The Black Hand Read online

  Petrosino would hear the name Cascio Ferro again, would in fact write it one day six years later in the leather notebook he carried with him at all times; he may even have met the capo face-to-face, this time in a foreign land, under enigmatic circumstances, where the advantage rested entirely with the Sicilian. But that encounter lay at the end of a long and obsessive journey that the detective was just about to embark on: the war, which began as his war, with what some Americans called “the Sicilian wolves” and others considered “that mysterious and weirdly elusive organization,” but which was formally known as the Society of the Black Hand.

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  “In Mortal Dread”

  Petrosino heard about the society before he actually encountered it. Sometime in the early years of the century—we cannot be sure when—he was given information about a shadowy group that was lurking in the Italian colony. It was at first mostly whispers, about how La Mano Nera was striking terror in the hearts of immigrants by threatening them with death if money wasn’t paid. They were taking children, blowing up homes, burning homes; they were meeting reluctant victims on the streets with knives and guns. Few in the Italian colony were willing to say what the Black Hand was or what it did; women crossed themselves when they spoke the words. The fear Petrosino’s friends and informants exhibited was startling. There were stories of dead bodies, headless bodies, children stuffed in chimneys and left to decompose. But what was this Society? Where had it come from? How did it operate? Was it even real?

  In the early years of the century, Petrosino took up his diary and first recorded his thoughts on the Society. “Scores of Italian murderers are lurking in the lower part of the city and plying their trade of Black Hand extortion. Unless checked at once, they will so extend their operations that the police will be sorely tried in running them down.” Something—a corpse? a letter?—had made it clear to him that the Society was quite real.

  America hadn’t yet awakened to the threat incubating in its cities. There had been scattered reports of the Black Hand’s operations since before the turn of the century, but no panic. That would change beginning one sultry morning in August 1903. It was then that the Society broke out into the open. Nothing would ever be quite the same for Italian Americans, for their new country, or for Petrosino again.

  It began in Brooklyn. A letter was dropped into the mailbox of a contractor named Nicolo Cappiello in the thriving but largely nondescript Italian neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Inside the envelope was a set of instructions: “If you don’t meet us at 72nd Street and 13th Avenue, Brooklyn, tomorrow afternoon, your house will be dynamited and your family killed. The same fate awaits you in the event of your betraying our purposes to the police.” It was signed “La Mano Nera” and illustrated with black crosses and daggers.

  Cappiello was from Naples and he’d never heard of the Black Hand, a name taken from a group of anarchists and protesters that had flourished in the late 1800s in rural Spain. He dismissed the letter. Two days later another arrived: “You did not meet us as ordered in our first letter. If you still refuse to accede to our terms, but wish to preserve the lives of your family, you may do so by sacrificing your own life. Walk in Sixteenth Street, near Seventh Avenue, between the hours of four and five tonight.” Cappiello again did nothing, and after a few days, men began showing up at his house, some of them friends and others claiming to be representatives of this “Black Hand” organization. They informed him that a price of $10,000 had been put on his head, but if he handed over $1,000, they would make the problem disappear. With his friends, some of whom he’d known for a dozen years, was a “mysterious stranger,” Cappiello said, who left him “filled . . . with a nameless horror.”

  He now believed that the Black Hand would kill him if he didn’t obey. He paid the $1,000.

  The letters stopped. But a few days later the men were back, asking for $3,000 more, their threats more insistent and ugly. His family stopped going out in the street, afraid of being assassinated. When a reporter called at Cappiello’s home, the door opened and a revolver was pointed at his head. The reporter stuttered out his name and was told to enter. Once he was inside, Cappiello’s wife apologized. “We are in mortal dread of our lives,” she told him, “and for more than a month we have been living in constant expectation of death. We knew not whom to trust.”

  Cappiello had had enough and went to the police. They arrested five men, who were convicted and sent to jail.

  The Black Hand might have remained an obscure crime fad contained to the Italian neighborhoods of a few American cities, except for one thing: the fierce competition among the New York City tabloids. A reporter from the Herald Tribune, which was known for its sensationalist crime stories, heard about the letter and the extortion attempt and wrote it up. The editors gave it serious play, and other newspapers soon ran stories about this terrifying new phenomenon. “COWERS IN FEAR OF BLACK HAND,” cried a headline from the Evening World. “THE BLACK HAND AT WORK HERE,” the Tribune warned. The Society, which had been familiar only to its Italian victims and their friends, suddenly became known in millions of households across America in a matter of days.

  And then the children began disappearing.

  On August 2, eight-year-old Antonio Mannino, son of a prosperous contractor, walked into a confectionery store at the corner of Amity and Emmett streets in Brooklyn. He eyed the selection of candy and soda water and chose several of his favorites for his friends. He paid with “a shining fifty-cent piece.” Outside the shop, eighteen-year-old Angelo Cucozza, who worked for the boy’s father, was waiting on the sidewalk. When the boy emerged, Cucozza called to him, “Come along, Tony, it is time we were off.” The boy and his friend “disappeared down the street in the darkness, and that was the last seen of him.”

