Petrosino learned to identify individual gangs by how they killed. One left a blue sash on the body of a victim; another would stab the victim thirteen times, a third twenty-one times; others would leave a row of wounds across the torso in a certain pattern that never varied. Kidnapping a victim’s relative became a familiar tactic that the Italian Squad knew to take seriously; it was called sequestrazione, or “sequestration,” a legal term meaning the seizure of assets until a debt was paid. Another common method was the “watch of death,” the vigil placed on those whom the Society had selected for elimination. Each step along the path indicated where in the process the case was, sometimes allowing the squad to anticipate the Society’s next move.
Then there were marks that read like urban hieroglyphics. The freggio, the slashing cut across the face, identified an informer. A body found with no ears was a message that the person had overheard something he shouldn’t have. If a victim was found with his tongue cut out, he’d talked to police. A missing nose? Petrosino learned this was a case of something called the troppa bircca, or a man who’d inquired into things that were none of his business. (Troppa means “too much,” but bircca is untraceable—perhaps a bit of Sicilian slang.) One Manhattan gang sliced a victim’s face from mouth to ear with a bale hook, a sharp curved tool used to gather hay. When an Italian Squad detective caught the slasher and asked his victim to sign a complaint, the man pointed to the crescent scar on his cheek. “This time they cut me here,” he told the detective. “If I do what you ask me, they will cut me here.” The man drew his finger across his throat. He didn’t sign the complaint.
There were modern touches, too. One Society gang in Brooklyn had access to a baker’s oven. Knowing that murder convictions required a body, they murdered their victims, then baked them in the oven until only ashes and bones remained. “Many times,” said a member of the Italian Squad, “the morning bread of the Brooklyn neighborhood was caked on a funeral pyre.” Whenever this particular gang struck, the Brooklyn Italian Squad knew it had to find the bodies before the members disposed of them.
The squad had also deciphered the meaning of the letters, which almost always followed a set pattern. In their first note, the Society would instruct their victims to deliver a ransom to a specific location; members of the gang would watch the man but fail to make the rendezvous. By telling him, in a second letter, exactly where he’d gone and what he’d done, the Society gave the victim the impression that he was being watched at all times, stoking his fear even higher. In the second letter, the Society would tell their prey to seek help from a “friend,” who might be able to negotiate in his place. Petrosino found that, in almost every case, the friend was in reality a Black Hand associate, acting as a “cut-out” for the gang, protecting them from prosecution. The detective informed police officials across the country about these methods, and they used the information to adjust their tactics in the ongoing fight.
Petrosino’s insights into the Society spread from coast to coast through his wide network of police contacts and newspaper articles. He was in such demand that journalists sometimes made up interviews out of whole cloth and published them; Petrosino once came across a long article for which the writer hadn’t even bothered to contact him. The detective simply didn’t have time to explain the inner mysteries of the Black Hand to every hack in America.
…
Despite his fame, the glow of Petrosino’s early victories had begun to fade by early 1907. Even the expanded Italian Squad couldn’t cope with the sheer numbers of immigrants pouring into the city and the criminals who came with them. New York was being splashed liberally with blood that season. “There was a killing in First Avenue tonight,” reported the Washington Post on January 26, 1907, “that would have done a frontier town proud.” A Black Hand victim and his tormentor had shot and sliced at each other with guns and razors. At the corner of 48th Street and Second Avenue, the victim spotted his quarry and fired a shot at two hundred feet; the bullet caught the Black Hand man in the hip and spun him to the pavement. Bystanders gawked as the two profusely bleeding men ran north along First Avenue. At the next corner, the pursued man looked back over his shoulder, which gave the gunman time to drop him in his tracks with a bullet through his head. Such scenes were not uncommon.
In August, detectives in the central office were told to wear masks when they did lineups so that Society suspects couldn’t identify them. In October, a Black Hander with a dynamite bomb under his coat powerful enough to destroy a city block was found stabbed to death in Brooklyn. In December, the Black Hand burned down a tenement at 5 Rivington Street; the sixteen families inside barely escaped with their lives. A concerned citizens’ group in Chicago sent a telegram to the chief of the police department. “New York is experiencing unparalleled outbreaks of crime,” it read, “many of which are assassinations by members of foreign secret societies, blackmailing plots, and criminal assaults on women and little girls, chiefly by foreigners . . . Will you state your ideas of how best to cope with the situation, which admittedly is beyond control of police?”
The Italian Squad itself had to change offices several times when suspicious Italian men were found congregating near the base of operations, clearly watching Petrosino’s headquarters. His life was under continuous threat. He received letters almost daily telling him he would die for his work; one journalist at the time estimated that the detective received thousands of death notes over the length of his career and was the target of hundreds of murder plots. “They have no imagination,” Petrosino told a friend as he read one letter. “They all send me the same kind of message.” He never kept the letters but threw them away after giving their contents a cursory glance.
There were suspicious encounters. Petrosino recalled that, more than once, he was bumped into by a stranger on a Manhattan street; as the pedestrian glanced at him and passed by, the detective was overcome by an uncanny feeling that the man was an assassin who’d lost his nerve at the last moment. When he walked the streets, he kept his Smith & Wesson .38 revolver in his pocket, an index finger on the trigger, ready to be pulled out at any moment.
