Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino
The terror might come in the mail, or in an envelope slipped under the door. Or a note tacked to the wall. Pay up, it would say. Give us the money. Or your child dies. Go to the police, your child dies.
The letter would be unsigned. But everyone would know who had sent it: the dreaded Society of the Black Hand, a shadowy criminal organization that targeted Italian immigrants to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The recipients of such a note had few options. If they did nothing, the Society might make good on its promises. Its threats weren’t empty — the Society was responsible for bombings, arson, kidnappings and murders. The Society’s targets could meet the extortioners’ exorbitant demands, and pay the hard-earned ransom — though inevitably, that would lead to demands for more money.
Because they were immigrants and because they were Italian, Black Hand victims typically could count on little help from officials. In New York, the bulwark against Black Hand was extraordinarily thin, but also very tough. It consisted chiefly of one man: a dark-suited, opera-loving bruiser of a cop with a photographic memory, a sixth grade education and fists like iron, named Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino.
Petrosino (right) leading a suspect (2nd from right) to court along with two fellow detectives
For more than 20 years, Petrosino waged an almost single-handed war against the Society of the Black Hand. It was as much a war for the place of Italian immigrants in American society, for their rights to exist and to be seen as Americans worthy of legal protection.
It’s a story recounted in Stephen Talty’s engrossing new book, “The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). And if this pitched battle sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay, it is; Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing Petrosino in an film adaptation of the book that will most likely be released sometime in 2018.
Petrosino was the very definition of a self-made man. Born in the Campania region of what is now Italy in 1860, he came to New York with his widowed father at the age of 13. The young immigrant worked his way up from bootblack to street sweeper to manning a garbage scow, where he was noticed by a Tammany-connected police inspector named Aleck “Clubber” Williams.
Recognizing the young man’s talent and drive, and seeking ways to bring Italian voters into the Tammany fold, Williams made Petrosino a member of the NYPD in 1883. At 23 years old, Petrosino became one of the very first Italian-American police officers in New York City.
This distinction came at a price, as Petrosino also became the object of intense criticism from his neighbors in Little Italy. Many viewed him as a traitor to his people, someone who had turned his back on Italians in favor of an untrustworthy, oppressive American government. It wasn’t long before he started receiving death threats. Petrosino was forced to move to an Irish neighborhood to escape the barrage.
If the anti-police sentiment bothered the young recruit, it didn’t keep Petrosino from quickly proving himself to be an exceptionally gifted law officer. His native command of Italian dialects allowed him to patrol the city’s Italian communities, and to develop informants, with a facility that his Irish peers lacked. Though he stood only 5-foot-3, he carried himself with a cocksure confidence. He had an internal catalog of faces and names for most everybody he met. He also had a closet full of disguises that he would employ to go undercover.
Modal Trigger
Courtesy of the Petrosino family archive
Plus, he could fight; Petrosino had no qualms about laying out a perp, if the situation called for it. Often, it did. Especially when it came to Black Hand.
The Society claimed a large “membership” of dangerous felons, but it had no central leadership; it wasn’t so much an organization as a set of criminal practices — extortion, kidnapping, and so on — practiced by different gangs under a common banner. It thrived in New York, but had spread across the country to cities like Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans, as well as the coal regions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Anywhere there were Italian immigrants, so too were there Black Handers — Italian immigrants themselves — to torment them. The first known Black Hand killing in the US was in 1855, near New Orleans, but it was not until the 1890s that the Society started to spread, like some infernal epidemic, with a wave of kidnappings.
Frustratingly for the Society’s victims, law enforcement was largely indifferent to Black Hand crimes. Italian immigrants ranked low on the list of things the police, elected officials and American society at large cared much about. Their strange languages, their foreign ways, their darker skin, all put them outside the main of “white” America. Compounding this prejudice was the suspicion that any or every Italian might be a practitioner of the Society’s dark criminal arts.
Modal Trigger
Petrosino (right) leading a suspect (2nd from right) to court along with two fellow detectives.Library of Congress
Petrosino sought to change that perception. He was promoted to become the first Italian detective sergeant in the country, and he pleaded with his superiors in the NYPD to form a task force to take on Black Hand. His requests were initially rejected, and when commissioner William McAdoo agreed to authorize an ”Italian Squad” under Petrosino’s command in 1904, the funding and resources were insultingly scant. Petrosino got only five officers and no office space. For a time, the squad met each morning in Petrosino’s apartment.
