Unit 11 · The Black Hand and the Chicago Outfit

Picture a grocer in New York in 1905. He opens a letter with no name. At the bottom are scary drawings: a hand, a dagger, maybe a skull. The letter says to pay a large sum or something terrible will happen. Letters like this were signed with a black hand. People began calling the crime itself the Black Hand.

Getting money from someone by threatening them has a name. It is called extortion. The Black Hand letters were extortion. They were also anonymous, which means the writer did not give a name. Not knowing who sent a threat made it feel even scarier. The victim could not tell if the writer was a stranger or someone down the street.

The term Black Hand was first used in New York around 1903. Letters like these spread to Chicago, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and other cities. They were most common from about 1903 to 1915. By about 1920 they had mostly faded away. Newspapers of the time printed many of the letters, so historians can study them today.

In 1909, a New York police leader named Arthur Woods wrote a magazine article called "The Problem of the Black Hand." Woods was a deputy commissioner in the New York Police Department. Many readers believed the Black Hand was one huge secret organization with a leader and members in many cities. Woods argued that this was not true.

Woods explained that the Black Hand was a method. Many small gangs, not connected to each other, used the same trick. Some senders were simply copycats. They read about Black Hand letters in the newspaper and decided to try it themselves. The black hand drawing worked because it made a small gang seem big and powerful.

Historians today mostly agree with Woods. They find no proof of one Black Hand society that ran everything. This matters. A rumor about a giant secret group can make people more afraid than they need to be. It can also make them suspect a whole community. Sorting out what is proven from what is rumor is one way to fight fear.

Between about 1880 and 1920, millions of Italians moved to the United States. They were immigrants, people who move to a new country to live. Many settled in city neighborhoods with other families from Italy. They opened bakeries, groceries, barbershops and small banks. Many worked long hours to save money and send some home.

Black Hand criminals looked for people like these. They mostly wrote to other Italian immigrants. They knew which shopkeepers had savings. They knew newcomers might not speak English well. They also knew many newcomers did not trust police, because officials back home had not always been fair. To prey on people means to hunt them as targets. These criminals preyed on their own neighbors.

This is the most important fact in this chapter. The Black Hand was not "what Italians did." Most Italian immigrants were the victims, not the criminals. The criminals were a small number of people. Historians such as Humbert Nelli, who studied Italians in Chicago, make this point clearly.

Think about what a Black Hand gang needed. It needed people to pay. It also needed people to stay quiet. If victims told the police, the gang could be caught. So the letters always warned: tell no one. The criminals counted on silence to protect them.

Sometimes, when a shopkeeper refused to pay, a gang set off a small bomb at the shop or home. Newspapers reported these attacks. The goal was to scare the whole street, not just one person. When neighbors saw a damaged shop, some decided it was safer to pay. The fear spread further than the harm itself.

But silence also had a weak point. When one victim spoke up, others often came forward too. A witness is a person who tells what they saw or know, often in court. Every witness made the gang weaker. That is why the people who spoke up, and the people who protected them, are the real heroes of this history.

Joseph Petrosino was born in southern Italy. He came to New York as a boy. As a young man he joined the New York Police Department. At that time, very few officers spoke Italian. Petrosino did. He could talk with shopkeepers, workers and families in the way they spoke at home.

Petrosino became a detective, a police officer who investigates crimes to find out who did them. Around 1906, he was put in charge of a special squad, a small team, of Italian-speaking officers. People called it the Italian Squad. He later reached the rank of lieutenant.

Language mattered. A victim who could explain a threat in Italian, to an officer who understood, was more likely to come forward. Petrosino’s squad arrested many extortionists. He also wanted Americans to see that Italian immigrants were fighting crime, not causing it. He was an Italian American standing up for other Italian Americans.

Petrosino noticed something about many extortionists. Some had already been convicted of crimes in Italy. They had kept that past hidden when they came to America. A criminal record is an official list of crimes a person has been convicted of. If Petrosino could get those records, he could prove who these men really were.

Under American law, some immigrants who hid a criminal past could be deported, or sent back to the country they came from. So Petrosino’s best tool was paper, not a gun. In early 1909 he sailed to Italy on a secret trip. His plan was to gather criminal records from Italian courts and police.