One reporter stopped by Petrosino’s apartment building on Charles Street to get details for a story he was working on. It was late at night, and the journalist was waiting in the darkened hallway on the first floor for the detective to arrive home. After a few minutes, the reporter glanced toward the foyer and recognized Petrosino’s massive frame as he came through the front door into the lighted vestibule. The reporter, leaning against the wall, was in shadow. When Petrosino entered the hallway and turned toward the stairs, the man spoke Petrosino’s name, “not thinking of the caution which must surround this man, who for years had been storing against himself all the vengeance of which the criminal Italian nature is capable.” Petrosino jumped, the reporter recalled, not away but toward him, moving so quickly that the reporter had no time to speak. The detective pinned him against the wall with terrific strength, knocking the breath out of him. Only then did the newspaperman catch his breath and manage to cry out his name. The detective instantly let him go.
“Petrosino did not laugh,” the reporter recalled. He simply nodded and told the man, “I thought it was my time, at last. Someday they will get me.”
…
The pressure on Petrosino and Commissioner Bingham grew throughout that turbulent year. The Tribune was calling for the “rapid deportation of Italians,” arguing that, every other measure having failed, this was now “the only hope for the future.” The Italian Squad was still catching and arresting Black Handers throughout the city, and driving out others through intimidation, but it seemed that for every Black Hand member the squad caught, three new ones joined the Society.
On August 20, after another rash of Society violence, General Bingham took action. He shocked New York by demoting two Italian Squad detectives, Frank Bonanno and Felix de Martini, to a lower rank and cutting their pay from $2,000 a year to $1,400. “I want the police to make good on th
ese Black Hand cases,” the General told the press, “and when I find that investigations have been shiftlessly handled, off will go the heads of the police officers.” Bonanno and de Martini were farmed out to plainclothes duty in the Bronx. The pair were two of Petrosino’s best men.
Bingham took pains to emphasize publicly his support for his ally. “Now don’t think I’m running down my men,” he told reporters on one occasion. “Lieutenant Petrosino and his Italian Squad have done excellent work.” But he acknowledged that the squad’s success had created problems. The members had become so well known in the Italian colonies that they were being recognized on the job, undermining their investigations. But the neighborhoods where the Black Hand flourished remained “strange and impenetrable” to non-Italian cops, creating no-go areas for the NYPD.
The scourge even invaded the consecrated realm of American baseball. On August 18, 1907, Frank Chance, the manager and captain of the Chicago Cubs, arrived at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan to play the New York Giants. He found a letter waiting for him with a bony hand and “clawlike fingers” drawn at the bottom. “Dear Sir,” it read. “Your club must not get again pennant this year 1907 from New York . . . If you do not let the Giants win the first place this year, Gang of Black Hands will see you after . . . We will use bombs on your players on train wreck . . . We are cranky on Giants. Yours truly, Black Hand.” Police theorized the bad grammar was a giveaway for a Giants fan trying to disguise himself as a half-literate Italian. The letter, sadly for the team’s supporters, failed ignominiously: the Giants finished in fourth place in the National League, twenty-five and a half games behind the Cubs. Months later, George Napoleon “Nap” Rucker, a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Brooklyn Dodgers), got a letter accusing him of throwing games to National League teams and informing Rucker that he would soon be assassinated. “The charge is absurd,” said his manager. “Still, it will not do the pitcher any good.”
It didn’t. The first game Rucker pitched after receiving the letter, on August 17 versus the Cincinnati Reds, he was shellacked for five runs on twelve hits. Brooklyn lost, 5–0.
…
The drumbeat of horror depressed Italians. Immigrants, one priest in Detroit reported, were “filled with a feeling that the Americans despise them.” Divisions between immigrants from the south and north of Italy, which had always been present, sharpened. “The Sicilian is bloodthirsty man,” read a petition sent to the Manhattan coroner, signed by two hundred women from northern Italy, “treacherous; thief; overbearing; vindictive; liar; counterfeiter. He belongs to Black Hand. He exercises blackmail. Is a dynamiter, and by blood a coward. Therefore if the Government wants peace, if the Government wants quietness in America, we must suppress the immigration from the Sicily.”
If there was one sign of hope, it came from a direction Petrosino had long looked to. For years he’d been encouraging Italian Americans to find their courage and join together to fight the Society. Now it began to happen—in Chicago. Prominent Italian Americans in that city called for a meeting on November 17 at Roti Hall. More than a thousand people showed up and crowded into the building to witness the founding of the Society of the White Hand.
At the appointed hour, a Chicagoan named Stephen Malato climbed to the lectern amidst the murmuring of male voices below. As he peered out over the audience of Milanese, Sicilians, Calabrians, and Campanians, each group talking in its native dialect, Malato gestured for the crowd to be silent. “We will clean out the Black Hand within a month!” he began. “We will give the public enough evidence to convict these blackmailers and then it will stop.” Malato read out the mission statement of the White Hand Society, one that spoke to the fears and hopes of the Italian community. The men in the room pledged themselves “to remove from the atmosphere the burden of mystery and terror” created by the Black Hand and “to rid public opinion in America of its preconceived notions and prejudices.” The White Hand would be not only a crime-fighting organization but also an advocacy league that would restore the good name of Italians. “War without truce” was the call the members heard that night. “War without quarter.”
