The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  But Petrosino loved America with the unreasoning love of the immigrant. “No native-born American was ever a more ardent patriot,” wrote Frank Marshall White. “He considered himself under an eternal and illimitable debt of gratitude to his adopted country for the opportunities it had given him and so many others of his race.” Petrosino had taken the request to help protect the country’s leader with deep seriousness, and now McKinley was dead.

  After a few moments, Petrosino gained control of himself. “I warned him!” he said to the assembled journalists. “I told him the anarchist criminals wanted to kill him. But the President was too good-hearted and believed too much in other people’s goodness.” The reporters ran back to their offices and filed long stories headlined “PETROSINO WARNED HIM!” and “ITALIAN DETECTIVE TRIED TO SAVE MCKINLEY.”

  In the years since the McKinley tragedy, Petrosino had worked closely with the Secret Service on a number of cases, including the Barrel Murder. Italian criminals were often involved in counterfeiting, and sometimes Black Hand gangs dabbled in the game themselves. Over the course of several years, Petrosino had come to believe that the agency’s leaders in New York knew the names of “nearly every man” engaged in Black Hand work. On the face of it, this sounds like a preposterous statement. Why would the Secret Service have the names of Society members but refuse to act? But Petrosino had an unimpeachable source for his belief: the agency itself.

  On a hot August day in 1904, a special delivery letter appeared at the office of Joel M. Marx, the assistant district attorney for New York City. Marx was a hard-charging prosecutor who’d gone after Italians who were selling false citizenship papers; scores of them were now languishing in jail. The letter read: “Mr. Marx, I wait for you at door yesterday evening. I see you but I say I give one more chance: if you don’t stop this business, we will kill you . . . and the Italian detectives. Let the poor people go . . . If you don’t stop we kill you and your children. Revenge.” The letter was signed with a heart pierced by an arrow, flanked by two crosses, well-known symbols of the Black Hand.

  Several Secret Service agents were attached to Marx’s office, and he put them on the case immediately. “This is the first time the Black Hand properly has come within the jurisdiction of the Secret Service,” Marx told the Tribune in a front-page story. “My men are hot on the trail of the gang, and expect to break it up before we are through.”

  But he was fudging on the jurisdiction issue. The Secret Service had no power under its charter to pursue criminals who threatened government employees. Marx had simply deputized his men to investigate a threat against an important constituency: himself.

  Petrosino must have been startled by this news. He and his men had received hundreds of death threats from the Black Hand, and not once had the agency volunteered to hunt down the culprits. But even more intriguing information was to follow: Marx went on to say that the Secret Service kept thorough files on the Society. “We have a description,” he told reporters, “of practically every member of the Black Hand.”

  This was almost certainly bluster. There were thousands of Black Handers in New York, with new recruits joining daily, and it would have been impossible for the Secret Service to keep track of them all. The only near-complete file of Black Hand criminals resided in Petrosino’s head, and that was constantly evolving. But clearly the agency had kept tabs on Black Hand activity, and it was possible they were aware of the major players. That information would have been invaluable to the Italian Squad.

  …

  Now, in October 1905, after the attempted murders of the Gimavalvos, Petrosino publicly appealed to the Secret Service, which had once called on him in their time of need, to join the fight. He’d risked his life to assist the Secret Service and protect the president, but the issue went much deeper: Italians were being imported to build America’s infrastructure. They were contributing millions of dollars to the economy every year. They were, by and large, decent, devout, hardworking citizens. And they were being preyed on by criminals of extraordinary cruelty, but their government offered little or no help. Did Italian Americans deserve the same protection under the law that any other citizen received? Petrosino believed they did. The day after his interview with the New York Times, he raised the stakes in another newspaper interview. “You may think I am foolish,” he said, “but unless the federal authorities come to our aid soon, New York will wake up some day to the biggest catastrophe it has ever seen.”

