And the burden increased daily. Italian immigration into New York continued at a torrid rate throughout the squad’s early days. The year of the unit’s founding, 1904, saw 193,296 Italian men, women, and children enter the United States. By 1905, the total had jumped to 221,479, and the figures for the following two years were even higher: 273,120 and 285,731. Inevitably, some of those immigrants were criminals. “There are thousands of Black Hand robbers and assassins in New York and Brooklyn,” Petrosino admitted to the Times in October 1905, “and they are a rapidly growing menace.” Later, he put the number of Italian criminals working in Manhattan at between 35,000 and 40,000, with more arriving every day.
Alberto Pecorini, a newspaper editor who studied the Society, agreed. He estimated that 95 percent of the small businessmen, shop owners, organ grinders, bankers, and unskilled laborers in the Italian colonies were paying the Society a weekly extortion fee to keep their businesses and families safe. If this figure was correct, it would mean that there were hundreds of thousands of Black Hand victims in New York alone. But even that number was incomplete, as it excluded those immigrants who’d fled the country in fear for their lives. “The Black Hand,” wrote journalist Frank Marshall White, “has ruined and driven out of the United States thousands of honest and industrious Italians who might otherwise have made the best kind of citizens.”
It’s possible that those numbers were exaggerated. The fact that most Black Hand crimes went unreported made it difficult even for someone like Petrosino or Pecorini to gauge their true number. But there was ample evidence from other sources—victim lists confiscated from Black Hand members, reports from journalists in St. Louis, Chicago, and other cities—that the number of victims was high, certainly in the thousands every year in New York alone. Especially for a small businessman, if you’d amassed any kind of wealth at all in your years in America, you could expect to be threatened.
The demographics were against Petrosino. The Italian Squad was a thin line of men standing on the Atlantic seaboard facing east, braced against a wave that never crested but only kept climbing higher. Many observers believed that the NYPD had made a token gesture by creating the squad while withholding the institutional support the unit needed. “It seemed like a hollow victory to many,” wrote one historian, “a PR stunt.”
As Petrosino trained his men in the intricacies of the Society, he pushed for funds to open a proper squad office. Finally, McAdoo consented. The detective wouldn’t be allowed to house his unit at 300 Mulberry—or perhaps Petrosino requested a place away from the Irish—but he was allowed to rent space at 175 Waverly Place, in what is now Manhattan’s West Village. Petrosino rounded up what supplies he could muster, found a few old desks to haul up to the office, and hung a sign in the window that read “Real Estate.” Any citizens who knocked on the door asking about property in the neighborhood were quietly turned away. The business was simply a cover for the Italian Squad’s real work.
When the squad was firmly established in its new home, the New York Times sent a reporter to do an in-depth interview with the chief of this exotic new bureau. He described the man he found waiting for him:
The eyes are the intelligent eyes of a student. There is generally a kindly light in them, a light that makes one feel easy in mind. They invite you to be confidential, and when the straight line of the lips breaks into a smile, you can readily imagine that you are talking to some gentle and thoughtful person who has your interest at heart.
Petrosino began with a tour of the office. Photos of Italian criminals lined the walls, and on a wooden table sat a display of weapons confiscated by the squad: stilettos, revolvers, blackjacks. The detective held up what looked like a pencil sharpener. “Look at this,” he said. It was, in fact, a knife taken off an extortionist.
The little inspection over, the two sat down for the interview, and the reporter asked Petrosino how he planned to destroy the Society of the Black Hand. The answer was perhaps a surprise, coming from the notoriously tough detective. “Enlightenment,” Petrosino said. He explained:
We need a missionary more than a detective in the Italian quarters of New York. A missionary who would go among the newcomers and impart to them a reasonable amount of knowledge concerning our government. It is ignorance of the blessings he might enjoy in this country that is holding back the Italian-American citizen. They do not know their constitutional rights. They don’t even know the glorious history of the Republic.
