The Black Hand Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: “A Great and Consuming Terror”

  “This Capital of Half a World”

  Hunter of Men

  “In Mortal Dread”

  The Mysterious Six

  A General Rebellion

  Explosion

  Wave

  The General

  Photos

  “The Terror of Hurtful People”

  Once to Be Born, Once to Die

  “War Without Quarter”

  Backlash

  A Secret Service

  The Gentleman

  In Sicily

  Black Horses

  Goatville

  A Return

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Sample Chapter from AGENT GARBO

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephan Talty

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-63338-4

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © J. S. Johnston/Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-63535-7

  v1.0317

  To the memory of my father,

  the immigrant

  Non so come si può vivere in questo fuoco!

  (I don’t know how it’s possible to live in this fire!)

  —AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT ON FIRST SEEING NEW YORK CITY

  Prologue:

  “A Great and Consuming Terror”

  On the afternoon of September 21, 1906, a high-spirited boy named Willie Labarbera was playing in front of his family’s fruit store, two blocks from the glint of the East River in New York City. Five-year-old Willie and his friends ran after one another shouting at the top of their lungs as they trundled hoops down the sidewalk, laughing when the wooden rings finally toppled onto the cobblestone street. They ducked behind the bankers and laborers and young women wearing ostrich feather hats, making their way home or to one of the neighborhood’s Italian restaurants. With each wave of pedestrians, Willie and the other children would vanish from one another’s sight for a second or two, then snap back into view once the walkers passed by. This happened dozens of times that afternoon.

  More people passed, hundreds of them. Then, as the silvery river light began to dim, Willie turned and dashed down the street once more, disappearing behind yet another group of workmen. But this time, after the pedestrians had strolled past, he failed to reappear. The spot on the pavement where he should have stood was empty in the fading sunlight.

  His friends didn’t notice right away. Only when they felt the first pangs of hunger did they slowly turn and examine the small expanse of sidewalk where they’d spent their afternoon. Then they began to look for Willie more earnestly in the lengthening shadows. Nothing.

  Willie was headstrong and once boasted that he’d run away from his parents as a lark, so perhaps the other boys hesitated a few moments before entering the store and reporting that something was wrong. But eventually they had to let the adults know, and so they went inside. After a few seconds, the boy’s parents, William and Caterina, dashed from the shop and began searching the surrounding streets for some sign of the child, calling out to ask the proprietors of candy stands and small grocery stores if they’d seen the boy. They hadn’t. Willie was gone.

  It was at this moment that something odd and almost telepathic occurred. Even before the police had been called or a single clue was gathered, Willie’s family and friends simultaneously arrived at a revelation about what had happened to the boy, without speaking a single word to one another. And strangely enough, people in Chicago or St. Louis or New Orleans or Pittsburgh or the tiny unheralded towns strung between them, the mothers and fathers of missing children, of whom there were more than usual in the fall of 1906, would have come to the same conclusion. Who had their child? La Mano Nera, as the Italians called it. The Society of the Black Hand.

  The Black Hand was an infamous crime organization—“that fiendish, devilish and sinister band”—that engaged in extortion, assassination, child kidnapping, and bombings on a grand scale. It had become nationally famous two years before with a letter dropped into a mailbox in an obscure neighborhood in Brooklyn, at the home of a contractor who’d struck it rich in America. Since then, the Society’s threatening notes, adorned with drawings of coffins and crosses and daggers, had appeared in every part of the city, followed by a series of gruesome acts that created, according to one observer, “a record of crime here during the last ten years that is unparalleled in the history of a civilized country in time of peace.” Only the Ku Klux Klan would surpass the Black Hand for the production of mass terror in the early part of the century. “From the bottom of their hearts,” one reporter said of Italian immigrants, “they do fear them with a great and consuming terror.” The same could have been said for many Americans in the fall of 1906.

  When the letters began arriving for the Labarberas several days later, their fears proved correct. The kidnappers demanded $5,000 for Willie’s return, an astronomical sum to the family. The exact words the criminals used haven’t been passed down, but such letters often contained phrases like “Your son is among us” and “Do not give this letter to the police for if you do, by the Madonna, your child will be killed.” The message was reinforced by drawings at the bottom of the page: three crude black crosses had been inked onto the paper, along with a skull and crossbones. These were the marks of the Black Hand.

  Some claimed that the group and others like it not only were creating an entirely new level of murder and extortion in America, a dark age of spectacular violence, but also were at that moment acting as a fifth column, corrupting the government to their aims. This idea had plagued the new immigrants from Italy for at least a decade. “There was a popular belief,” said Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge about a supposed Italian secret society, “that it was extending its operations, that it was controlling juries by terror, and that it would gradually bring the government of the city and State under its control.” Skeptics, including the Italian ambassador, who bristled at the mere mention of the Society, countered that the group didn’t exist, that it was a myth created by Americans to curse Italians, whom the “whites” hated and wished to drive from their shores. One Italian wit said about the Society, “Its sole existence is, in fact, confined to a literary phrase.”

