suburb,
hotelkeeper Pietro Caputo was living under the threat of the Society when three men walked into his hotel bar, led by a criminal known as Big Pietro. The strangers ordered drinks, and when Caputo went to pour them, Big Pietro reached over the bar, his knife flashing in the gaslight, and stabbed down onto the saloonkeeper’s head, then brought the blade forward and cut viciously across his throat. Caputo fell back and collapsed to the floor. Fatally wounded, his hands grappling for the shotgun he kept behind the bar, Caputo stood up. A curtain of blood gushing from the wounds on his head obscured his vision, but he could make out the shape of Big Pietro; he pointed the shotgun and yanked back on both triggers. The buckshot sliced Big Pietro’s scalp from his skull and blew the top half of his head away, spraying his two accomplices with brain matter. Caputo fired twice more before he fainted and bled out. The local Italians formed a posse and went hunting Big Pietro’s partners in the woods that surrounded the town.
The Black Hand was so feared that there were few it declined to attack, even mobsters. At one point in the history of the Society, a Chicago group decided to target Big Jim Colosimo, a top gangster who controlled gambling and prostitution on the Near South Side. Colosimo’s gang, known as the Chicago Outfit, dominated crime in the Windy City, and Big Jim, in his spotless white suits and diamond jewelry, enjoyed the profits in high style. Colosimo’s connections with corrupt Chicago pols, beginning with Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, were peerless, and he was considered as untouchable as anyone in Illinois. He was making $600,000 a year from his chain of brothels (he’d married a famous madam, Victoria Moresco, to get this part of his business started) and eventually expanded the business to two hundred houses.
But Colosimo began receiving letters adorned with daggers and ebony hands, and he took them seriously enough to pay out a total of $5,000 to the Society before realizing, like many merchants and innocent victims before him, that he would soon go bankrupt. Colosimo apparently believed that no one in his own gang was up to the challenge of stopping the Black Hand, so he looked farther afield, to Brooklyn. There he found John “the Immune” Terrio.
Terrio had immigrated to New York as a young boy and worked as a bouncer before graduating to various gangster pursuits. Bright and tough, he was spotted by the New York mobster Paul Kelly, who remade Terrio’s appearance (choosing conservative suits), reformed his manners, and offered him business advice. Soon Terrio was running a profitable numbers business. When he was targeted by the Black Hand, he had a simple solution: he killed everyone and anyone connected with the extortion demands on sight.
When he received the call from Big Jim, Terrio knew he faced the same challenge on a grander scale: Colosimo was a far more public figure, and far wealthier, than Terrio was. Terrio took the train to Chicago and set up meetings with the various gangs that were sucking money from Colosimo. Each time the bagmen showed up at the rendezvous, Terrio and his men opened up on them with their tommy guns and left the bodies in the streets as a message to other Black Hand gangs. The number of threats declined precipitously. Terrio was so successful that Colosimo took him on as his right-hand man. Terrio eventually imported another rising gangster into the outfit to act as his bodyguard, an ugly, intelligent, and thoroughly vicious former bouncer named Al Capone. The underground fight against the Black Hand ended up transporting the notorious Chicago mobster to the site of his future empire.
…
These acts of resistance showed that the native courage of the Italian American was still intact. But they were isolated incidents, scattered across the country and over a period of many months. They didn’t present an existential challenge to the Black Hand; there just weren’t that many Society victims who were comfortable killing other people, even to save their own lives.
Petrosino had another idea: organized resistance. He’d been calling for the creation of protection groups, in which Italians could band together and fight the Society, for at least two years. “If they would form a Vigilance League,” he’d told the Times on September 22, 1905, “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.” Now he went to leaders in the Italian community and begged them to join together. But fear of the Society was everywhere, and the men turned Petrosino away.
By early 1907, it was clear that the Italian Squad, even at forty men, couldn’t take down the Black Hand on its own. The Secret Service had declined his appeal. The only hope, as Petrosino saw it, was for Italian Americans to rise up against their oppressors.
But he was running out of time for this to happen. Alarm over the Society had already begun to seep into American politics and popular culture. Soon that alarm would grow into full-blown panic.
11
* * *
“War Without Quarter”
The work of the squad was growing increasingly dangerous. On December 28, 1907, Rocco Cavone was climbing slowly up the stairs of an apartment building in Kingsland, New Jersey, toward the room where he had reason to believe a young man named Nicolò Bananno was hiding. Bananno was the leading suspect in the murder of a young Italian barber in Manhattan on Christmas Day: the victim had opened his front door, expecting a holiday guest, but had instead been blasted once in the chest with a pistol round. Cavone had been staking out the Kingsland building for two days. Now he was closing in on capturing the fugitive.