Even as he launched this new experiment in law enforcement, Petrosino argued that policing wouldn’t be enough. Italians didn’t feel part of America; they needed teachers, ambassadors, social workers. The detective strove to emphasize that his countrymen loved freedom, just like Americans, but were confused about how America worked or if, in fact, the system should be trusted at all. Petrosino urged Americans to have patience with his people. The average Italian, he said, “works hard, has simple pleasures, loves the things that are beautiful and sends his children to the public schools. He is worth enlightening.”
The journalist filed his story and a copy editor slapped a headline on it. “PETROSINO,” it read, “DETECTIVE AND SOCIOLOGIST.”
…
Every morning, the men of the new italian squad arrived at 175 Waverly dressed in workmen’s outfits, wearing the wide-brimmed felt hats then in fashion with the contadini. Their chief sorted through the hundreds of leads he’d gathered from his nfami and divided them up among the detectives. The men then left the premises in ones and twos and ambled down Waverly heading for their assignments, disguised as laborers being sent out to repair rental properties.
The Society’s violence was ratcheting up with unnerving speed. Bombs were being detonated in Little Italy, Brooklyn, and the East Side. Three policemen were guarding a Williamsburg store when its brick front launched into the street with an earthshaking roar. A dynamite charge had been set without the men realizing it. The shop was torn apart. No one saw the bomber, and police were mystified as to how he got the explosives onto the premises. Letters to other businessmen promised the same. “If you don’t pay, great coward,” one read, “you will suffer. Resistance is useless. Death now stares you in the face.”
Serrino Nizzarri was a baker who ran a shop at 98 Bayard Street in what is now Chinatown. A Black Hander, Anthony Fazia, had already made one attempt on his life, calling him out of a barber’s chair and attempting to sink a knife into his chest before Nizzarri managed to dodge the thrust and flee. A letter spelled out whom Nizzarri was dealing with: “Our society is composed, besides Italians, of policemen and lawyers, and if you make known its contents, we shall know at once.” When he was ready to pay, the Society letters told him, he was to leave a red handkerchief in his window. But the red handkerchief never appeared. Nizzarri had decided to resist.
One evening, the baker was making bread in the basement of his shop, with his daughter and her baby nearby. Sensing a presence, he looked up and saw a man walking slowly down the stairs into his workplace. It was Fazia. The Black Hander spotted the baker and pulled out a gun, pointing it at Nizzarri’s chest. The basement echoed with two shots. The bullets missed the baker, but in the excitement his daughter knocked into a pot of boiling water and spilled it on her child, who let out a horrible cry. The baby was scalded to death.
The Italian Squad hunted down Fazia and brought him to the downtown detention center known as the Tombs. He declined a lawyer, went to trial, and declared defiantly from the stand, “I’ll go to jail, but he,” meaning Nizzarri, “will pay the penalty. My friends will look after him all right. Read the letter. It tells all.” Fazia was defiant, but the squad could take satisfaction in a small victory. Nizzarri had stood up and testified against his persecutor, and the man would spend the best years of his life in Sing Sing. If they could string a number of such cases together, the Society would be crippled.
The battle between the Black Hand and the Italian Squad was the talk of the city. Even jewelry designers took note. Early on in the craze
, a newspaper reported that the “Black Hand Is Now the Rage” and went on to explain that “since the recent declaration of Detective Petrosino of the New York police force that there is no such thing as the Black Hand Society”—this was a misquote, Petrosino having said no national organization existed—“the whole thing has been taken as a joke.” Street vendors began selling small black hands made out of metal for use as watch charms or buttons. The demand, the newspaper reported, far outstripped the supply. Stores in Manhattan even sold special stationery with the Black Hand insignia at the top of the letter, with matching envelopes, so one could send one’s girlfriend or great-aunt in Rochester a “Black Hand” letter. The symbols of death and horror had been taken up by the smart set; it had all “become a proper fad.”
But violence continued to bubble up everywhere. In nearby Westfield, New Jersey, John Clearwater, a “white” (non-Italian) owner of a restaurant, was walking home at 1 a.m. when a Black Hand gang that had been threatening his life confronted him. They pointed revolvers at him as Clearwater whipped out his own gun and began firing. Two bullets slammed into the restaurateur’s body and he dropped to the ground. The Society members fell on him with their daggers, stabbing him in the neck and face. He bled to death in the road.