  But if the Society was a fiction, then who had Willie?

  The Labarberas reported the kidnapping to the police, and soon a detective knocked on their door at 837 Second Avenue. Joseph Petrosino was the head of the famous Italian Squad, a short, stout, barrel-chested man, built like a stevedore. His eyes—which some described as dark gray, others as coal-black—were cool and appraising. He had broad shoulders and “muscles like steel cords.” But he wasn’t a brute; in fact, far from it. He was fond of discussing aesthetics, loved opera, especially the Italian composers, and played the violin well. “Joe Petrosino,” said the New York Sun, “could make a fiddle talk.” But his true vocation was solving crimes. Petrosino was “the greatest Italian detective in the world,” declared the New York Times, the “Italian Sherlock Holmes,” according to popular legend back i
n the old country. At forty-six, he’d already had “a career as thrilling as any Javert in the mazes of the Paris underworld or of an inspector in Scotland Yard—a life as full of adventure and achievement as ever thrilled the imagination of Conan Doyle.” He was shy with strangers, incorruptible, quiet-voiced, brave to an almost reckless degree, violent if provoked, and was so adept with disguises that his own friends often passed him by on the street when he was wearing one. He had only a sixth-grade education but possessed a photographic memory and could instantly recall the information printed on a piece of paper he’d glanced at years before. He had no wife or children; he’d dedicated his life to ridding America of the Society of the Black Hand, which he felt threatened the republic he loved. He hummed operettas as he walked.

  Petrosino was dressed in his customary black suit, black shoes, and black derby hat when William Labarbera opened the door of his apartment and escorted him in. The father of the missing boy brought out the letters he’d received but could tell the detective little else about the case. The Black Hand was everywhere and nowhere; it was almost occult in its all-knowingness, and it was cruel. This both men knew. Petrosino could see that Willie’s parents were “nearly crazed with grief.”

  The detective emerged back onto the streets and immediately went to work, pumping his informers and contacts for clues. He had a vast network of spies and informants —nfami—spread across the metropolis: bartenders, doctors, peddlers, lawyers, opera singers, street cleaners (known as “white wingers”), bankers, musicians, scar-faced Sicilian thugs. Willie’s description soon appeared in many of the city’s dozens of newspapers.

  But no one had seen or heard from the boy. A fourth letter arrived, demanding the family sell their modest home to raise the ransom. The building was the Labarberas’ only asset in America, something they’d spent their lives saving for. Selling it would doom the parents and their children to grinding poverty, a poverty they’d left the Mezzogiorno to escape. It would snuff out their American dream for at least a generation.

  Somehow, the Society had anticipated the family’s reaction. Included in the fourth letter was an incentive, perhaps directed at Mrs. Labarbera. When the paper was unfolded, something fell out and tumbled to the floor. A dark lock of Willie’s hair.

  …

  The days passed. Nothing. The boy had been atomized.

  Then, in the third week, a tip from an nfame. This man had heard a curious story from Kenilworth, New Jersey. A woman had been out strolling in a working-class neighborhood when she passed a man carrying a large bundle. Just as the woman walked past, something inside the bundle had emitted a piercing cry. The man hurried into a nearby house, so crude and ramshackle that it was described as a “hut,” and closed the door. But the woman, startled by what she’d heard, remained outside, watching the door intently. A few minutes later, the same man emerged from the house, still carrying the package—which was silent now—and placed it in a covered wagon. Then he drove away.

  On hearing the story, Petrosino immediately hurried to the foot of West 23rd Street and stepped aboard one of the steamship ferries to New Jersey. As he watched the docks of the West Side recede, with the lamps that hung from peddlers’ pushcarts glowing in the dusk like distant campfires, the detective leaned over the railing and listened to the waters of the Hudson whoosh and sigh against the ferry’s prow. His mind was whirring with possibilities, names and faces of suspects, stored in his memory months and years earlier and now called to account. Perhaps he sipped a glass of buttermilk bought from one of the vendors (two cents for the unsterilized version, three cents for the sterilized). The trip would take about a quarter of an hour, so Petrosino had a few minutes to think.