The trip was supposed to stay secret. But news of it leaked and was printed in a New York newspaper. People who wanted to stop him may have learned he was coming. Petrosino went ahead anyway. He traveled to Sicily, the island where many of the records he wanted were kept.

On the evening of 12 March 1909, Joseph Petrosino was in Piazza Marina, a square in Palermo, Sicily. Shots were fired, and he was killed. He had been in Sicily only a short time. He died doing the work he believed in: gathering proof.

Police in Italy investigated. The chief suspect, the person they most believed was responsible, was a Sicilian crime figure named Vito Cascio Ferro. But he was never convicted. That means no court ever found him guilty. No one else was convicted either. The case remains officially unsolved.

Here is how a careful historian sorts it. Documented: Petrosino was shot dead in Piazza Marina on 12 March 1909. Documented: no one was convicted. Disputed: who gave the order. Police files and later claims point to Cascio Ferro, but that evidence was never tested in a trial. We can say he was the main suspect. We cannot say he was proven guilty.

Petrosino’s body was brought home to New York. His funeral was held on 12 April 1909, one month after his death. The streets filled with people. Many were Italian immigrants. They had lost a man who had fought for them.

How many came? Newspapers printed an estimate, a careful guess, not an exact count. The New York Times reported about 200,000 people. Other reports said about 250,000. No one could count every person on a crowded street, so the numbers differ. Historians give both and name who made them.

The funeral sent a message. Petrosino had been an Italian immigrant who became a police leader. The crowds showed that a huge part of the Italian community stood with him, not with the criminals. A funeral like this is also a memorial, a way to remember a person and what he stood for.

In November 1907, Italian-American community leaders in Chicago brought a plan to the Italian consul. A consul is an official who looks after his country’s people living abroad. Their plan was a new group to fight Black Hand extortion. By early 1908, the group had an office in the Masonic Temple Building, at State and Randolph streets downtown.

They called it the White Hand Society. The name was a direct answer to the Black Hand. White stood for honesty and for acting in the open. A society here means an organized group of people working for a shared goal. This society was not secret. It wanted everyone to know Italian Americans were against the extortionists.

The White Hand offered rewards, money for information that helped catch criminals. It pushed police and courts to take Black Hand cases seriously. It urged victims to come forward and tell what they knew. Not every effort succeeded. But it showed that the community was organizing itself against crime.

A stereotype is an unfair idea that everyone in a group is the same. In the early 1900s, many Americans held a stereotype that Italians were criminals. This hurt honest families. Some landlords would not rent to them. Some bosses would not hire them. The Black Hand made this stereotype worse.

Stereotypes can lead to terrible harm. In New Orleans in 1890, the city’s police chief was murdered. Some Italian men were put on trial, but the trial ended without convictions. On 14 March 1891, a mob broke into the jail and killed 11 Italian men. This was a lynching, a killing by a mob without any trial. Prejudice, judging people unfairly because of their group, drove the mob.

More than a century later, in 2019, the mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, formally apologized to Italian Americans for the lynching. Groups like the White Hand wanted to fight both dangers at once. They wanted to stop the criminals and show that the Italian community was on the side of the law.

By about 1920, Black Hand letters had mostly faded away. Why? Historians give several reasons. They do not all agree on which reason mattered most. When experts weigh the same evidence differently, we call the question contested.

One reason is better policing. Italian-speaking officers, like Petrosino’s squad, made it easier for victims to report threats. Some extortionists were arrested, convicted or deported. A second reason is community action. Groups like the White Hand, along with brave witnesses, broke the silence the gangs needed.

A third reason some historians give comes from a new law. In 1920, the United States banned the sale of alcohol. Selling alcohol illegally became a far bigger business than threatening shopkeepers. Some criminals may have moved into it. That story is the next chapter. The lesson of this one is clear: silence protected the Black Hand, and speaking up together weakened it.

On 16 January 1920, it became illegal to make, sell or transport alcoholic drinks in the United States. This period is called Prohibition. It came from the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Many supporters hoped it would reduce drunkenness, protect families and make cities safer.

