The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  In fact, Rockefeller had good reason to fear. His splendid estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, was a hotbed of Black Hand violence: two of his workers had already been attacked; in addition, nearby a deputy sheriff had been stabbed with knives and beaten with clubs, and a road builder had been murdered with a bullet through the brain. Finally, Rockefeller had dismissed all the Italians working at his estate, and locals—that is, non-Italians—were hired in their place. Rockefeller claimed that he just wanted to give honest men a chance at employment, but prejudice and fear were rife in the country, and it’s hard to believe they didn’t play a part in the mass firing. The move proved highly popular with the press. “Praise for Mr. Rockefeller is heard on all sides,” declared the Times, which noted that the magnate was even allowing these men to go into his forests and cut wood to burn in their stoves, during a season when temperatures regularly dipped below zero. At the same time, hundreds of immigrant servants, groundskeepers, and laborers tramped away from Pocantico Hills, uncertain where they would find new jobs to feed their children.

  The states tried passing new laws to stop the outrages. Legislators in West Virginia proposed a law to bar Italian immigrants from entering the state. New Jersey made extortion punishable by twenty years in prison. New York had already passed a law raising the sentence for kidnapping to fifty years, a direct result of the Black Hand scare. A prominent Detroit clergyman who worked with Italian immigrants called for the death penalty for simply writing extortion letters. “There should be no mercy shown,” he said. “This is an epidemic.” In July, the Black Hand achieved a marker of international fame: Lloyds of London announced that it was now insuring businesses and individuals against Society attacks.

  The terror even began to shape the country’s demographics. Farmers in states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi badly needed labor in the early 1900s to plow their fields and harvest their crops. Federal officials estimated that the region was losing $1 million per day because there was no one to till the farmland, with African Americans streaming north to escape Jim Crow laws and virulent racism. Who would fill the void? Italians were solid candidates—thrifty, used to hot climates, and hardworking.

  But all over the region, voices spoke out in opposition. “It is sometimes wiser to bear the evils we have,” argued an opinion piece in the Nashville American in 1906, “than to fly to others with which we are unacquainted.” States below the Mason-Dixon Line petitioned the government’s immigration authorities for more northern European immigrants while explicitly discouraging them from sending Italians. During its 1908 session, the Virginia state senate passed a motion that urged representatives to “oppose in every possible manner the influx into Virginia of immigrants from Southern Europe, with their Mafia and Black Hand murder societies.”

  The Society was even thrust into the center of the 1907 race for the Mississippi governorship. “The campaign . . . now under way,” reported the Pittsburgh Post, “seems likely to turn upon a race issue, but a race issue in which the negro is little concerned . . . It looks now as though the election will be a referendum on whether the Italian is wanted or not.” Candidates stumped from small town to small town decrying the devastation that the hordes of olive-skinned southern Italians would bring to Anglo-Saxon Mississippi. Some went so far as to produce “Black Hand scrapbooks,” filled with newspaper clippings that described bombings and kidnappings in the North, and passed them around at their campaign rallies, where voters pored over the books with fascination, reading of such things as the freggio, omertà, and the blood oath.

  Once the modern Ku Klux Klan arose in 1915, its members would attack Italians, burn crosses on their lawns in Mississippi, and chase their families out of Birmingham at the point of a gun. The faces one sees on the sidewalks of Asheville today, the names of civic leaders in Tuscaloosa or Biloxi, the list of alumni at Ole Miss—all are different from what they might have been. The Society created fear where there had been only strangeness.