  After his appeal was published, Petrosino sat back and awaited an answer. It arrived in the October 21 edition of the Times. An unnamed official from the Treasury Department, which oversaw the Secret Service, formally replied to Petrosino’s request. “If Detective Prosini,” the official said, mispronouncing the detective’s name, “wishes to obtain the assistance of the Secret Service bureau in his fight against the Black Hand or Mafia, he can do so by paying our men the same as if they were members of a private detective agency.” The Society had “confined their operations to individuals,” and until they moved against the government itself, the agency was “not at liberty to intervene.”

  There were practical reasons for the response. The Secret Service office in New York had only twenty agents, engaged full-time in chasing counterfeiters. It was important work, and it consumed significant amounts of both time and money. To take on the Black Hand would have placed an enormous additional burden on the office. And the Secret Service wasn’t technically allowed to investigate crimes such as Black Hand cases, although Roosevelt and his administration had rendered that restriction meaningless by 1905. They’d expanded the agency’s role to many types of crimes—corruption, land fraud—that its agents weren’t legally authorized to investigate. And the Secret Service had taken action against the Society before, in the case of Assistant District Attorney Marx. The reality is, if the agency had wanted to go to the aid of Petrosino and his people, it could have.

  But it didn’t. And the statement from the faceless bureaucrat wasn’t just a rejection. It was an insult. If Italian Americans wanted protection from murder and extortion, the agency was telling Petrosino, they would have to pay for it.

  Why would a spokesman for a government agency choose to humiliate publicly, in the New York Times, a cop who was trying to prevent American citizens from being murdered? We have no evidence, other than the cutting nature of the words, of what lurked behind the agency’s reply; its archives are silent on the subject. It might have been simple prejudice against Italians; it might have been pique that a dago was making demands of the agency in such a public way. But whatever motivated the statement, its substance was clear: Italian immigrants would receive no help in their life-or-death struggle with the Black Hand. American citizens or not, they were being thrown to the wolves.

  7

  * * *

  Wave

  As Petrosino made his way through Little Italy on a typical summer morning, the streets swarmed with life. Peddlers hawked prosciutto, fresh bananas, and brightly colored hand-drawn portraits of the king and queen of Italy. Delivery wagons trundled down the narrow streets, scattering pedestrians and trailing small children waiting for scraps to fall from the back, which they scooped up and carried home to their mothers. He passed theaters featuring traditional Italian puppet shows, tenements where open windows emitted the squawks and hoots of monkeys as from a zoo’s big house, as entire floors were given over to the raising of the animals for the organ grinders who roamed the city. He passed the offices of marriage brokers promising honest virgins from the old country, and undertakers whose signs advertised the cost of shipping a body back to be buried in Italian soil. In the alleys as he strode past, crap games were in progress and religious processions were forming up, carrying the statues of saints pinned with dollar bills, meant as offerings for deathly ill relatives or friends. As the black derby moved through the crowd, above it the fire escapes were crisscrossed with lines of laundry, while on the rooftops, bedsheets were laid out, covered with yard upon yard of crushe
d tomatoes drying in the sun before being turned into tomato sauce for the family’s evening pasta. Men’s straw hats fluttered in the breeze, stolen from the heads of their owners by small boys and clothespinned to lines strung from one side of the street to the other.

  Newcomers who’d arrived only days or even hours before on a steamship from Genoa passed the detective on the streets. Italian immigrants landed in New York and were often sped on their way into the heartland, to jobs in Kentucky or Michigan or Pennsylvania, to lend their backs to the industrial revolution that was transforming the country. Petrosino could have told you their histories after one glance. They were from Maida or Padua or Naples, and they’d seen a billboard in their town square that promised “Buoni Lavori!” (Good Jobs!), high wages, and cheap steamship tickets. There was even one poster that showed a textile mill with a bank across the street, and laborers striding from one to the other carrying bags of money. The men would have left their homes and boarded the ship, some carrying a ball of yarn in their luggage, leaving a cousin or girlfriend on the pier holding the other end. When the horn sounded and the boat moved away from the dock, the yarn would slowly unspool, the line of thin wool floating in the air until the last turn of the roll, at which point the string hung in the air, kept aloft by the shore breeze.

