Although the people who committed Black Hand and Mafia crimes, and the people who were targeted, were very largely Italian or Italian-American, the two had little else in common.
To begin with, and despite the recent and quite heavily publicised book on the subject by Stephen Talty, the "Black Hand" was in effect a type of crime – extortion via threat of violence – and not a criminal organisation. There is some evidence that loosely-organised groups committed more than one Black Hand crime, but none that there was a broad-based, permanently-organised criminal group that operated under this name, or was labelled as such by the newspapers or the authorities.
Conversely, and again despite quite a few efforts – most prominently those of Joseph Albini – over the years to suggest that it was also little more than a label, inappropriately applied, there is considerable evidence that the Mafia was indeed a criminal organisation with specific leaders, membership requirements, and even membership rituals.
It can also be helpful to look at dates. Mafia groups can be shown to have existed in Sicily from around the 1840s, and they were a significant feature of life on the island from the 1860s at least. Their activities, in these early years, focused on cattle rustling and extortion, the latter being focused on threatening the citrus groves that were one of the most profitable parts of Sicily's agrarian economy. From a US perspective, however – and while individual Mafiosi were active in the US from the 1850s, and Mafia "families" existed there from c.1880 (in New Orleans) and c.1900 (in New York) – the identification and labelling of Black Hand crime, and the extensive newspaper coverage that resulted (which reached a peak when the famous opera singer Enrico Caruso was revealed to have made a hefty payment to Black Hand extortionists) was focused in the first decade of the last century, and therefore antedated most but not all Mafia activity in the US.
We can sum up by saying that some Black Hand crime probably was Mafia related, but that the "Black Hand" was in no sense a rival or precursor operation to the Mafia. And a final key point to bear in mind was that Black Hand-style extortion was very much a "first generation" type of organised crime. While it certainly was possible in some cases to go back and extort a victim for a second time, it was much more a "slash-and-burn" type of crime, in which significant effort had to be made to achieve a single, albeit sometimes lucrative payoff, and which typically ruined the business that had been targeted. Later generations of organised criminals, including, famously, the main Mafia families, preferred what was known as the "dipping the beak" technique of extortion – taking much smaller sums, regularly, from a business that was thereby enabled to continue to operate indefinitely.
I covered all this in more detail in a book I wrote on the origins of the Mafia in the US. The relevant passage read like this:
It did not take long for Italian crooks to demonstrate in several American cities just how lucrative organised crime could be. Extortion rings, which had been commonplace in Sicily and sprang up in the Italian quarter of New Orleans as early as the 1850s, appeared in New York during the last years of the nineteenth century and in Chicago – home to another large and growing Italian community – after 1901. The methods adopted by the men responsible were very similar. Threatening letters demanding substantial sums of money were sent to wealthy residents of the immigrant districts. The victims, who were generally storekeepers or bankers, were told to take an envelope of money to a lonely meeting point, or hand the cash over to a man who would call on them at their place of business. Failure to comply, they were warned, would result in the destruction of their premises and perhaps in their own deaths.
The letters, which were always anonymous, were often phrased in bizarrely courteous Old World language, but the underlying threat of violence was ever-present. ‘I beg you warmly,’ one such missive concluded, ‘to put them [the notes] on your door within four days. But if not, I swear this week’s time not even the dust of your family will exist.’ Another, even blunter, letter warned:
"You got some cash. I need $1000.00. You place the $100.00 bills in an envelope and place it under a board at the northeast corner of 69th Street at eleven o’clock tonight. If you place the money there, you will live. If you don’t, you die. If you report this to the police, I’ll kill you when I get out. They may save your money but they won’t save your life."
Sinister communications of this sort – received unexpectedly by victims who knew all about the impotence of the police – usually had the desired effect. Most of the extortionists’ targets were terrified, and unknown hundreds handed over sums that they could barely afford. Not everyone complied, of course, but the brave and the stubborn few who ignored the letters could expect to get a visit from the gang, and though it was not unheard-of for a victim to shrug off even their threats and remain unmolested, or to negotiate the payment of a smaller sum, everyone in Little Italy had heard of stores destroyed by dynamite, children kidnapped and sometimes murdered, and rich men shot or knifed to death for failing to hand over cash.
Bombs were the favoured tool of the extortionists. They were anonymous, created a terrifying effect, and were easily assembled – so many Italians were employed in the construction trade that it was a simple matter to steal dynamite. They could even be used outside the streets of Little Italy; a New Jersey Justice of the Peace, who had convicted several members of one gang, was ‘literally blown to pieces’ by a parcel bomb delivered to his office. Even in high profile cases of this sort, however, arrests were few and far between, and it was widely known that many of the most famous and influential Italians in the city had caved in to the extortionists’ demands. The best-known of these victims was the opera star Enrico Caruso, who met one demand for $2000 and – when this fact became public knowledge – was rewarded for his capitulation with ‘a stack of threatening letters a foot high’, including another from the same gang for $15,000.
To many New Yorkers, including the reporters of the English-language press, the most compelling feature of these cases was the bizarre decorations that adorned the extortion letters. Demands were accentuated with crude drawings of skulls, revolvers and knives dripping with blood or piercing human hearts. Many also featured pictures of hands, in thick black ink, held up in the universal gesture of warning. It was this last feature that inspired a journalist writing for the New York Herald to refer to the communications as ‘Black Hand’ letters – a name that stuck, and, indeed, soon became synonymous with crime in Little Italy.
From there it was but a short step to the idea of the ‘Black Hand’ as a distinct organisation, with its own leaders and hundreds, if not thousands, of members scattered through the country. The notion of a powerful, professional criminal conspiracy did seem to answer many questions, not least explaining why the authorities found it so very difficult to make arrests. The police, led by [the New York Italian-American detective Joseph] Petrosino, did what they could to ridicule the idea, but without success. Conviction that a Black Hand society actually existed soon took root. By 1905 the San Francisco Call was reporting that the organisation had 30,000 members, and chapters in a dozen cities across the United States. In 1907, Black Handers were blamed for as many as 300 killings in Manhattan alone, and the number of their outrages was said to be increasing at the rate of four a day.
From the perspective of most ordinary New Yorkers, the Black Hand was at once a thrilling source of entertainment and a symbol of just how desperately uncivilised Italian immigrants could be. For the men and women of the Sicilian quarter, who lived with the threats of the extortionists every day, it was a reminder of how little had really changed since they crossed the ocean, to be preyed upon in the United States as they had been at home. For Giuseppe Morello [leader of the first Mafia family established in New York, c.1900], though, the success of Little Italy’s extortionists was if anything an inspiration. For if unorganised amateurs, lacking skills and experience, could make a success of such illegal enterprises, what opportunities must there be for real criminals, men who would not scruple at raining far greater destruction down upon their victims and enemies? How much money was waiting to be made by the ruthless? What, in short, were the prospects for an American Mafia?
Sources
Joseph Albini, TheAmerican Mafia: Genesis of a Legend (1971)
Mike Dash, The First Family (2009)
James Fentress, Rebels and Mafiosi: Death in a Sicilian Landscape (2000)
Stephen Talty, The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History (2017)