No business was exempt. When the steamship Sibiria sailed into New York Harbor and docked at Pier 1 with a load of fruit from the West Indies, there were bundles of mail waiting for its Sicilian crew. One of the sailors opened a letter and found a note from the Society. If the crew didn’t pay the Black Hand $50 each, the seamen would be murdered one by one. The captain told his men to show the message to the Italian Squad. “No!” the men replied. “For God’s sake no! That’s one of the things we mustn’t do. They would kill us right away.” The Sicilians refused to leave the ship and stayed holed up in their cabins, “huddled together like sheep, hands on revolvers, which most had borrowed, others having clubs.” The sailors closely watched every longshoreman who came onboard to unload the fruit as he entered the hold. The men didn’t rest until the ship sailed away from New York.
Italians were frankly terrified. In Brooklyn, Tony Marendino, the young son of a contractor, vanished from the streets one afternoon. When the Italian Squad approached the boy’s father, he refused to talk to them. Even without the family’s help, the squad was able to track down the kidnappers, Salvatore Peconi and Vito Laduca. Peconi was a known Black Hand associate who’d been arrested before for kidnapping a child. The pair was arrested and held in jail to await a grand jury. When word reached the victim’s father, he rushed to the courthouse and tried to pay the kidnappers’ bail, even going so far as to claim that Peconi was his best friend and should be released immediately. Marendino feared that if Peconi went to jail for stealing his son, his life would become unlivable. He refused to testify against the pair, and the Italian Squad was forced to drop the case.
Intimidation was rife; when one star witness appeared in court during a Black Hand trial, detectives watched the crowd to try to catch anyone giving her “the death sign.” Just as she was about to name a Society chief, she saw something in the crowd that caused her to stop dead. She nearly fainted, but continued on. Only when another signal was passed did she stand up, screaming, “I swear by the God in heaven! I swear on the grave of my sacred mother! I swear I know nothing! I can tell nothing! I will say no more!” One judge in Baltimore ordered the jury box and the witness stand picked up and turned around so that the men in the audience couldn’t see the faces of those giving testimony.
Reports poured into the office at 175 Waverly. Men appeared at the door holding letters, or telling stories of children who’d disappeared, mysterious fires, explosions in the night. Petrosino was just coming to understand the extent of what he was facing. He estimated that for every Italian who came to him, there were 250 who kept silent. The Black Hand scourge was already reaching epidemic proportions.
5
* * *
A General Rebellion
In the summer and fall of 1905, a quite lethal cloak-and-dagger game unfolded across the length and breadth of Manhattan. On grand avenues, in tenement hallways, in malodorous, gaslit alleyways, in the “chianti cellars” where it was rumored that Society men gathered to plot their crimes, the Black Hand and the police clashed again and again. It was a test of the Society’s strength in America. A test, really, of whether it could be stopped at all.
Some of the Italian Squad’s cases were simple. When a butcher at 211 Bleecker was targeted by extortionists, the squad showed up early one morning before the street came alive with shoppers. They hid in the butcher’s freezer and stayed there for hours, drinking hot cocoa and dancing to keep warm. They sat on slabs of ice and told stories about their childhoods or the slick thugs they’d encountered in the Tenderloin. Finally, late in the afternoon, a man identified in the Washington Post as Gioacchino Napoli walked into the shop and accepted $50 in marked money. The detectives staggered out of the freezer one by one, half-frozen, and threw handcuffs onto Napoli. In a later case, the detectives worked behind the counter of a drugstore at Second Avenue and 12th Street, dressed as clerks and even serving customers their laudanum and nerve pills, while they glanced through the windows at the cousin of a Black Hand victim who was nervously pacing, waiting for a bagman to appear. The squad men watched as the cousin spoke to a young Italian, who was accompanied by two other men. The cousin handed the stranger something, then took out a handkerchief and wiped it quickly across his lips. It was the signal. The detectives rushed from the drugstore, but the three Black Handers were already running toward a departing streetcar, which was flying down Second Avenue at nearly twenty miles per hour. The trio managed to hop aboard the streetcar. A squad member reached the doorway and pulled himself on, but one of the Society men, Paolo Castellano, saw the detective enter and dove through the streetcar’s open window, plunging headfirst to the cobblestones before picking himself up and running.
