Black Hand (extortion)
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Black Hand (extortion)
Black Hand ( it, Mano Nera) was a type of Italian extortion racket. Originally developed in the eighteenth century, Black Hand extortion came to the United States in the later nineteenth century with immigrants. Black Hand was a method of extortion practiced by gangsters of the Camorra and the Mafia. American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century sometimes made reference to an organized "Black Hand Society", a criminal enterprise composed of Italians, mainly Sicilian immigrants. However, many Sicilians disputed its existence and objected to the associated negative ethnic stereotype, but this was not the only viewpoint among Italian-Americans. ''Il Telegrafo: The Evening Telegraph'', a newspaper for the Italian American community in New York City, printed an editorial on March 13, 1909 in response to Joseph Petrosino's assassination, which read in part, "The assassination of Petrosino is an evil day for the Italians of America, and none of us can any longer deny ...
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Black Hand Wanted Poster
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have often been used to describe opposites such as good and evil, the Dark Ages versus Age of Enlightenment, and night versus day. Since the Middle Ages, black has been the symbolic color of solemnity and authority, and for this reason it is still commonly worn by judges and magistrates. Black was one of the first colors used by artists in Neolithic cave paintings. It was used in ancient Egypt and Greece as the color of the underworld. In the Roman Empire, it became the color of mourning, and over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches, and magic. In the 14th century, it was worn by royalty, clergy, judges, and government officials in much of Europe. It became the color worn by English romantic poets, businessmen a ...
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Antonio Mirabito
Antonio Mirabito (alias Frederico Baryndo; July 1, 1886 - August 18, 1977) was a notorious Italian immigrant who was believed to be the boss of a network of Black Hand gangs located in the Northeastern Region of the United States in the early 20th century. He was the first person in New England to be arrested for crimes associated with Black Hand. His arrest was widely publicized and he was punished heavily in hopes of demoralizing others who were participating in the growing practice, which was a predecessor to the Mafia. He left his career in crime after he married and had 9 children. Early life Mirabito was born on July 1, 1886, in Malfa, Province of Messina in the region of Sicily, in Southern Italy. He spent his childhood there, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. He arrived in New York, and swiftly moved into the Greater Boston area. He likely lived between Watertown, Massachusetts and Boston, Massachusetts. His life would not be well documented until h ...
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History Of The Sicilian Mafia
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the p ...
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American Mafia
The American Mafia, commonly referred to in North America as the Italian American Mafia, the Mafia, or the Mob, is a highly organized Italian American criminal society and organized crime group. The organization is often referred to by its members as Cosa Nostra (, "our thing" or "this thing of ours") and by the American government as La Cosa Nostra (LCN). The organization's name is derived from the original ''Mafia'' or ''Cosa nostra'', the Sicilian Mafia, with "American Mafia" originally referring simply to Mafia (or ''Cosa nostra'') groups from Sicily operating in the United States, as the organization initially emerged as an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia (known also as ''Cosa nostra'' by its members) formed by Italian immigrants in the United States. However, the organization gradually evolved into a separate entity partially independent of the original Mafia in Sicily, and it eventually encompassed or absorbed other Italian immigrant and Italian-American gangsters and Italia ...
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Black Hand (Chicago)
Black Hand extortion was a criminal tactic used by gangsters based in major cities in the United States. In Chicago, Black Hand extortion began around 1900 and had all but faded away by 1970, replaced by the Mafia. The Mafia was initially organized by Johnny Torrio and further organized by Al Capone into the extant Chicago Outfit sometime later. Black Handers in Chicago were mostly Italian men from Calabria and Sicily who would send anonymous extortion notes to their victims emblazoned with a feared old country symbol: the "Black Hand". The Black Hand was a precursor of organized crime, although it is still a tactic practiced by the Mafia and used in organized crime to this day. The Black Hand gangsters of this time period differed from the Mafia by lacking formally structured hierarchies and codes of conduct, and many were essentially one-man operations. Black Hand blackmail was also common in New York, Boston, and New Orleans. Victims would be threatened with being beaten, shot, ...