  …

  For four years, the country had tried various combinations of police pressure, new laws, violent public condemnation, and the creation of White Hand societies. But little had changed. The Society was, if anything, stronger. The Black Hand was no longer a trend; it threatened to become a permanent part of the national scene. “Unless the Black Hand be wiped out by the most drastic measures soon,” warned the San Francisco Call, “the system will become firmly grounded in the American social structure.” The paper estimated it would take ten years, and the lives of many law enforcement officials, to eliminate the Society. The Black Hand was putting down deep roots. The Manhattan gangs were making so much money, Petrosino found, that they were investing in legitimate concerns, opening stores and even banks on the East Side. Tens of thousands of workers were contributing two or three dollars out of their weekly paychecks. To that extent the Society had become an institution much like the IRS. Meanwhile, Manhattanites—who dwelt at the center of the national panic—existed in “a state of mind bordering on hysteria.”

  For the first time, newspapers began to direct their mounting anger at the Italian Squad and its leader. “The trouble all along has been in one respect at least, in the personal character of Lt. Petrosino,” complained an editorial in the Detroit Free Press. The writer had clearly never met the detective: he hilariously described Petrosino as “elderly, grey-haired, spectacled, slight of build.” The portrait of a frail, vulnerable investigator was ridiculously off the mark, but it reflected the writer’s view of Petrosino’s temperament. “He may be morally certain that he has located a gang of [Black Handers],” wrote a Free Press editorialist, “and that they are planning a bomb carnival, but he will not arrest without the kind of evidence that will convict in court.” The writer painted the detective as an aging milquetoast who carried the Constitution around in his pocket for frequent, nearsighted study.

  It wasn’t just policing that was being overwhelmed. In July of that year, Lieutenant Vachris of the Brooklyn Italian Squad confided to a journalist that he had had to drop some Society cases because city officials refused to pay for the extradition of Italian criminals from other states. Black Hand suspects were going free for lack of carfare. And in Brooklyn, the firebrand lawyer Francis Corrao, who’d vowed to take on the Society from his position as the first Italian D.A. in the country, found obstacles in his path, too. Corrao was assigned menial duties that could have been handled by any law clerk, while Black Hand victims were being killed in the streets. “Murder, assault, and robbery of Italians,” he fumed, are “looked upon by the District Attorney’s office with the most cynical indifference.” Corrao couldn’t get even simple assaults prosecuted if they involved an Italian victim. “Every avenue and every door was shut to me,” he said, “that I might not, even in the smallest degree, aid in putting down an Italian criminality that has outraged the people of my race.” The prosecutor realized that his appointment had been mere political window dressing. The Brooklyn D.A., he believed in his heart, didn’t care if Italians lived or died.

  Even the detective’s longtime supporters in the press were growing fatigued. On May 26, the Evening Herald, which had lionized Petrosino for years, now skewered the NYPD. “LIVES OF 10,000 IN PERIL BY BLACK HAND,” the headline blared; “BINGHAM HELPLESS.” The article laid out its indictment on the Black Hand war: An epidemic of smallpox, cholera, or even a disease less dangerous

  than either of these which would imperil the lives of 10,000 citizens of New York in less than a year and a half might easily call for drastic action on the part of the authorities. Yet there is affecting New York at this time an epidemic of lawlessness which has extended over five years, gaining strength with time . . . A few hundred ignorant, dirty, low-browed aliens . . . have the metropolis of the United States and the second largest city in the world by the throat.

  Another article in the same edition went after the detective himself. “PETROSINO’S SQUAD A FAILURE,” read the headline. “Of Petrosino’s honesty and ability, there ca
n be no question,” the paper made clear, “but his special Italian staff has failed to make good.” The Black Hand would have to blow up an entire tenement building, the paper predicted, killing hundreds, before the NYPD came to their senses.

  In fact, the Italian Squad, with four years of often bitter experience under its belt, was more effective than ever. In the past two years, its investigators had made 2,500 arrests, 2,000 of them in Black Hand–related crimes, and gained 850 convictions. In November they raided a tenement on Long Island and uncovered nineteen bombs. Three days later, Petrosino arrested a kidnapper who’d snatched a number of children off the streets of East Harlem, putting an end to his spree. Squad members were working flat out, often arriving back at the offices after fourteen or sixteen hours on the job and collapsing on their desks, rising after a few miserable hours of sleep to return to a blackmailing case or the search for a kidnapped child. For one stretch of six months, Petrosino rarely returned home to his own bed.