Italian lawyers, merchants, physicians, and bankers lined up to sign their names to the society’s list of members. Grand plans were formed: a $50,000 war chest was promised, of which $10,000 was pledged inside the hall. The White Hand would recruit, train, and pay no fewer than one thousand detectives to hunt down the malefactors in Chicago; within a few days, the league had received five hundred applications for those positions, which went by the title “secret agent.” The executive committee drew up a list of eleven known Black Hand leaders to give the detectives a head start once the candidates were selected. Until indictments could be obtained against these men, the White Hand promised to maintain round-the-clock surveillance of their homes.
Twenty men were sworn in as deputies, adding to the rather bewildering list of various agents who would chase down Society members. These were not your typical crime fighters—among them were a peddler, a clerk, and a laborer—but they were willing and eager to begin. The chief of the actual Chicago Police Department gave the effort a ringing endorsement, saying the White Hand would be able to track down the blackmailers better than his own men. The Chicago newspapers published glowing editorials, which were reprinted all across the country. The result, one author wrote, was that the Italian community no longer felt it was being treated as “a pack of criminals, cowards, and thwarters of justice, unworthy of being harbored in a civilized country.”
Almost immediately, imitators began to spring up all across the nation, in cities and towns large and small. On January 22, 1908, Italians in New Castle, Pennsylvania, banded together as the Catholic Protective Society. Organizations were proposed or opened in Carbondale and Reading, Pennsylvania; Clarksville, West Virginia; Brockton, Massachusetts; New Orleans; Baltimore; and many other places.
As soon as the White Hand of Pittsburgh was founded, its members took up arms against the enemy. The two sides met in a rail yard among the coiling loops of steel tracks, dodging freight cars and engines puffing black smoke. A gun battle erupted. The Black Handers and the White Handers hid behind railcars, ducking their heads out for a view of their enemies before firing their guns. The battle raged over an area measuring three city blocks, with hundreds of shots fired. One White Hander was hit by a bullet and went down; two others chased after the gunman, slipping and tripping on the rocks that bordered the rail beds. Finally, they caught up to the Black Hand member, identified as one Phillip Rea, and shot him dead.
…
Other victories followed. In “Helltown,” where the Black Hand had effectively taken over the government of the thriving mining village, the local police admitted they couldn’t stop the Society, and so Frank Dimaio of the Pinkerton Detective Agency was called in. The agent met with operatives from the U.S. Steel Corporation—the limestone from Hillsville was a key ingredient in the corporation’s ovens—and decided to follow the path set forth by Petrosino’s infiltration of the anarchist societies of Paterson, New Jersey. The agent and several other detectives disguised themselves as Italian immigrants and boarded a ship outside New York Harbor, then entered Ellis Island. After passing through the immigration halls, the men headed for Hillsville, where Dimaio soon brushed up against the Black Hand. Fearless and daring, he joined the Society and rose to a position of leadership. After months under deep cover, the trap was set. One afternoon, as the miners trudged to the small building where their pay envelopes were distributed, they found a stranger standing next to the cashier’s window. When one of the Black Hand suspects entered, the man would tell him there was a problem with his wages and ask him to step into a back room. There, agents would jump on the suspect and put him in handcuffs.
It worked perfectly until a woman allied with the Society noticed that men were going into the back office and not coming out. She ran to the headquarters of the gang to spread the word. As the woman entered the house, a boxcar ran dow
n a railroad siding nearby; the door opened and policemen began pouring out. The lawmen surrounded the house and pulled nine suspects out one by one.
The audacious strike had wiped out a complete Black Hand outfit in a single morning. It seemed to offer hope that an alliance of private agents, police, prosecutors, and Italian witnesses could defeat even a deeply entrenched Society gang. Hillsville was no Manhattan, of course, but the formula had worked.
That same year, the federal government finally delivered the tools needed to fight the Society. Packaged into the Immigration Act of 1907 was a clause that allowed for the arrest and deportation of any immigrant who’d been convicted of a crime in his home country, up to three years after his arrival in the United States.
And finally, in the new year of 1908, the Italians of New York joined the cause. The announcement came at a “big and fiery” meeting held at Manhattan’s Bolletino Hall at 178 Park Row. The gathering, held before an overflow crowd, marked the founding of the Italian Vigilance Protective Association. Speakers took the stage throughout a raucous evening and called the gathered men to arms with “impassioned addresses, with the vociferousness and gesticulations of which only members of the Latin race are capable.” The Black Hand was condemned and the glories of the Italian people proclaimed. Bootblacks, cobblers, and merchants stood shoulder to shoulder as the speakers fired their volleys, competing with one another in their cries of “Viva!” and “Bene!” Three hundred men signed their names to the league’s membership list that night.
The Black Hand Page 17