But many people still wanted to drink. That created a huge illegal market. Making or selling alcohol against the law was called bootlegging. Hidden bars called speakeasies opened in back rooms and basements. Gangs that could brew beer, smuggle liquor and deliver it quietly could make enormous amounts of money.

Prohibition lasted almost 14 years. It ended on 5 December 1933, when the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it. Historians still debate how much Prohibition reduced drinking. Most agree on one result: it made some criminal groups far richer and more powerful than before, especially in big cities like Chicago.

In 1920, a powerful Chicago crime boss named "Big Jim" Colosimo was shot dead on 11 May. His top man, Johnny Torrio, took over. Torrio had come to Chicago from New York. He saw that Prohibition, which had begun that January, was a chance to make huge profits.

Torrio ran his group like a business. It brewed and sold beer, ran gambling houses and paid people to look away. A young man from Brooklyn, Al Capone, worked under him and rose quickly. This kind of long-lasting criminal business is called organized crime. Years later, Capone’s Chicago group became known as the Outfit.

It is important to be clear about who these men were. They were a small number of criminals. Most Italian Americans in Chicago worked honest jobs, and many were hurt by gangs. Gangs of this time also had leaders of many backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish and Polish Americans. Crime was not the mark of any one people.

Chicago’s bootleggers fought over territory, the neighborhoods where each gang sold beer. Torrio’s group had a rival, the North Side Gang led by Dean O’Banion. O’Banion was killed in November 1924. Two months later, in January 1925, Torrio was shot and badly wounded. He recovered and retired, leaving Capone in charge. In October 1926, North Side leader Hymie Weiss was killed.

Violence was only part of how the gangs worked. They also used bribery, paying officials to do what the gang wanted. Some police officers, politicians and others took gang money to ignore crimes. When the people meant to enforce the law are paid to break it, that is called corruption.

Corruption made gangs hard to stop. A raid might be canceled. A case might fall apart. But not everyone took the money. Many honest officers, reporters and citizens kept working against the gangs. The rest of this chapter is about them.

On the morning of 14 February 1929, seven men were shot and killed inside a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago. Most were connected to the North Side Gang, Capone’s rivals. Because it happened on Valentine’s Day, newspapers called it the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The killings shocked people across the country.

Many people at the time believed Capone ordered the attack. Many still do. But believing is not the same as proving. Capone was in Florida that day. No one was ever convicted of the killings. Historians have named different possible gunmen, but the case was never proven in court. It is officially unsolved.

This is a place to practice sorting evidence, the facts that help show whether something is true. Documented: seven men died at that garage on that date. Documented: no one was convicted. Disputed: who planned it and who fired. A fair history says all three clearly and does not pretend the disputed part is settled.

After the massacre, investigators turned to a scientist, Calvin Goddard. Goddard studied ballistics, the science of guns and bullets. When a gun fires, it leaves tiny scratches and marks on the bullet and the shell. Those marks can link a bullet to the gun that fired it.

Goddard used a comparison microscope. It lets an expert look at two bullets side by side and compare their marks. His careful work showed how science could help answer violent crimes with facts instead of guesses.

In the summer of 1929, the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory opened, with Goddard as its director. It soon joined Northwestern University. It was one of the first scientific crime labs in the United States. It was paid for at first by private citizens, including Burt A. Massee, who led the grand jury that looked into the massacre, and businessman Walter Olson.

Movies sometimes make 1920s gangsters look stylish and exciting. The real record is different. Gang wars killed many people in Chicago, and bystanders were sometimes caught in the danger. A bystander is a person who happens to be nearby but is not part of what is happening.

The harm went beyond violence. Gangs ran rackets, dishonest schemes to get money, often by threats. Some business owners were forced to pay for "protection." Bribes meant that honest officials struggled to do their jobs. People found it harder to trust police and courts.

Chicago’s name suffered too. Around the world, some people linked the city with gangsters. That was unfair to millions of Chicagoans who worked, raised families and obeyed the law. The garage on Clark Street was torn down in 1967. Today, historians choose to remember the people who were harmed and those who pushed back.

In 1919, Chicago business leaders started the Chicago Crime Commission. It was a committee of the Chicago Association of Commerce. It was not part of the police. It was a watchdog, a group that keeps watch on something and speaks up when it sees problems.