The Italian Squad’s mission was daunting: to patrol and enforce the law in the city’s Italian districts, protecting a population of over half a million. Nevertheless, the Italian Squad was marvelously effective. Its six members followed leads, tailed suspects and pursued Society suspects, working nearly around the clock. In its first year, they managed to cut the number of Black Hand crimes in New York in half, and they arrested hundreds of Black Hand members.
Laws allowed for the deportation of recent immigrants convicted of felonies, which meant that hundreds of criminals found themselves on the boat back to Italy.
All the while, Petrosino’s reputation, and the threats against his life, grew.
Considering his fame, and the sheer number of dangerous enemies he made during his career, it is perhaps surprising that Petrosino lived to his late 40s. He met his end in 1909, in Palermo, Sicily, while on a secret mission to investigate the flow of Italian criminals to the US. One evening after dinner, shots rang out in the Piazza Marina, near the city’s harbor. His killer was never found. Palermo was lousy with crooks deported from the US as a result of the Italian Squad’s work, and it seemed nearly everyone in town wanted him dead.
Modal Trigger
Petrosino’s coffin arrives at his widow’s home.Library of Congress
Petrosino’s body was returned to New York, and his funeral was an extraordinary event — more than 200,000 people turned out to mourn, many more than had done so for President McKinley’s funeral a few years earlier.
As author Stephan Talty notes, “He was the first Italian that many Americans respected and loved.” Joseph Petrosino remains the only member of the NYPD to die in the line of duty outside New York City.
Black Hand continued to terrorize New York in the years after Petrosino’s death, until a reform-minded police commissioner named Arthur Woods signed on in 1914. Woods authorized a brutal (and possibly unconstitutional) campaign against Black Hand suspects, borrowing many tactics from Petrosino. Black Handers were surveilled, harassed, hounded out of town and out of the country, with the full force of the NYPD. They were vigorously prosecuted, and known criminals were forbidden from entering the US.
In a sense, this was Petrosino acting from beyond the grave, Talty believes. “Even though he had been assassinated, he left behind a blueprint for how to approach the Black Hand, and had deconstructed it in a way that I think only an Italian-American could do.”
[img]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/hisl017_ec209_143088221.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=915[/img]
Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino
The terror might come in the mail, or in an envelope slipped under the door. Or a note tacked to the wall. Pay up, it would say. Give us the money. Or your child dies. Go to the police, your child dies.
The letter would be unsigned. But everyone would know who had sent it: the dreaded Society of the Black Hand, a shadowy criminal organization that targeted Italian immigrants to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The recipients of such a note had few options. If they did nothing, the Society might make good on its promises. Its threats weren’t empty — the Society was responsible for bombings, arson, kidnappings and murders. The Society’s targets could meet the extortioners’ exorbitant demands, and pay the hard-earned ransom — though inevitably, that would lead to demands for more money.
Because they were immigrants and because they were Italian, Black Hand victims typically could count on little help from officials. In New York, the bulwark against Black Hand was extraordinarily thin, but also very tough. It consisted chiefly of one man: a dark-suited, opera-loving bruiser of a cop with a photographic memory, a sixth grade education and fists like iron, named Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino.
[img]https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ax003_5b76_9.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=443[/img]
Petrosino (right) leading a suspect (2nd from right) to court along with two fellow detectives
For more than 20 years, Petrosino waged an almost single-handed war against the Society of the Black Hand. It was as much a war for the place of Italian immigrants in American society, for their rights to exist and to be seen as Americans worthy of legal protection.
It’s a story recounted in Stephen Talty’s engrossing new book, “The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). And if this pitched battle sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay, it is; Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing Petrosino in an film adaptation of the book that will most likely be released sometime in 2018.
Petrosino was the very definition of a self-made man. Born in the Campania region of what is now Italy in 1860, he came to New York with his widowed father at the age of 13. The young immigrant worked his way up from bootblack to street sweeper to manning a garbage scow, where he was noticed by a Tammany-connected police inspector named Aleck “Clubber” Williams.
Recognizing the young man’s talent and drive, and seeking ways to bring Italian voters into the Tammany fold, Williams made Petrosino a member of the NYPD in 1883. At 23 years old, Petrosino became one of the very first Italian-American police officers in New York City.