  When Tony’s father, Vincenzo, began receiving letters signed by the Black Hand, the kidnapping became a sensation. Papers in Newark and Baltimore picked up the story and splashed it across their front pages, then Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities followed. “ALL NEW YORK STIRRED BY THE LATEST OUTLAWRY,” cried a headline from the St. Louis Dispatch. When a newspaperman tried to take a picture of Vincenzo Mannino near his home, the man exploded in anger. “My picture must not be printed,” he shouted at the photographer. “I would be a marked man. They would all know me and any of them could kill me.” Afterwards Mannino took to his bed and remained there for a week, nursed by his wife. The family’s fear and the larger community’s growing terror seemed to feed off each other. When the police went before an Irish American magistrate named Tighe to ask for warrants for the arrest of two suspects, the judge not only granted the request but also told the policemen, “Go out and make arrests—alive if you can, dead if you must.”

  As in almost every crime involving Italians, the call went out: “Send for the dago.” Petrosino was assigned the case. He immediately began chasing down reports of two suspicious men on the ferry to New Jersey, and searched several towns there without finding anything. Sightings poured in from points farther west and south. “Evidently,” wrote one journalist, “there are scores of pairs of Italians wandering around the country, each pair accompanied by a boy who looks like Tony Mannino.” A rumor of a secret cave in Manhattan popped up, and detectives were sent to inspect it. The piers were watched. When a boy matching Tony’s description was spotted walking in Astoria, Queens, cops poured into the neighborhood at midnight and began knocking on doors, “pulling little Italian boys out of bed wherever they found them.” A photograph of Tony was held up to the boys’ faces for comparison, and their parents were questioned. But the child was nowhere to be found.

  The Black Hand responded to the police pressure by sending a letter to a Brooklyn station. It was addressed to the captain in charge of the investigation. “Stop chasing us,” it read, “or be killed.” Papers across the country played up each new development, and readers woke up every morning anxious to know if Tony had been found. Americans looked at their immigrant neighbo
rs with a newfound distrust. “The Mannino kidnapping case,” reported one newspaper, “gave the public so distinct a feeling of the danger from the Italian population that the wildest stories of blackmailing, kidnapping, and similar criminal brotherhoods were circulated, and none seemed too wild to receive credence.”

  Manhattan was on the edge of panic. In October, a rumor went around East Harlem that the Black Hand was threatening to blow up Public School 172 unless a ransom was paid. Parents of children who attended classes there streamed out of nearby tenements and raced toward the building. “Five hundred frenzied men and women clamored at the doors,” wrote one journalist, “demanding that the pupils be immediately released.” The heavy wooden doors began to buckle as the mob pushed forward, screaming for their children. The school’s principal emerged from his office at the last moment and managed to calm the crowd before a riot could break out.

  A reporter for the Times sought out Petrosino and asked him about this new secret society that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. “The ‘Black Hand’ gang is undoubtedly at work in this city,” Petrosino acknowledged, before trying to pour oil on the waters. “One man claims to have received four such letters and did not give up any money. He is still alive and in no danger of dying.” The detective encouraged any Italian who’d received a Black Hand letter to keep his money and report the matter to the police. If people like Tony’s father were brave, Petrosino announced, the scourge of the Black Hand could be ended before it truly began.

  The Society wasn’t impressed. It sent another letter to Mannino. “We will not kill the boy, having behaved himself quietly,” it read. But they announced that they were thinking of selling him. “A childless family promised us by letter $2,000 if we sent them the boy. Be sure we will if Mr. Mannino does not come upon an agreement with us. We are not ignorant nor criminals, but gentlemen like you, only this big land of America disappointed our expectations, and we need money to go back to our beautiful, picturesque Italy.” It was signed, “Very respectfully yours, Capitano of” with the outline of a black hand.

  Then, on August 19, a week after the disappearance, a breakthrough. Mannino’s cousin was out walking at midnight when he saw a small figure approaching from the other end of the street. The cousin ran toward the boy and saw that it was Tony. He embraced him and took him home. The Mannino family refused to say if they’d paid a ransom to have the boy freed, then cut off all contact with Petrosino and the police. It was clear to the detective that money had been exchanged. Mannino had not listened to him. He had judged that the Society of the Black Hand was stronger than the NYPD.

  It was Petrosino’s first public defeat by the Society, and it was a dispiriting one. Every ransom that was paid strengthened the group, burnished its growing legend, and attracted new members to its ranks. The detective believed that there were already thousands of Black Hand criminals in New York, formed into small gangs of a handful or a few dozen men, who used common tactics and cooperated with one another.

  The number of Society cases started rising. Men—it was always the men who came to see Petrosino—began showing up at 300 Mulberry and shoving letters into his hands, letters that threatened the very existence of their families. Some days he received as many as thirty-five. There were, he knew, too many cases for him to investigate them all.

  The tension rose all through the summer, fed by stark headlines. The Black Hand burned down a candy stand in Brooklyn and immolated the shop’s owner, Ernest Curci, inside. A bomb exploded on 151st Street, sending glass and wood splinters through the air, injuring twenty people. Five girls in East Harlem were kidnapped, but their families were too terrified even to report the crimes. There were rumors—though it couldn’t be confirmed—that one of their bodies was found stuffed inside a chimney. The girls’ parents never came forward, so Petrosino had no way of knowing the truth.