Cavone had already been promoted to lieutenant after only a short time with the squad. He’d recently married a young woman and installed her and their baby in an apartment at 77 Thompson Street in lower Manhattan. Catching Bananno would be the latest feat of a detective on the rise.
Above Cavone a skylight let down a few rays of dirty sunlight into the stairwell. The light threw shadows across his path as he trained his eyes upward. The hallway smelled of cooking: onions, prosciutto, peppers, fresh garlic.
Cavone paused, listening. He placed his foot on the next step and was pushing upward when suddenly two shots rang out. Unbeknownst to Cavone, Bananno had been crouching with his revolver at the top of the stairwell for the detective to get close enough to kill. Cavone whipped his head back and cried out. He’d been shot in the face.
Hearing the shot, other members of the squad raced up the stairs from their positions below. The sounds of their pounding feet mingled with footfalls that echoed from above: Bananno was running up the stairs, toward the skylight. When he reached it, the gunman pushed the glass panes open, hoisted himself up, ran across the roof to the fire escape, and bounded down the shaking structure to the street below.
The cops reached Cavone and found him bleeding from the face and left hand. One of Bananno’s bullets had slammed into his forehead at an oblique angle, creasing a furrow down his face before ricocheting through his palm. “Never mind me,” Cavone said to his fellow squad members, “but get the fellow who plugged me.”
The detectives gave chase. Cavone worked his way slowly down the tenement stairs and out of the building. He made it to the train station and was whisked back to New York. Petrosino was waiting for him at the terminus and rushed him to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. What Petrosino’s feelings were at the time—the dread of having to tell Cavone’s parents and young wife that the man he’d recruited had been killed—can only be imagined. But Cavone was lucky. Some of the nerves in his left hand were damaged, and doctors told him he might not regain the full use of his fingers. The head wound, however, was only superficial.
Bananno, alone in a wooded area with the police closing in, put the gun to his cheek and pulled the trigger. He failed to kill himself, however, and the Italian Squad soon took him into custody.
If arrests of men like Bannano burnished the squad’s reputation, Petrosino knew they weren’t enough. The detective and his men had enlarged their aims by 1907. They weren’t just arresting Black Hand leaders and breaking up their gangs; they aimed now to decode the Society itself, to reveal the natur
e of its mission in America.
After three years, Petrosino had found that the Society acted more like a terror franchise, in which different branches followed their own rules on membership and initiation, on how to approach a victim, when to inflict violence, and how to guard the Society’s name. Every branch, no matter how tiny or obscure, traded on the reputation of the Black Hand. One journalist perceptively quoted Robert Louis Stevenson on sixteenth-century Parisian gangs—“independent malefactors, socially intimate, and occasionally joining together for some serious operation, just as modern stock-jobbers form a syndicate for an important loan.” It was as good a description as any.
The Italian Squad found evidence of cooperation between the franchises. “Specialists” were often imported from other cities to kill a victim, so that the gunman wouldn’t be recognized and the gang responsible couldn’t be identified. When the Society itself was slandered, a local branch might spring into action to protect its good—that is, its bad—name. Donato Zarillo, who lived in West New Rochelle, New York, “spoke sneeringly” of the Black Hand in a local saloon one evening, calling its members a bunch of cowards and vowing if they ever dared to threaten him, he would end their lives. Word got around the neighborhood, and soon after, Zarillo was shot on a New Rochelle street and left to die, along with his severely wounded brother.
The Black Hand was a classic secret society: its members vowed never to reveal its innermost values to outsiders. In fact, very few did. Their oaths were sworn in a ceremony called a picciotto. A member who went through one described the ritual: The men met in a secret location, first depositing all their weapons in one place, which was guarded by a member. They formed a circle, linking their arms together. The new recruit was told that the center of the circle represented an abyss “in which everything spoken was to be forever buried.” The leader began talking in a strange tongue, uttering a kind of chant or invocation, after which the men kissed one another on the cheeks. If the newcomer was being inducted as a cameristo, or full member, five knives were set in the middle of the circle with the blades pointed outward. A handkerchief was laid over the daggers, with the points still visible. The men drew lots, and the member who drew the short stick rolled up his sleeve and presented his bare arm. As “cabalistic incantations” were chanted, the man’s arm was sliced across, and the new member had to drink down the spurting blood.
The Black Hand Page 16