  The Black Hand was growing more daring and ruthless with every passing month. The scale of what was happening in New York was difficult to comprehend. In the Italian colonies, as the immigrant neighborhoods were known, the men patrolled in front of their homes with loaded shotguns; children were locked inside barricaded rooms, forbidden to go to school; buildings stood open to the weather, their fronts ripped off by bombs the organization had planted. Certain quarters of New York, one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan cities in the world, were being bombarded as though the metropolis were under siege from a dreadnought anchored in Upper Bay. “The society of darkness” had killed dozens of men, mutilated and maimed others, and now held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of citizens under its spell. The panic had grown to such proportions that a family had only to return home and spot a black hand imprinted on their door in coal dust—a sign that the Society had paid a visit—for them to hurriedly pack up their belongings and board the next ship back to Italy.

  And it wasn’t happening just in New York. As Petrosino had long predicted, the fear had spread from city to city, blazing across the country like a prairie fire. The Black Hand had materialized in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Newport, Boston, and in hundreds of smaller cities, midsized towns, mining camps, quarries, and company villages in between. It had murdered men and women in many of those places, blown up buildings, triggered lynching parties, and deepened the mistrust of Americans for their Italian neighbors. Countless Americans—not just Italian immigrants—were in the thrall of the Society, and more would soon fall victim: millionaires, judges, governors, mayors, Rockefellers, lawyers, members of the Chicago Cubs, sheriffs, district attorneys, society matrons, gangster kingpins. That January, members of Congress had been threatened by a series of Society letters, and although their story had a unique and rather bizarre ending, several of the representatives from various states had fallen victim to “nervous prostration” as a result.

  There were towns in the coal belt of Pennsylvania that had been taken over by the Society as if by armed coup; its leaders held the power of life and death over their citizens. After a shocking Black Hand murder, the residents of Buckingham County would send a message to the Pennsylvania governor that resembled those from settlers in the early West surrounded by Apache: “Conditions here intolerable; a gang of assassins strongly entrenched three miles away; one citizen shot in back, others threatened; county authorities appear powerless.” The petitioners asked for “detectives and bloodhounds.” New laws were being written and passed to slow a wave of terror that seemed incapable of being stopped. The South was in revolt against Italian immigrants, largely because of the Society’s outrages. President Teddy Roosevelt, a friend of Petrosino’s from his days as New York police commissioner, was said to be closely following developments from the White House. Even the diminutive king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, had taken time away from the vast coin collection that obsessed him to write Petrosino about the issue, which was close to his heart, enclosing an expensive gold watch along with the letter. Citizens of nations from India to France and England were enthralled by this contest between the forces of civilization and those of anarchy, and perhaps touched with Schadenfreude at the difficulties the young upstart of a country was having with its dark-eyed immigrants.

  Petrosino was well aware of this attention, with good reason. He wasn’t just a salaried employee of the New York Police Department; he was famous, perhaps the most famous Italian American in the country. And with fame, at least in Petrosino’s eyes, came responsibility. Along with a small vanguard of his compatriots—a lawyer, a district attorney, the founder of a fraternal society—the detective had set out to spark a movement that would lift Italians out of their precarious situation. They were accused of being a savage people unfit for American citizenship; Petrosino furiously disagreed. “The Italian has a natural love of liberty,” he argued to the New York Times. “He has had to fight bitterly for enlightenment in his own country and what Italy is today has been attained by heroic struggling.” But his struggle, to make Italians into full-fledged Americans, was faltering in the face of the ongoing war against the Society; even the Times had joined the calls for an end to immigration from southern Italy. How could you redeem your race when the �
�vampires” of the Black Hand were bombing, maiming, and killing their way across the entire country?

  As Petrosino had learned, you couldn’t. The struggles were too intimately connected. The writer H. P. Lovecraft would later provide an example of the animosity Americans felt toward the newcomers in a letter to a friend in which he described immigrants from Italy crowded into the Lower East Side as creatures who “could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.” Instead, “they were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.”

  If Petrosino had been winning the battle against the Black Hand, his crusade would have proceeded more smoothly. But 1906 had gone badly; blood, allies, and territory had been lost. The shadow of the Society now extended over the whole of Petrosino’s adopted homeland, from the stone mansions of Long Island to the craggy inlets of Seattle. Petrosino was filled with foreboding.

  But tonight he would put aside his worries. He needed to find Willie Labarbera.

  Petrosino reached the far shore and disembarked. He hired a carriage, and the driver hissed at the horses and sped off toward Kenilworth, about twenty miles due west, with the detective aboard. The pier cleared of its passengers, and a horse cart filled with coal trundled aboard the ferry to supply its engine room with fresh fuel, then departed, after which the ferry pulled out for the return trip to Manhattan. The dock grew quiet. A few hours later, a carriage reappeared at the dock and Petrosino climbed out. He waited for the ferry to arrive, then stepped aboard. The vessel pulled away from the New Jersey pier and slipped across the dark, rippling water toward the gas lamps glittering in the low-slung city across the Hudson. He was alone. The boy had been nowhere to be found.