  Once they landed in New York and were processed through Ellis Island, the men flowed across the country in search of work. In Chicago, Italians toiled in the foundries and factories. In the rail yards spreading out into the Midwest, Italians laid track. In West Virginia, they mined coal. Among the ones who stayed in New York, the men dynamited and dug the subway tunnels while the women sewed in the garment factories. In Brooklyn, they welded ships. In upstate New York, they dug out reservoirs and sealed the banks of the aquifers with concrete. In Michigan, they mined iron ore. In New England, they quarried stone and granite. In Kansas City, they slaughtered cattle in the stockyards. In St. Louis, they forged bricks in that city of a hundred brick plants. In Delaware, they picked peaches. In Florida, it was cotton. In Louisiana, rice and sugar. Everywhere they sweated beneath the sun, building roads and canals. Italians, who were often hired for the most dangerous work, suffered 25 percent of all industrial accidents in the country, with one in five men who came to America maimed or killed on the job. “Your railroads, your public buildings, your coal are wet with Italian sweat and blood,” said the writer Enrico Sartorio.

  And they were sometimes beaten and enslaved. One Calabrian at a labor camp remembered trying to help a fellow Italian on the run.

  My attention was drawn to the other side of the creek, where an Italian was shouting for help—appealing to us as fellow-countrymen to aid him. He had been felled by a blow of a heavy stick dealt him by one of the guards. Cervi, my friend, and I tried to cross over to help him, but were prevented by our boss, who drove us back at the point of a pistol; all I dared do was to shout to him not to resist or he would be killed and to go back; the man who had struck him lifted him bodily by his coat and pushed him on, striking him every time he stumbled or fell from exhaustion.

  “I am nailed to the cross,” wrote one immigrant from some unidentified point in the American interior. “Of the 100 paesani who came here, only 40 have survived. Who is here to protect us? We have neither priests nor carabinieri to look after our safety.” Even in death, the Sicilians and Calabrians were worth less than their fellow men. When, in 1910, an explosion ripped through the Lawson mine in Black Diamond, California, blasting fire out the mine mouth and shooting eight-foot timbers half a mile from the shaft, twelve miners were killed, all of them foreign-born. Families of the Irish and other nationalities were given $1,200 for each of their loved ones; the Italians received $150.

  But they came anyway, pulled by the promise of America. And secreted in the carts and railcars were one or two men who carried with them the germ of the Black Hand. By 1906, the Society seemed to be everywhere.

  Bombs tore apart homes in St. Louis; the bodies of Italians turned up on the slopes of hills in Appalachian coal country with dozens of stab wounds; children went missing in Detroit and were never heard from again; families in Los Angeles abandoned their businesses and fled on steamships back to Italy. In October 1906, a Black Hander walked into a Connecticut home where Giuseppe Vazanini was eating his supper, placed a gun to his chest, and shot him dead. In Pennsylvania, violent gun battles between Society sympathizers and Italian residents broke out in the mining town of Walston that left three dead and a dozen seriously wounded; in another village, a Black Hander tossed a stick of dynamite into a shack occupied by miners the Society believed had informed on them, blowing three men to shreds.

  Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker of Pennsylvania became so alarmed by the mayhem that he ordered in the state constabulary, the third time he’d been forced to call in troops in a single week. “The murderous spirit of the Black Hand,” one newspaper observed, “is beginning to manifest itself all over the state.” Society members who were arrested in one town “sneered at the officers” and “declared that the society was so strong that it would be impossible to break it up, and that eventually it would rule the country.” In Westchester County, New York, laborers were being shot, knifed, or beaten to death. In response, local sheriffs swore in and armed posses of men, who went roaming through the countryside with orders to kill any “desperado” molesting the workers. “WHOLESALE MURDERS IN WATERSHED REGION,” the Times reported that August. “TRAINS CROWDED WITH ITALIANS FLEEING FROM THE BLACK HAND.”

