""The Black Hand""
Joseph Petrosino, the tough Italian policeman who headed the squad, gave his views on the Black Hand criminals:
…The gangsters who are holding Little Italy in the grip of terror come chiefly from Sicily and Southern Italy, and they are primitive country robbers transplanted into cities. This is proved by their brutal methods. No American hold-up man would ever think of stopping somebody and slashing his face with a knife just to take his wallet. Probably he would threaten him with a pistol. No American criminal would blow up a man’s house or kill his children because he refused to pay fifty or a hundred dollars. The crimes that occur among the Italians here, are the same as those committed at one time by rural outlaws in Italy; and the victims, like the killers, come from the same ignorant class of people. In short we are dealing with banditry transplanted to the most modern city in the world.
Shortly after Petrosino’s ascension to Bingham’s secret police squad, he was murdered in Palermo, Sicily. Becoming the first NYPD officer to be killed whilst on duty outside of the USA.
In a 1908, Lindsay Denison wrote about the workings, and origins, of the Black Hand. She claimed the gang name had arrived from a story printed in The Herald newspaper. The story declared that a recent murder of an Italian immigrant had been committed by the original ‘The Black Hand’ — a secret Spanish society dating back from ""Inquisition days"". The Herald speculated that the Black Hand was coming to life again amongst the Latin communities.
She went on to purport of organized sections of the Black Hand:
It is not possible to speak certainly of the way in which the spoils of their plots are divided. It seems most likely that the ‘divvy’ is governed by the generosity of the head ‘bad-man’ and the risks taken by the members accumulating the loot. The worst and greediest scoundrel in the plot takes all he dares. Most of the rest goes to the men who made the threats. Half of what the chief takes goes ’ higher up’. There are at least two or three old graduates of South Italian crime, who never sully their hands with the commission of actual crimes nor trouble their minds to plan them …
more:
https://www.gangrule.com/gangs/the-black-hand