  But something else, too, must have haunted Petrosino: the stories told by recovered children. When one six-year-old boy named Nicolo Tomoso was taken from the streets near his home on East Houston, the kidnappers kept him for two months. Finally, after a ransom was paid, the boy returned home, pale and shaken. He told Petrosino that he’d been lured away by a man who gave him a penny and a stick of candy. When the boy had refused to go with the stranger, he’d picked him up and carried him to his car. The child was driven to a house in Brooklyn and kept there.

  During his imprisonment, little Nicolo was treated fairly well; his captors fed him steak and macaroni, but he wasn’t allowed to take off his shoes even when he slept. If he cried, one of the kidnappers would threaten to cut his tongue out. When his family finally scraped together enough money to pay the ransom, Nicolo was taken from his bed, carried to the steps of a school near his family’s home, and left there.

  But the most disturbing thing was that Nicolo hadn’t been alone in his little prison. After he was safely back home, he told Petrosino that a small boy named Tony (not Tony Mannino) and two little girls were kept in the same room with him, and they’d remained behind even when he was freed. The girls were mostly silent during the long days, but Tony “cried most of the time and said he wanted to go home.”

  Even with his network of informers, Petrosino had no record of another boy named Tony being kidnapped, or of two missing girls. Now when Petrosino walked the streets, he was forced to imagine the interiors of the buildings he passed, to see through the brick and mortar to the scenes inside. Were there children languishing in the airless attics, their hands bound and their skin striped with welts? Were their corpses buried under the trash heaped in basement corners? For Petrosino, Manhattan must have become, in that season of kidnappings, a haunted city.

  …

  Over the course of the ensuing year, society activity smoldered quietly in the Italian ghettoes of the Northeast, forcing Petrosino to work on one case after another. Then, in the summer of 1904, “Black Hand fever,” as it had come to be called, burst into flame. On August 22, Joseph Graffi was murdered in a New Rochelle tenement, his heart cut in two by a knife thrust. A bomb blew up Poggroriale Ciro’s grocery store on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan, injuring his wife. And a wealthy Bronx contractor, Antonio Barroncini, entered his home at 81 Van Buren Street to find that Mrs. Barroncini had vanished from the house. He searched every room and then went out on the streets, calling on friends and relatives. Barroncini walked the city nonstop for six days before returning exhausted and brokenhearted to Van Buren Street. Then, at midnight one evening, he heard a knock at his front door. When he rushed down and turned the doorknob, he found two Italians standing on his porch; the pair told Barroncini they were holding his wife and he would have to pay a ransom to get her back. Barroncini quickly found the money and handed it over to the two. When the traumatized woman was returned home, she told her husband that the Black Handers had knocked on their door one afternoon and rushed into the house before she could react. They bound and gagged her, then dragged her from her home.

  The first hints of a Black Hand–inspired backlash emerged. The Brooklyn Eagle, the Washington Times, the New York Times, and other papers went on the record supporting curbing the number of Sicilians allowed into the country. One newspaper even cautioned Italians “to remember the fate of their countrymen in New Orleans some years ago,” a reference to the 1891 lynchings of eleven Italians after the murder of the city’s police chief, an event seared into the memory of many Italian Americans. The Society received so much press, and the anger at Italian immigrants escalated to such a pitch, that Italy’s representative was forced to issue a public statement. “The kidnapping of young Mannino is certainly a serious matter,” said the ambassador, Baron Edmondo Mayor des Planches, “but it is nothing that concerns the Italian government . . . When Italians leave Italy and come to this country we expect them to be good citizens . . . I condemn the fact that Italians have been engaged in kidnapping or other crimes . . . and I hope they will receive full punishment.” The government in Rome, headed by the ineffectual King Victor Emmanue
l III, had effectively washed its hands of this Black Hand business.

  A number of Americans came to the defense of the country’s new residents. The New York Mail listed the virtues of the immigrants and called for “the sound American doctrine” of “equal treatment.” The New York Evening Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, published a strongly worded editorial on October 14, 1904, that stood foursquare against the simmering hatred: “To say that the Italians are a criminal race is utterly false. They have their criminals among them, as have other races. A great majority of them . . . are law-abiding, honest, hard-working, devoted to their families.”

  The Nashville American, one of the rare southern voices that came out in support of Italians, chastised publishers who allowed their papers to issue blanket condemnations. “Newspapers,” it declared, “especially such as are owned and edited by men that were immigrants themselves, should refrain from appealing to the stupid race prejudice of the crowd by false and stupid charges of race criminality.” The opening dig was most likely aimed at Hearst’s main competitor in New York, Joseph Pulitzer, the most powerful newspaperman in the country, who’d emigrated from Hungary in 1864, his journey financed by military recruiters who were gathering men to fight on the side of the Union in the Civil War. The American also opined that, even if Sicily was uncontrollably violent, Kentucky was worse.