  Americans were spooked. A Chicago woman stabbed an Italian detective who’d staked out a Black Hand rendezvous, thinking he was the bagman. A Pennsylvania man shot and wounded a man who charged past him at a moment when he was expecting a Society member to show up. It turned out the victim was an innocent pedestrian running for a streetcar.

  It became abundantly clear by the spring of 1906 that Petrosino’s warning that non-Italians would soon fall victim to the Society was quickly becoming a reality. Letters had begun to arrive in far-flung cities and towns where the Society had been merely a report in the local newspaper, some of them written in languages other than Italian or English. There were notes in German, in Greek (signed “Maupa Xepi,” which transliterates as “Black Hand”), notes in Yiddish and Hebrew and, later in the Black Hand era, even one verified missive composed in Latin. And it wasn’t just day laborers and other workers who were receiving these threats. Inevitably, as the Black Hand expanded geographically, its appetites increased, and the rich and powerful came within its sights. In fact, in the first months of 1906, it looked as if the stain had spread all the way to the House of Representatives.

  The affair began with postcards sent to various members of the legislature. On one side was a drawing of a black hand. Beneath were the words “Only four days to come.” The appearance of the cards caused a commotion in Congress. “Members began to ransack their brains,” reported the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “in an effort to think of what act they had committed to gain the enmity of the Black Hand.”

  Two days later, another batch of notes arrived. Again there was a sketch of a black palm print, along with the words “You only have two days more.” The countdown caused “nervous prostration” among the legislators, and security inside and outside the chambers was increased. The following day brought additional letters, which read, “You have only one day more.”

  The next morning, as the Capitol waited, hypnotized with dread, the final batch of notes arrived in congressional mailboxes. The mystery was revealed. “No more Black Hands,” the letters read. “Use Blank’s soap.” It had all been a marketing campaign.

  The congressional scare was diverting, but a far more revealing case was unfolding farther north, in the quiet burg of Springfield, Massachusetts. That same winter, a Black Hand letter arrived at the home of Daniel B. Wesson, the “Revolver King,” of the firm Smith & Wesson. Wesson’s guns had helped turn the tide in the Civil War and win the West; and at the ripe old age of eighty-one, he was enjoying
his money in high style. The gun mogul was worth north of $30 million, and he’d spent a fair slice of that fortune on his gargantuan house, a “magnificent pile of masonry” that many mistook for a large hotel.

  The threats terrified the elderly mogul. Police and private detectives converged on the mansion and questioned anyone approaching its front entrance. “Half a dozen of the most experienced men in the police department were secreted in the underbrush,” reported the Washington Post. Patrolman Simon J. Connery played a particularly dramatic role in the case. One evening he entered the mansion, donned a false beard, along with one of Wesson’s business suits, and spent a few minutes practicing speaking in the millionaire’s “peremptory tone.” When Wesson’s barouche was called to the front door, pulled by two fine horses, Connery emerged from the house and sang out, “To the corner of Library and Carew streets!” with an actorly flourish. No extortionists or assassins appeared, however.

  But the industrialist, gripped by fear, refused to leave the house. As the weeks went by, “his nervous system gradually broke under the strain.” On August 4, Wesson died. The coroner reported that heart failure “superinduced by neurosis” was the cause of his passing, but many of his neighbors believed that the strain of the Black Hand threat had contributed to his death. Wesson was buried in Springfield, in a steel vault, to prevent the Society from tampering with his remains.

  But the most interesting feature of the Wesson case was the identity of the agency that had been called in to protect him: the U.S. Secret Service.