![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/images-5.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nNew York, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis and Kansas City were centers of this activity, all of these metropolitan areas containing the largest segments of Italian and Sicilian immigrants in the country.<\/p>\n
In New York, the top Blackhander for three decades was Ignazio Saietta, known to inhabitants of Little Italy as Lupo the Wolf. Others who operated in Brooklyn and Manhattan during Saietto’s Black Hand supremacy were Frankie Yale (Uale), Johnny Torrio, and Ciro Terranova, who later became the racket czar known as “The Artichoke King.”<\/p>\n
Saietta concentrated his Black Hand terror against Sicilians living in the Harlem district; he was more than once arrested for Blackhanding by Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, the intrepid head of the NYPD’s special Italian squad, whose almost impossible job it was to track down the extortionists. Saietta’s Black Hand fortune, however, permitted him the best lawyers in the community and he squeaked past one indictment after another. He was finally put out of action by his own greed when he thought counterfeiting would be more lucrative than extortion; he was caught by Secret Service agents and sent to prison for thirty years.<\/p>\n
Lieutenant Petrosino got it into his head that most of the Blackhanders probably had criminal records in Sicily. If the New York authorities could prove nothing against these extortionists, he reasoned, they could at least be permanently deported to Sicily if they were wanted there. He began lengthy correspondence with Sicilian authorities, sending them the NYPD records of Sicilians arrested for Blackhanding. His work paid off. Police in Palermo, Sicily sent back wanted sheets on many of these, and more than 500 Sicilian gangsters were subsequently deported to their native country to face prosecution and imprisonment.<\/p>\n In some instances, Petrosino, a hulking six feet, 200 pounds, did not wait for the mail from Sicily. When his good friend, the internationally famous tenor, Enrico Caruso, received a black Hand note, Joe tracked down the sender by himself. He broke the man’s arms and personally threw him onto a boat headed for Sicily with the warning that he would “blow out” the man’s brains if he ever came back to the U.S.<\/p>\n The guile which personified the Blackhanders was not for Joe Petrosino. He faced the extortionists squarely in alleys and dark hallways, most often alone, and handled them with his fists and police revolver. On one occasion he tracked down Enrico Alfano, a ranking member of the murderous Camorra brotherhood of criminals, who had killed several helpless persons in New York after they refused to pay Black Hand notes. Alfano was wanted, Italian police notified Petrosino, for killing and mutilating an entire family in Naples.<\/p>\n It was the kind of job Petrosino liked. He located Alfano’s room. Drawing his .38 caliber service revolver, Petrosino raised his heavy foot and slammed it against the door. It banged down on two men who were waiting on the other side with drawn guns. Petrosino jumped onto their stomachs with each foot and leveled his gun at Alfano who was making for a window.<\/p>\n “Go ahead, rat!” the policeman yelled. “My bullet will take away your head.” Alfano meekly dropped his gun and surrendered. Petrosino roped all three Blackhanders together with their own ties and a bedsheet and dragged them down four flights of stairs and through the gutters of Little Italy on Mulberry Street for two blocks to the station, telling the startled Italian spectators along the way: “Is this what you’re afraid of, these gutter rats? How fierce is the Black Hand now? Spit on them!” But none dared to spit.<\/p>\n Petrosino’s life was lived against razor-thin odds. He himself received over a thousand Black Hand notes telling him to leave New York or die. He was repeatedly shot at on the street. Knives flashed in bustling crowds, slashing out at him. Poison was put into his food in restaurants. But still he lived, honored by the city of New York and by the Italian and Sicilian governments for his service. Italian authorities presented him with an inscribed gold watch.<\/p>\n Petrosino decided that instead of sending makesheets on those suspected of Blackhanding in New York to Sicily and Italy, he himself would journey to Palermo. There, he concluded, it would be easier if he merely went through the police files checking mugshots to locate wanted criminals he knew were living in the U.S.<\/p>\n Joe convinced Police Commissioner Bingham to send him to Palermo, Sicily in 1909. Arriving in Palermo, Petrosino energetically tackled the police archives there, unearthing hundreds of wanted cards on fugitives known to the NYPD. These he mailed in large batches to Bingham, who promptly had the criminals arrested and arraigned for deportation.<\/p>\n But Petrosino was living inside a hornet’s nest. His investigation ran headlong into the core of the Mafia and the Mafia dons wanted him exterminated; he was getting too close to knowledge concerning their own activities and power. Capo di tutti capi<\/em> (boss of bosses) “Don” Paulo Marchese, head of the Mafia’s Grand Council in Sicily, actually entertained Petrosino in an exclusive restaurant to learn if the policeman knew of the Mafia hierarchy. When he discovered that Petrosino was hot on the trail, he ordered him murdered.<\/p>\n The next evening, March 12, 1909, Petrosino waited at the base of the Garibaldi statue in the large Piazza Marina in the very center of Palermo. He had been tipped that an informant would meet him there with a complete list of all the important Mafia chiefs in Sicily and the U.S.\u00a0 He was met, however, by more than a hundred shots fired from the darkness and killed.<\/p>\n His death caused an international uproar and produced profuse apologies from the Sicilian Government. His killers were never apprehended.<\/p>\n Culled from: Bloodletters and Badmen<\/a><\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0Bodyworlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the\u00a0archived version<\/a>\u00a0for all entries up until now).<\/p>\n Here\u2019s today\u2019s entry:<\/p>\n September 6th.\u00a0 <\/b>The whole camp is wild with excitement over the prospect of exchange, for the first eighteen detachments are now under marching orders. Nobody understands it, but there is a universal uplifting of heads by those who had already shut out hope.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nLieutenant Petrosino, intrepid!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nEnrico Alfano and his tremendous moustache.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nFuneral of Joseph Petrosino<\/em><\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
Plastination Specimen Du Jour!<\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\nSiamese twins<\/em><\/p>\nAndersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!<\/h3>\n