  Ideas for stopping the bombing craze were few and bordered on the extreme. The bloodthirsty Brooklyn Eagle proposed a life sentence for anyone convicted of simply possessing an explosive device. If the bomb exploded? “Send him to the chair.” Beating criminals was passé; the crisis had become so acute that members of the Society “should be classified with Sherman’s Good Indian.” That is, the only good Black Hander was a dead Black Hander, and the miscreants should be shot on sight. The New York Post didn’t go quite that far, but it did demand that kidnappers be physically marked so that their crime would be known. “Let the letter ‘K’ be branded low on the forehead of the criminal,” wrote the editorialist, “then let him be turned loose to meet the living death that would await him in society.” This idea was heartily endorsed by the Times-Union of Jacksonville, Florida, which encouraged legislators to make it law.

  Three years before, Petrosino had told his fellow citizens, “We need a missionary more than a detective in the Italian quarters of New York.” Education and loving grace would win out over time. Now the mood of the city, and the nation, had darkened considerably. Americans weren’t calling for missionaries. They didn’t want detectives. They desired vigilantes.

  Commissioner Theodore Bingham decided to comply.

  13

  * * *

  A Secret Service

  In the winter of that terrible year, Petrosino’s life changed once again. On November 30, 1908, Adelina gave birth to a twelve-pound baby girl. The overjoyed father brought the infant to St. Patrick’s to be baptized Adelina Bianca Giuseppina Petrosino. At a party, one woman remembered the detective going around urging guests to eat some cake, like any exuberant new father. “He was so happy and delighted and smiled every minute,” she recalled.

  The next few months, fulfilling ones, were unlike any the detective had ever experienced. Petrosino “had begun to acquire a taste for family life and the joys of fatherhood,” wrote his Italian biographer. He no longer returned to his office after dinner to take up another Black Hand case or study police flyers from Chicago. Now he hurried home to 233 Lafayette to have dinner and play with the baby. His love of music deepened. Musicians would drop by after their gigs around the city to play some arias in his apartment, trying not to wake young Adelina. Pedestrians walking by could hear the notes of his favorite operas floating down from the three windows above. The music might go on into the early morning. Wine, certainly, was drunk.

  The mood at 300 Mulberry was not quite as festive. Commissioner Bingham had been brought in to stop crime, particularly Black Hand crime, and he hadn’t been able to do it. In plotting a way forward, the General had begun to think past Petrosino. For months, as the headlines had turned darker and more strident, he’d been nursing a proposal to kill the Society off once and for all: a private army of detectives, invisible to the public and answerable to no one but him. A secret service of his own. It would be the first such force in America.

  The General revealed the plan to the press. “You ask me what I want to do?” he fairly barked at a reporter for the Sun. “Just this: I want a force of from six to ten real detectives, Secret Service men . . . What little crime of this Black Hand sort we could not prevent absolutely we would make arrests and convictions in mighty short order.” In fact, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been granted such power long before. “What the people of New York, Italians, and everyone else are thinking of in allowing this campaign of bomb throwing and assault to go on without giving the Commissioner of Police the entirely reasonable and inexpensive aid he asks for, I don’t know.”

  Bingham’s plan was to hire at least half a dozen top-notch men whose identities would be known only to the commissioner and who would never testify in court. Bingham would pay them out of a secret fund, and they would report directly to him. He warned that the kind of detective he had his eye on would cost $10,000 a year, around four times what Petrosino was making. One of these super-sleuths alone, Bingham boasted, “could knock out the Black Hand in a month.” The General never explained precisely what these detectives would do that Petrosino and his squad weren’t already doing. There was a suggestion that some of the methods would fall outside the law. Bingham neglected to answer a rather fundamental question: if the men weren’t going to appear in court, how could the evidence they gathered be introduced at trial?