This distinction came at a price, as Petrosino also became the object of intense criticism from his neighbors in Little Italy. Many viewed him as a traitor to his people, someone who had turned his back on Italians in favor of an untrustworthy, oppressive American government. It wasn’t long before he started receiving death threats. Petrosino was forced to move to an Irish neighborhood to escape the barrage.
If the anti-police sentiment bothered the young recruit, it didn’t keep Petrosino from quickly proving himself to be an exceptionally gifted law officer. His native command of Italian dialects allowed him to patrol the city’s Italian communities, and to develop informants, with a facility that his Irish peers lacked. Though he stood only 5-foot-3, he carried himself with a cocksure confidence. He had an internal catalog of faces and names for most everybody he met. He also had a closet full of disguises that he would employ to go undercover.
Modal Trigger
Courtesy of the Petrosino family archive
Plus, he could fight; Petrosino had no qualms about laying out a perp, if the situation called for it. Often, it did. Especially when it came to Black Hand.
The Society claimed a large “membership” of dangerous felons, but it had no central leadership; it wasn’t so much an organization as a set of criminal practices — extortion, kidnapping, and so on — practiced by different gangs under a common banner. It thrived in New York, but had spread across the country to cities like Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans, as well as the coal regions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Anywhere there were Italian immigrants, so too were there Black Handers — Italian immigrants themselves — to torment them. The first known Black Hand killing in the US was in 1855, near New Orleans, but it was not until the 1890s that the Society started to spread, like some infernal epidemic, with a wave of kidnappings.
Frustratingly for the Society’s victims, law enforcement was largely indifferent to Black Hand crimes. Italian immigrants ranked low on the list of things the police, elected officials and American society at large cared much about. Their strange languages, their foreign ways, their darker skin, all put them outside the main of “white” America. Compounding this prejudice was the suspicion that any or every Italian might be a practitioner of the Society’s dark criminal arts.
Modal Trigger
Petrosino (right) leading a suspect (2nd from right) to court along with two fellow detectives.Library of Congress
Petrosino sought to change that perception. He was promoted to become the first Italian detective sergeant in the country, and he pleaded with his superiors in the NYPD to form a task force to take on Black Hand. His requests were initially rejected, and when commissioner William McAdoo agreed to authorize an ”Italian Squad” under Petrosino’s command in 1904, the funding and resources were insultingly scant. Petrosino got only five officers and no office space. For a time, the squad met each morning in Petrosino’s apartment.
The Italian Squad’s mission was daunting: to patrol and enforce the law in the city’s Italian districts, protecting a population of over half a million. Nevertheless, the Italian Squad was marvelously effective. Its six members followed leads, tailed suspects and pursued Society suspects, working nearly around the clock. In its first year, they managed to cut the number of Black Hand crimes in New York in half, and they arrested hundreds of Black Hand members.
Laws allowed for the deportation of recent immigrants convicted of felonies, which meant that hundreds of criminals found themselves on the boat back to Italy.
All the while, Petrosino’s reputation, and the threats against his life, grew.
Considering his fame, and the sheer number of dangerous enemies he made during his career, it is perhaps surprising that Petrosino lived to his late 40s. He met his end in 1909, in Palermo, Sicily, while on a secret mission to investigate the flow of Italian criminals to the US. One evening after dinner, shots rang out in the Piazza Marina, near the city’s harbor. His killer was never found. Palermo was lousy with crooks deported from the US as a result of the Italian Squad’s work, and it seemed nearly everyone in town wanted him dead.
Modal Trigger
Petrosino’s coffin arrives at his widow’s home.Library of Congress
Petrosino’s body was returned to New York, and his funeral was an extraordinary event — more than 200,000 people turned out to mourn, many more than had done so for President McKinley’s funeral a few years earlier.
As author Stephan Talty notes, “He was the first Italian that many Americans respected and loved.” Joseph Petrosino remains the only member of the NYPD to die in the line of duty outside New York City.
Black Hand continued to terrorize New York in the years after Petrosino’s death, until a reform-minded police commissioner named Arthur Woods signed on in 1914. Woods authorized a brutal (and possibly unconstitutional) campaign against Black Hand suspects, borrowing many tactics from Petrosino. Black Handers were surveilled, harassed, hounded out of town and out of the country, with the full force of the NYPD. They were vigorously prosecuted, and known criminals were forbidden from entering the US.
In a sense, this was Petrosino acting from beyond the grave, Talty believes. “Even though he had been assassinated, he left behind a blueprint for how to approach the Black Hand, and had deconstructed it in a way that I think only an Italian-American could do.”