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. The Labarberas reported the kidnapping to the police, and soon a detective knocked on their door at 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 was fond of discussing aesthetics, loved opera, especially the Italian composers, and played the violin well.
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 Black Hand was everywhere and nowhere; it was almost occult in its all-knowingness, and it was cruel. This both men knew. 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. It would snuff out their American dream for at least a generation.
Included in the fourth letter was an incentive, perhaps directed at Mrs. When the paper was unfolded, something fell out and tumbled to the floor. 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. 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.
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 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. As Petrosino had long predicted, the fear had spread from city to city, blazing across the country like a prairie fire.
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.
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. 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. 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. History - American Studies.
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