  At any rate, Bingham needed funds for his new secret service. The Board of Aldermen, led by Tammany in the inimitable shape of Big Tim and Little Tim Sullivan, held the purse strings. A clash loomed.

  The General was undeterred. He spoke about the service to anyone who would listen: newspapermen, civic clubs, police banquets. He wrote an essay for the May issue of the North American Review in which he declared that “the police force itself, even the best men, would not recognize a high-grade, first-class, real ‘sleuth’ if he came down the street headed by a brass band.” (Petrosino must have winced at that.) The General was obsessive by nature, and the secret service became an idée fixe for him. There were rumors in certain circles that Bingham was nursing political hopes that went beyond being police commissioner. If he was considering a run for higher office, destroying the Black Hand would be a feather in his cap, a coup that no other political leader could claim. He would be lionized far and wide for such an accomplishment.

  The announcement of Bingham’s idea caused a sensation. The prominent novelist (The Great God Success) and journalist David Graham Phillips had become famous for uncovering a Senate corruption scandal. Now Phillips sensed another abuse of power in the offing and wrote to the Times in a fury. “Thanks to the carelessness of New Yorkers about decent government,” he declared, “our present police force is to a great extent an instrument of blackmail and oppression. A secret police force would be even worse.” The Black Hand was evil, he conceded, but a secret service would be a danger to democracy. “I see no politics, no ‘grave menace to free institutions’ in the doings of ignorant, crazed creatures, issuing from dingy top rooms to run amuck with dynamite. It seems hysteria to me to take them so seriously, to call homicidal mania political propaganda.”

  William Randolph Hearst agreed. His Evening Journal dissected the proposal with a sharp knife. “If Mr. Bingham uses his police force at his discretion,” the paper warned in an editorial, “what is to prevent him tomorrow from taking money from Mr. Rockefeller to investigate another class of citizens—labor union men, or recalcitrant legislators, or any others?” The cure, Hearst believed, was worse than the illness.

  The argument raged as far away as Nashville, where a local paper took Bingham’s side. “The fact [is],” the editors wrote,

  that every New York detective is more truly a public character than the Mayor is. Let a “plainclothes man” sally forth and patrolmen will nod to him, street car conductors will ask no fare, bellboys will pick him out, janitors will make a sign, bootblacks will look eagerly about for his quarry, politicians will wing patronizingly, barbers will stop in the midst of a shampoo, pawnbrokers will get anxious, second story men
will duck into the nearest saloon, and the cronies of all of these will note his passage with silent wonder as to what’s up.

  In other words, Petrosino and his men had become too famous to do their jobs.

  That Bingham’s remarkable suggestion—a secret police force in the largest American city, answerable to only one man—was seriously considered by Manhattanites speaks to the depth of their anxiety. The proposal was the direct result of the failed war on the Black Hand. By now the Society often seemed indifferent to the police. When the famous tiger hunter and prohibition activist C. D. Searcy received a series of letters in the winter of 1908, one of them advised him to “go kiss yourself goodbye, for we are several hundred strong.” This was followed by a taunt: “Now go ahead to your detectives, who are the only friends you got, and see if they can help you. Yes, they can help you get your lights put out.”

  Bingham’s idea received generally good press. But he knew he was facing a battle with the Sullivans and their aldermen. Soon after his announcement, the board called the commissioner in to testify before a special committee. When the session opened, members immediately attacked Petrosino and his men, accusing them of outlandish acts of brutality. Bingham grabbed his cane and levered himself up to direct a blast at Little Tim. “I am the Police Commissioner,” he shouted. “I am responsible for everything my men do . . . Petrosino is one of our best detectives. With a handful of men he has to keep thousands of Italian criminals in line. Of course he has to use his hands now and then, but we ought to let him alone.”