On 23 April 1930, the commission’s chairman, Frank J. Loesch, released a list of 28 names. He called them public enemies. Al Capone was number one. The point was to shame the gangsters in public and to push police, courts and voters to act.

The list worked as a spotlight. Newspapers across the country printed the phrase "Public Enemy Number One." It became part of everyday American speech. It showed that ordinary citizens could organize and demand action when officials were not doing enough.

Early in 1930, a construction supervisor named Philip Meagher was killed in Chicago. Soon after, on 7 February 1930, Colonel Robert Isham Randolph, president of the Chicago Association of Commerce, announced a new crime-fighting committee. Its members’ names were kept secret. People called it the Secret Six.

Why keep names secret? Members feared the gangs would target them or their families. Their anonymity, the state of not being named, protected them. The group used money from business leaders to support the fight against gangs. It stayed active until January 1933.

Here is something to think about. This course studies secret societies. Many used secrecy to protect belonging. Black Hand gangs used secrecy to protect harm. The Secret Six used secrecy to protect people who stood against harm. The same tool, keeping a secret, can serve very different purposes. What matters is what the secret protects.

Eliot Ness joined the federal Bureau of Prohibition in 1927. He led a small team of agents, officers who work for a government agency. They raided illegal breweries and seized trucks and equipment. Each raid cost Capone’s organization money. It also showed the public that some officers could not be bought.

Many people today think Ness is the man who put Capone in prison. That idea comes mostly from later stories. In 1957, a book about his work called The Untouchables made him famous. TV shows and films followed. They turned the story into gunfights and chases.

The record tells a quieter story. Ness’s raids hurt Capone’s business, but Ness had little to do with the case that convicted him. That was a tax case built by IRS investigators and federal prosecutors. A legend is a popular story that may grow bigger than the facts. The Ness legend is exciting, but the real heroes of the conviction were patient accountants.

Proving that Capone ordered crimes was very hard. Witnesses were afraid, and he kept his distance from the violence. So the government tried a different path. Everyone who earns a large income, money received from work or business, must pay income tax on it. Did that include money from crime?

In 1927, the US Supreme Court answered that question in United States v. Sullivan. A bootlegger named Sullivan had not filed a tax return. He argued that reporting illegal income would force him to confess to crimes. The Court disagreed. Illegal income is still income, it ruled, and it must be reported.

This decision opened a door. If investigators could show Capone had a large income and had not paid tax on it, they could charge him with tax evasion, which means illegally avoiding paying taxes. The job went to the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, including agent Frank J. Wilson.

Frank J. Wilson needed proof that money flowed to Capone. He found it in three ledgers, account books where a business records money in and out. They had been seized years before from the Hawthorne Smoke Shop in Cicero, a gambling place tied to Capone’s group. They covered 1924 to 1926 and had been labeled wrong, so no one had studied them.

Entries in the ledgers recorded profits and payments. One line, as later reported, noted $17,500 next to the name Al. But a ledger alone could not prove who wrote it or what it meant. Wilson’s team compared the handwriting with bank deposit slips. The handwriting led them to the bookkeeper, the person who kept the accounts, Leslie Shumway.

Agents found Shumway in Miami in early 1931. He explained the entries. At Capone’s trial he gave testimony, telling the court under oath what he knew. A witness who spoke, plus careful records, did what years of raids could not. Wilson’s summary report on the case, written in 1933, is now posted by the IRS for anyone to read.

In October 1931, Al Capone went on trial in federal court in Chicago. The prosecutor was US Attorney George E. Q. Johnson. The judge was James H. Wilkerson. Each separate crime a person is charged with is called a count. The jury heard from witnesses, including Shumway, and studied the records.

Late on 17 October 1931, the jury returned its verdict, its decision. Some records date it 18 October, because the jury finished so late. The jury found Capone guilty on five of the 22 counts. On 24 October, Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to 11 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Capone’s lawyers filed an appeal, asking a higher court to overturn the decision. On 27 February 1932, the appeals court upheld the conviction. Capone was later moved to Alcatraz prison in 1934. He was released in 1939, in poor health, and died in 1947. He was never convicted of murder.