The detective and a patrolman who happened to be onboard pulled out their guns and began blasting away at Castellano. “The car was in an uproar,” reported the Times, “men, women, and children screaming and ducking out of range of the revolvers.” A bullet struck the blackmailer in the hip, spun him around, and sent him crashing to the pavement. The detectives jumped off the streetcar and dragged Castellano to the nearest precinct along with his two accomplices.
Petrosino taught his men how to read Black Hand letters, to notice certain turns of phrase and bits of dialect that could reveal their author’s identity. There were too many threats to take them all with equal seriousness, so the detectives had to learn to distinguish a genuine letter from a bogus one. Some threats lacked the proper touch, such as the one received by a Mr. Nussbaum of Manhattan in the fall of 1905. “See here,” it began. “We ain’t going to fool with you no longer. If we don’t get $50 on September 30 before 11 a.m., we’re going to kill you and your girl. I am president of the Klick and can write plainer letters than the rest.” It was signed the Black Hand, but the culprit turned out to be Mr. Nussbaum’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Nellie. She’d written the note “just for fun.”
A different letter, sent to a Manhattan barber whose shop had been destroyed by a bomb, indicated a far higher level of danger. “You know what to expect now,” it read. “This is just a beginning . . . You are doomed because you will not obey . . . We are the men who visited Palibino in 116th Street and Ciro, the grocer, in Elizabeth Street.” That kind of message demanded immediate attention. Later in the history of the Society, a Chicago man received a letter from his son’s kidnappers, written by the boy. “Please, papa,” it read, “pay the money or you will never see me again.” The Black Handers added a postscript: “Would you know your boy’s head if you saw it?”
Petrosino estimated that tens of thousands of New Yorkers were being extorted by the Black Hand. These were the men digging the subway tunnels, carving out the city’s water reservoirs, building out the skyline. How many did the Black Hand have un
der its thumb? And how, Petrosino wanted to know, was the Society getting the name of every man working on these gargantuan projects?
It took months of legwork, but Petrosino and his men finally unraveled the scheme. When a new building project was announced—a railroad line, an aqueduct—a Black Hand member was assigned to get a job on it. He would show up at the work site, disguised as a common laborer, just as Petrosino did on his investigations, and apply for one of the spots. When he got it, he would head to the camp and mingle with his fellow laborers. Once established there, he would pretend to receive a Black Hand letter, which he’d have brought with him for this very purpose. “He tells one or two and pretends he is almost scared to death over hearing the news,” Petrosino explained. “It quickly spreads until every man in that camp fears every other man, not knowing who or how many in the camp are members of the Mano Nera.” The workers became afraid to talk to one another, fearing their neighbor might belong to the Society. Once the men had been demoralized and isolated, another Black Hand member was ordered to show up at the camp on payday and begin collecting their tribute.
Other aspects of the Society’s operations dwarfed that particular scheme. Petrosino soon discovered that members of Black Hand gangs were getting jobs as tellers at savings banks all over the colonies and keeping records of the deposits of small merchants. Essentially, they were acting as moles, reporting on the financial holdings of potential targets. Those assets were substantial. By the end of the decade, Italians in New York would own $120 million in property, $100 million invested in various businesses, and $20 million in bank deposits. The Society was keeping track of who was prospering in order to terrorize them. Black Hand members congregated in barbershops, restaurants, bars, places where immigrants socialized, and trawled for gossip on who had recently gotten married (wedding gifts were not exempt from the Society’s greed), whose uncle or father had recently died (nor were inheritances), or who had sold the family farm back in Calabria or Sicily.
The Black Hand Page 7