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Joe Petrosino
Joseph Petrosino (born Giuseppe Petrosino, ; August 30, 1860 – March 12, 1909) was an Italian-born New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who was a pioneer in the fight against organized crime. Crime fighting techniques that Petrosino pioneered are still practiced by law enforcement agencies. Early years and family Giuseppe Petrosino was born in Padula, a ''comune'' in the province of Salerno, in the southern Italian region of Campania. Young Giuseppe was sent with his cousin, Antonio Puppolo, to live with his grandfather in New York City. A streetcar accident took the life of his grandfather, and the two young cousins wound up in orphans/surrogates court. Rather than send the children to the orphanage, the judge took them home to his own family, and provided for the boys until relatives in Italy could be contacted and arrangements made to bring over family members. So, Joseph Petrosino and his cousin Anthony Puppolo lived with a "politically connected" Irish hous ...
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David Hennessy
David C. Hennessy (1858 – October 16, 1890) was a police chief of New Orleans, Louisiana. As a young detective, he made headlines in 1881 when he captured a notorious Italian criminal, Giuseppe Esposito. In 1888, he was promoted to superintendent and chief of police. While in office he made a number of improvements to the force, and was well known and respected in the New Orleans community. His assassination in 1890 led to a sensational trial. A series of acquittals and mistrials angered locals, and an enormous mob formed outside the prison the next day. The prison doors were forced open and 11 of the 19 Italian men who had been indicted for Hennessy's murder were lynched. The March 14, 1891 lynchings were the largest known mass lynching in U.S. history. Early life David C. Hennessy was born into an Irish Catholic family, son of Margaret and David Hennessy Sr., at 275 Girod St., New Orleans. David Sr. was a member of the First Louisiana Cavalry of the Union Army during the U ...
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Enrico Caruso
Enrico Caruso (, , ; 25 February 1873 – 2 August 1921) was an Italian operatic first lyrical tenor then dramatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles (74) from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. One of the first major singing talents to be commercially recorded, Caruso made 247 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920, which made him an international popular entertainment star. Biography Early life Enrico Caruso came from a poor but not destitute background. Born in Naples in the via Santi Giovanni e Paolo n° 7 on 25 February 1873, he was baptised the next day in the adjacent Church of San Giovanni e Paolo. His parents originally came from Piedimonte d'Alife (now called Piedimonte Matese), in the Province of Caserta in Campania, Southern Italy. Caruso was the third of seven children and one of only three to survive infancy. There is ...
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Little Italy
Little Italy is a general name for an ethnic enclave populated primarily by Italians or people of Italian ancestry, usually in an urban neighborhood. The concept of "Little Italy" holds many different aspects of the Italian culture. There are shops selling Italian goods as well as Italian restaurants lining the streets. A "Little Italy" strives essentially to have a version of the country of Italy placed in the middle of a large non-Italian city. This sort of enclave is often the result of periods of immigration in the past, during which people of the same culture settled together in certain areas. As cities modernized and grew, these areas became known for their ethnic associations, and ethnic neighborhoods like "Little Italy" blossomed, becoming the icons they are today. List of Little Italys Australia *Little Italy, Melbourne *Norton Street, Sydney * Beaumont Street, Newcastle Canada *Little Italy, Edmonton in Alberta *Little Italy, Montreal, in Quebec *Little Italy, Otta ...
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Mike Dash
Mike Dash is a Welsh writer, historian, and researcher. He has written books and articles about dramatic episodes in history. Biography Dash was born in London. He attended Peterhouse, a college at the University of Cambridge particularly noted for teaching history, and completed postgraduate work at King's College London, where he obtained a Ph.D. Dash authored a series of books covering incidents in the history of the Dutch East India Company, the Netherlands, India under British rule, and New York during the Progressive Era. Each focuses on a single event or series of events, among them the wreck of the East Indiaman ''Batavia'', the Dutch tulip mania of 1634–1637, and the early years of the American Mafia. He has written for a history blog, "Past Imperfect", published by Smithsonian Magazine. In 2014, his blog post on the Lykov family, "Lost in the Taiga," was named one of "Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism" by ''The Atlantic''. Dash's 2009 book, ''The First Fa ...
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Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most populous city in the country. The city boundaries encompass an area of about and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. It is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999). The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest ...
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Extortion
Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit through coercion. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest and most common form of extortion, although making unfounded threats in order to obtain an unfair business advantage is also a form of extortion. Extortion is sometimes called the "protection racket" because the racketeers often phrase their demands as payment for "protection" from (real or hypothetical) threats from unspecified other parties; though often, and almost always, such "protection" is simply abstinence of harm from the same party, and such is implied in the "protection" offer. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime. In some jurisdictions, actually obtaining the benefit is not required to commit the offense, and making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit ...
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